This post brought to you by me realizing that in the last 10 minutes I have:
Received a text update from my pre-reader and bestie who has just gotten out of the hospital
Commented on another author friend’s post about the world cup, referencing my sadness we didn’t get to actually see any WC games when I visited for her wedding last month in one of the group play cities
Wished a happy birthday to the husband of one of my steady readers who I became friends with when we realized she lived a mile from me (we now live 3,000 miles apart but I visit every time I’m in her state)
People shit on fic because fic creates networks among women that are like the networks men have. Networks make you powerful and the people who need women not to be powerful know that.
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kind of weird how parts of your soul are left in various locations without any warning… like yes i’m always at the top of that hill, sitting at the bus stop, in the cool light of the Japanese restaurant, standing at the pier etc etc
And if you want some extra cards to add to Libby from some of the largest library systems in the US, check out Books Unbanned! It’s primarily meant for younger people (13-26) to help counteract book bans
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Reasons for hope: Lots of amazing people did a ton of work to make this fantastic, fully interactive resource available - because no matter how bleak things seem, there are millions, and millions of people doing everything they can to protect both the world and their own communities.
You can use this to view and subscribe to updates, project statuses, and for at least some of them even whole dossiers. This is an amazing resource, I highly recommend checking it out
wip thursday since all the cool kids were doing it
I didn't post yesterday cause I somehow thought we'd be closer to finishing the chapter, but I'm realizing it's nowhere near done, so howsabout a little check in on the fun, fun beach vacation for Mock Orange 11 from your local overheated discouraged author:
A rumbling creak gave Obi-Wan a heartbeat of panic. A perfect, cut circle lifted up out of the stone. Under Sifo-Dyas’s command, the rock door rose into the air as smoothly and easily as a full moon coming up over their heads. An entrance lay revealed underneath, a faint glow emanating from the pale steps disappearing down, though the temple’s power generator must have been long since disconnected.
“That is what serves as your locking mechanism?” Dooku's voice broke the awed hush, apparently unimpressed by either the feat of Force or the ingenuity of the concealed entrance.
“Mainly to keep out any curious animals. After the closure, the locals tend to avoid this place. The main entrance,” the gem in the center of Master Kostana's forehead caught the sun as she inclined her head in that direction, “is blocked off with a similar stone device.”
“That hardly seems secure.”
“No? It would take a well-trained Force user to open it.”
“A well-trained Force user,” Dooku repeated with cool deliberateness, “such as a Sith attacker?”
A much louder, abrupt bang startled them all: Sifo-Dyas apparently losing control over the levitating stone door. He caught it before it could roll fully off and careen into the sea below...or slide the other way and crush them all.
“What?” Sifo-Dyas snapped, utterly unapologetic over his mistake. As soon as he had lowered it back beside the opening, he exploded at them. “That was heavy! You’re welcome, by the way! I’m holding the damn thing open while you all stand around yapping. ‘That hardly seems secure’ –oh, fuck off, Dooku.”
His outburst was met with uncomfortable silence.
Hey if you're coming to Washington DC for the Fourth of July: don't
We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.
The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.
My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.
Please stay out of this. It's not worth your health. Get your relatives and family to stop. I can give you recs for so many DC museums and things to do if you want to make the most of your trip. Any other local can too.
There is absolutely no reason to leave whatever is the coolest place you can find during this heat wave. Whether it's an indoor space with air conditioning, or a shady place near running water.
Not just DC. No "celebration" anywhere is worth heat stroke.
Also dear god, pity the people who have no choice but to be out in this heat.
Hey if you're coming to Washington DC for the Fourth of July: don't
We're having our turn in the heat wave and reports from the National Mall are brutal already this week. That screenshot is today's forecast (courtesy of the Capital Weather Gang) and tomorrow and Saturday are confidently going to be worse than this is.
The national Mall has no shade on the grass and you will be exposed to the sun constantly while also experiencing extremely high humidity. You will not be allowed a bag over a certain size to enter the mall and it has to be clear. You cannot have an insulated water bottle, it has to be clear. Reports are that there are two entrances to the area so you'll have to wait in line to even get in. I cannot find a number on how many cooling stations there are, except that it's "few" to "none" depending on what accounts I read online. Vendors are allegedly charging more than the posted prices and seem to be unprepared for actual crowds - these are the official vendors not the scam food trucks that park all around the edges of the mall. And that's the extent of the planning done because it was not a priority to make sure attendees don't pass out.
