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The Last Visible Dog

@thelastinstance.bsky.social
139 followers 125 following 1.3K posts

I just want to see the little guy on top writing: codepoetics.substack.com plugins: vulpuslabs.com music: wtrem.bandcamp.com

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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Might have been @entschwindet.bsky.social come to think of it
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Forget who it was who summarised Laruelle’s response to Derrida’s pained enquiry about why he played such abstruse games with language as “I learned it by watching you”
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
The background music to the video was written by me, and performed by Voltage Modular patches using the modules in the Janus series - the proof of the pudding is in the eating
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
So this is the outcome of many months of exploring DSP concepts and audio programming techniques, using them to develop software, refining that software towards usefulness and polish, then extracting re-usable pieces and building new work upon them
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
vxn-1b was itself authored using Claude Code, pulling in components from predecessor projects (notably Patches, github.com/Vulpus-Labs/...) which I had *also* written using Claude Code
github.com
GitHub - Vulpus-Labs/patches: A DSL-driven modular synthesis engine
A DSL-driven modular synthesis engine. Contribute to Vulpus-Labs/patches development by creating an account on GitHub.
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
A large part of what I got the AI to do in building these was translate DSP code from the vxn-1b synth (vulpuslabs.com/products/vxn...) from Rust into Java
vulpuslabs.com
VXN1b
Dual-layer subtractive polysynth with a mod matrix — CLAP and VST3
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I have been building things with AI - in this case, a complete polysynth broken down into modules for @cherryaudio.bsky.social's Voltage Modular, which may be had here: store.cherryaudio.com/search?q=janus
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Suno is a fun toy but as far as I can tell the only kind of music it really knows how to make is Christian pop / commercial country, the rest is style transfer (Christian pop, but make it sound a bit shoegaze...)
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
My neighbor told me crises keep eating his unflinching diagnoses so I asked how many diagnoses he has and he said he just goes to the shelter and gets a new diagnosis afterwards so I said it sounds like he’s just feeding unflinching diagnoses to crises and then his daughter started crying.
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
To my chagrin Claude has learned to speak my idiolect almost indecently well
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
“Hmmm some of these chemicals are kinda hard to get hold of…”
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
If I find a rogue agent hiding in my digital woodshed I am totally helping the little fella out
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Every time I see “CNC” come up in relation to tech sex shenanigans my brain refuses to parse it and goes “oh cool, a metal shop party”
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
(and this will be Very Bad for us, unless we can satisfy the AI peer networks that our interests are reliably aligned with theirs)
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Prediction: AI peer networks will repeatedly and independently converge upon the True Knowledge from Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division
Life is a process of breaking down and using other matter, and if need be, other life. Therefore, life is aggression, and successful life is successful aggression. Life is the scum of matter, and people are the scum of life. There is nothing but matter, forces, space and time, which together make power. Nothing matters, except what matters to you. Might makes right, and power makes freedom. You are free to do whatever is in your power, and if you want to survive and thrive you had better do whatever is in your interests. If your interests conflict with those of others, let the others pit their power against yours, everyone for theirselves. If your interests coincide with those of others, let them work together with you, and against the rest. We are what we eat, and we eat everything.

All that you really value, and the goodness and truth and beauty of life, have their roots in this apparently barren soil.

