clicked on a blogspot-y programming site a few seconds ago and realized that I was basically jumpscaring myself. the site was probably anodyne but those kinds of sites tend to set my spidey-sense a-tingle because of what the past decade of scientism hath wrought1
one of my biggest struggles in programming in the abstract is finding a good way to actually represent potentially abstract data as a number. a lot of the people who have historically been good at that sort of thing do so because they are tied to ideologies that are good at that, whether or not the actual measurements of the data actually represent the thing they think is under study. Ah, to be so unburdened by the concerns of epistemic uncertainty
little wonder that I've found myself so comfortably suited to computational seismology, I suppose -- one of the few sciences where the human component of what is under study, the sociological consequences of the work, is so obvious that Edward Herman will have risen from his grave and penned a new chapter of "manufacturing consent" before you can even schedule a meeting with the press anonymously to raise concerns about any conclusions people are drawing from the data
anyway this came from being reminded about 'dimes square' which is the new york version of those kinds of silicon valley reactionaries who see their political fulfillment in elon musk. they're dweebs who think they've escaped provincialism by existing in a tiny neighborhood in a large city2, and all think they're bob dylan despite doing nothing but ranting about how abortion is bad, actually3
-
Elon Musk is a big dumb baby who has trouble falling asleep because he believes the basilisk4 is real. I have trouble falling asleep because fucking Boeing, a company who should be, due to its finances being so tied to government contracts, largely immune to the corrupting forces of capitalism, can't build a plane that doesn't fall apart. We are not the same
-
this is of course the irony, that they have only become more provincial by being in a small neighborhood in new york. as a noted recluse I can say confidently that it doesn't matter how big the city you live in is if you only ever leave your apartment to cross the street for a party. if you live alone you're always a country of one
-
David Rakoff, a regular contributor to This American Life, has a bit about Rent that I find funnier than I probably should. But what really makes it funny is that the visionless fake-artists that actually do make up the new york pretend-cultural scene are all the most insufferable straight people you've ever met
-
it is so fuckin funny to me that roko's basilisk is called that specifically because the big bad creature in harry potter 2 was a basilisk. yudowsky wrote a giant fuckin harry potter fanfic, that's why it's called that.