tsylba

The whole piece feel like vibe farming by some youngling piecing together part of the hacker culture as seen by the media in the 90s with some reddit or vintage tumblr trends on top. I resonated with a lot of themes it tries to capture but it ends up looking more like a teen trying to commodify a subculture in a performative way rather than a real tentative alternative to the system, as we saw every generation or so.

I'm all in for lowtech, degrowth, permacomputing, Bookchin municipalism and Illich like "tools for conviviality" but here it seems.. candid and non genuine.

I'm always saying it's better to finish on a good note rather than a bad one, "<Insert Bad Things> but <Insert Good Things>" (eg. "You're stupid but I love you" vs "I love you but you're stupid"), but that's the kind of case where it's clearly better to do the reverse. Huh.

Frugality is a state of mind, feeling guilty about it is not a frugality problem more than a labeling one.

It's the same for climate change, a lot of people want to feel good about themselves labeling them ecological when they're not capable to act on it (eating less meat, avoiding to take an airplane to travel, ..etc). They feel guilty not because of 'it' but because they don't want to act about something they reason is the morally good choice. It's performative virtue signalling.

As a general rule I don't think you can label yourself as anything (eg. a liberal, an anarchist, a frugal, a skeptic, a believer, a punk, ..etc). You either are or you aren't. Chasing a label and an identity is the best way to never be it like a perfume wearing you rather than you wearing it.

I'm under the impression, maybe wrongly so, that every other week we saw a primer on some basic CG stuff: Bézier curves, Fourier transforms, Dithering, Tonemapping, ..etc, of themes being fetched from a pool of maybe 10 items that cycle every once in a while but get upvoted because CG stuffs are inherently cool (and they're often well written like this one).

I think I'm gonna make `primersprimer.graphics` to list them or something.

I find it quite interesting that peoples talking on a website called "hacker news" find it fine that a company selling you an OS make it harder for you to install app not approved by them, notably so when there is enough scare screens as of now to discourage any too gullible peoples to do so.

What would we think if Microsoft decided all of a sudden to do something similar with Windows? How there is no outrage about this in that community?

Like the boiled crab in the chef's cuisine, we slowly accept the rising temperature around us as totally fine and normal.

Somewhat relevant article about the demise of a culture: https://aeon.co/essays/how-yuppies-hacked-the-original-hacke...

Albeit I agree with the general thesis, I find it funny that the very next sentence after the author say:

the moment I find something that crosses my desk which starts with “it’s not this, it’s THIS”, I immediately click off and move on.

He follows it by his very own "It's THIS, not this" statement:

I want real people, real creators, and real content in my feed, not LLM slop.

The Machine must have learn it somewhere I guess.

Personally I use stars in two ways: 1) It's interesting and I want to keep track of it for possible future use and 2) It's a fantastic idea and kudos to you even if I'll never use it.

As a side note it's kind of disheartening that everytime there is a metric related to popularity there would be some among us that will try to game it for profit, basically to manipulate our natural bias.

As a side note it's always a bit sad how the parasocial nature of the modern web make us like machine interfacing via simple widgets, becoming mechanical robot ourselves rationalising IO via simple metrics kind of forgetting that the map is never the territory.

I can understand how a technology, this one or any others, can be a fun and interesting tool, a creative one even, but a few things bother me a lot about it which all can be summarized as what Ivan Illich called "Tools for Conviality".

Simply put, we delegate a freedom of use and cognitive power to complex tools and organizations that control and shapes them. One can argue that it's kind of the same if I decide to code any kind of programs the 'old' way, especially using native language, albeit their exist toolchains and OSes that are open source and thus technically free of monolithic take over.

Furthermore those LLMs tools seem to me like the transhumanists cybernetic enhancements of cyberpunk dystopia, splitting Humanity between those of us that would be able to afford them and the others that are left off the competitive arena. Again, an issue that were still there to some degree in a capitalist economy but where the real entry to programming was just a computer and an internet connection to some extent, a way more democratic and affordable goal than having a subscription to a Big Bad Corporation owning everything about you and your creation, where 'free' non local models are not a real answer here either.

Any new technology have some good potential, sure, it's obvious even. I don't think the path they naturally lead to are always the best we could take though, and I hope we wake up to the fact our society are nothing short of democratic* when the economical entities that govern us is nothing but.