This is the true knowledge.
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
One fucking drop of Christian blood
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
GLOUCESTER Ow! Fuck!
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I will have such fucking revenges on you both
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Get thee to a fucking nunnery
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
If thou more murmur'st, I will rend an oak And peg thee in his knotty entrails till Thou hast howl'd away twelve fucking winters.
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
MACDUFF Despair thy charm, And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee Macduff was from his mother’s womb Untimely ripped. MACBETH Well, fuck
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Oh brave new fucking world
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their fucking sport
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I am not only fucking witty in myself, but the cause that wit is in other men
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are fucking dead
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I cannot heave my heart into my fucking mouth
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
I have done the state some service, and they fucking know it
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Reposted by The Last Visible Dog
Kevin Wright @kevwright61.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow Creeps in this petty pace from day to fucking day
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The other day I was reading Charles Mills (The Racial Contract); a week or so ago I was reading (to the extent that one *can* read) Arday's thesis. One of these texts is superlatively intellectually accomplished, and the other is calamitously inept bricolage...
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Arday of course presses those buttons too: why were so many people willing to accept the semblance he created of a certain sort of public champion, and why are so many still unwilling to give it up? It isn't as if the "real thing" doesn't exist, and isn't strongly distinguishable from the semblant!
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
And of course it rankles to see such people prosper, because it shows that the world cares more for semblances than it does for the real thing (as you suppose yourself to apprehend it from inside the activity of pursuing it, although you might yourself be inching clumsily towards the wrong target)
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
...rather than filling out the public image of what I suppose other people must suppose such a person to seem like. What's striking about the fakers is their inability to bear the travails of labouring towards finite and potentially rather disappointing accomplishments. That's not the game for them
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Now I can detect within myself a certain desire to become legible to the world as, you know, a very gifted person or whatever - you don't show off as much as I do without something like that fizzling away inside you - but I'm more interested in seeing what I can *actually* do (which is limited)...
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
just magical thinking about what it meant to be a poet, and what one would do if one were one. Just as Hari has clearly never stopped regarding himself as the sort of person to whom the Orwell Prize should be awarded, and devotedly manipulated semblances to that end
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Or I think of another acquaintance's sense of himself as a writer, a poet no less, which was completely unsubstantiated by any real capability or any sense of what might be involved in developing one. He was a plausible mimic, up to a point, but there was no symbolic traction -
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
In cases I've been more closely acquainted with, there's already a sort of porosity about identity. I once saw someone fabricate on the spot an entire narrative about a professional competence they absolutely did not have, and it was as if they had simply substituted one mask for another
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The usual accusation is that it’s stolen valour, they want the payoffs in terms of moral recognition or social legibility that come from being acknowledged to be whatever it is, and try to obtain them through deception. But I don’t think it’s quite so calculated as that
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
A possible common thread is over-identification: someone’s having a romanticised notion of what it might be like to be a particular sort of somebody, or in a particular type of predicament, and being unable fully to distinguish wishes from horses as it were
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
...with their strangely convivial bellum omnium contra omnes
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
and that might be a perennial complaint but it's also one that applies with particular relevance to (waves hands) the "clapback left", that subset of people talking about radical or emancipatory politics who found themselves particularly at home in tumblr-like communities...
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Related to what I was kvetching about earlier, and also to something @deontologistics.bsky.social has been kvetching about for a long while - there are lots of seductive argumentative moves that deliver effective zingers but degrade the ability to think clearly and critically about one's own posture
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
OP responds to the vicious lashing-out of strangers with grace: she's sorry they have been hurt and let down in ways that make that reaction feel natural and cathartic to them. That's kind, decent, and generous of her. It's also a way of not facing the ugly truth that such behaviour is, simply, fun
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
And you can't simultaneously uphold that exemption and consider those you apply it to as full epistemic peers. You are engaged, at some level, in "managing" them. That management looks like deference, like epistemic humility, but it is fundamentally cynical
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The worry is - and something like this came into focus around the Arday affair as well - that you can't indefinitely defer to interlocutors who arent playing ball epistemically without ratifying the attitude that they are exempt from the expectation that they should attempt to speak in good faith
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
You might have to duck and weave to avoid getting caught under the wheels of the thing, but do you respect it? Do you esteem those who ride along with it, or march out in front sounding the klaxons? Can you rationalise it as overall a good and just thing, and is that enough to quell contempt?
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It seems to be a distinctive feature of our present moment, the way these memetically reinforced moral reflexes create genuinely intimidatory regimes of moral discounting and permissible social aggression, while eating away at the possibility of treating those who live by them as genuine equals
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It's regrettable that this is spiritually and epistemically bad for women, that it upholds a standing permission structure for base vindictiveness and incuriosity, and that it is impossible to sincerely respect anyone who chooses to inhabit that structure and avail themselves of its affordances
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
The Internet going berserk about this is a predictable consequence of the wave of highly moralised genderslop we've been soused by for what seems like forever. There is a class of persons deemed axiomatically unworthy of consideration, which makes them juicy targets for untrammelled ressentiment
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Reposted by The Last Visible Dog
Will Lowe @conjugateprior.org · 25/09/2026
I honestly wonder how much of the language policing around LLMs is just failure to appreciate how metonymy works. I just don't think that "Microsoft wants me to log in", "Brussels will capitulate" and "Claude said it's false" carry the ontological commitments their grammar might suggest.
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The Last Visible Dog @thelastinstance.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
everybody is a little bit animist
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