piggy [they/them]

You don’t think permanent removal is at least part of the point of prisons/jails? Seems like there are quite a few people who think of prisons as a way to get rid of “undesirables” and there has been a constant push to speed up death penalty proceedings. The entire probation/parole system seems like a way to keep people coming back.

I agree that in a microcosm and at the individual level it’s a removal of undesirables, and it works that way in rich locales, but there are way more poor people than there are rich people, and way more poor prisoners than rich prisoners.

The problem is that prison industrial complex needs bodies. The other extractive bit of this is that the revolving door of US jails justify the thin blue line’s enormous extraction of local resources. The majority of the imprisoned in the US are in jails waiting arraignment. It’s a revolving door. These people end up being locked out of a real life because the system is punitive, and feeds itself. So while it does control where populations of people are, it is not a permanent removal in the same way where you empty San Francisco of all Japanese people and move them all to empty land.

Plus the entire system was built around putting black people in prison to continue slavery. How is that not permanent removal? The US has basically just been making baby steps towards prison reform for 100+ years so it isn’t quite as blatant these days, but literally millions of people have been permanently removed by it

Remember that slavery is not removal. Death is not removal. Slavery is extraction. The US is not removing black people, it is trapping them. That’s the history of slavery and anti-slave patrols that seeps into law enforcement. It’s a strategic difference that implies a difference of intent. We are not removing communities, towns, neighborhoods etc, of the black population to force them into slavery. We are trapping individuals in the legal system which in aggregate affects those communities, towns, and neighborhoods but we are not “emptying the cities”.

Notably the comparison falls apart a little because originally gulag were often seeded with mass population transfers, but towards the middle/end of the soviet union gulags had a stable enough rotating population to simply shard a larger camp into smaller camps at the periphery. By that time people were sentenced to gulags individually rather than transferred en-masse.

It’s a fuzzy distinction for sure, but the main distinction is that we’re moving bodies one by one, not street by street/neighborhood by neighborhood/town by town/etc.

“Winning a war” with Russia from the NATO perspective is a task that would require every NATO member to engage in a total war that would wipe out a large portion of Eastern Europe.

There are NATO members who would balk at this immediately such as Turkey. There are NATO members who would be blood thirsty and balk at this once the war started, and Russia became a real threat (rather than imagined) inside their borders, which is almost every Eastern European and Nordic Country.

I cannot see Norway going to war with it’s neighbor at the behest of America.

Prisons are closer to a hybrid financialized gulag system than concentration camps. The ultimate goal of concentration camps is permanent removal. The ultimate goal of gulags was economic extraction. US Prisons and Jails function in this way in the sense that many governments in the US use prison labor. However this goes further in the sense that the bodies of prisoners are typically commodities in and of themselves when you’re looking at the interplay between private for-profit prisons and the various governments they contract with.

But we’ve had actual concentration camps for immigrants along the Southern border for decades, these camps are also hybrid financialized systems because some of them are also run by for-profit companies.

America is simply the synthesis of the horrors of humanity with a financial twist!

I usually drive my wife to the train in the mornings. She usually listens to NPR morning edition for quick updates. We bitch about how lib they are in the car.

This morning she woke me up and NPR was already playing, it happens sometimes. I hear about this collision. The first thing in my head and out of my ADHD mouth at 6:40AM was “Shit, Iran finally got SpongeBob”.

My wife was a figure skater as a teen and now plays Women’s hockey. She’s still into figure skating as a sport. In the car she elaborates on how crazy the crash was because it was full of figure skaters and she was just watching figure skating Nationals. She has a ticket to Worlds this year. I felt kinda bad about “SpongeBob” but I still think it was a good bit without any context.

Bumping Lena’s story she’s the OG of DIY HRT on the web. Full process is here

find a way to initiate the whites-only rapture

Melanin is too heavy to be lifted by their Lord’s Grace.

See I disagree, that’s actually a good feature. Many “movies with a point” can only take on the perspective a sole protagonist as a totalizing force. The split protagonists in Barbie show that the actual antagonists are the systems under which the protagonists exist both in Barbieland and the real world. It’s a true solidarity movie in the sense that Barbie not only does what is good for Barbie but she also learns to make space for Ken in a society that is a gender mirror of our own. Ironically Barbie in this way does have an apotheosis as an avatar of corporate feminism (woman savior) in but in aesthetic only, because in action she is showing solidarity along intersectional lines within her own society. Something that she ultimately wants to bring to the real world. Barbie doesn’t start the movie with all the answers as an all knowing intersectional socialist, she develops that on screen by bouncing off her deuteragonist in Ken. Ultimately not only does this structure make a fun movie, it makes a good movie with a point. Very often I have a hard time watching movies with a point with other people because at one point the “fun” of the movie falls apart for the “point”, something that doesn’t happen with the complexities of Barbie.

