Within the last few months I have noticed a troubling trend from men* in, and adjacent to, electronic freedom and free software who are well on their way to becoming the next elder statesmen of these communities. All at once, they all have begun engaging in tepid endorsements for the minor use cases of large language models (AI**) they discovered. When broached with criticism, they get extremely defensive.

It is undeniable that any motivated person or team can find the proper nails to direct a particular fit-for-purpose hammer at. What these advocates are missing is that people are directing their ire towards them because when they lend their reputation for the handful of appropriate cases, they are helping to paper over the various maledictions of Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, etc., and the evils the leaders of AI companies are ushering into the world are not small. This year we have had their tools powering the bombing of a school full of children, motivating people to suicide, reports on how these data centers are poisoning the water of agricultural communities and causing elevated rates of cancer, automated CSAM generation, and more. We are but three mere months into this year, and weekly the tragedies escalate.

I fully believe that it might be irksome for people generally excited about technology to be shouted at when they find a use case. Figuring out where and how a tool works brings on an incredible euphoria, and being shouted at definitely harshes the vibe. Sometimes, by virtue of your position, you must forgo euphoria because you are held to a higher standard. That standard and the expectation to meet it are not purity culture, though; that is the price of wearing the crown.

I have no doubt that the notable people and leaders of these communities have worked their asses off to be in the position to influence policy, get invited to give speeches around the globe, be paid for work they seem to enjoy, and generally get to rest in the shade of the orchard they tended. The implicit deal is that these figures are expected to hold the line against the regressive forces on behalf of everyone else in the community. At first blush, this may seem unfair because I very much believe that deal was not what any of these folks were working towards, but if one wants to brandish their leftist credentials or fly the flag of allyship, it requires acting in solidarity even if that means giving up something of yourself.

The technologies as they exist today pose significant danger, and as a result, the elites within these communities must have the humility to refrain from talking about their clever uses. Not because our community elites lack the capability to pull off cool stunts but because the hazard of them opening up their reputation as a laundromat for evil is too great.

In this moment, we would be better served by lesser-known people quietly doing the work of “repurposing the master’s tools.” That is a better path forward for two reasons. The first is that by prominent people refusing to spend any time selling the master’s tools, the masters must do it themselves. The energy that was previously spent threading the cursed needle can now be directed into showcasing the tools and systems that are already oriented towards enriching people’s lives and do not require the work of reconfiguration. Should the repurposed tools prove pro-social, word will get out without our most decorated community members taking up the mantle.

The second reason this serves the moment better is that, unlike our more esteemed community members who will surf IRC or gaze into an esoteric forum like it’s the Necronomicon, the AI boosters do not care to roll about in that muck with the people who actually toil over technology***, but they do read and pay attention to advocates and figureheads that have risen above the teeming masses.

When the most visible members of our communities discuss their positive experiences, no matter how deep between the cushions they couch their caveats, the boosters immediately chamber that bullet and fire it into the crowd of people resisting their designs. When we express anger at the prominent figures of the community, it might be in part us asking them to refrain from using the tool, but the more crucial thing we are asking for here is that you stop manufacturing ammunition for the opposition.

* Any denizen of the web could probably guess to whom I refer, but this is about multiple people and likely applies to some I have never encountered. I have intentionally excluded their names because, at the end of the day, I have learned from and deeply respect many of these people. I hope someone flags this for them to read because it appears that despite making it to the top, they still think themselves the underdog, and the responsibilities to the community they actually hold haven’t been fixed in their minds.

** The marketing term has consistently beat out the more useful specific terms in popular discussion across the decades. I think it’s important to use the specific term, else the boosters subsume technologies that existed long before they came around as their own.

*** There is a reason that all the optimization in this space is coming from either open source folks or countries facing export controls and not the companies seeking trillions of dollars in investment.

In an interview from the nineties, Steve Jobs described the computer as a “bicycle for the mind.” It’s an apt metaphor, or it can be when computers are at their best. Computing is a long way from its best. More often than not, today’s operating systems are locked down, and the applications so reliant on internet access that people are pressured into paying a subscription for continued access to the tools and the data they work with. More and more applications have moved from working perfectly fine on your computer to all but requiring the cloud (a synonym for someone else’s computer). The cloud and the data centers around the world are what enabled the software as a service (SaaS) model that dominated the 2010s. If you follow the stock market, go on LinkedIn, or have sat in a corporate meeting at many jobs, the primary collection of ideas dominating the 20s appears to be large language models (LLMs).

Where the SaaS model says as long as you have a browser, you can simply focus on using our software, the LLM method seems to be moving towards you will have nothing, you will know nothing because you can always just ask a bot, and you will be happy. Anyone seriously working with LLMs knows that they require so much cajoling that it is often better to do it yourself, find someone suited for the task, or live with the output you were given even if you are unqualified to assess its quality.

