Yeah, I haven’t been feeling great about having to nod vigorously and feign enthusiasm for slop on every damn cover letter and interview I’ve had recently. The best I’ve managed is saying I only use it in professional capacity and try to emphasize the personal learning angle as a defense.

It’s brutal out there and I’m losing hope. I wish I had another industry I could pivot to await the passing of the bubble that gives me the flexibility to be a musician like remote work programming does.

I really wish this was my average experience trying to land another software gig in the past year…

I regret reading that in full. Really, read the opener summary, stop at “What if pee pee was poo poo” and you will be wiser and happier.

Insane that people got paid large sums to write this.

Commented [97]: if we simply imagine something that didn’t happen,

“Intelligence Displacement” indeed.

Also, these are more targeted at beginners to programming, but Daniel Shiffman has a youtube channel and a free book about creative coding with p5 (The Nature of Code) that is very good. Depending on your background, it may contain a lot of remedial material, but there’s some really great ideas on how to think about designing dynamic systems that make cool images and interactive art in there, especially in the later chapters if you skip around.

I need a shower.

I grow increasingly frustrated every time one of these ponderous essays fails to mention the gutter racist and eugenicist beliefs of these people. This dilution of what ‘far right’ means only serves their interests, and it’s malpractice to not mention that the racism is foundational to their origin and organization as a movement.

I expect better of the New Yorker; it’s disappointing to see their writers following the path of the New York Times.

2020s as the decade where tech stopped progressing in the way we know it

I mean, sure, but I think the underlying cause here is the end of Moore’s law and exponential growth of potential userbases as the world becomes fully connected. The Enshittocene can be viewed as a consequence of capital’s attempts to continue exponential growth while the fundamentals are no longer capable of sustaining it.

Processing and its descendants, p5.js, p5.py. Nannou for Rust.

vpype is a really powerful python library/toolkit for generating art for plotters (drawing robots).

Blender with python scripting is also widely used.

Some relevant keywords: “procedural art”, “generative art” (generative AI is kinda killing this one), “creative coding”, “algorithmic art”, “plotter art”, “pen plotter”, “live coding” (for music with code)

The fediverse (mostly mastodon) has a decent presence of artists, usually tagging works with some of the above keywords.

you can count on microslop to always be behind the curve

_(credit)

who up continvoucly morging they branches

Enjoyed this piece from Mission Local on San Francisco’s “March for Billionaires” yesterday.

Choice excerpts:

Despite the San Francisco locale, a participant said the event had “grassroots” origins at a “little rationalist restaurant get together” in a “group house” on Shattuck Avenue, subverting any assumptions that Berkeley is all radical hippies.

Mission Local contributor Benjamin Wachs coined a term for an event in which media observers outnumber participants: a panopticonference. This was close to that. Those in attendance did their best to field questions from the barrage of journalists that backed them into a tree.

This is where Annie, a young transgender woman who attended the protest in a T-shirt that said “I’m in a polycule with Aella,” first met Kauffman. An impromptu debate ensued, with Annie “aggressively defending billionaires.” It was, participants concluded, worthy of a larger forum.

“People are just jealous that they are poorer and weaker and uglier,” she said. “We are beautiful. We’re smart. We’re strong… We are supporting the billionaires, here.”

pegged butts

some fun dorking opportunities out there

Saw it linked elsewhere!

I find his posts as of late extremely disappointing.

I truly think the Rust Programming Language is an outstanding piece of technical writing (due credit to Carol Nichols as well) and commend a lot of the outreach and projects he’s been a part of, but recently his takes are all purely beige prose bemoaning “the discourse” around LLMs and ATproto while making every excuse to hype up the tech.

The comment thread that inspired his dramatic exit was so mild that I don’t understand how anyone can take his claims at face value.

“alpha slop”

I am reminded of Val Packett’s lobsters comment I read the other day:

The “AI” companies are DDoSing reality itself.

They have massive demand for new electricity, land, water and hardware to expand datacenters more massively and suddenly than ever before, DDoSing all these supplies. Their products make it easy to flood what used to be “the information superhighway” with slop, so their customers DDoS everyone’s attention. Also bosses get to “automate away” any jobs where the person’s output can be acceptably replaced by slop. These companies are the most loyal and fervent sponsors of the new wave of global fascism, with literal front seats at the Trump administration in the US. They are very happy about having their tools used for mass surveillance in service of state terrorism (ICE) and war crimes. That’s the DDoS against everyone’s human rights and against life itself.

Inshallah

My power bill went from ~$100 to >$300 / month average in the past year, and my state is one of the more proactive ones about building out solar and wind. Between this, the removal of ACA subsidies causing a healthcare death spiral and doubling rates, the brain drain, the economic isolation, the tariffs, it feels like a coordinated effort on all sides to wipe out what’s left of the American middle class and turn everyone into serfs. Things are going to reach a breaking point.

I’ve been made aware of a new manifesto. Domain registered September 2024.

Anyone know anything about the ludlow institute folks? I see some cryptocurrency-adjacent figures, and I’m aware of Phil Zimmerman of course, but I’m wondering what the new grift angles are going to be, or whether this is just more cypherpunk true believer stuff.