* Well, I don't even think we could call our political systems democratic without any kind of random selection anyways. A pastiche of one at best.

It's funny and beautiful because I recognized the sounds from my country but less so those from other places, which obviously might be a bias due to me seeing where the pointer is at any moment but can also simply be explained as different geography and biomes would produce different sounds. Even a river will be mold differently and have a peculiar acoustic, which I never really think about until now and find fascinating.

This make me think of the GitHub spamming issue.

See, my GitHub email is not my main address, and when I got some it's either from a user of one of my repository or from a marketing team that extracted thousand of address from starred repositories to fake genuine email with my name and all.

The things is, it's always a less than stellar product. It started with NFTs, calm down for a bit and now came back with a vengeance with AI startups.

I guess it's a number game for them but I can't comprehend their lack of value, same for those peoples that subscribes to everyone just to gain a sub back (and judging by the number, a lot of people sub back without thinking about it, so it works).

Damn I despise that marketing-bussiness hellscape that the internet slowly morphed into along the years. We can't have nice things because there will always be a prominent proportion of us that would exploit it for personal gain and we would do collectively nothing against it, for the name of liberal economic or something. And forward the enshitification goes.

It's a lot of words to say "it's well done texturing".

This is one of the best things about writing online: your future friends will seek you out.

Do I live in the same reality as the author? is that really a thing as in "it happens regularly enough to be mentioned as if it was"?

Apart from this I'm so-so about this, like I believe a lot of people from my generation I'm fond of the idea of the internet as it was in the 90s, like a decentralized cyberspace of free spirit thinkers, which slowly diluted itself as decades past and might have been at its peaks during the blog bubble and RSS feeds era (meeh it's arguable). But it seems like that spirit is long gone and we've been compartmentalized, our spaces enclosed like the British Luddites were before us. I'm all for the permacomputing self-hosting ring websites but it seems like a thing mostly done by the cool kids, the Artists, the few that tend to do it for the performative angle more than from their own tropism or the one from the culture (as it was done when it was natural to do so).

I'm not sure we could really go back to that era flavored internet culture without burning the centralized juggernauts to the ground.

You guys using convoluted git commands when a single line of subversion works:

svn checkout https://github.com/tensorflow/tensorflow/trunk/tensorflow/ex...

Imagine how many small donations are made to some non-profit cause and then up being wasted on paying for fancy proprietary fonts.

I can imagine they'll take the angle it helps improve the "brand-awareness" which supposedly bring them more profits in the long run.

For some non-profit I've given to I've received more donation reminder letters that my one time donation would have cover for.

I understand it's a meme, but you're not "touching grass" if you need the mediation of an app to do so.

It's engineer logic 101, when technically true does not mean ontologically true.

Interesting, in my experience LLMs hallucinate so much on stuffs I know about that I instinctively challenge most of their assumptions and outputs, and found out that this kind of dialectic exchange bring the most out of the "relationship" so to speak, co creating something greater than the isolation of us two.

Relevant 2018 essay by Nicky Case «How To Become A Centaur»: https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-case/release/6

It's funny because I rarely seen this (wrong approach) done anywhere else but I pick it up by myself (like a lot did I presume) and still am the first to do it everytime I see the occasion, not so for optimizations (while I admit I thought it wouldn't hurt) but for the flow and natural look of it. It feels somehow more right to me to compose effect by signals interpolations rather than clear ternary branch instructions.

Now I'll have to change my ways in fear of being rejected socially for this newly approved bad practice.

At least in WebGPU's WGSL we have the `select` instruction that does that ternary operation hidden as a method, so there is that.

All of this led to quite a vicious backlash against me personally, with countless angry comments about and directed at me across YouTube and social media, which included many death threats and threats of violence (although I should be clear that while these threats were numerous and graphic, I doubt any of them were “credible” from a law enforcement standpoint, i. e. I did not have actual reason to fear for my safety).

While I understand how, from the public perspective, you can be despised by the work and influence of powerful individual that can shape collective narrative and "destroy the things you love", I'm always a bit confused about death threats. I get this come from a vocale minority, not the majority of the mob, and maybe linked to a Flanderization of view on a public yet anonymous space that most often than not have no real will to be executed, but still, how you end up being that kind of a person ?