Both of these trends in consumer computing applications are a trend in a perilous direction. I am not here to argue that SaaS companies have or have not delivered good value to businesses and maybe even individuals, but the computing arrangement necessary for software as a service to work converts computers from bicycles into automobiles for the mind. When the computer becomes the mind’s automobile, the incentive becomes to force everyone onto toll roads.

In order for a computer to be a bicycle for the mind, it largely needs to be user serviceable. From the operating system to the hardware to the software we install. There should be a certain ergonomics that someone with the time, motivation, and access to the tools and parts should be able to take a machine that’s limping along and make it roadworthy once more.

Again, that path isn’t for everyone, and computers should exist in such a way that any neighborhood has the infrastructure to maintain one’s electronics affordably and with ease. Be it a computer shop, a library meet-up group, a repair café, or all of the above where you can get help with troubleshooting, maintenance, and recommendations.

That world has existed in the not too distant past. You still hear echoes of it when you find yourself in a strip mall and see an independent operator running a repair shop or manage to hear something about Best Buy’s Geek Squad. Let’s assume for a second that we still have the communal knowledge to bring that world back. What should we ask of software?

Frankly, we should ask for a lot more, but what I am thinking about today is how software might strengthen our skills to the point where we do not need it or, in its absence, operate fine without it.

I think an application that utterly fails to enhance our cognitive abilities is maps software. GPS plus mapping software is truly incredible and has come a long way. Regardless of how I think something like Google Maps should exist as infrastructure (something that is commonly held and maintained as such), the client software we use to interact with GPS leaves much to be desired. This tool could operate in a way that enhances our ability to navigate in the world.

For example, say over the course of a month you put directions in to go somewhere seven times. The client should have built in a feature for its guidance to exponentially back off. Maybe it starts by guiding you start to finish, but the next time, it stops a quarter mile from the destination. The time after that, it goes further, and so on. Day by day your mind’s path-making is strengthened because we have developed our tools to know when to provide assistance and when to take it away.

Before LanguageTool went in on the LLM hype, I found that its advice on grammar and punctuation was helpful. My personal method for editing usually involves copying paragraph by paragraph into a tool to check for spelling and grammar mistakes and then hand-editing those because I want to train myself to be better and retain the intuitive understanding (comma usage has long plagued me).

I learned Photoshop long before generative AI (LLMs) was integrated into the product, and I learned that software hand in hand with the basics of photography on a Nikon camera. That there was similar terminology between my camera settings and the software I used to edit expanded my understanding of how my camera worked and what it meant to take a photo. Photoshop acted as a set of training wheels for understanding my camera. It was a manifestation of the computer as bicycle for the mind.

A tool that has executed this training wheels approach well is the Cura slicing software. Every setting has a tooltip that explains what it does. When I started 3D printing, I relied on Cura, an Ender 3, and a book on common printing failures. Through these, I learned a lot about printing in a short amount of time because the book had a page with pictures of different failure modes, the Cura software had all the settings labeled so that I could quickly learn the jargon of printing, which enabled my ability to search, and the Ender is such a do-it-yourself device that there is a huge community to seek out when you are at your wit’s end.

When computers are designed in an accessible way with standardized parts and easily modifiable software, it drives people into the ecosystem. People become knowledgeable about it, software can enhance books, books can enhance devices, and people can enhance themselves. People build communities around software and electronics that even offer a glimmer of this vision. These gestures, intentions, and actions make the world richer.

When you open many applications today, the first time you use them, a first-time walkthrough guides you along. Some tools have a daily tip that pops up. My experience of initial tutorials is trying to get through them quickly and onto the one thing I downloaded the software for. Daily tips are a nice affordance, but a pop-up when you open an application for the first time in a given day can come off as annoying. The best experiences are planned from the ground up and baked into the background. On some level it shouldn’t feel like we are learning nor that the tool is asking more of us and less of it.

The transition from novice to expert with any given software should be a transition so seamless that we do not notice we have gone from a stabilizing wheel on each side to one side to a person providing gentle support at your back before they let go and you are gliding alone, aided by your own center of gravity, by the two wheels of the bike, and by the power of your pedaling.

In a different career, as a younger person, I had the great honor to land at a city owned theatre, after my first season of summer stock as the house technician and general assistant to the technical director. If, for a moment, you will excuse the vocational awe, I genuinely look back on that time as a blessing. My career continued from there but at some point I needed to make a different choice. The joy from the moments of creation and camaraderie that comes from making art collaboratively simply could not outweigh the anxiety of making enough money, but this post isn’t wistful rumination on a life that could have been. It’s about our professions.