I think what it says about being optimistic has a little more depth and nuance

I will agree with this, but I think the presentation sucks. It’s overshadowed by the conflict. There’s not enough repetition of a character getting beat down, choosing to maintain optimism, trying again only to get beat down because the alternative is personally unbearable in some way. That is ultimately the logical ends of the ideology behind optimism in that movie, but I think it’s too “sad” to show to Americans. Americans culturally, cannot deal with the end of the handsome hamburger party. We have a tantrum. Instead the movie shows optimism through the idea of being a goofy silly little guy and putting googly eyes on stuff. Which to anyone who has ever met a goofy silly little guy they’re often the most pessimistic or realistic people ever and not really optimists. In as such it doesn’t really differentiate between practicing optimism and being intrinsically optimistic. The characters are just kinda just vaguely assigned this through the googly eye motif. It becomes very confused it doesn’t have a clear presentation of the difficulty of a character choosing to practice optimism.

It really reminds me of the issue of orientalization and commodification of Eastern Philosophies. For example Buddhism is imported into America as a top down tool of corporate obedience and mindset shifting, rather than a bottom up understanding of life through a personal and reciprocal lens. A corporate American Buddhist may know that they clock out at 5PM and work stress is impermanent but they don’t share their food at the end of the day because people are given what they are owed here. A traditional Buddhist shares their food because even grace is fleeting and it’s better to share it than attempting to selfishly savor an impermanent experience.

I spent the entire other post being triggered by the EEAO comparison and the placement of EEAO as higher than Barbie, and I need to write about Barbie specifically and why I think it’s better.

So first off, I really had 0 expectations for this movie. Greta Gerwig hasn’t been my favorite screenwriter/director. Beyond her rework of Little Women, I’ve seen Ladybird and Frances Ha. To me many Greta Gerwig movies are really about the ennui of being a “girl” from a “serious perspective”. I do like the “I’m just a girl” style memes, and I can appreciate the emotional valence of the “I’m just a girl”, but attempting to paint it with a “serious” brush is a bit off putting for me because ultimately it’s not serious by definition because it’s a gendered impulse. I had this huge problem with Ladybird because it’s effectively a “my life a movie” movie for any woman whose ever been a teenager and did the incredibly lame thing of having a huge crush on a guy who thinks People’s History of the US is a “deep book”. In essence Greta Gerwig movies to me up until Barbie and outside of Little Women (which she was a good director for), have been about modernizing the essence of Jane Austen in a serious way but without the discernment of a Jane Austen style society. In essence the follies of Ladybird are follies but they are never actually contrasted against the “serious” portions of Ladybird. To put it more bluntly there’s never a serious arc for Ladybird where someone tells her to pull up her pants and her follies are filmed from a play stupid games win stupid prizes perspective – the writing and camera forces us to take her seriously and take her agency seriously as if she knows what she’s doing even if she doesn’t. Tones of this appear in Frances Ha, but Ladybird is a much better and more in your face example.

With this in mind, Barbie was a real fucking treat. Immediately I understood the setup. Barbie lives in a gendered society that’s a corporate feminist matriarchy. It skewers corporate feminism essentially as a “top dog” style system where the in-gender is women instead of men. Barbies can do anything, Kens are defined through Barbies, and the tertiary characters are the LGBTQ and minority accessories that cosmopolitan women (e.g. Barbies their avatar) wear to show their virtue. I think Ken learning “patriarchy” as a turn of the century / mid century masculinity from Will Farrel as a caricature of a modern CEO was extremely well done. I think the tying of women in the real world to Kens and not Barbies was a great idea. I think reifying Barbie as a real world woman at the end where she has to contend not just with the gendered place in society as a Ken but with the specific forms of how society polices women as also really well done. Contrasting this with the political issue at Barbieland is great because Ken’s aren’t policed as much as women in the real world but the main point is that they are only seen as people through the dominant gender (Kens to Barbies, women to men). I think the movie could have been a little harder on Barbie in terms of the treatment of the LBGTQ and minority coded characters, but “i guess” there’s limited run time. It’s still disappointing that that conflict is introduced and resolved within the scope of like a 5-10 minute scene. Ultimately this has an extremely pleasant amount of depth for what should have been a “fun” and empty headed movie about a toy line.

