Dave Rahardja’s Mind
The recent fiasco involving Linus Torvalds running Linux like the privileged man that he is and entirely missing the central points of the arguments made by people who don’t enjoy his kind of privilege reminds me that there are some OSS projects that have become so large, so important, and so monolithic, that the behavior of their project leadership becomes indistinguishable from a…
I’m glad to (finally) see some buyer’s remorse in the corporate ranks about their rapid deployment of AI, often at the expense of jobs (or so they claim). Costs are rapidly rising. Software quality is plummeting. Morale is tanking. The workers are getting angry. People are swamped with slop. About the only ones happy with this change are sociopaths who live increasingly solipsistic lives with a…
Most people who stand against AI Slop are not standing against AI tech itself, but the way that the tech is developed and deployed. Tech is neutral. AI tech is neutral. Burning fossil fuels is neutral. Nuclear power is neutral. Using asbestos for fire resistance is neutral. The tech behind firearms are neutral. Each of these tech can be developed and deployed judiciously to achieve specific things…
USians often have this notion of themselves as independent free spirits who are self-sufficient and have a who-the-fuck-cares disposition to what others think and that they use some god-given innate value systems to make their decisions and to hustle and get ahead in life. But in reality, we are all relatively weak social primates that depend primarily on norms, systems, and infrastructures to…
One of the most off-putting things to me about LLM-based tools is that they encourage you to treat these models like people. You talk to it like it’s sentient, and you assume it has a theory of mind, and you give it tasks like you would another person. If it doesn’t work, you have a “conversation” with it as if you’re trying to explain something to another human being, then encourage it to try…
I think people forget that reputation has always been a very real thing among software developers. Building a trustworthy reputation takes a very long time and requires a track record of high quality work. One’s claims and assertions are often weighed against one’s reputation in the software community. The amount of reliance that others place on one’s work product is also often proportional to…
People on the left have this bizarre trait of criticizing their candidates for not being left enough, when the current alternative is literally Hitler without a mustache. David Sedaris wrote this quip that stuck with me: To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest…
A bit of car trivia I learned: The Ferrari 550 Maranello (1996–2002) had an interesting way of delivering fuel to its front-mounted V12 engine. It used a relatively early Bosch Motronic fuel injector system that used a high-pressure common rail. Fuel was carried from the fuel tank in the back of the car and pumped into a pair of rails in the engine bay at maximum pressure. Valves would then inject…
One thing that continues to grate on my conscience about AI is how artists and writers consistently feel that the technology has stolen from them. We all know that web scraping is (and should be) a perfectly legal and acceptable use, because preventing it also prevents all sorts of beneficial behaviors—the Internet Archive wouldn’t be able to exist, for one thing. But yet, the very nature of AI…
If your answer to anyone who doesn’t like something that an open source project is doing is “then fork it yourself”, you’re a piece of shit. First, not everyone who uses FOSS is a coder. This is a feature, not a bug. Second, not everyone who is a coder is a maintainer, and they shouldn’t have to be to have their voices heard. Third, when someone is intentionally worsening a project, and you harass…
I saw a post recently wherein someone used LLM tools to analyze someone else’s software, which eventually led them to a conclusion that was essentially completely wrong. Not only that, the LLM drew conclusions about the authors behind the code that were borderline character assassination. Nevertheless, this person posted this output as though it were some kind of deep insight. These LLM outputs…
I think people wondering why US citizens aren’t more outraged by the wanton constitutional disregard committed by the US government need to realize that the US government has always been committing transgressions—just not against its white middle- and upper-class citizens. From its founding, the US has treated certain populations as having less rights than its preferred class: the wealthy, white 1…
Nazi atrocities This article haunts me. https://aeon.co/ideas/what-did-hannah-arendt-really-mean-by-the-banality-of-evil What did Hannah Arendt really mean by the banality of evil? | Aeon Ideas Can a person do evil and yet not actually be evil? What Hannah Arendt meant by ‘the banality of evil’ remains a puzzle aeon.co Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil” gets thrown around to describe…
We are all susceptible to conspiratorial thinking. It’s a truism that people with wealth and power are loath to give up said wealth and power, but to go from that to thinking that there’s a master plan to wreak Fascism that’s been unfolding for decades is very likely wrong. While the end result (wreaking Fascism) may be the same either way, IMO the slide to Fascism wasn’t planned, but emerged from…
I want a society that’s designed to make everyone moderately wealthy, and not only five people astronomically wealthy. The damage and misery caused by unmitigated inequality has been demonstrated over and over again, for millennia, yet we fall for the lie over and over again. In the US, we choose inequality because we are taught to believe the blatant lie that we might one day be one of those five…
Here’s how you can stop bridging your posts from Mastodon to Bluesky, and how you can stop seeing posts from Bluesky bridged to Mastodon. To stop sharing your posts to Bluesky: Find the user @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy (Type the user in the search box and click the Profiles matching… button) Block the user @bsky.brid.gy@bsky.brid.gy Click the Preferences button on the sidebar Go to…
Someone recently cited “tall poppy syndrome” as an illustration of a person who resents someone who has more wealth than they do. The implication being: we shouldn’t resent rich people, but instead celebrate their wealth. This principle is a good idea! You should be happy when your friends get wealthier, or do better than you, or accomplish tasks that you could never hope to achieve! …to a point.…
Religious babble As we round the orbit to another season of Christmas, I’m once again bringing up as an ex-Christian that a lot of “Christian doctrine” that believers lay claim to was actually written by Paul, then expanded over time by countless Catholic expositions, Protestant philosophers, and modern-day Evangelical charlatans. Almost everything that we know about what Jesus personally taught…
Because you “worked hard” on something doesn’t entitle you to be free from harsh criticism of your public work. An observer is entitled to form their own opinion of your work regardless of how much sweat you poured into something. Scolding the public to “be nice, because they worked hard on this” is rather infantilizing. When beginners set out training, they often look for a safe environment in…
Those silly, gigantic urban trucks are the modern equivalent of high heels in Renaissance Europe. High heels were a practical invention that let horseback riders maintain a firm foothold on the stirrups, but they eventually became the status symbols of aristocrats. French men in tights wore heels in the 17th century because they were impractical. They couldn’t walk on muddy or cobblestoned streets…