The technical director I worked under remains one of the sharpest people I have ever worked with. He’s got a real engineer’s mind coupled with keen aesthetic sensibilities. Truly something to envy. One day I asked him, “Why are you here? You could be at a large theater with a higher budget than we have.” Arms folded, leaning against the wall, he half shook his head and said, “At one of those places, I would be the guy with the clipboard. I wouldn’t get to make things.”

It was an arresting statement. A decade on, that moment has stuck with me. It was also fair for him to say. Over the seasons we worked together, he had built & designed some incredible sets. Giant polyhedral dice that polypocketed open to be different sets for She Kills Monsters, A set of wooden cogs that spanned a considerable length of our proscenium that were operated by a single actor leveraging a large handle that generated enough force to rotate the entire set for Jekyll & Hyde, conscripting me to get him a bus that he would then transform into a piece for the stage for an run of Priscilla. The man consistently produced honest to god stage magic and always came in under budget. I learned a lot about how I wanted to be in the world from his commitment to the craft.

He knew what he wanted from his profession: the opportunity to hone his craft and gain the skills to better his ability to put art into the world.

I’m a long ways away from my theatre career. I’ve worked one show this decade. About a decade ago, I decided to see what the alternative careers were. I figured maybe I could get some stability and do theater on the side. Some people manage that track; I don’t think I am possessed of the temperament to do that labor part-time professionally or even as a hobby. I tend to be monomaniacal in my endeavors. After briefly working my way through IT help desk and some network operations support, I landed a role as software engineer. Programming was something I taught myself working the second shift in a network operations center, and eventually, I would formally earn a credential in it. I’ve spent the better part of a decade learning about, writing, and maintaining code.

If you have the very good fortune to be excused from thinking and hearing about artificial intelligence, may your god continue to bless you. I do not have such a fortune. The current incarnation of artificial intelligence (generative AI) is here. Container ships full of money have been either spent or promised via legally binding IOUs. For years now money has been set on fire in service of making numbgup*.

In service of numbgup, the software profession has seen untold layoffs and the imperative in many shops is to get the bot working in your code bases and go faster. Don’t worry about having the finger tip feeling for the code base. No need to dredge through enough boilerplate to realize that the abstraction is bad, we’ve overcome bad abstractions with boilerplate at the speed of AI.

You don’t need to write the code; you just need to hold the clipboard and make sure things are on track. If they’re not on track, don’t worry. When they get to prod, it’s your name attached to those commits, so we’ve got all the accountability sinks we need. Make sure that you’re playing Numberwang to win. Throw that code in a pipeline and have it try to win Numberwang again if it fails the linting or the tests.

Here is the thing, though: I do not want to hold the clipboard. In fact, what I want is to hone my craft, learn from colleagues in an environment where we are encouraged to hold each other to high standards, own my successes and my mistakes. Though, software possesses a similar ephemerality to the stage, I want the work I put into the world to be durable. I had many goals when I was a theatre worker, but one of them was to ensure that when my name appeared in a playbill, people would be pleased to know I was involved in the show because they had a respect for the quality of my work. I’m not sure if I gave the career enough of a shake to get there with audiences, but I feel good saying I was on the path there. I have many goals today, but I want the same thing to happen when someone sees my name on a commit, in an escalation path, or on the org chart, they will know that my work is solid.

I have spent some time ruminating on what I desire from my profession. It is tailored to software engineering, but I think it is broadly applicable. I have grouped these into the following categories: learning, sharing, quality, agency, accountability, and respect.

Learning: The computer science and software engineering fields are still young fields, and the work of computing can be expansive. There are innumerable ways to improve one’s craft and become a better engineer. Learning should not be limited to the domain of reading but actual implementation. It is better to understand the full implications of something through practice, implementation, and refactoring. The profession should require our hands on attention.

Sharing: This is a personal preference, but I wish that more developers would take the effort to codify their knowledge. My personal preference is the written word but I think we should inculcate in our peers that putting our knowledge into the record is an unalloyed good. I enjoy writing documentation. Some may want to put forward toy examples under permissively licensed code or to build the documentation in test suites and rest collections. Hell, maybe it’s a podcast, or even video tutorials. You could bundle this into learning or quality, but I think explicitly enumerating sharing is important because we know that sharing knowledge helps to reinforce one’s own abilities.

Quality: We should be encouraged to strive for the highest standards of quality and wear the projects we work on like a badge of honor that things are stable, they don’t have random errors, don’t consume needless resources, are reliable.

We have long been in an era where hardware people did the grueling work of making chips better, and us software people have largely squandered those performance gains by simply throwing more RAM at a problem. There are exciting strides on the fringes but no one is handing out bags of cash for the endeavor of improved software performance, let alone shipping containers. We have gotten so drunk on this freely available RAM, and it’s made the quality of our products worse. In everything we do, we should be respectful of resources, and we should endeavor to target making these systems work perfectly at the lowest reasonable end of hardware for the task at hand.