The other thing that’s extremely well done is the story structure. You can split out Barbie and Ken into their own movies and they work, but they’re in the same movie! And it’s possible because Barbie and Ken are both protagonists (Ken in practice is actually a deuteragonist), but the antagonists in the movie are the systems in Barbieland and the Real world. We know this because both Ken and Barbie have their own hero’s (don’t take hero literally I just don’t wanna say monomyth for ease of understaanding) journey that intersects. The hero in the story is clearly Barbie who saves Barbieland, defeats the CEO of Matel and emanicpates the Kens. The villain is actually the CEO of Mattel, who not only attempts to capture Barbie/Ken in the real world but take over Barbieland by misleading Ken.

I really think that Greta Gerwig should stick with comedy or dramady because prior to this watching her movies was like watching Paul Giamatti in a serious role, and then he slips on a banana peel and you’re not supposed to laugh at it, you’re supposed to cry.

I disliked EEAO because its message is a hugbox that doesn’t give realistic examples of healthy conflict resolution. The ironic dissonance between the action of the movie and the message don’t mesh because the action is supposed to be showing familial/cultural strife and the message is about being kind due to unknown unknowns. However it doesn’t actually resolve a significant dispute outside of a familial dynamic. As an immigrant I feel like this movie targeted me but the “lessons” I’m supposed to take home are completely trite compared to my real life interaction with cultural differences in my family. It’s essentially a fantasy that pretends that your immigrant grandma will gleefully learn your American cultural boundaries after a difficult talk, something that my inter-generational immigrant family has no real experience with (and neither do many of my friends who are also immigrants and even more targeted by this movie because they’re Asian).

Likewise outside a family dynamic this movie falls entirely flat, because despite all her flaws my grandmother is my family and I still have to take care of her. The American version of this is cutting your family out when they’re annoying. Ironically the movie is also pick and choose about what properties of assimilation its characters take which feels very pidgeon holed in terms of its messaging. But beyond the family the movie doesn’t really take a real stance on conflict resolution because of it’s Looney Toons/Stephen Chow style approach. The martial arts are a metaphor for familial conflict, but by using that visual metaphor there is nowhere to escalate if the movie were to have a real villain rather than a metaphor for a teenager with a tantrum. I’m sorry in the real world you’re not going to fight “hate” with “love” at the level of physical conflict.

Barbie becoming a real woman in the real world is supposed be a humorous peripeteia to the fact that she has had an aristocratic experience of being the dominant gender/sexual orientation in Barbieland. She has never actually been culturally policed in the way that real women are.

Same as the joke about being called a tankie, Barbie despite being an icon of feminism cannot actually navigate the real world’s complex social structures. Which is also paralleled to real world events like when libs get upset at Chappel Roan for her politics or her reclamation of her own personal experience, rather than being defined by the whims of her fans.

It’s really fun but I didn’t like the ending, the kens should have all been put into labor camps

The whole meta-commentary is that top-dog style dominance is pointless and recreates the same disparity solely through binary means. Its literally an anti-corporate feminist message diffused through feminist humor. So much of the movie is based on this ex:

• Barbie-land is a corporate feminist gender swapped society from real life.
• The characters that are LGBTQ coded are literally sidelined the entire movie as side kicks.
• The Kens main complaint is that they are only recognized as people through Barbies.

The entire thing is based on the same axioms as “MORE WOMEN CIA TORTURERES” and “They say the next one (missile) will be sent by a woman.” memes. The reason Greta Gerwig uses turn of the century mixed with mid century markers of masculinity is that so you don’t get tied up in knots about Kens starting podcasts. Apparently people still get caught up on an ironic gender flip.

good bit

I know an artist that got super rich off of NFTs, she didn’t own any or had anything to do with the crypto side she just made the “apes” though I think hers were mostly fairies. She’s very good at the whole “industrial artist” gig. NFTs honestly seemed like a gold rush for people with the ability to navigate that space. She cleared half a million one year.

There’s a tradition of the Soviet intelligensia being temporarily embarassed nobles, see big fans of Bulgakov.

His only mistake is that the gold bars were stamped “Made in Egypt”. Just like TikTok if they were of American provenance you get a pass.

What you’re afraid of is precisely what was tried with outsourcing dev jobs. That proved to work in some areas where you have very boring crud apps, but was a complete failure in others. I expect LLMs are just going to work out in a very similar fashion.

Okay but like again, I’m not afraid of losing my job. I’m afraid that we’re going to lose real capability as a society. It’s how our oligarchs are practically morons compared to past oligarchs who built hundreds of libraries, or how we don’t have the real capacity in the US to build rail.

