Apologetics for past US imperialism does not seem a productive strategy for criticizing present imperialist actions, nor preventing future imperialism.

A writer friend I have says that if she were looking at just her own financial security, she’s super grateful for AI, because she’s pivoted into fixing AI written articles from places that laid off all their human writers. Being a contractor, her hourly rate is way higher than times when she’s been employed full time as a writer, plus it takes way longer to rewrite a broken article than it would’ve done to just write a decent article from scratch (and they insist that they want her to fix the AI articles, not rewrite them from scratch. I assume this is because the higher ups have their heads so far up their arses that they’re not willing to acknowledge that they shouldn’t have laid off the humans).

The work isn’t as fulfilling as proper writing, but she’s getting paid so much compared to before that she’s able to work less than she was before, and still has money to put into savings. She’s still living super frugally, as if she were still a typical, struggling writer, because she was expecting that this wouldn’t last for very long, but she’s been at this for quite a while now (with a surprising amount of repeat business). She thought for sure that work would begin to dry up once the financial year ended and companies went “holy shit, why are we spending so much on contractors?”, but last we spoke, it was still going strong.

I’m glad that at least someone human is making bank off of this. And if it was to be anyone who lucks into this, I’m glad that it’s someone who has the extremely poor fortune to be laid off 4-5 times in one year (and this was pre-AI — she was just super unlucky)

I’m a biochemist who got into programming from the science side of it, and yeah, code written by scientists can be pretty bad. Something that I saw a lot in my field was that people who needed some code to do something as part of a larger project (such as adding back on the hydrogens to a 3d protein structure from the protein database) would write the thing themselves, and not even consider the possibility that someone else has probably written the same thing, but far better than they be can, and made it available open source. This means there’s a lot of reinventing the wheel by people who are not wheel engineers.

I find it so wild how few scientists I’ve spoken to about this stuff understand what open-source code actually means in the wider picture. Although I’ve never spoken to a scientist in my field who doesn’t know what open source means at all, and pretty much all of them understand open source software as being a good thing, this is often a superficial belief based purely on understanding that proprietary software is bad (I know someone who still has a PC running windows 98 in their lab, because of the one piece of essential equipment that runs on very old, proprietary code that isn’t supported anymore).

Nowadays, I’m probably more programmer than biochemist, and what got me started on this route was being aware of how poor the code I wrote was, and wanting to better understand best practices to improve things like reliability and readability. Going down that path is what solidified my appreciation of open source — I found it super useful to try to understand existing codebases, and it was useful practice to attempt to extend or modify some software I was using. The lack of this is what I mean by “superficial belief” above. It always struck me as odd, because surely scientists of all people would be able to appreciate open source code as a form of collaborative, iterative knowledge production

You make a compelling point

Your comment felt like it made my blood pressure spike, because I have heard people saying this 100% without irony

That is a much better name for it, especially because some of the ways in which veteran code gets creaky does feel analogous to age

I wish that the code was open source, because it’d be super interesting to be able to look under the hood of a game like Rollercoaster Tycoon

The slightly different ID is REAL ID, not just REAL compliant. It looks like it’s similar to how, in my country, driving licenses are coloured differently depending on whether you’ve passed your driving test; A learner’s provision driving license is green, and when you pass your test, you get a pink one.

Might also be a context switching thing

Like, when I have a dedicated space to go for work, then I find that really helps me to get into the right headspace. My productivity has always been shit when I’ve lived somewhere that doesn’t have enough space to do this.

Maybe what’s happening is that the different language forces you to be in a different headspace, which for some reason, helps you to focus better.

This theory is weakened somewhat by the fact that your mother tongue is Portuguese, and you don’t find your focus to be improved by English.

