iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

recognizing zero as an unrealistic ideal cannot stop you from knowing that you could maybe be 1 step lower

you bargain for the ability to moralise your number while you immediately recognize the pure, obvious distance from it and zero. you ponder what your options are

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the communication tool of a number in a range is almost cruel in how well it works

100

the desire to accurately map in multiple dimensions is a fun exercise but becomes a bit less effective in communication with a clear purpose :p

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(it doesn’t really matter what the labels are - the discussion is what matters and people like numbers)

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the scale I discuss with my friends is a very explicit numbered 0 to 10 scaled like soup kitchen revolutionary to israel palantir landlord. it feels like a needed addition to the tech worker impulse of implicitly bragging about salary

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I go back and forth. I think what inspires me to some (maybe radical maybe tame) amount self-sacrifice is the experience that people like me have helped me reach this far. Some part is random privilege and merit, but some amount is tangible effort/sacrifice which I am not completely blind to.

yea this is take that is both extremely true and ‘boring’ in a way that cannot raise more venture capital. the idea of the paperclip is spoken very religiously by the people who are literally selling the unlikely-but-maybe-paperclip-scenario machine

I can tell you tried to be nice and I did my best to not be too rude. Thank you for your thoughts.

yeah. I guess my answer to this is while I’m not sure where it’s like where you are, in my everyday it’s a lot easier and more common to be vegan/vegetarian now than it probably used to be.

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I perhaps self-select for people who do not want to be a “founders”, though I agree with your analysis of the general tendency. As a queer person I just have to believe things can be better in order to continue existing. With this comes the belief that it is foolish to believe anything else.

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I enjoy hearing this perspective - it’s one that’s rarely spoken about even in progressive STEM circles. The concept is usually that we’re either “just workers” or “important or uniquely gifted to create social change”, which are both pretty clearly wrong

000

It did not. I was trying to agree with your frustration that it didn’t exist already, while also saying that I am glad there was at some warning of externalized trust. The rest followed only as your frustration with the world met mine. I don’t mind it, and am happy _you_ published and spoke about it

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Can anything else come of this, in your worldview? Is every attempt at solidarity futile for you and I?

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and are we then uniquely privileged or not? Is our profession uniquely evil shaped? This machine has many components, surely? Is it all subsisting only on class traitors (or would we not call ourselves this)?

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I think this idea that our privilege comes from cooperation has to be misguided; this can only be true to some extent (but I guess this is the limit?). I just refuse to see people I want to call friends go along with this scheme.

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it is not enough if we say this only to not dare be annoying or cause a fuzz as we look on silently as noone supports a coworker who speaks out. my current understanding is that we need to both hold pragmatism in our hearts while practicising anarchist calisthenics or whatever you want to call it.

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it is this history I see and think about. Maybe I will turn as jaded as you, but for the moment it only makes me more confrontational in spite of the fear of being discarded by my peers. I think the implication of leverage you hear is exactly spoken with an effort-neutralizing effect

it is the main event as you and I likely agree only in the sense that this is where capital (in the financial sense) hopes it can make itself the most powerful, MIC or not. If this is what people want to discuss, I refuse to let it happen uncritically, and will bring the politics up even like this

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It is not a magically unique world for us, but we have enormous privileges that people do not dare speak about or do not even recognize. Even if I think you know this, what use is it if you imply to me that I am making a fuzz over ‘nothing’ (relative or absolute)?

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im not sure where you get this idea of me from. do you not see that I am putting this energy exactly where I think it can do the most? We are programmers and have a huge responsibility as workers to participate in solidarity - is this misguided? am I spoiled or ignorant to think this?

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no. What I am trying to say is just that these topics come and go, but are always the proxy of politics. I have been inspired by writing like yours to be louder about what some of us already agree on, and I apologise if this wasn’t the intended outcome.

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even if my critique misguided, please use the opportunity to tell me where else to put this energy. the accept of the status quo as “well I wish I was a farmer” feels like ignorance. afaik people outside of tech also believe this same instinct that their situation is uniquely cursed to be terrible

100

these are fair points and it is not at all out of left field that you could make these connections, I merely question the complete disregard of concern as merely “more of the bad stuff” - I think it is exactly this impulse I find distateful exactly as you diagnose our industry at large

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surreal day. very funny that the goto ffmpeg crate is named in reference to shrek the third

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im sad to hear the implication that you have always felt this dread but I hope the information that your writing does not leave that same cynicism in the people who find it, is at least nice to hear

its entirely possible that im just a naive child but LLMs have been around for years at this point, and they came into the mainstream while I was still new to programming. maybe some are imagining nostalgia of their youth but im 24 and computers didnt stop being interesting when I learnt of capital

im not going to say that the effort to bring this sort of thing into reality isn’t some sort of giant accomplishment, but it seems irresponsible to equate that to merit of product when we have other information

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graydon im a fan of your writing. excitement is not at all the issue! I think people tend to overstate their confidence with this type of material and feel dread exactly at the thought that this is the only way people are excited about computers, while I have the opposite feelings

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note also that when I say that I don’t like how they write, I am *both* referring to text they generate and text you end up writing on its behalf with the same tone of intellectual confidence. It’s not interesting to note that summarized text about LLM output was actually created by an excited human

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to be clear, im ideologically opposed to the idea that programming can merely be about feature specification (“prompt engineering”), so the bar is high for me to be impressed with something that sets out on those premises

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its probably a decent usecase! i just dont like how llms write, and I feel like I have a great reason to start trusting their code after years of disappointments in this area. I’m open to the idea of changing my mindset around it if the stability seems high after more people try it

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this is at least an amusing answer

Patrick Walton @pcwalton.turbofishstudios.com · 03/10/2026

oomf im sorry but i find that weird and not uh cute

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Reposted by maya🌻

Bevy's scene format is frustrating because it's the best scene format out there, but it could have been far better. Lack of a delimiter between entities is such an own-goal and everyone is going to be tripping up on this forever.

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this exchange is starting to sound like im an llm you’re slowly convincing that its actually good to eat crayons

don’t kill the messenger! or if you want to anyway, kill the appropriate messenger. first you download some documentation and a copy of wikipedia. then: pacman -Rns NetworkManager

im facing a personal hell of my own creation: showing up on time for an important meeting which decides like half my working effort for the next 4 months

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adding stuff to my website

eliezer stan? (im not getting it)

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thank you for at least writing a clear notice, though no notice will make up for the dissatisfaction that it isn’t a real maintained project, especially due to how every feature is noted as if it is battle-tested

and you are! it is no thought experiment

my laptop would have to be quite gross for me to do that to the poor thing

Alona @alona.page · 02/10/2026

there's a reason like 90% of us have em

020

Reposted by maya🌻

THINGS TO SAY TO YOUR _RUST COMPILER_ - i brought to my own _TokenStream_ - sell me this _opsem_ - who legally _owns_ this value? - let me speak to the optimizer directly - where do you keep the _rare types_ - don't be a _hero_

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maya🌻 @maya.is.fckn.gay · 28/09/2026

i did learn something but i should just be on time for my classes if i wanted that experience

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maya🌻 @maya.is.fckn.gay · 28/09/2026

went to the Rice Against Fascism event to get taught desktop widget programming by catgirls and instead some old guy talked to me about docker containers for an hour

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maya🌻 @maya.is.fckn.gay · 26/09/2026

hey girl are you an image macro the way you make that bottom text