I’m currently working as a platform architect coordinating 5 teams over multiple products building a platform for authoring, publishing and managing rich educational courses across multiple different grade levels. I do most of the greenfield development still, I personally manage a DSL and tools for it, while figuring out platform requirements and timelines for other teams including my own. I used to work on a real time EEG system doing architecture and signal processing. I’ve architected and implemented medical logistics platforms. I’ve been a first engineer at a couple of startups. I’ve literally written purpose built ORMs, schedulers, middleware frameworks, and query frameworks from scratch. I’ve worked at almost every major common role at a principal level except security (which is mostly fake) and embedded so front end, back end, database optimization/integration, infrastructure, machine code on JVM and X86, and distributed computing. I haven’t work in niches like networking, industrial, ML or quantum, I’d only really want to explore quantum or networking in reality. But quantum is something you typically need PhDs for otherwise it’s gonna be a bit grunty. OSS may bring up engineers for some of these roles, but in practice the majority of OSS projects don’t reach the level of complexity that I’ve worked at – the ones that do aren’t community projects they’re corporate ones.

Very few people can step into my shoes, most principal engineers I’ve met average out at a large project where they implemented a strangler once or twice. The system currently has a hard time reproducing me, if the bottom falls out it’s gonna be good game. I’m happy that LLMs are helping you rediscover your passion, but the kind of stuff you’re talking about are toys. Personally they’re not fun, they’re mostly boring, I enjoy building large technical systems in complex problem spaces in a high level reproducible way. Everything else gets stale quickly. I’ve built out systems where if you blow on the code the tests turn red without test maintenance and creation being a burden. The goal was high value test in 5 minutes in that system. The future I see is that everything is just shittier because the skill that is hard to find and is dying is understanding the essential complexity at the 10,000 ft view, the 100 ft view, the 1 ft view, and the 1 micrometer view. I can barely find developers who can innately understand essential complexity at one of those view points. I’ve met about 20 who can do all 4 and I’ve met maybe like 400-ish devs in my life.

The only passion project I wanted to start I basically decided to call off because if successful it would be bad for the world. I wanted to build a high level persona management software that could build swarms in the tens of thousands without being discovered.

If LLM removes programming as a job, might be nice, but in practice it’s just gonna mean more people on the struggle bus.

And as I already pointed out above, the problem here isn’t with automation but with capitalism. In a sane system, automation would mean more free time for people, and less tedium. People are doing these jobs not because they want to be doing them, but because it’s a way to survive in this shitty system.

There are certainly bad programming jobs, but programming jobs in general are extreme labor aristocracy. Yes people are chasing the bag, but they’re certainly not “survival jobs”. Within the system until you reach senior levels is no real discriminator between “bag chaser” and “person who is trying to learn”, both these are going to get squad wiped.

There’s certainly still going to be a path to being a SE. But it’s going to be autodidact hobbyists who start extremely young. As a person who has been running Linux since 5th grade, who got a CCNA at 16, who has only had programming or network jobs since high school, this is the worst path because the reality of the career at scale murders your passion. If I don’t age out I’m betting my next 10 years are going to be uncomfortably close to Player Piano, and that’s something that’s entirely dreadful. Instead of teaching juniors to program at scale while giving them boring CRUD tasks, I’ll be communing with machine spirits so “they” can generate the basic crud endpoints and the component screens.

The reality of being a greybeard is that if you’re close to retirement in this industry like my dad is, you’re gonna do the same shit jobs as the bag chasers. They’ll stick you in the basement and steal your stapler if you even make it past the vibe check interview. The only way to avoid this is to be a lifer somewhere, but that in itself is a challenge.

The difference between the previous developments and now, is that it may improve productivity now in your case and the case of the 1000 juniors, but tomorrow it’s going to actually undercut demand for people. Building a system that builds and deploys applications has been the goal of several public and private projects I’ve been privy to. I agree this exact use-case that you linked is an example of a way to not have to learn ANTLR or how an AST works and flip a coin if it works. In practice though, this is step 1. Code generation has improved significantly in the last year alone across the whole LLM ecosystem. The goal isn’t’ to write maintainable code or readable code, the goal is to write deploy-able code with 90% feature coverage. Filling the last 10% with freelancers or in house engs. depending on scale. To me that’s a worse job than the job I have now, at least now I can teach others how to do what I do. If that’s taken away from me I’m not fucking doing this job anymore. I don’t care about computers because in reality this job at scale is about convincing morons to stop micromanaging how you build things.

Can’t wait for RFK Jr. to let the free market decide how much listeria people choose to ingest.

I’m so excited for this