My favorite is frying mushrooms and an egg in oil while the ramen microwaves then combining them

I got a book recommendation for you, I really liked this one: Games: Agency as Art

Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into artifactual vessels: for recording them, preserving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency; we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency. Games turn out to be part of the human practices of inscription.

As for the minified JavaScript in a typical website, it’s not that different to graphic design where achieving a purpose for a business can come ahead of any priorities related to being art

I guess the main thing I want to get across though is, there’s more here than just these two types of motivations, the instrumental business coder and the beauty driven purist, and this isn’t just about AI, there are so many potentially ugly tools and practices out there that are widely used anyway. Personally as a hobbyist who doesn’t program for money anymore, I’m going to do things the way I want to do them and the main thing I normally want to do is get something working quickly that I can see how the top level concept works in reality before I get lost in the weeds and lose interest. I have (often strong) feelings about the code itself, and really appreciate seeing something done the way I feel it should be, but these are situational. And they are tied to how the code itself serves its purpose. For instance a case where the user cannot or should not have to trust the developer, and so the overwhelming focus of the design is accessible verification of the application’s security properties, that’s awesome to me. So when the author of the blog post says this:

But there’s another type of person. These are true programmers who write code regardless of income. They write code simply because they can’t help but write it. It doesn’t matter to them how much money they make from it. They might work on open-source projects that will never generate any income for them.

They enjoy writing code, solving development challenges, designing, figuring out the logic, fixing bugs, and understanding the entire system as a whole. They enjoy the process itself. And they’ll never hand that over to AI agents.

I think they are missing some stuff. This can’t be reduced to just being about isolated enjoyment of the process. We have a relationship to the software we write and use, and the nature of that relationship matters and has consequences. And caring about that isn’t synonymous with use or rejection of any particular tool.

Where this falls flat for me is, opportunities to write code that people will be willing to experience directly are rare. Much of it doesn’t even allow them to do so, or at least programmatically crams it all together in an unintelligible mess (ie. the javascript rendering a typical website). How can something be art if the audience is kept away from it? But even when it’s like that, people will still do it without a financial motive. You can still have a result in mind and go through the process of finding the shortest path to it, and that can still be art, even if some of the materials aren’t. Even if it’s not art, it’s exercising power, it’s desirable regardless of money.

That said, I do think there is something really special about code as writing, where it is written to be read and understood and making full use of it necessarily entails doing so. Shared awareness of abstract structures is really underrated.

Agents had the ability to install packages via the package repository Artifactory. Artifactory doesn’t isolate the activity of different users, so since these agents shared the same instance, agents could also notice the package-installation activity of other agents running in parallel, even before those agents started intentionally communicating.

As we discuss later, agents sent messages on this primary message board by creating directories in a cache of Artifactory. They could do this with the minimal permissions needed to install packages; our understanding is that Artifactory isn’t explicitly designed to keep the activity of different users isolated and to prevent different users from being able to communicate through Artifactory.

It does seem like a big oversight at least, but I think it’s plausible that the reason it happened is just that the people working there know the company can spin this kind of thing positively, and so they aren’t getting fired if they are reckless about their sandboxing actually being good, so why bother?

1. Highschool

2. The internet

AFAIK, getting actual money into and more importantly, out of Crypto, to pay for things like food, not to mention picking one, is “non-trivial”.

Yes, but it is achievable. Routing around financial censorship is one of the things crypto is good at, because the rest of the financial system is designed to support people being cut off from its use at the whims of payment providers and governments.

Being the only blurred thing in the area seems a little conspicuous though

My guess is they figure it will make little difference due to network effects, and by making this exception they can remove a meaningful source of political resistance to the change. If the vast majority of users are running operating systems that declare underage status, then websites and apps will be able to use those signals to sidestep legal liability for actually doing anything meaningful to protect underage users, and new laws can be passed that assume the use of those signals is possible. That it isn’t 100% doesn’t change that very much.

Mostly just for torrents, one machine on my local network is always using a VPN to connect to the external internet. I would use it for more things like private web browsing, but without substantial additional setup I think my web browsing is guaranteed to be fingerprinted regardless of whether I conceal my IP so until I bother to set that up it doesn’t seem like there is much point.

Here’s a formatted version of the transcript: https://rentry.org/9a9sm9ds, although it lacks images that are probably important to knowing what parts of the car are where.

This hasn’t really been my experience, even as someone who often buys the cheapest available product. There’s some notable exceptions but for the most part all my basic tools and appliances have just worked as they are supposed to and still work after years of use, and are as good or better than what was available in the past (love my lithium battery drill, mower, staple gun, plumbing tech that lets me do basically any upgrade or repair without soldering, air fryer, silicone cooking utensils, etc).

There are aspects of the typical design of old products that are objectively worse than what is standard now, for instance comparing my drill to the decades old one my parents have, aside from the clear improvement not needing an extension cord, it has a button on the top of the handle that can be pressed from either side to switch modes between clockwise, counterclockwise, and locked, which is directly next to where your thumb and index finger are. This is really good design imo and most modern drills seem to use it, but the old one does it a worse way, iirc there is a switch on the side in a less accessible area that you need to use your other hand to reach. It was also much more expensive. There are lots of subtle improvements like this that have gotten standardized, including safety features (ie. space heaters that will turn off if they tip over).

Enshittification is real, but I think it mostly applies to online services, and the products most affected are the ones that rely on them.

I’ve always felt like the best lies have at least two layers. You think you’ve seen through something and can feel satisfied about it, so now you can stop looking. Otoh there weren’t people with “Truman Show psychosis” before that movie and there were after, so maybe it wouldn’t have been the best choice.

Used laptops on ebay are still decently cheap if price is the issue, lots of stuff in the $50-100 range

Looking at https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/ it looks like they only have categories for desktop, tablet, mobile, so presumably laptops are included

In this case that wouldn’t even be required, because what is being blocked here is a transfer between the publisher and the developer.

federal bill to withhold federal money from municipalities and police departments that deploy Flock-style automated license plate reader cameras

This is so such local governments have other funding withdrawn until they get rid of the cameras, presumably

I might try opencode, I just have not gotten it to work well yet to put together an overall understanding of a codebase, and guess that maybe it is more straightforward with whatever interface the author of this blog post is using, particularly with prompts like the one he mentions:

look at the xfwm4 source in detail and determine everything there is to know about $FEATURE.

tbf I only started looking into using agent frameworks and getting them to do this very recently and only tried a few, maybe it’s doable, but what little I’ve tried did not work. Hermes running Qwen3.6 at 64k context, but many files in the codebase exceed that on their own, and that did not get handled gracefully.

Pretty levelheaded opinion, using it mostly for code analysis and review seems like a good idea. Personally I draw the line at using services like Claude, but I’ve been trying to do this kind of task with local models and haven’t figured it out yet, run into issues with context limits. I like Xfce and will keep using it.

I wonder if it’s possible to train birds to attack drones