CIRCLE WITH A DOT

This is also why a pair of blogs highlighted on bubbles.town about reaching out to writers—and how anyone who doesn’t welcome that communication is just “in it for the money,” as if this is a lucrative profession, let alone hobby—rubbed me the wrong way. They seemed well-intentioned but also naive to the sheer amount of abuse, whataboutism, and nonsense some people receive for having the audacity to… blog.

Which is great for them! They shouldn’t have to worry about that or experience it firsthand. I have cherished some of the private, positive feedback I’ve gotten over the years, and I fucking love that other people are having a good time. But I also don’t read comments (and certain-fuckin’-ly would not add ‘em to my site) because the risk-reward simply isn’t there. And that’s been true since before people started entrusting their communications to plausibility demons; I can’t imagine it’s gotten better over time.

(I guess technically this is a sub-post. My bad.)

“This negative parallelism—‘it’s not just x, it’s y’ is maybe the most infamous AI writing-ism there is. It is something that is regularly called out as being obviously AI, and is the formation in the sentence Mamdani wrote that Spero called out. But I didn’t use AI. Did I use that construction because I’ve been immersed on an internet full of generic AI writing on every platform all day everyday for years? Or did I just happen to think that was the best way to phrase it at the time?”

Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain

AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy.

404 Media (www.404media.co)

This is why I’m so fucking irritated by all the slop and the people who are quick to claim any writing using an “AI writing-ism” must be slop. We shouldn’t have to second-guess our writing like this! We shouldn’t have to add “will this be accused of being slop?” to the list of concerns that lead to defensive writing. (Oh, how much I’ve had to hedge and over explain to cut off bad faith arguments and feedback from fuckin’ morons.) It’s just… gross.

kinda (not at all) funny how annoying "set up a box to procure, store, and enable the streaming of media" can be made. everyone wants a fuckin' docker compose with eight containers and networking rules and shit and "oh you have to set up your directories this way or your performance is going to be shit" and it's like, fuck, dude, none of this needs to be made as difficult as it has been... except nobody wants to package the "procure" and "enable the streaming" apps because at this point containerization seems to be the default.

except you can't even just trust a goddamn docker compose file that's been shared because you have to audit every goddamn line to make sure you aren't setting up your shit to get popped, exfil private data, etc.

openbsd's approach could make all of this much easier to handle, since the goal is "just rcctl enable some shit and you're ready to roll" but, again, packaging is an issue, and it's unlikely to be resolved because iirc these are a bunch of dotNET apps for some reason?

(not that any of this would matter but somehow the password I saved when I set up the goddamn Fedora Server install is no longer—or was never—working so idfk. I just want to be able to sit the fuck down and watch some fucking shit without having to A) search across a bunch of services that have crammed ads in unless you can afford a premium tier, which I can't, or B) manually search for ahem relevant Linux ISOs and check directory permissions and file permissions and whatever the fuck, stay on top of updates, etc. I just want to enjoy media the way it was meant to be enjoyed! please stop making it worse!)

Like, these folks understand that those CEOs are just “people” who lack integrity and empathy, right? And that you can’t expect them to correct their behavior without the proper incentives, which in this case are reminders of what it’s like to be truly, viscerally afraid?

They only understand violence and fear as abstract notions because they almost exclusively commit or spread them from afar. (Aside from the ones who prey on their partners, children, and others who can’t defend themselves.) In the absence of governments willing to intervene, a better understanding of what it’s like to experience these things as real, as something that can arrive from within arm’s reach, is required.

Some people are pointing out how serious the ordinary person should be taken once gas hits $5 per gallon. What about when grocery stores are empty? Or when swaths of the country become uninhabitable because of wildfires and flooding and other climate-related disasters?

Some people will read this and say with a straight face that “violence is never the answer,” and I just want to know what the fuck it’s going to take for them to understand that no, actually, it seems in this particular case violence is the only answer. https://www.theguardian.com/business/2026/may/01/ceo-pay-workers-minimum-wages

@hacks4pancakes “old man who has needed to be dragged into public view over the last week honors commitment to attend perhaps the most cognitively dissonant event possible where his greatest enemy (people who are supposed to tell the truth) can be implicated as would-be assassins” does lend itself well to “this was staged,” yeah. Claiming it sounded like a dropped tray is also weird as fuck for someone who should probably be extra concerned about gunfire due to A) the “previous incident” and B) what I will only summarize as “public sentiment.”

(I have not engaged with coverage of the event beyond that because our media apparatus is particularly bad at breaking news coverage and introspection so this is probably not going to get decent coverage until Ronan Farrow’s kid writes a book 20 years from now.)