Allison's bookmarks (2026 archive)

Most recent

Power grab

"Omarchy is a fascist project that normalizes fascist thinking for everyone entering that community (even unknowingly). The baseline has to be not to use that system. And as people who believe in human rights and dignity, in community and a tech world that can be better we need to oppose Omarchy. Need to make sure it gets no seat at any table."

linux foss politics fascism

Lia's blog - Code is a wedge and programmers are tools

"If you are refusing genAI in games, you need to refuse it from us too. You need to pressure the C-suite on how code is being written. You need to interview programmers. You need to refuse to cede even an inch of ground. You need to grab your hammer, and knock that wedge right back out."

programming games ai

It Breaks a Village: Bevy's 6th Birthday – fallible

"This attempt to reframe people who are leveraging the cultural-economic weight of an international trillions-dollar spending spree as somehow disadvantaged is an active reframing that one doesn't need to buy into or admit through the door. "AI" Booster positions are bought and paid for and forced into every space with the backing of the most overpowered corporations and professional clout networks that have ever existed. Pushing back against it is what involves sticking out your neck."

ai programming foss community culture

The AI Hater's Manifesto

"Everything you see is the result of elevating people who value and build things based on growth. LLMs offer so many promises to those who don’t want to build anything of value — a way to seem like you’re 'investing in American infrastructure,' a way to be sinophobic, a way to crush workers, a way to pretend like you care about the future... all wrapped in a tool that can give you enough facts to pretend you know anything safe in the knowledge that most people are trained to believe somebody who sounds smart."

ai politics economics

Return the Favor - by Mike Brock - Notes from the Circus

"The morally serious position is not do not impose costs. The morally serious position is impose costs on people attempting to end democratic governance, because failing to impose those costs will result in democratic governance ending. The alternative is losing the country to a movement that will not extend to you the courtesy you are extending to them."

politics rhetoric culture

Literary Hub » Steven Thrasher on the Killing of Jason Arday

"The mediocre 'journalists' covering Jason’s downfall are vultures. His death was a breaking news event in the New York Times, Guardian and BBC—publications, I can personally attest, which have ignored the work of many brilliant Blackademics in recent months, but which will giddily announce their deaths."

academia race

Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner

"On my trip to Montréal, I was stopped by security in Gare Centrale and informed that tripods weren't allowed and asked, au franglais, whether I was recording or taking a picture. Rather than try to answer that philosophical question in a language I don't speak, I just said 'désolé' a few times and put away the tripod, which seemed to be sufficient."

photography programming

I'm done using AI – Brett Codes

"So in summary: using AI for coding led to depression, apathy, existential dread, and worse software. Not good. Add on top of that the negative environmental, community, and economic impacts of AI, and it became extremely apparent to me that something's gotta change."

programming ai

The mathematical beauty of hyperbezier curves - Linebender

"This curve behaves surprisingly similarly to a cubic Bézier, especially at smaller angles, but when pushed has very different behavior. Overall it has smoother curvature variation and is more likely to have monotonic curvature. It contains within it a few valuable analytic curves, and is also good at approximating a wide range of others."

math 2d graphics mol typography

Brewing Collectives

small, sweet little guide for forming a permacomputing collective. "Fermentation is a method, a slow, interdependent process shaped by invisible collaborators. Like microbes that preserve and transform, our work ferments beneath the surface, unfolding, unfinished."

computing permacomputing community activism politics

Whose freedom is it anyway?

"And the vocabulary in which you are asked to evaluate the arrangement is supplied by the same master. Accept that the product is an intelligence, that ingesting your work is learning, that its failures are hallucinations, and that freedom means you are free from owning anything of all that. Every sentence available to you has been arranged in advance, so that refusal comes out sounding like superstition and fear of the future." really wonderful synthesis

technology history politics ai

C Is Not a Low-level Language - ACM Queue

"it is possible to make C code run quickly but only by spending thousands of person-years building a sufficiently smart compiler—and even then, only if you violate some of the language rules. Compiler writers let C programmers pretend that they are writing code that is "close to the metal" but must then generate machine code that has very different behavior if they want C programmers to keep believing that they are using a fast language"

programming c compilers

Konrad Hinsen's blog

"Conviviality matters for science for multiple reasons. One of them is epistemic: if you want to derive knowledge from your work, you need to know exactly what you are doing, and that includes a detailed understanding of your tools. Moreover, research is much facilitated if you also have the inverse: the ability to create a tool that does exactly what you want to do. And since science is a collective activity, in which participants critique and build on each other's work, the understanding of tools needs to be shared inside a discipline." (also discusses the Python 3 transition as an example of a loss of conviviality)

science technology epistemology programming python

Prompt Injection as Role Confusion

good research, but how to you get the conclusion of a paper like this and still have some hope that structuring a text in a particular way will meaningfully address the problem? "Even replacing a single bigram, "The user", (a phrase heavily associated with reasoning) with "The request" drops attack success rates by 19%." it's just a circus clown show

ai language

Why you should refuse to let your doctor record you • Buttondown

"When people are presented with a draft note (no matter what its origin) this will impact how they proceed. It should be relatively possible to check the contents of the note for accuracy (does that match what just happened?), though we guess this gets harder the longer the time lapse between encounter and chart note correcting. Surely it’s harder to chart from scratch later, too, but we’d be really interested to see studies of how much misinformation gets recorded with or without automatic chart note drafts."

