Microsoft Access Database Lab, Fort Gillem, 1997. if you've ever used an MS Access database made by a contractor for internal use by the federal government, you'll know that face she is making is Highly Correct.

The right way to think about code generation with ChatGPT is through the lens of natural-language representations of code– documentation and comments–and not the code itself. The whole thing is parasitic on a substrate of solid technical writing. Where this doesn't really exist (e.g. The Nix Expression Language) generation is also bad.

Whenever I see archivists making a big deal about historians talking about "archival discoveries," I just quietly remember that most of my archival experiences look like this.

https://twitter.com/laurenstokes/status/1638950748925861893

I've worked as an archivist and as a historian, and almost nothing makes me feel crazier than when archivists talk like well-described, fully processed records are the norm.

I find this kind of thing enormously frustrating, because it elides the basic fact that most of the large scale, post-war population control efforts weren't done in the name of Malthusianism, but in the name of modernization theory and economic growth. theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/… The ecomodernist camp is absolutely obsessed with erasing this legacy.

He saved everything. 🙏 Was sent home with all sorts of Bell equipment I need to clean, ID, and potentially find good homes for.

you really do have to block matt yglesias. yes, you. he feeds on your response to this shit. yglesias is like some kind of fucked-up social media utility monster. i'm begging all of you to stop feeding him.

Oh God, not archival "discovery" discourse again. I spent years of my life cataloging and describing records and this shit not only dramatically exaggerates the finding aid situation at the vast majority of archives, it erases the interpretative work of historians.

Some shortcomings in this thread, but I still basically buy it. Centrist politics is animated by a desire to approach mass politics as something that can and needs to be technocratically managed at scale. But that's a utopian dream.

https://twitter.com/kevinbaker/status/1367271685490151424

The shortcoming of all of these centrist, nudgeocratic, managerial approaches to politics isn't only that they don't work, it's that people are *aware* they're being manipulated and start developing adversarial (and often maladaptive) approaches to being pushed around.

movie buddy couldn't make it through Crossed paws.

I want ferns to come back. Bring back ferns. succulents have had their day.

why do delivery trucks have to beep when they're parked??????????? the amazon ones I can hear through closed windows, while wearing headphones, and I can't hear for shit.

Just horrified myself by thinking "what if I rated my historical knowledge of every country on a five point scale?" potentially a useful exercise, but an unflattering one.

A lot of irritating, mostly vapid people and ideas were able to build huge followings in 2010s because the people criticizing them were even worse. The decade of being anti-anti-*.

I really don't know how you get to a political point like this and refuse to show any self awareness, and decide the solution is to keep letting the same people do the same thing? There's going to be endless debates about messaging, voting, the propriety of protest tactics. And we're going to ignore the fact that large majorities oppose any move to make abortion illegal. That this move is unpopular. This is a problem with leadership and not popular opinion

One of the strangest developments of the last few years has been the centrist insistence that HR department-inflected identity politics, the stuff that everyone actually hates, is the left's fault. They invented it! The ideology that everyone actually dislikes is the elite-captured version, the Clinton campaign version. But they pretend like they had nothing to do with it.

I am again reminded of the people who earnestly told us at the beginning of this year that it was stupid (or worse) to see the Maus ban as an outgrowth of conservative sexual politics and sex panic. We're now several months into a meltdown about "groomers" and Disney cartoons and we've reached the culmination of a generation-long project of sexual control. You really do have to wonder about the political judgement of people who refused to see it.

Logging back in briefly to share this remarkable (and sometimes distressingly honest) essay on identity and the scars that class mobility leaves behind. It had been sitting in my queue for months and I wish I had read it right away.

https://twitter.com/johnpmerrick/status/1467896007321128972

yesterday was the fiftieth anniversary of the limits to growth report, something I spent years researching. at one point, I had hoped to have a book out, with a release coinciding with the anniversary. i was honestly pretty depressed about it, but (given present circumstances) the value of an news peg would have been absolutely worthless.

revcoms are asleep, post old avakians when I was in college, I knew this guy who was in RCP and told me with a straight face that he'd die for "chairman bob."

happy birthday, molly! thank you for being my kitty! she chowed down on some junk food, played a lot of sneakchase, napped exuberantly, surveilled the place where she saw a mouse 20 months ago, had a lazy swat-fight with me, and I think had a good day. love her.

if you're a US-based commentator with a big platform and you're going on and on about "anti-imperial left" you have bad fucking priorities. saw someone going off about PSL. you're fighting against a marginal group *on the left*.