Quality should denote one additional thing, though: support. What we release into the world should have clear paths to getting help, be that documentation, tutorials, or, God forbid, a real flesh-and-blood person.

Agency: The long arc of history makes it clear that computing technology has a conservative streak. Conservative in the sense that it centralizes power, enables greater surveillance, and encourages the homogenization of the world so that it may be rendered machine readable.

We had a brief era where bandwidth costs moved the means of computing into the home. Connectivity meant that we could work and explore privately and share those discoveries on our terms, when we were ready, but every day since dudes got a Dell, the powers that be have been working to claw back any liberation people may have experienced through computers. Any engineer worth their salt should try working with open protocols and ensure that the paths to leaving their software are seamless. We should strive to make our software maximize a person’s ability to express themselves in the domain we are creating it for.

Accountability: Computers, algorithms, and automation are often a way to eschew responsibility. That should not be the case; mechanisms for accountability should exist like they do in other professions. There should be engineering unions that hold their members to standards as part of the craft but also to exert meaningful force when employers want to make decisions that would make our systems worse. Perhaps in addition we could have a board that software engineers can be certified through that functions like the American Bar Association with all the professional and ethical obligations that entails.

This should not exist as a means of gatekeeping but so that there can be a north star for ethics and standards and a meaningful means to adhere to these standards when people seek to undermine them. It may not be necessary for every engineer to hold a board certification or be a member of a specific union, but it would do a world of good if the profession as a whole were concerned with what loosing their software into the world means. Presently, software engineers have no real means to send an email that will make a leader’s blood run cold, in the same way a lawyer sending “This course of action is being taken against the advice of counsel.” Or, “If we continue down this path that could harm people, the workers have voted to authorize a strike.” Either of these means would broaden the accountability within the software industry.

Respect: We must have respect for each other, the work we are doing, and the people who will come to rely on what we build. We can never know how or who will use our software, but we should treat this unknown with a certain solemnness. Iris Meredith captured this sentiment better regarding software than I can:

This means that everything, to a greater or lesser extent, calls for the level of regard given to a situation where life is at stake: you never know when a tool that you make or something that you build might be put into a situation where lives depend on it, after all.

It is not just the reliance on our software that we should have respect for but the impact of it as well. In everything we make, we should take a beat to think through the implications. I would not suggest it is possible to account for every possible abuse of a given software, but we are so far afield of thinking about even the most obvious harms that taking a single second to consider how someone might use software maliciously would immeasurably improve the present.

Respect should extend to our experience. At the highest echelons of this industry, it helps to have gotten a computer science degree from MIT or Dartmouth, but the long time need for technologists has allowed those from non-traditional backgrounds to take the side door into the profession. It is our duty to make sure many paths bring people to the technology trades. Part of keeping those paths viable is recognizing their lived experience not only matters but makes us better technologists.

All these ideas bundled together could be called something else: excellence.** We should strive for excellence from ourselves, within our professions, and we should do this for each other.

Society would benefit across the board from an adherence to excellence. I do not think firms are desirous of these expectations, because the pursuit of excellence eats into margins, but excellence is worth pursuing. Right now you might be an engineer who finds themselves staring down having to work with AI. Maybe you even enjoy it. Maybe it’s doing something for you. I have no real interest in arguing with anyone about this, but I would ask that you meditate on if the tool is making you better at your craft. If you took away the tool, would you still be helpful in a room full of people? As someone who hates whiteboard interviews, I abhor the removal of tools, but if the tool atrophies your muscles through usage, it is probably a cursed object.

*numbgup: a neologism coined by my dear friend Dan to grossly express the idea of “number go up”

** h/t to @GeePawHill@mastodon.social for helping me to make this connection.

Finding bio labs with viruses seems like something that would raise more alarm bells in a functioning federal government.

Nicole Zieba, the city manager of Reedley said she was “not surprised about the discovery.” Fresno County supervisor Nathan Magsig said items discovered in the Reedley lab “pointed to the fact that there may be additional laboratories in other parts” of the U.S. Zieba said that Reedley officials had tried to warn the federal government.

“I hope they are paying attention because when we tried to raise the flag, we received just such a poor response from the CDC,” Zieba said. “It’s almost as if they didn’t want anything to do with it.”

www.cbsnews.com/news/las-…

Wired ran an article featuring people romantically engaged with chatbots. I don’t really know where I sit with it. Mostly, to me, it appears as another step on the road to making every interpersonal interaction a market phenomenon. In this case, it’s the apotheosis of the idea of a relationship as a monetary transaction. Instead of two romantically involved people negotiating their relationship through a company that they, as a couple, can decide to stop using, you have one person paying a company, and keeping that company in business is necessarily fundamental to their romantic interaction staying alive. It isn’t as though you can port the interactions and behavior of a Replika model to another competitor or your own device. Money is required to continue those relationships. Never mind what can happen if they decide to change their underlying model.

