serving absolute gergely

I DID THIS IM VERY PROUD OF IT YOU KNOW WHY

BECAUSE

WAIT FOR IT

Gold ring, greybeard, trippin’ on the mushrooms

Blood-mad Nazgul trashin’ the hotel room

We don’t care

We got to Rivendell across the stream

And everybody’s like

Mountains, dwarf mines, presents from the Elf Queen

Rowboats, rock paths, Gollum on a rope leash

We don’t care

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/02/canonization/#operate-iterate-improve

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":

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/25/today-in-tabs/#unfucked-rota

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):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/06/15/vernacular/#hypercardian

But if that's so, how to make sense of the seeming paradox of all that tech debt? For a tech company, code is a liability, not an asset:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/06/1000x-liability/#graceful-failure-modes

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/04/23/maximal-plausibility/#reverse-centaurs

But it's also obviously going to produce terrible code:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/27/rancid-vibe-coding/#class-war

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?

I didn't grow up around farms, but my parents were never interested in hiding where food came from. My mom grew vegetables in the garden and we knew what farms for animals were. I grew up in suburbia, but I remember even at about 6 years old, I was making plans for living on a farm when I grew up. My cousin and I hatched plans every family gathering about how we would get a farm so our parents couldn't tell us what animals we could keep. I distinctly remember sitting on the floor with her explaining that a farm house would cost us about $80,000 (????? Where did I get that number, I have no idea, but damn I was close, this place was $90k), and how we could keep a couple of cows for milk, and chickens for eggs. I'm not sure at six I grasped the "live animals -> meat" process, but at no point in my life do I remember being surprised or horrified that this would be the case. Cats hunt kill and eat mice and birds, wolves hunt kill and eat deer, humans raise kill and eat cows and chickens and pigs. Some animals eat other animals, and that was never a surprise to me.

The only thing that (briefly, when I was a child) made me want to be vegetarian was how truly terrible my father was at cooking any kind of meat. His philosophy, I think, was that you should cake the meat in black pepper and then cook the meat until it is leather and/or so closely resembles charcoal briquettes that you can use it to cook the next meat with. I, for some reason, have a practically pathological aversion to anything which even slightly has a browned/overcooked smell or taste to it now, surely unconnected. It also turns out I'm mildly allergic to black pepper, and get sick to my stomach when eating it which would explain why I thought I just hated meat, because every time I ate it at home I felt sick. Combine that with how good my mom was at cooking vegetables, and yeah, I considered maybe I was an herbivore (also nothing wrong with that, some animals don't eat meat, that wouldn't have been a surprise to me either).

However, I have never and would never consider going vegan for any reason that wasn't "your body has decided to be violently allergic to all animal products of every kind and you will die if you eat or use them" but even then, idk. It would be a tough choice. There's a quality of life (my life) issue there. Once I left home for college and started cooking my own meat and skipping the pepper, it turns out I really like meat. I have absolutely no desire to not eat meat because of some (incorrectly) perceived morality surrounding it. Animals eat meat. Humans are a kind of animal, adapted to eating meat and plants. I am human.

So the only real thing is understanding the differences between factory farming (which has so much room for improvement in animal care and well-being) and small farms raising their own animals for food, where they treat the animals well. And hunting. I'm not about to stop eating meat, I see nothing morally wrong with it, and there's nothing medically wrong with it for me. But I do try to source much of it from locally raised animals that were treated well (either by myself or by others in my community), or that were taken legally during legal hunting seasons (MOST of my red meat is venison from the one deer I get a year).

Like, I could get my eggs from a factory farm (ie, the supermarket) that packs their birds into battery caging, OR I could get them from my neighbor down the street who has 50-some chickens that free range their 40 acres all day every day and gather around her back door every evening waiting for her to come out and walk around with a big bowl of fresh mash (wet feed, veggies, mealworms, etc), putting scoops in various bowls around her yard as a bedtime treat (they have regular feed 24/7, too). I could get beef from a supermarket (who got it from a big factory farm that may or may not have their cattle on pasture, who may or may not treat them the way I hope they do) OR I can talk to the mini Dexter/highland breeder (called "2 men and a hen"!) in my state that pastures and names all their cattle and posts videos of them feeding treats and learning how to give them better lives and improve the breed, because they sell their extra steers and cows by quarters, halves, or wholes when it's time to have them processed, and know that that animal, was spoiled absolutely fucking ROTTEN because I see videos of them on Facebook almost every day. AND I would support a local small queer farm in the process.

I could buy pork from the supermarket that looks like this

Orrrr I could talk to the Dexter guys from above that also raise mangalitsa pigs and get some from them

Literally the only non-bacon pork I've ever considered voluntarily eating, because it looks amazing, and I love watching their pigs run around their pasture/Forest with piglets every year. I mean, look at these guys!

Those animals are going to live their best lives running around doing hog shit to their heart's content, and have one bad day at the end, and become a natural part of my food chain. I'm okay with that, actually. I like that. The animals are not immortal, they will die no matter what anyone does, and processing them for food is imo better than burying them or letting them rot.