It does feel intuitively plausible to me that there is some underlying linguistic thing going on here. There might be some research studying the link between different languages and ADHD experiences, because it does seem like there’s something interesting there. If there isn’t currently any such research, I have no doubt that it’s just because it hasn’t been done yet (the wide domain of “academic research on autism and/or ADHD that respects the personhood of the people being studied” is unfortunately, a relatively recent development, but I have been pleased to see that it has been growing rapidly in recent years). If I find anything, I’ll report back (which may be in many weeks or months)

A while back, I was talking to some people at a bar and the discussion turned to Skyrim Vs Oblivion, with Oblivion being the table’s preference due to being less dumbed down than Skyrim. I chipped in something like “if that’s what you like about games, then Morrowind’s where it’s at”, to which someone quipped “you’re showing your age there”.

I admit, I took a little bit of psychic damage from that. I’m only 29, so pretty young compared to most Morrowind fans, but I was the second oldest person in this discussion. Part of me still thinks of Zoomers as teenagers

(((gnu)imp)tk)lib)object)

Voters care what they say. Them being bots doesn’t diminish the influence they have on politics

That’s hella selection bias though. I’m more concerned with how many people are Reform voters (even if the majority of them aren’t so deep that they’d attend a Reform rally)

I replayed Vampire: The Masquerade — Bloodlines (2004) recently

Indeed, that is the healthier way to go about things.

Personally, I struggle with that kind of compartmentalisation, but I would probably be healthier if I could do that. I have never lasted long when doing work that I’m not passionate about, and when I am passionate about work, it’s hard to not bring it home (even if that’s just working on stuff adjacent to the task).

I know a lot of people who work in academia, and it’s simultaneously inspiring and depressing to see how people’s research interests end up bleeding into basically all elements of their regular life. I think some people are just wired that way. I wish that they had the freedom to engage in that in a more healthy way, free from the additional bullshit that Capitalism heaps onto them, making the dynamic so toxic.

However, given that we do live under such oppressive economic conditions, “work to live, not live to work” is an essential mantra to aspire towards, especially the people who put their whole heart into their work. It’s not ideal, but it is necessary to learn if we want to survive without burning out.

This reminds me of the surprisingly effective inflatable frog costume that was in the news recently during protests against ICE

Something I find cool about this book is that it’s so well known that people who haven’t even read it will often gesture towards it to make a point. It reminds me of how “enshittification” caught on because so many people were glad to have a word for what they’d been experiencing.

It’s a useful phrase to have. Recently a friend was lamenting that they’d had a string of bad jobs, and they were struggling to articulate what it was that they wanted from a job. They were at risk of blaming themselves for the fact that they’d struggled to find anything that wasn’t soul sucking, because they were beginning to doubt whether finding a fulfilling job was even possible.

They were grasping at straws trying to explain what would make them feel fulfilled, and I cut in to say “all of this is basically just saying you don’t care what job you have, as long as it’s a non-bullshit job”. They pondered it for a moment before emphatically agreeing with me. It was entertaining to see their entire demeanour change so quickly: from being demoralised and shrinking to being defiant and righteously angry at the fucked up world that turns good jobs into bullshit. Having vocabulary to describe your experiences can be pretty magical sometimes

Nice! Talk about a great example of “OP delivers”. My thanks to the person you’re replying to for asking the question that led to this useful answer

Any noun’s a verb if you noun hard enough

When you’re a member of a marginalised group, it’s easy to just become dead to it, because it’s just part of your regular life. You can’t do anything about it, so it’s either die, or just get on with it as best you can. This is pragmatically necessary, but it’s easy to end up internalising a bunch of unhealthy stuff and begin feeling like the suffering you face is your fault. It’s a slow process, where you just sort of forget that you’re suffering an injustice, because it’s just normal.

My late best friend was like in the OP. He would often be shocked and outraged at some of the things I face as a disabled person, and it was always jarring in a way that reminded me of how bullshit it is that I have to face some stuff. He’d say things that would make me go “Yeah! That is fucked up”. Being angry at a thing doesn’t necessarily make things any better, nor does it make it easier to bear, but getting angry at myself (which inevitably happens if I slip into internalised ableism) definitely makes things harder.

Recognising my suffering as oppression is also a powerful step towards finding community and building solidarity, which is a useful step towards concrete political change