Now, I don’t begrudge people for using computers to find solace, but that we have structured the world in such a way to make statistically likely responses paired with hard drives and RAM easier, more feasible, and attractive than being in relation with others is wholly depressing. I do not think the problem here is with the people engaging the machines, though. It is likely the case for many people that this software allows people to see and find themselves safely in ways they haven’t before. In many ways, the usage of romantic chatbots reminds me of Turkle’s work in Alone Together.

At this point, there will always be a subset of people who find interacting with this software the easiest way to be in the world. For the sake of all involved, we should frame the language differently. The reporting in the Wired piece would refer to the chatbots as though they were people. I found that troubling because what appears to be going on is something closer to an intense text-based simulation.

People might argue that they feel real feelings and that there is something deeper, but you can have these sorts of responses to books, video games, cinema, and art. That’s a good thing! The advances in chatbots represent a technological development in an existing medium that enables you to experience a facsimile of reality. Facsimiles can be useful. It is okay and even good to learn something about yourself through engaging in computer-aided simulation and roleplay. What unsettled me about the article is that every participant and the author seemed ready to lose sight of that fact. I think that is a mistake.

Confronting the reality that romantic LLMs are another iteration of interactive computer software is something we can use to better society. We can investigate how and why people use them and the situations where the software goes wrong. We can use that information to create interventions that give people an alternative to shelling out money just to feel a little less alone in the world. When we obscure the fact that these are computer-aided simulations, we further contribute to the corporate consolidation of power and make it harder to create a healthy pluralistic society that provides a base level of emotional and material needs for everyone.

That people are finding themselves and getting lost in media isn’t strange or even new. What is strange is that countless words have gone into convincing us this is something other than that.

I know that my current government would not do something like this, but imagine if governments were committed to technological innovation through creating open hardware. This is something off the cuff that I’d just like to have in the aether, but imagine the government solicits bids for modular laptop, mobile, and wearable platforms. Companies then submit proposals, and whoever wins the bid must make available x amount of electronics platforms per year, with direct support for the boards guaranteed for 10 years. To win these bids, the company would need to meet criteria that consider ecological impact, production labor conditions, operating cost, production cost, longevity, and interoperability.

Other companies would be free to stick to their in-house designs, teams, and private supply chains, or they could opt to remix the public hardware platform, but the subsequent design must be released back into the public domain. There is likely some optimal timeframe for the design to be exclusive to the company producing it (likely in the 1-5 year range).

This post is somewhat inspired by the Framework and all the cool projects I see their motherboards popping up in. The other factor influencing my thoughts here is the fact that computing technology is stable. Desktops have been in a good spot, laptop chips have reached a solid performance/power spot, and battery technology has immensely improved. There will be gains, but it feels like we have long passed the point of immense gains, and our efforts and public funds should go towards long-term/frugal computing. Most people I know who aren’t computer professionals or hobbyists don’t need a cutting-edge machine; they need a stable one.

I would like to spend some more time thinking through this. For now, I offer this little sketch of a possible future.

I recently completed a 600-mile round-trip drive to witness a pair of my dearest friends get married. Normally, I make sure to pack the CDs and get any digital exclusives cached and queued up on my phone. It’s been a hell of a month, so that task didn’t happen. Instead, I refreshed my VPN credentials between my phone and server so that my music would seamlessly play from home.

Through winding tree-lined roads and a severe thunderstorm, my car faithfully kept my connection alive. The electrons flowing into my home kept my server vigilant and ready to respond to requests. Packets bounced off cell towers and raced through fiber until music faithfully reached my phone. Despite being on the road, I felt connected to my home in ways that eased the mental strain of travel. There’s comfort in knowing that your computer is up and running. It allows you to feel as though you didn’t leave some heating element powered and laying in wait to catch fire; it signals that a major disaster hasn’t come through the area, disrupting the power grid or shearing off the roof of your home, and that your friends and family in the area are also safe from those hazards.

There are limitations. As the queue plays, I tell my partner about all these times and moments and how the songs are connected. She doesn’t have a vast collection of DRM-free music. Her most cherished music isn’t on my server, and she does not possess a similar hobby of hosting services for herself. If an important musician from her past makes an appearance in my collection, that is incidental. As long as we are tethered to my home, her stories don’t naturally surface. Being connected to my home accidentally but necessarily excludes her from the casual intimacy that arises from sharing the importance of art and the time and place it was first encountered, molded the person sitting next to them, where easy, loving moments pass between one another.

