#depressing cw ?

[snarp]

90% of documentation sucks. 99% of LLM documentation sucks. Why? Possibilities:

LLM devs lack the necessary skills to write docs because they're under the age of 25 and have been working on the same couple projects that whole time.

LLM devs don't understand why docs are important because they're under the age of 25 and have been working on the same couple projects that whole time.

LLM devs view their work in the way that mystery cults view their worship, and enter an ecstatic state not conducive to communication upon opening Jupyter Notebook/Google Colab/etc. (It's like when a snake-handling churchgoer picks up the snake.)

LLM devs choose not to write docs because they think that providing publicly-accessible information on how their code can be used makes their expertise less-valuable in the job market:

"If I'm the only one who understands the tools I made, people who want to use my work will have to pay me."

-- Final words of 10,000 naive LLM devs who have spent the last 2 years duplicating each other's work without realizing it, because they have never provided a coherent public explanation of what their work is intended to do, making it impossible either for them to find each other or for prospective users to find them. They died of dysentery.

If they had lived only a few months longer, they'd have gotten back in the computer chair and discovered, with mounting horror, that they no longer know how to use their own work, because they spent a few months doing something else (hospital, PT, etc) and the unwritten knowledge that they thought they had hoarded - in fact recalled only due to near-daily repetition - fell out of their heads, teaching them an important lesson about their own fallibility.

They didn't, though. They died of dysentery. Very sad.

[tabby-shieldmaiden]

My intrusive thoughts: “Hey, maybe the fact that your University graduate parents wanted you and planned for you was a sign that you weren’t actually a soul which needed to be here. Maybe that’s why you don’t intuitively understand yourself and your likes and dislikes. God didn’t push through to put you here, he just conceded to one-and-a-half mortals’ demands. Maybe that’s why you can’t stand the thought of who your “true self” could possibly be. Maybe that’s why you’re meant to be just a faceless member of society.”

My agnostic thoughts: “Or maybe you’re just tired and hungry and mad at everyone and dehydrated and about to start your period.”

[prospitianescapee]

Also, I am sorry to be rude, but there is another reason that it is maybe not great to be the Bank of Startups, which is that nobody on Earth is more of a herd animal than Silicon Valley venture capitalists. What you want, as a bank, is a certain amount of diversity among your depositors. If some depositors get spooked and take their money out, and other depositors evaluate your balance sheet and decide things are fine and keep their money in, and lots more depositors keep their money in because they simply don’t pay attention to banking news, then you have a shot at muddling through your problems.

But if all of your depositors are startups with the same handful of venture capitalists on their boards, and all those venture capitalists are competing with each other to Add Value and Be Influencers and Do The Current Thing by calling all their portfolio companies to say “hey, did you hear, everyone’s taking money out of Silicon Valley Bank, you should too,” then all of your depositors will take their money out at the same time.

[prospitianescapee]

Johnnie L. Turner got into office in 2020 by means of, basically, identity theft:

He ran against a reasonably-popular Democratic incumbent named Johnny Ray Turner. Didn't do much campaigning - that might have alerted people to what he was trying to pull! Common sort of situation around here.

if you die this way you go to American Valhalla

[snarp]

Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.

-- cohost to shut down at end of 2024 (2024-09-09)

Being very careful never to mention this person's name. What multimillionaire is out there debt-trapping devs to get hold of social media site code?

[stil-lindigo]

lead balloon (the tumblr post that saved me)

if this comic resonated with you, it would mean the world to me if you donated to this palestinian family's escape fund.

--

no creative notes because this isn't that kind of comic.

I know I don’t owe any of you anything but I still felt compelled to write about my long term absence. And I feel far enough away from the dangerous spot I was in to be able to make this comic. I have a therapist now, and she agreed that making this could be a very cathartic gesture, and the start of properly leaving these thoughts behind me. I am still, at seemingly random times, blindsided by fleeting desires to kill myself. They’re always passing urges, but it’s disarming, and uncomfortable. I worry sometimes that my brain’s spent so long thinking only about suicide that it’s forgotten how to think about anything else. Like, now that I've opened that door for myself, I'll never be able to fully shut it again. But I’m trying my best to encourage my mind in other directions. We'll see how that goes.

I am still donating all proceeds from my store to Palestinian causes. So far, I've donated over $15K, not including donations coming from my own pocket or the fundraising streams which jointly raised around $10K. In the time since I made my initial post about where this money would be going, the focus has shifted from aid organisations to directly donating to escape funds.

If you'd like to do the same, you can look at Operation Olive Branch, which hosts hundreds of Palestinian escape funds or donate to Safebow, which has helped facilitate the safe crossing and securing of important medical procedures for over 150 at-risk palestinians since the beginning of the genocide.

[regularbeans]

am i gonna die without ever being happy? that would _suck_

[prospitianescapee]

[Transcript:]

OneCSeven commented:

what strikes me the most is the absolute inability for Musk to experience satisfaction, to be satiated. He's a hungry ghost. He was up in the middle of the night haunted by the absolute deprivation of only 9 million impressions on his worthless superbowl tweet. He's so taken in by the Skinner box of twitter that he bought it and is making the box-maintainers specifically give him higher numbers. But the whole point is that no matter what number the machine gives him he will feel dissatisfied with it because that feeling is precisely what makes the machine work.

This is the endgame of whale-baiting, right? You make software that's hostile to brains in the hopes a few rich people get poisoned by it and become willing to exchange money for higher numbers. In twitter's case, they got eaten by the whale. They get slack notifications at 2am if the whale isn't getting enough numbers. In a way, the app created its owner. That's a little fucked up to me, more so than the standard Al domination tropes, that a system without agency ends up in control.

this comment on a vid about elon musk was so good i had to save it

[quarterlifekitty]

cw: death, murder, severe grief induced depression, alcoholism

Undead!Husband!Ghost who stalks his way home just as soon as he claws his way from the damp, heavy soil on top of his coffin.