As cool it might get to badmouth the new generation and how everything is getting south, I have found more and more attempts to get back to a more convivial and humane approach to medias, especially of the literacy kind, with Reviews and Journals for niche audiences of peculiar aesthetic and intellectual values.

Granted, we've seen similar fashion in the past with blog, and then with the mailing list revival, which both quickly get preempted - commodified even - by the marketing squads that devitalize every new media by their unending eager to devour their techs and cloaca'd them into ad platform trend.

But it's my earnest feeling that the AI-ssistant behemoth, still quite roboto in its fake expertise and sanitized answers, could be easily defeated by the willingness for poetry and the new form language and our creativity would take to circumvent it.

We easily get sidetracked by boredom, but humans are creature hooked on authenticity.

Grifter content creator in fear for their revenue stream.

Your writing style is the inspiring level kind.

80's Punks were the Tricksters of ancient mythology (eg. Coyote in amerindians culture), it always been the role of those at the margins of Society dealing with uncomfortable other realities, bringing liminal space into our collective consciousness. Punks are not dead, they (or more precisely their archetypal essence) have just shape shifted into another form we fail to recognize as we age while their prior shell have been consumed by mass media and commodification.

Chances are the future generation Punks are either that itch we can't quite name or out of our generational perception altogether.

I like to say we, as human, are all « shaman » : we're structuring chaos into order.

Any job is just that, it's a story, it's transforming & aggregating bits of the information field into another, surrounding it by meaning in the process.

I don't care if you work with computer, as a social worker or as a fisherman. You're just transforming bits mate.

I guess it's the logic behind the vaccine mandate fearmongering. If one would want to reduce the population maybe the easiest method would be a stochastic approach by injecting at random a malicious agent affecting health or reproduction globally. Of course it would mean we do have such an agent and we know how to control it, which I doubt, but it's sound (and kinda painless).

Oil is a hell of a drug for civilization, and I'm not sure how we will willingly tune off of it, unless we chose a radically different economical organization.

But as many I am kind of hopeless as it seems competition, which fuel this need, is at the core of mankind (or at least the leading West)'s mentality.

« At » is correct here, it's a descriptor of "where", here "remotely".

Nietsche's « Beyond Good And Evil» in french would be "Par-delà le bien et le mal" or "Au delà du bien et du mal". In this example, the "where" is beyond.

The Domino's pizza tracking bits is a funny one for those whom had read Snowcrash, where a whole earlier section of the book is about the advancement of the pizza delivery industry.

I don't know, it seem to me the 90s had a very dystopian view of future Pizza Hut.

« The Deliverator stands tall, your pie in thirty minutes or you can have it free, shoot the driver, take his car, file a class-action suit. The Deliverator has been working this job for six months, a rich and lengthy tenure by his standards, and has never delivered a pizza in more than twenty-one minutes. [..] Pizza delivery is a major industry. A managed industry. People went to CosaNostra Pizza University four years just to learn it. Came in its doors unable to write an English sentence, from Abkhazia, Rwanda, Guanajuato, South Jersey, and came out knowing more about pizza than a Bedouin knows about sand. And they had studied this problem. Graphed the frequency of doorway delivery-time disputes. Wired the early Deliverators to record, then analyze, the debating tactics, the voice-stress histograms, the distinctive grammatical structures employed by white middle-class Type A Burbclave occupants who against all logic had decided that this was the place to take their personal Custerian stand against all that was stale and deadening in their lives: they were going to lie, or delude themselves, about the time of their phone call and get themselves a free pizza; no, they deserved a free pizza along with their life, liberty, and pursuit of whatever, it was fucking inalienable. »

Let's be real, there is only one way to debug C and C++ program : fprintf(stderr, "%s %d\n", __FILE__, __LINE__);

I wonder how this kind of amount is decided, a percentage of the profit they have earn from the decision perhaps ? what is the metrics ? It seems enormous but it's kind of fair when you profit from a monopoly position in an economical infrastructure.

I have no idea how this legal stuff work but it sure does seem fascinating.

Nice read, quite a well written essay. I like how two seemingly distinct subjects are organically knitted together to raise its arguments. What partly sounds like a (not so) hidden praise for creative commons remix culture may I add.

[edit] Also : https://youtu.be/IeTybKL1pM4

I love how the word "social" has been preempted to mean the exact opposite of it.