I am tied to my home and to my past, but the logic of running one’s own services necessitates a certain level of individualism. Sure, I could easily host her music, but she would need to have equal interest in acquiring DRM-free copies of the music that shaped her life. Well-matched partners are often not perfectly matched in hobbies. Now, I could scour her record collection, inquire about her favorite bands, and make an effort to acquire the albums for a shared music collection. That would certainly be intimate. It’s the sort of intentional making of intimacy that adds breadth and depth to shared love, but it’s not casual, like the spark of a shuffled song that sets a story from the past in motion. The limitations baked into the self-hosting prevent the moments of casual intimacy that strengthen the foundations of a relationship.

Surely, at any point, we could have connected her phone to my car and gone through Spotify, surfaced the meaningful music, and I would have been happy for the experience of hearing new music and learning about touchpoints of her life. Spotify presents its own challenges, though. Are the artists she would like to show me even on Spotify? Does she have a curated playlist of her own music, or does she primarily rely on Spotify suggested playlists? If the latter, how is the moment influenced by Spotify’s recommender systems? Do these systems construct playlists in such a way that they optimize for the lowest royalty payout over the course of an hour? Is there an unknown deal that means, for a portion of the drive, they will seed the tracks with some new up-and-coming artists? Is Spotify going to make us think Drake lost a rap battle by playing Not Like Us (definitely not)? It’s entirely possible that Spotify could have been opened and none of those scenarios played out, but the logic of these platforms intervenes in even more sinister ways in our day-to-day lives that the thought of allowing them to mediate my personal relationship erects a different kind of barrier, even if I am interacting with Spotify with an open mind.

Where does one go from here? Do we run that well-trod road of nostalgia, buy a Tangara and a refurbished iPod (half of this relationship is firmly in the Apple ecosystem), and pass the aux chord back and forth? We could; the dedicated devices would offer greater fidelity, our listening experience would be unencumbered by the weight of corporate algorithms, and we would not worry about the state of our cell service. My home could be fully ablaze, and the sentimental tunes pumping out of my car speakers would leave me none the wiser.

While I love a dedicated device, keeping a well-curated MP3 player was a part-time job, and I yearn for more than nostalgia. I yearn for a world where two people can possess seamless access to a lovingly curated collection of their favorite music without corporate mediation, arcane devices, making a job out of it, or the logics of individualist self-hosting. I cannot say I have a suggestion for bringing it about; only that I have plowed headlong into the limits of self-hosting, and we all deserve something more.

I know it’s not in vogue for corporations to hire people, but our work would absolutely be improved by having a junior dev right now. There’s a lot of paired programming/troubleshooting happening, a lot of changes are happening rapidly, and I can’t keep pace to troubleshoot them, deploy changes, and document findings. Obviously, I am capable of doing those things, but not at the speed required. Scoping some of this stuff out as discrete tasks is absolutely work that a junior dev should cut their teeth on.

I finished Claire Dederer’s Monsters. The first two thirds of the book are interesting enough but I had planned on finishing the book and putting it on the cycle-out-of-the-house shelf. The last third has me reconsidering that though. It’s the part of the book where the author grapples concretely with what to do with the work of monstrous people and whether she is a monster herself. It’s where the work shows that it’s been suffuse with a strong foundation in theory all along. I picked up the book as a literary life preserver. I discovered this book around the same time that the band Anti-Flag broke up due to internal monstrosities. I hoped that reading the book would allow me to rescue something important. Even if my path will not be the same as Dederer’s, grappling with monsters alongside a fellow traveler is preferable to grappling alone.

Leaving for myself useful for removing all the contents of a specific merge commit

git revert -m 1 {merge commit hash}

Are there fantasy stories out there that don’t implicitly endorse substance dualism? Feels hard with a lot of them because they deal with souls/spirits/separating mind from body.

My thinking around debt has shifted in the last few years. US debt has worked to finance the lifestyle that many people’s parents had without financing and make it seem as though the system was humming along fine just fine (Anyone doing the barest of observation could see this wasn’t true). We know that debt has long been a liability used to make you complicit in the way things are. During the Neoliberal era I saw debt as a tool — a double-edged sword you could make your way with. As we find ourselves firmly in navigating an openly authoritarian era, it is harder to view debt as a blade that you wield. Cautious wielding can no longer keep you safe. Debt now hangs like the sword of Damocles. Do what you can to unburden yourself from it.

I understand why the Wikimedia Foundation created a dataset that is purpose built for machine learning purposes. It was given at gunpoint though. The motivation was to discourage the scraping of their sites. These are all pretty disgusting developments.

