• 5 Posts
  • 261 Comments
Joined 5 months ago
cake
Cake day: April 25th, 2026

help-circle
  • I’ve never seen one but I’m pretty sure I’ve been stalked by a puma on more than one occasion. The silence is the most unnerving part. Just dead silence. The birds the squirrels, all of them suddenly stop yapping. Maybe you hear some snapping in the trees. Not a lot. Maybe one twig. And then you leave the area and thank whatever god you worship that attacks are really rare. If the cat wanted you the cat would have you.

    I have seen coyotes, and they’re not scary in the slightest unless you have a smaller animal with you. Coyotes are scrawny little bastsrds but they’re devious. I have heard stories about a lone coyote “playing” with a dog, and then luring said dog into the woods where it is then set upon by the pack. Probably just folklore. What’s not folklore is that they’ll absolutely eat your pets and livestock if you give them a chance. They are, in many situations, pests.

    I’ve not met a bear but I’m not looking forward to it.




  • I tend to be fairly sensitive, and I haven’t been very successful in quieting my own kneejerk defensiveness when “yes all men” and “male tears” come out. A lot of feminists are justifiably angry but I don’t have to stay in a room where I don’t feel welcome.

    So I tend not to label myself a feminist even though I agree with feminists on most things. I vote for feminist candidates, I’ll defend feminism when people tell lies about it, but I can’t be a feminist myself because I can’t participate in it.












  • the best way to make sure everything is some flavor of fine is to keep learning new practical skills. I got pretty doomery there. But the other technological trend that can’t really be stopped is decentralization. Communities can, and will continue to be able, to grow their own food and produce their own power. Knowing how to make thst stuff happen is going to be incredibly important in the rest of the 21st century


  • We’re basically already at a point where most enterprise documentation is written partly or entirely by AI, and then read mostly by AI. Eventually true understanding of e.g. how to build a docker-compose file will be genuinely rare. And they want to apply that model to everything.

    The risk isn’t that GAI will decide, in an Asmovian sense, that the best way to make peace on earth is to kill us all, or that to achieve it’s manufacturing quota it must transmute all matter in the universe I to paperclips. The real risk is that the MBA-wielding professional-managerial class will not be able to resist the siren song of demolishing labor with something that works “well enough.” Eventually they’re going to put it in charge of something critical like ATC or dam control or the electrical grid.

    Humans, by our nature, are diverse, and one fuck up rarely cascades through the entire global system. We make small fuck ups and train each other. AI “learns” by observing and probabilistically imitating, and one model could be deployed in a thousand places and screw up the exact same way.

    tldr ai won’t kill us, our bosses will once Anthropic wines and dines them