"Vibe Coding severs this constitutive relation. The Vibe Coder does not enter the Symbolic order, but submits to its statistical imitation. The model offers no Law, no withholding, no exteriority. It does not confront, it echoes. It does not interpellate the subject, only returns a semblance of dialogue without ever addressing you as subject. The Vibe Coder becomes neither full author nor full subject, but a medium through which predictive recombination speaks —spoken by the model as much as speaking through it. The Symbolic order is not engaged but simulated. What emerges is not understanding, but interpolation: machinic consensus dressed in familiar cultural forms."
"[E]very time someone complains about vandalizing the Waymos in Los Angeles as some kind of violence against Alphabet’s balance sheet, just remember that Waymo isn’t profitable and never has been! They already lose money, the amount lost by destroying the car is pocket lint in the Alphabet balance sheet realm."
"[T]he way technology changes work is neither automatic nor inevitable. It is shaped by collective choices about what kinds of work, and what kinds of working lives, society is willing to sustain."
"The process-engineering function of an LLM, therefore, is to prevent fundamental problems from ever getting fixed, to reward the rapid-fire overwhelm of infrastructure teams with an immediate, catastrophic cascade of legacy code that is now much harder to delete than it is to write."
"Using a 12-bit colour depth limits the available colours, so slight changes to luminance, chroma, and hue must be made, but these are small enough not to be noticeable. The resulting palette has evenly-spaced hues, only small variations in chroma, and smoothly increasing and decreasing luminance."
"I... was the primary author of Protocol Buffers version 2, which is the version that Google released open source. Cap’n Proto is the result of years of experience working on Protobufs, listening to user feedback, and thinking about how things could be done better."
"These works are simultaneously images and material records of their own making.
Field recordings of production sounds were made at each site, then transmuted into digital spectrogram images using a linguistic audio software. Color was assigned to the wave forms, then translated into a pattern by a weaving technician to create a Jacquard fabric."
"Grinding is a fantasy by which the change you desire can be achieved by continuing to do what you are already doing in small, comfortable increments. Grinding is the copium of liberal democracy: enough small instances of inoffensive protest and general decorum will gradually push society to Max Level. Is Metaphor: ReFantazio an allegory😉 for the Obama administration, some mildly progressive status-quo-ing aestheticized as radical change?" (by Todd Anderson) I disagree with this but it is usefully provocative haha
"Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace."
"An engineering problem is solved when the structure works: a bridge bears the weight. However, a bridge bearing weight does not confirm one's hypothesis that bridges possess an understanding of gravity."
"I am in a position to know and appreciate what a difference education makes to the quality of your life. The vastness of the world it opens up to you while simultaneously instilling in you the curiosity to explore it. The sense of perspective it offers, enabling you to view the events of your life, and the events of whatever historical moment it is yours to live through, in a much larger context, rather than being resigned to viewing them from a standpoint of uncomprehending ignorance, as if they were all happening for the first time and for no discernible reason."
"Le remplacement d’un smartphone est ainsi plus souvent motivé par la frustration liée à l’accumulation de dysfonctionnements matériels et logiciels sur l’appareil que par une réelle incapacité d’utilisation." (english: smartphone replacement is more often motivated by frustration linked to accumulating hardware and software problems, not by the phone being actually impossible to use) so... smartphone manufacturers are actually *incentivized* to ship and promote shitty software, because it drives sales of newer models. got it.