Allison's bookmarks (2026 archive)

Most recent

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