Pain in the ass. Doesn’t have his damned phone and he has no idea where this cemetery is.

Doesn’t have his keys, either, and it’s the middle of the fucking night. Finds a window open just a crack— his absence in your life shows. He would’ve never left you vulnerable like this. Kitchen is a mess of takeout containers. You haven’t been taking things well. Answering machine flashes a bright red number— 38.

He takes off his shoes and his jacket— like he’d only stepped out for the day, rather than having been dead and buried for months. Hates the fucking formalwear they buried him in. Ambles his way upstairs.

Sees some fucking stranger in his house. Sleeping in his bed. Right next to his wife. Bruises on your neck.

It was yet another self-destructive attempt at distracting yourself from what happened. The shitheel you picked up at the bar doesn’t even fully wake up before his skull is cracked against the hardwood of the headboard. You barely stir. Simon leans close and smells the liquor on your breath. He tilts your head gently so your cheek is to the pillow.

He digs through the dresser drawers for nearly half an hour before he finds the obscure little corner where you’ve hidden your wedding ring. You tell yourself it’s to make yourself seem available, but really you just couldn’t stand the sight of it. Whose gaze reflected back from the polished gemstone.

It’s slipped delicately back onto your finger. It’s looser than it used to be.

The body is dragged from the bed and deposited on the floor, blood already soaked down past the sheets and into the mattress. He doesn’t care. He’s still covered in dirt and rot and he doesn’t care about that either. He’s so fucking tired.

Crawls in the bed next to you, an arm loosely thrown over your waist.

When you wake up, he’ll cook you some real food.

[i-am-confused-always]

what I say: “it is what it is”

what I mean: “I have cried about this for hours and have probably self harmed and contemplated suicide over this.

[snarp]

Individual choices like switching to Linux don't necessarily help with problems like the CrowdStrike collapse, because that's happening due to a corporate technological monoculture created by economic incentives created by dangerously-rich idiots.

You can't expect a bank or credit card processor or etc to make tech decisions that take them out of the monoculture: that's just not what those guys do. "It's not worth it."

Right now, a bunch of people who can't get into Word on their Windows PCs are, instead, on Google Docs on their iPhones, rewriting the same "cost-benefit analysis" they've been rewriting for years, explaining why continuing to use exactly the same set of brittle, closed-source, user-hostile products that literally every other company uses - CrowdStrike and Windows and iOS and Gmail - was and is better than the potential expense/risk of moving away from them. They're saying that it's fine, and this is going to keep happening, and it's fine. Because:

When everything collapses all at the same time: your competitors are part of the Everything. And your own quarterly earnings are in line with theirs. And no one singles you out. You will not play the goat, today. So, it's fine. This is fine. And it's going to keep happening.

[prospitianescapee]

Perhaps the lowest point in the downward spiral of our public life is epitomized by the "CostCo Guys," a duo consisting of father Andrew "A.J." Befumo Jr. and his son Eric Justice Befumo. They gained popularity on TikTok and YouTube in 2024 for their videos filmed at the warehouse store Costco. Their first viral video featured them shopping for meatballs for Eric's mother. They subsequently began producing videos in which they rated products from Costco, categorizing them either positively as a "boom" or negatively as a "doom."

These videos are riddled with paradoxes that defy easy understanding. On the surface, they appear to be spontaneous amateur recordings, but it has since been revealed that they were carefully staged with the help of assistants. While they seem to serve as publicity for Costco, they were initially made without any collaboration with the company—and at one point, the duo was even thrown out of a Costco store while attempting to record there. As such, the CostCo Guys epitomize a widespread trend of free publicity. Thousands of individuals, particularly young women, post video clips online that promote brands of body lotion, lipstick, or nail polish—a capitalist’s dream come true and an unexpected byproduct of economic neo-feudalism.

zizek's critique of the costco guys

[vive-le-roi-au]

Prologue

(This post contains both images and text.)

(You’d been looping back to just the third floor for… you don’t know how many loops. Hundreds?)

(Maybe that was the problem. You didn’t do it all in one go. You just have to do it all, from start to finish, and kill the King.)

(From the top.)

(…Again.)

(You went back. Again.)

(Maybe you took too long. Just need to go faster.)

(…No. Still not enough.)

(It feels good though. Killing the one who killed you, thousands of times. It’s cathartic.)

(You’re even strong enough that you don’t need the Housemaid—MIRABELLE. HER NAME IS MIRABELLE, MIRABELLE, MIRABELLE!!!)

(…You don’t need Mirabelle’s help anymore.)

(…)

(You wouldn’t mind doing this a few more times.)

(…)

(Back to the stage, Siffrin.)

(…)

(…)

(…)

(It’s just another part of the loops now.)

(Go through the House. Kill the King. Talk to the Head Housemaiden. Something’s broken, failing, rotting. Loop back to Dormont.)

(The worst part?)

(Murdering the King has stopped bringing you joy.)

(It used to make you smile, seeing him crumble, blood spilling from his mouth, pooling on the ground.)

(Sometimes, you reduce his body to dust, cutting it up more and more and more until there’s nothing left. You’ve killed him slowly, draining him of his strength and bleeding him from a million places all over, watching the light slowly leave his eyes.)

(And you can’t even enjoy it anymore.)

(…)

(So why are you still here?)

(Whose fault is it that you’re trapped here?)

[stil-lindigo]

scorched earth.

a comic about a princess who died in a fire.

(this is a sequel to bite of winter, a comic about Snow and what became of her after her death.)

--

creative notes:

--

all my other comics

store

[j0celynh0rr0r]

Trying to get away?

[prospitianescapee]