My local friends and I have reached a consensus that tourists are going to get extremely sick and none of us know what the EMT response or planning is on the mall this year. People are going to die.
Please stay out of this. It's not worth your health. Get your relatives and family to stop. I can give you recs for so many DC museums and things to do if you want to make the most of your trip. Any other local can too.
Anya is live and ready to show you everything. Watch her strip, dance, and perform exclusive shows just for you. Interact in real-time and make your fantasies come true.
✓ Live Streaming✓ Interactive Chat✓ Private Shows✓ HD Quality✓ Free Actions
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The heat’s been brutal this summer but we still gotta eat! If you’re like me, heat might suppress your appetite, and the last thing any of us want is to sweat over a hot stove and oven when it’s already boiling outside. Here are some of my favorite hot-weather recipes to keep hydrated and fed with when the weather is unbearable! (All recipes should be un-paywalled).
NYT’s best gazpacho (lives up to its name!!)
Persian cold cucumber soup (if you like tzatziki you will like this!)
Eric Kim’s cold noodles with tomato (infinitely riffable Korean flavor profile — for a creamier and less brothy take, try these cold sesame noodles too)
Vietnamese chicken and herb salad (this is an excellent time to get a rotisserie chicken so you don’t have to turn the oven on)
Radish sandwiches with butter and salt (and in a similar vein, if you dig this flavor combo you should try this Polish cottage cheese dip on some good rye bread or even crackers)
It’s still a little early in the season, but you can never go wrong with a BLT (or, if you don’t eat bacon, try this tomato furikake sandwich in its place)
Infinite iterations of pasta salad! You can use anything you got but here is a template I like.
Assorted dense bean salads. This back pocket canned salad is a weird combo of jarred ingredients but it slaps, this hoagie-inspired one is super satisfying, and cowboy caviar is a classic for a reason.
Poke bowls! Canned tuna mixed with some kewpie mayo and sriracha is a budget-friendly riff on the usual ahi and makes everything taste like a spicy tuna roll, but use whatever proteins you like, this is more of a loose template.
Please feel free to add some of your own favorite summer recipes in the replies and comments! We’ll get through this together. 🤝🤝🤝
The difference between “today’s task” and “accretive work”
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
One thing I've learned about paradoxes: often the answer to the riddle of "how can this one thing have such a contradictory set of features and effects?" is "it's not one thing, it's two things*."
That's the idea that set me on the path to writing about "reverse centaurs" and AI. I was hearing from experienced programmers whom I knew to be reliable narrators of their own experience who described how AI was letting them write the best code of their lives; and from equally experienced and reliable coders who described a nightmare of tech debt: "I work in aviation, and I just don't think anyone should ever fly again, those things are now unsafe at any altitude, thanks to the code I had to sign off on":
For so long as I thought of both of these groups as doing the same thing and getting wildly different outcomes, this was a paradox. But as soon as I realized that the former group were "centaurs" (workers who get to decide and direct their adoption of automation) and the latter were reverse centaurs (workers who were conscripted to serve as peripherals for automation systems), it all snapped into place. It only looked like they were doing the same thing – they were actually engaged in fundamentally different activities, which is why they were having such different experiences.
The same goes for vibe coding. Plenty of people I knew had gotten real value out of vibe coding personal utilities that made things better for them in a way that I instantly recognized from a life spent around people who'd been able to adapt and customize the systems they used to make their lives better:
Vibe coding can be seen as part of a lineage that includes shell scripting, Applescript, Hypercard and Visual Basic: ways for technical novices to directly create personal software, without having to ask a programmer to interpret their needs (and without having to pay every time they wanted to do something new with their computers):
AI's pitch to bosses is that they can fire most of their workers in order to terrorize the remainder into tolerating a working life wherein they are made to mark the AI's homework, at superhuman speed, and to assume the blame when it goes wrong. This is obviously a terrible way to write code:
So is vibe code a way of empowering people to have the personal, vernacular tools that they design and adapt as they see fit? Or is it a way to shovel technological asbestos into the walls at scale, filling up our high-tech society with ghastly, lethal technical debt we'll be digging our way out of for generations?
