zjp

One of those things that's so shockingly tasteless and tone-deaf you'd suspect it of being a false flag.

No kidding. After years of all offices and no housing I wouldn't put it past this place. What other city on earth hates its citizens more?

Build more housing.

It's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.

You know it never occurred to me I could look things up before. Everything I've ever known I learned orally. Even C. I remember sitting on pappy's lap, watching him wave his hand to draw out an asterisk in the air. "A pointer..."

Literary culture is so confusing.

Anyway, the editorial rule is to spell it out on the first use and then to abbreviate it:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today... ...NASA says...

Many articles fail to do this and assume insider knowledge. It's all fine and good after you look it up or if you're an expert and familiar with the topic. Good for you. For everyone else, in other disciplines, or lay people, or for students, it's nice to extend the courtesy of spelling it out once.

Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.

Derrida was worried that people were merely imitating his style of thinking without the substance, but it's fine for AI to do it to humanity-in-general. OK.

Yeah I'm from Kansas and none of these meanings were new to me.

Different models, similar number representations. Different models for different languages, similar concept representations. They have to learn all of this from human text input, so they're not divining it themselves. It all makes a strong case for universal grammar, IMO.

This is the Hemingway Editor by another name, and I have the same complaint about it that I have about the Hemingway Editor. See:

https://zjpea.substack.com/p/an-llm-will-never-say-thou

What if we turned the regional love for megaprojects into something actually useful like a canal from the UAE through Oman, to permanently weaken Iran?

At some point you just have to spend spare cycles on ideas you think matter. What's harder than rejecting an idea is rejecting a finished, working product. And if your team says "I wish you had worked on something else", that's great, but if you're not my boss and and they're happy, who cares? And sometimes even your bosses. If you believe in something hard enough you will build political capital by meeting work obligations and spend it down working on your baby.

Just anecdotally, you should always ask things in the third person. I feel like it sidesteps LLM sycophancy somewhat.

Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.

'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it doesn't mean anything.

I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.

This is clever but it’s self defeating because it’s tasteful. It’s a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.

Firefly, Dr. Who, Sherlock, on repeat. My own personal circle of hell.

They’re exactly as cringy as each other actually, but your self-righteous point is well taken. Sure, agreed. I have class consciousness now. I am awakened. As if I would ever make this some random cashier’s problem.

I don’t really think that’s a proportionate solution to a minor annoyance. So far the advice I’ve gotten has been:

- restructure my relationships

- say something psychotic like “let’s go to a different neighborhood so I don’t have to say two words for dessert”

But you are all misreading this as a cry for help or advice. It is a bit. I even say the goddamn fucking words! I just think they’re cringey and I was commenting on my distaste for that feeling. I don’t have a cellarful of champagne either. I have bad news about the Easter bunny.

“You sound like a whiner”. Get a sense of humor maybe? Or failing that at least display the self composure and grace I so lack and pound sand.

Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It’s not fucking musical. It doesn’t fucking enhance the fucking thought or it’s the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the fucking material. It’s just fucking there.

Wait no, I see what’s happening. I am sorry. Deeply and I mean it. I was cruel to you. When a person does what you just did it is itself typically a dominance move. Those questions scream passive aggression. They are too close too early to be anything else. I read concern trolling. I read elaboration as escalation. I missed confusion and concern. And I was drunk on how annoying I found that to be, because getting into it on a forum can be thrilling. And when you replied to something so simple and dripping with sarcasm with complete earnestness, it snapped me out of my stupor, and made our conversation clear. Yes, I have called a cookie a basic bitch. I found that somewhat grating. It is conceptually true that you could avoid it. There are social pressures that disincentivize avoiding it. Everything else is drama and joke and rhetorical flourish. Recast in this light, I am embarrassed by what I have said to you. We have barely been speaking the same language because the language is the layers as much as the words.

As God said to Abraham. What illuminating advice.

I think you should and it would be productive for you, because you could learn from Claude’s

A) literacy, and B) social awareness.

Both of which are, terrifyingly, greater than yours. I'm not going to be therapized by someone so obtuse that they read a deep fracture in my personal relationships out of a minor cultural complaint and some exaggerated rhetoric about the phenomenology of experiencing it when a machine that may not even have qualia gets the point.

At this point I think it's pretty clear that what's happening is concern trolling. These aren't real questions. If you're confused, copy our comment thread into an LLM and have it explain my point to you. No one on earth is authentically this humorless.

"A little childish"; Bob's your uncle.

No.

I think the cost of having to say something humiliating is at least equal to the cost of the cookie, so I want it for free. Of course I had fun with my sister in law, even if I rolled my eyes at the business. That's beside the point. Making you say this stuff is a tiny, petty act of domination. Say it or you don't get the cookie, or you look unfun. Anyway, it's the same argument people have been having forever about not wanting to say 'grande' at Starbucks. A war we won. And we will win this one.

Cheems will be to millennials what the Grateful Dead logo was to Boomers.

You don’t always get to choose the restaurant. Sometimes your friends drag you places. Sometimes your sister in law wants to go take a photo of the Castro Theater and then get a cookie, and you find yourself in Hot Cookie calling a chocolate chip a Basic Bitch. I just think that these kinds of "perfect agency" gotchas ignore the tradeoffs of living an actual life.

Millennials delenda est. Or maybe Gen X. But definitely millennials. I am stockpiling champagne for when performative profanity goes to the grave with the silent generation against which it is still rebelling 70 years later. I do not want to order the sloppy toppy burger at BURGERSLUT. Just give me a cheeseburger. But yes, you should build a website.