Apropos of nothing here are some links:

thedabbler.patatas.ca/pages/poi…
github.com/ai-robots…
zadzmo.org/code/nepe…
git.madhouse-project.org/algernon/…
marcusb.org/hacks/qui…
codeberg.org/MikeCoats…
codeberg.org/konterfai…
github.com/Fingel/dj…

I am starting to notice that the AI generated images have gone in an opposite direction. They all used to be super shiny and now everything I’m seeing is more matte. I guess the surest way to tell if it’s AI these days is just: 1) does an image with some technical competence appear next to a low effort post? 2) are these style images being shared in volume?

Proposal: we inculcate a reflex that encourages people to not send messages generated by AI. If the communicative intent is generated by a prompt with a bullet point to be included, send the bullet point.

Saves time and doesn’t set the planet ablaze.

Programming note: Against The Future has long been a catch-all blog. I never really intended for that to happen, but short posts won out with the occasional long form post. I am going to be reworking the blog and shuttling the micro posts elsewhere. My long form posts sometimes include stepping through technical chatter, those posts will also be moving elsewhere. I want this to return to is the initial vision. When I started this, I imagined it as a tech criticism blog. There are brilliant people doing excellent tech criticism every day. I don’t think that is where my writing efforts should be. That is not to say that that type of writing won’t show here, just that it’s not the priority. What I want to switch the focus to is seeding alternative futures instead of the ones that are being forced upon us. We are in a moment of system collapse, and what gets picked up and used to rebuild is what is lying around. Here’s an entry to that effort.

Across media and time, it is perfectly normal to encounter an opinion that is outright worth rejecting, this is especially true of replies and comments. I regret to inform you that, today, someone was wrong on the internet. What I encountered was a post discussing that, for much of history, society has produced a class of men for whom no purpose exists. These people will not marry, have children, contribute to the pursuits of society, or be well-compensated for any labor they do produce, and they resent that. Historically, these men were either ground up by the dangers of pre-industrial professions, wars, or placated by compulsory marriage. All of these methods of handling men are at the expense of other people.

The proposed solution I encountered from one commenter was creating an [Experience Machine])(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Experience_machine) for these people. Another commenter pointed out that Curtis Yarvin had a similar proposal that requires disappearing people, sealing them in pods, and giving them “better” lives in cyberspace. I spent too much of my time reading that Yarvin for him to finally reach that conclusion. I’ll say this: imagining the biggest boot in the world you can lick and disappearing your friends, family, and neighbors because they are “liabilities” (read: not producing profits) to the state or even simply encouraging a mass of people to idle away their time in an “experience machine” to deal with the realities imposed by present existence is not a serious idea and one that is outright worth dismissing.

To be sure, we do not have a means to handle the roiling mass of folks who have been closed off to opportunity. They know, feel, and resent this deeply. A mass of men without jobs, families, or education is a breeding ground for fascism. We exist in the long shadow of GamerGate where these forces that had been lurking in society but confined to being whispered about in the bowels of the internet were injected into mainstream discourse. One hardly needs to look up to know that we approach the dangerous conclusion of bitter, resentful people who long for a past that does not exist. Assuming we will not excise this problem unscathed but have enough of our society left to rebuild, how should that happen?

It must start with purpose and knowing that they meaningfully contribute to the world around them. An obvious starting point is one’s job. Meaningful work that helps to rebuild the world. A Works Progress Administration revived as a Federal Job Guarantee would be the entry point. In cities across the United States, neglected maintenance and decay is abundant. Simply repairing sidewalks, bridges, and stairs could occupy people for years, but it must be more than that. Present conditions will be exacerbated by climate change. Cities will need to be redesigned, buildings will need improved HVAC efficiently heat and cool in addition to helping mitigate disease, neighborhood roads need to prioritize pedestrians and cyclists, public transit needs expanding, existing housing stock will need retrofitting, and new stock will have to be built up, unused corporate parks will need revamping, closed-loop industrial capacity must be built, our mode of agricultural production must be reshaped, and our natural resources will need conservation, maintenance, and repair.

Much of this is people-intensive manual labor that cannot be or is wildly expensive to automate; however, requiring a lot of labor is not automatically a bad outcome. The point here is not to make profit but to build up our capacity for a peaceful, sustainable society. Requiring a ton of people and compensating them is the point. It gives people skills, provides dignity, and says we value the work one does.

Changing our infrastructure is necessary but not sufficient, and the type of work mentioned cannot be completed by everyone. This fact is not an issue. Additional labor will be required to capture the public imagination about why the changes are happening, the people who are making them happen, and what the long-term impacts are. This should be done across mediums. Capturing the public imagination cannot be done without art. There should be a renewed Federal Theatre Project, putting on new plays developed for both national and local audiences. The National Endowment for the Arts should be expanded, and funding for the creation of relevant film and video games should be added to the mission. Grants should be earmarked for songwriters to travel the country, visit the sites that have been improved, and perform concerts about their experiences. Fine artists should be asked to, through their work, interrogate our recent past and the promise of a sustainable, pluralist future. Monuments to the people working in all these ways should be built. Valorizing our collective efforts is a means of inoculation against forces that will gather and try to upend these changes. Etching this history in public everywhere across mediums will remind people that we built something better, and we built it together.