Again: the paradox falls away once you realize that personal software you write for yourself is fundamentally different from "production code" that other people have to use, maintain and improve.
In an essay inspired by some thoughts on AI and mathematical theorem proving, Kellan Elliott-McCrea crystallizes this distinction in a really sharp way, bringing in Alex Kontorovich's idea of mathematical "canonization":
By canonization, I mean the process of taking a local, one-off formalization and turning it into library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest… Canonization often changes the picture itself: the definitions, the abstractions, the API, and sometimes even the statement…
Elliott-McCrea posits that making code that is "socially constructed in a way that leaves the team prepared to operate on it, iterate it, and improve it" is the difference between "I got it working" and "something the future can build on."
He's not claiming that "I got it working" is worthless. There's plenty of space for "disposable and single use software." Sure, to a trained software engineer, this might be "bad code" but doing today's task has value, even if the code that performs that task isn't "accretive."
Canonization is accretive. To canonize code is to make it "legible to systems of humans and non-humans operating on it." Free/open source software is the backbone of the canon: "decades of…intelligible, build-on-able work, sitting in public repos."
My "reverse centaurs" thesis isn't just a way to understand how programmers who seem to be doing the same thing can have such different effects. It's also about how the way that the capital was raised for AI requires that it produce as many reverse centaurs as possible, because the only way to recoup the farcical sums associated with AI production is to fire millions of workers and replace them with defective chatbots backstopped by the jobspocalypse's terrorized survivors, who can be made to endlessly toil away at marking the AI's homework because there are so many other workers who'll take their jobs if they refuse.
The point being that while centaurs are good and reverse centaurs are bad, the AI bubble requires the production of reverse centaurs, to the exclusion of centaurs.
In a similar vein, Elliott-McCrea describes how the imperatives of the AI industry are devouring its seed-corn – consuming the canon without putting anything new back in it. In the same way that AI can do endless theorem-proving but is essentially useless for creating "library mathematics: general, reusable, coherent, efficient, and compatible with the rest," AI can write a lot of running code, but the AI industry is further devaluing the already undervalued work of cleanup and canonization. As Elliott-McCrea writes, "the social production of knowledge [is] the seed corn."
Divergent effects of native deer and alien wild pigs on forest understoreys
Large herbivores are becoming more common in forests, but their impacts are not always what we expect.
Using nationwide forest inventories and camera-trap data across the eastern United States, researchers compared the effects of native white-tailed deer and alien wild pigs on forest understories.
They found that deer generally reduce native seedlings and promote invasive plants, although these effects weaken in warmer, wetter, or steeper landscapes. In contrast, wild pigs often suppress invasive plants and have mixed, context-dependent effects on native seedlings.
These results show that herbivore impacts depend on species identity, functional traits and environmental context, with important implications for forest management under global change.
A good example of how different herbivores affect their environment in different ways. Makes you wonder how many ecological interactions we've lost since the Pleistocene extinctions
In advance of the DR Congo - England match later, here's a post about someone you will have seen in the stands: Michel Kuka Mboladinga, or 'Lumumba Vea'.
Michel Kuka Mboladinga, nicknamed 'Lumumba Vea', stands silent and motionless through DR Congo football matches in tribute to Patrice Lumumba (1925 - 1961), revolutionary, independence leader and first Prime Minister of the First Congolese Republic (now Democratic Republic of the Congo), who was crucial in transforming DR Congo from a Belgian colony into an independent state. Lumumba believed strongly in both national and pan-African unity, in full decolonisation and in freeing his country's resources, politics and economy from foreign ownership, interference and domination. He was kidnapped, tortured and murdered only seven months after election by Katangan seperatists and Belgian mercenaries, with US, UK and UN involvement. His body was dissolved in acid, and it took until 2022 - and a court ruling - for all that remained of Patrice Lumumba, a single tooth, to be returned to his family.
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