ai medicine transcription

The Dead Economy Theory - by Owen McGrann - The Palimpsest

"The rationalist community rediscovers Bayesian epistemology and treats it like a revelation, apparently unaware that the philosophy of science has been working through these questions since the 1920s. Blog posts get treated as foundational texts. People who have never read Kuhn or Lakatos or Feyerabend construct an epistemology from first principles, marvel at what they’ve built, and proceed to use it as the intellectual building blocks for decisions that affect billions of people. The confidence is inversely proportional to the depth. Dunning-Kruger at scale."

ai politics philosophy

FOSS Contra Big Tech

"Perhaps, back then, the problem was that FOSS communities lacked the political consciousness necessary to recognise their strategic position and to connect it to a broader context and a theory of economic warfare. Nowadays, we deal with the reverse problem — growing political awareness with little strategic application."

foss politics software programming community organizing

Luddite Lab

"resources for unions, labor organizations, and worker-organizers fighting AI and automation at work"

ai labor

The Virtual OS Museum

"If a working version of an operating system exists somewhere, the goal is to have it here, in a form anyone can run on a reasonably modern laptop/desktop."

software history retro operatingsystems

SIGPLAN-M

"(SIGPLAN-M) organizes an international long-term mentoring program for programming languages researchers."

programming academia

How to smoke • Buttondown

"[S]uddenly an entire industry is telling you that you’re not capable of moving through your day without their help. An entire industry gaslighting you, until it becomes easier to just gaslight yourself into believing that you were never truly capable of things you are very much capable of."

ai tech culture

Activist or Academic or Both? The Quandary of Scholactivism for the Minoritised in the Ivory Tower | Foluke's African Skies

"Are scholars truly defined by the fact that we cannot seek specific outcomes? I cannot agree with this. If I was a scholar of the environment, I would be seeking to end environmental catastrophe. If I was a scholar of medicine, I would be seeking to change health care outcomes. If I was an engineer, I would be seeking improved engineering methods."

academia activism politics

AI as a Fascist Artifact

"The singularity is MAGA for nerds. A fascist narrative used to undermine everyone’s right and ability to envision futures." (among various other quotables)

technology ai politics

Kin - Everyday tools. No strings.

"[A] curated collection of simple, free web tools that just work. No subscriptions, no accounts, no tracking. Install them to your phone, use them offline..." these are nice but the lack of explicit licensing and source code gives me pause. also the font choice—unfortunately narrow serifs have been completely colonized by fascists and grifters

web apps

Grave Oak - Wikipedia

"[T]he age of around 2000 years stated in the Guinness Book is contested. According to the latest literature, the oak is estimated to be between 700 and 800 years old. [...] In its root zone, directly below the hollow trunk, there is a brick-built crypt containing the body of the manor owner Hans Wilhelm von Thümmel [de], who died in 1824."

trees horror botany oaks

Malleable Systems Collective

"Modern computing is far too rigid. Applications can only function in preset ways determined by some far away team. Software is trapped in hermetically sealed silos and is rewritten many times over rather than recomposed.... This community catalogs and experiments with malleable software and systems that reset the balance of power"

programming

Let’s talk about LLMs

"[LLM] advocates can’t have it both ways: either LLM coding will be an exclusive club for those who built up the necessary skills, XOR it will be a great democratizer and do away with the need for those skills." cogent, calm, well-sourced

ai programming

Des verbes | Tûtie’s blog

"[L]es IA génératives... détruisent ce lien à l’humain que je perçois dans le code, cette base de raisonnement qui n’existe soudain plus du tout. Je n’ai plus d’autrice pour m’expliquer, je n’ai plus personne à comprendre." The part where she lists friends and acquaintances she learned particular technologies from is very touching

programming ai culture

curb cut cartography

i swear i nearly died a dozen times on that / hellish stretch the challenge was exhilarating until / one day suddenly the whole lot had been repaved

poetry disability geography

how to make programming terrible for everyone | jneens web site

"When something goes wrong, we’re as likely as anyone to assume the computer is cursed, has it out for us specifically, or needs to be appeased in some way. And at that moment, the computer does have an interiority that is hidden from us. There certainly is something we haven’t seen or don’t understand! A good programming tool or computer language, though, is a means for us to find and dissect that interiority, stripping away the illusion. AI actively worsens it instead."