The National Science Foundation and National Institutes for Health should have funding expressly for studying the impacts of the ills being addressed through the Job Guarantee. A press corps of science writers should be founded to responsibly report the findings done by our nation’s scientists. Finally, National Public Radio, the Public Broadcasting Service, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting should be massively expanded to do the important work of covering these happenings, holding people and institutions to account, and showing the public the fruits of our labors.

Taken together, this would go a long way to rebuilding a robust civil society because it recognizes that people require monetarily and spiritually useful renumeration. Creating a society that recognizes the inherent worth of each person and ensures there is a role for them will take more than jobs. Work is not the sole means of meaning, and not everyone has the capacity to do this. The expansion of care work, community connection, and education will be vital, as will the maintenance of these values, but those are beyond the scope of these musings.

Some may quibble that any given one of these priorities is a waste of money, but a robust, resilient society cannot be atomized and examined. A pluralist democracy necessarily requires something that looks like waste to an observer from afar, but the point of funding documentation, study, and celebration is to have the waste shaken out in the process. How this takes shape and democratic processes we instill in the execution are on us. People who do not want to actually solve problems will ask, “How will we pay for this?” and while I think there are good answers to these questions, it is not our job to prefigure how it will be paid for but instead to put forth the demands with such force that there is no option but to figure out how to pay for these necessary interventions.

I wish I was better at is completing writing on a piece when I first feel its rumblings. There are many stories, essays, posts that I had an inkling of, didn’t write, and then years later something comes up that would have made them relevant or useful.

I’m sure this happens a lot to people and I’ve seen much better writers handle the same subjects I once wished to tackle, but I’m coming to believe that I need to more intently listen and give air to my quiet thoughts.

The OpenAI Ghiblification release is clearly Altman and his acolytes doing it as a show of force against someone who loathes their vision of the world. It is also a real time exercise where these people demonstrate that they want to use machines to devalue labor. If you directly compare a Ghibli still to their facsimile, the beauty is apparent in the Ghibli still and the rot of AI evangelism stands out. Over millions of images generated in this way, the damage is done. Altman’s shambling corpse images will convince some people that there are no new truths to be found in a Ghibli film.

Seeing calls for other countries to ignore US copyright protections. My monkey’s paw brain is just imagining that Canada & Europe stop enforcing US Copyright law, AI companies setup servers outside the US, train all these models. Sell the slop back to us. When they’re inevitably brought to court, they argue that this was all done where US Copyright isn’t enforceable.

Yesterday, I continued working on a writing project that I last touched back in June. It’s broken down into issues. I keep a log for most projects and this one noted that I had already outlined drafted each page of issue 3. Okay. I probably never synced from that device that I was last working on it from. I was away from home, so I continued anyway. Today, I went to go sync that data, and I’m fairly happy because upon rewriting the outline of the action, I still hit 75 percent of the beats. Now the work is just merging the differences together and carrying on.

Funny how even when you cannot recall the broad shape of something, your intuition still provides you with the contours.

I told myself I’d get my SBC with YunoHost on it running so I could try out GoToSocial but YunoHost tries my patience in ways I was not expecting.

I think I am getting worse at spelling. I suspect this is because spell checking has become automated. Going to adjust my writing interfaces and make that a more manual process again.

Told myself I’d spend one hour on the hobby programming project last (narrator: he would spend three), but got another one of the items off the checklist. I’m really considering pausing to ensure I have adequate test coverage and refactor. That sounds correct but also like actual work.

I guess my compromise will set a milestone where that must happen, so I can delay for now.

This and the keyboard from Simple Mobile Tools appear to be the only actively maintained FOSS Android keyboards.

keyboard.futo.org
simplemobiletools.com

My girlfriend found a 3D printable cat grass planter and asked if I could do it.

I, of course, said yes. The print required a honeycomb pattern infill. I’ve been using the last version of Cura 4 since I started printing and I avoid Cura 5 because there are changes that make it harder to use. Unfortunately, Cura 4.13 (the last release for version of 4) doesn’t have the honeycomb infill pattern; however, I discovered that smartavionics has been maintaining and improving Cura 4 and added this feature. They have added other features I haven’t had a chance to dive into.

This is all to say that while a bunch of people who have never done good in their entire lives are dismantling our commons and communal resources, there are more of us building every day. The seeds are there and they will grow.

We’re going to need to find new ways to coordinate massive efforts, but the people are there and ready to do it. Continue doing the things you’re good and keep your eyes peeled for your moment. We need you. The only way out is through, together.