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signals. thinking about shifting my mental framework to identify signals instead of waiting for concepts to be assembled. exploring the amount of energy and opportunities for distractions through the operations of processing what just happened and what is happening to short circuit latent and unnecessary systems. cut through the assembly processes and identify the raw signals. recognizing that naming these "raw signals" is misleading. maybe, shifting observability lower in the stack.

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Up earlier than I should be today. The witching hour got me. I started thinking about how many in society have decided they prefer screens and artificial words over real words and real connection. Have we collectively decided it’s easier to just not be vulnerable? I should go back to bed…

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So annoyed that reddit is gating read-access to it's threads. What's up with that?? (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻ (thx ascii-art)

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You look in the corner, you see a guy quietly eating cigarette butts. It's ok. He's dealing with a lot of stress from work. He takes care of his family. Capitalism

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Likewise... you look in the corner, you see a guy quietly eating cigarette butts. It's ok. He's dealing with a lot of stress for lack of work, or food, or future. He wants to take care of his family. Communism. We haven’t figured out yet. Maybe we never will.

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Went to the summer house to watch the but it was cloudy so we missed it. But the kids are asleep so guess I'll light a fire and crack a beer instead. Woe is me!

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Going to document some approaches to produce data visualizations using ari via DuckDB. Don’t know why it didn’t occur to me earlier, that there would be some solid community extensions for in DuckDB.

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I was trying to use an approach that relies on community extensions, but installing them is proving finicky. Going to consider an approach that requires less futzing.

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Phoenix oolong instead of my normal because I'm sick.

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there's no fundamental physical limit that prevents silicon from developing taste and judgement, but language is a lossy compression of reality. taste comes from experience, from the shadowy mass of episodic memory, which swirls and convects at the boundary of consciousness. the ideas recombine into new ones in the nuclear reactor of the hippocampus. but no matter how imbued with meaning and expertise is a handmade wardrobe we still get our shit from ikea

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Haiiii

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holaaa

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Guess we're doing Halloween stuff on sale everywhere now 🎃

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I'm doing experiments with short attention-span students and code. Starting with python, and, oddly, now working in BASIC. As a C programmer of 40+ years, I find this aesthetically and pedagogically displeasing, but I am delighted to see them getting fully absorbed in writing 130 PRINT "You have been eaten by a bear!" : GOTO 900. Yes there is spaghetti, but it's their spaghetti and they seem to take delight in debugging it. Python will come later.

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I was talking about this with some alumni students, specifically their experience learning python with us a few years earlier (these are college students who are not really using python any more). What it seems to boil down to is that with python you have the feeling that there is this huge forest of solutions to any problem you are having -- but you will never know the whole forest. BASIC feels like you "know" it after a day or two of playing around, evidently.

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Intro: Wisen to create a recursive learning loop for my coding harness. Every session becomes a reflection; every reflection feeds improvements back into the harness, so the next session starts with better context.

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So much present tense in generated prose. Terse, authoritative sentences, without breathing room, without hesitation or qualification. It jumps off the page, and not in a good way.

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What about the lack of density to paragraphs, the length of the sentences, or the confidence and determinism of their direction? Conviction with no limits. So reliably repetitive that you start seeing patterns as if you are looking and reading a record player with some scratches on it. Skips. Squeaks. Repeats. Yet. It gets the job done.

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Yet. It gets the job done. Here's where we disagree. Using these tools as part of the job, certainly. But if I am to read, discern meaning, analyze choices of diction and structure, consider the context both of the author and the audience, and finally derive value from the written word, then generative falls short on many levels. If the "job" is to produce something no one was ever intending to engage with, then we have a more fundamental question about the value of the job.

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Maybe what I messaged read as a disagreement and mentioning that they get the job done was actually not about producing prose (of any quality). I wholeheartedly agreed and still agree with you. Getting the job done was more about producing output - be it some prose, images, videos, software, whatever. They do generate output. It is not to say that the output is meaningful or meaningless. Some souls do enjoy it. Some others - don’t. I did start with a question though.

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