programming psychology ai

North Star Data Center Policy Toolkit

"This policy toolkit is primarily geared toward stopping, slowing, and restricting rampant data center development in the US at the local and state level. Our approach recognizes the extractive relationship between data centers and local communities... This toolkit is intended to help organizers and policymakers identify the strongest possible actions."

politics data cityplanning ai

On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: "The Master's Tools" in Tech Discourse

"A decolonial critique of technology is not simply 'the internet was always bad.' It is rather: the conditions that made the internet harmful to specific communities were never peripheral to its design; they're an integral part of it. And any politics that aims to restore something like the pre-enshittification internet without reckoning with those conditions is doomed to reproduce them."

feminism race culture technology

Si personne ne paie pour la preuve, tout le monde paiera pour le sinistre | Freakonometrics

"La preuve... ne se résume pas à quelques checklists ou à un vague 'human in the loop.' Elle exige une infrastructure documentaire, une collecte d’artefacts, des procédures de test, des moments de réflexion, bref tout un appareil organisationnel qui ralentit. Ce ralentissement n’est pas un défaut du système, il en est la condition de crédibilité!"

ai insurance risk

One Year, One Outfit Project — Rust Belt Fibershed

"a cohort-based project that responds to consumerism and the damaging effects of fast fashion. Folks who reside in the Rust Belt Fibershed region (within 250 miles of Cleveland) create an outfit through a soil-to-soil supply chain: fiber and dyes are grown, harvested, and made into a garment, and all garments are able to return to the soil at the end of their life cycle"

textiles fashion fiberarts craft

I don’t know what is Apple’s endgame for the Fn/Globe key, and I’m not sure Apple knows either – Aresluna

"But it’s not just ergonomics. One new of anything means more cognitive load. Fluid and natural keyboard use cannot blossom when a system of modifiers and shortcuts is confusing, inconsistent even between platforms that Apple controls, and when any time you use a third-party keyboard, some keys are unavailable, and some menus lie to you."

interfaces design keyboards writing apple computing mol

Jones on Arithmetic

tutorials on how to do "arithmetic on machines with just binary add, subtract, logical and shift operators, making no use of special hardware support for such complex operations as BCD arithmetic or multiplication and division" very good, very helpful

programming 8bit math

Low-Background Code

"The company produces the finest lorem ipsum on the planet, artisanal lorem ipsum... To produce the ipsum the company first runs a standard static generator. Then it employs copyeditors who personally review every word before sending it out to the ipsum-starved masses. But there is a bug in the generator: every thousand or so words has a typo. It’s your job to find and correct the typo. This is a nightmare job. You would lose your mind. But it’s also what we ask our reviewers to do every time we submit a massive LLM-generated PR."

programming ai labor epistemology

The Enclosure feedback loop

I agree with all of the points about enclosure etc., but not with: "The most popular LLMs will experience a feedback loop. More people will use them, which means that they will have more access to up-to-date training data, which means that the quality of their answers will be better." the only data that LLM users regularly supply to LLMs is *questions*. how will that data improve the quality of the LLM's *answers*? at most, the data will include instances where the LLM user happens to have mentioned in the chatbot text that the LLM's code worked, which seems like pretty low-quality data to me

programming ai epistemology

Seeing like a software company

good essay! i'm left wondering about the relationship between legibility and inequity—it seems to me like a good deal of inequity/abuse happens in the course of illegible processes, and that the primary way that organizations address inequity/abuse is by making those processes legible (and thereby subject to analysis, criticism, restoration). you know, DEI. but maybe real solutions require action on both levels. i'm also curious about what alterities within "legible" and "illegible" are being smoothed over by this neat taxonomy

organizations culture software

POV: ur my friend at a party and im explaining why i hate "AI" so much

this is a good essay about "AI" overall as a cultural, economic and political phenomenon, but this line from the section about programming stood out: "We all know that programming languages, not natural languages, are the best way to get meaning through to computers. If we’re using an intermediary to get to the programming languages, clearly there’s room for them to be improved. Why are we just giving up instead of interrogating that?"

programming politics culture ai

National Design Studio offers a rebrand of government services

"From what is visible so far, the National Design Studio isn’t functioning as a civic design program so much as an advertising agency for the administration and its policy goals. If one was feeling less charitable, they might simply call it a digital propaganda department." (see later in the piece for a vicious takedown of the Apple Store as a concept and institution)

design politics apple

Your mental models are out of date

"[W]e need to acknowledge that young people making speculative bets aren't stupid or weak. They're responding rationally to the world they inherited. The failure isn't theirs. It's ours, for giving them mental models designed for an economy that no longer exists."

economy politics money