Fun fact! This npc is standing there because that tile is on the same tile as the entrance to wayward cave underneath the cycling road. Because of how the bridge tiles and the tiles below them are programmed, if there wasn’t an npc there biking over that tile would count as going into the cave entrance and would warp the player to the cave. Rather than creating a way for bridge tiles over entrance warps to work with it that happening, they did the simpler thing of just putting a stationary npc on the bridge above
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you can’t do a jigsaw vs. other famous horror movie killer type of movie because it would immediately turn into home alone. just a looney tunes comical montage of trap after trap, culminating in the brutal onscreen murder of john kramer.
But now I kind of want to see a movie that brings a bunch of horror movie villains together to fill out teen slasher stereotypes being killed by saw traps in a weird mansion. Like, who's gonna be the final girl? Sadako? Who's the jock, the nerd, etc?
one of my friends is petite-bourgeois and has big boobs. another one of my friends is petite-bourgeois and has small boobs. therefore it’s not the boobs that define petite-bourgeoisie, it’s something else entirely
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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."
Vibe coding can be a tool to help when you don't understand _the syntax_ of a programming language. You still need someone who understands _the concepts_ and _the goals_ of building a system that has a software component.
like did you know that trees lower the surface temperature by up to 19° and grass by up to 24°... access to green space is access to safety in a climate crisis and it is a massive site of inequality because poorer areas tend to have less green space and thus get hotter. urban trees are an equality issue as well as a climate issue. sorry it's not a magic bullet that solves everything but sometimes you need to pick an issue that helps a bit and focus on that. this might not be yours. it's likely going to be mine in the future when my health issues allow me to take it on. if we each pick a thing we can make a difference
I'm posting this here because yes it's visually beautiful, but more importantly it shows the process of learning. It's not easy. It's scary. There's not a lot of people doing it.
It's beautiful because of the effort, not in spite of it. I feel like we don't value the effort of learning in social media posts, and this was incredibly done.
If you rely on a hidden phone for your safety, be aware that Australia’s new emergency warning system, AusAlert, can send alerts that override silent and “Do Not Disturb” settings.
If safe to do so, turn off any hidden device before the scheduled test and only switch it back on after the test period has ended.
A national test alert will be sent at 2pm (AEST) on 27 July 2026.
something about Toy Story toys is so strange to me. versions of animated characters based on real world toys, turned back into toys that are slightly different than the actual toys. slinky dog with a rubber spiral instead of a classic metal slinky. the porcelain bo peep and cloth woody turned into jointed plastic action figures. when toy story 4 came out and i saw a $30 talking action figure of forky, a character made out of a spork and a pipe cleaner, i stood in the walmart toy aisle staring at it like cameron from ferris bueller's day off staring at that painting in the art museum
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there is nothing a corporation hates more than having employees, but a close second is having to provide a good or service in order to make money. these two reasons concisely explain is why the ai bubble formed in the first place.
Given that patent attorneys, especially back then used to have hard science degree, it makes the one about how they know the weight limit on a bridge funnier.
"All drugs are drugs" = a surprisingly radical position that will upset people right across the political spectrum
This means:
If you draw a hard line between "drug" and "medicine" based on current legality where you live (or any other criteria) you've gone wrong somewhere,
If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to do massive harm to someone's body, mind or well-being you've gone wrong somewhere,
If you think legality and/or prescription status tells you all you need about a substance's capacity to contribute meaningfully to someone's healing, function or happiness you've gone wrong somewhere,
If you think certain substances should be excluded from informed consent (either withheld or forcibly administered) you've gone wrong somewhere.
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No, but two trespassers have seemingly free climbed the Empire State Building spire, flying a banner reading “when the power of love beats the love of power the world knows peace” right before they got engaged.
The climbers are believed to be Angela Nikolau and Ivan Beerkus, both famous for scaling some of the worlds tallest buildings, often without any safety restraints, and were previously featured in the Netflix documentary “Skywalkers: A Love Story”, detailing how the fell in love through their neoartistic pieces and scaling heights.
