> FGM reconstruction actually seems to have negative outcomes post-surgery. I'm surprised by this.

Surgery is essentially mutilation, just in the physical sense (you are cutting through healthy tissue), not a moral sense (the whole point is to make the body more healthy). The information gathered from mapping nerve endings in a clitoris will hopefully help surgeons perform reconstruction surgery with less damage to the body.

I type "incorrectly" on traditional qwerty keyboards, too. I also type "correctly" on my split ergonomic keyboard, using the workman layout. As far as I can tell, I'm not any faster with either; but I definitely enjoy using the ergonomic keyboard more.

And of course that is what it does, because there is no thinking involved! There is no logic. No consequence. No arithmetic. There is only continuation. An LLM can't continue a new idea, it can only continue a conversation about it.

An LLM does not have an opinion. Anything that looks like an opinion is just an emergent selection bias from its training corpus. LLMs are trained on what humans write, and human writing is kind and patient much more often than critical.

So what if we trained an LLM to be biased toward generating criticism? That would only replace the sycophant with a brick wall. What we really need is to find a way to bring logic and meaning into the system.

> Collaborating means the failure belongs to the process.

This is the way that hierarchy fails to scale. The larger a hierarchy, the more "process" must exist to keep it together. Process in a hierarchy must be defined by superiors, and implemented by inferiors, so it is superiors who must own the failure of process, and inferiors who are blamed for it.

> The average knowledge worker maintains accounts across system after system, switching between applications hundreds of times per day.

This is the more serious problem that comes from hierarchy. Work done by a team must become its own isolated context: the project. Anything anyone hopes to be able to do with a computer must be monopolized somehow by an "application". Why? An application is the only practical goal that a project can have. Anything more would have too broad a scope to be manageable.

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We don't need hierarchy. There is another way to do work, and despite making incredible the tools for it, we have barely scratched the surface.

We have a decentralized internet, email, and git, so why do we keep making applications? Application is not only a reflection of the hierarchy that makes it, it's also a reflection of the environment. No matter how you contribute to the puzzle, your contribution must be a piece. How else could it fit with the rest?

Free software has been struggling with this dichotomy from the beginning, but it's only getting worse. Most of the systems we use are becoming ever more consolidated and impositional. Most people don't configure their system by editing each of the unique config files: they open the GNOME/XFCE/KDE "system settings", and expect it all to stay consistent. Most of what we actually do with computers is facilitated by one of two major web browser engine implementations. Want to make a new window manager? Get ready to build a feature-complete Wayland compositor (probably leveraging the bulk of another compositor's code). Sure, you can use shell utilities, but it's not like we are doing anything new or interesting with them: just transforming text with a careful emulation of a 50 year old environment.

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There's no clear way to resolve this situation. Software is useless until it can fit as a piece in the puzzle. If we want a system that is not a puzzle, then wouldn't we have throw away all the precious pieces?

Even so, I think we have really lost touch with the original magic of computing. All these isolated contexts are walls that stop us in our tracks. Formats, accounts, applications, frameworks, platforms... all dead ends. Maybe it's time we make a path that doesn't end?

Is it conservatives' success that liberals fail to represent your interests? Probably. Is that success a result of conservatives actually succeeding to represent your interests? Unlikely.

If politics were structured by reason, then liberals might stand a chance at losing that game. Wouldn't that be nice? Of course, that would imply a deserving winner, which is sorely missing from our post-reason situation.

This is the core strategy of the alt-right playbook. By replacing discourse with engagement, the logical structure of politics becomes meaningless, and victory becomes automatic.

The playbook worked. The alt-right is in power now. We won't get the power back by playing the very game they destroyed.

So yes, this started as a different situation, but in the end, power is power.

The problem is that our courts have utterly failed to stand up for civil rights. This is especially true of the Supreme Court, who quite literally define how the law is interpreted.

Generative models (AI) are not really eroding copyright. They are calling its bluff. The very notion of intellectual property depends on a property line: some arbitrary boundary where the property begins and ends. Generative models blur that line, making it impractical to distinguish which property belongs to whom.

Ironically, these models are made by giant monopolistic corporations whose wealth is quite literally a market valuation (stock price) of their copyrights! If generative models ever become good enough to reimplement CUDA, what value will NVIDIA have left?

The reality is that generative models are nowhere near good enough to actually call the bluff. Copyright is still the winning hand, and that is likely to continue, particularly while IP holders are the primary authors of law.

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This whole situation is missing the forest for the trees. Intellectual Property is bullshit. A system predicated on monopoly power can only result in consolidated wealth driving the consolidation of power; which is precisely what has happened. The words "starving artist" ring every bit as familiar today as any time in history. Copyright has utterly failed the very goals it was explicitly written with.

It isn't the GPL that needs changing. So long as a system of copyright rules the land, copyleft is the best way to participate. What we really need is a cohesive political movement against monopoly power; one that isn't conveniently ignorant of copyright as its most significant source.

That's a very roundabout way of saying it. The T&C is a contract. They should not be able to pretend you agreed to a new contract.

Unfortunately, the brazen public crimes our president has been committing lately are much more high level. Thousands of innocent lives have been (and will be) ended, usually by much more dramatic and damaging means. The parts of our government that are responsible for prosecuting those crimes have decided to join in instead.

I don't care how long it takes to get off the bus nearly as much as I care how long it takes to get on.

It's incredibly unlikely that there is one coherent cause for low or high ridership. All we can do is improve the utility of the service. That means improving comfort (keeping it clean), reliability (running on time with minimal detours), throughput (carrying enough people), speed (minimizing the number of stops on the route), latency (minimizing the wait until the next bus), availability (more stops that service potential destinations), and coherence (more routes that take you directly from A to B, minimizing transfers).

Personally, I feel most undeserved by latency: the routes that are convenient to me run every 30min, and the routes that run most often run every 15min. I would ride the bus way more often if routes ran every 10min. I would ride them all the time if they ran more often than that. This seems like a pretty obvious opportunity that will never happen so long as prospective budget is determined by current ridership.

The problem here is more than the lack of interest in making a system that is both secure and usable. It's the outright rejection of usability as a goal.

I can finally put into words my frustration with NixOS. The most elegant solution to the ultimate problem already exists, yet no one is actually interested in solving the problem! In the end, we just got another convoluted system of incomprehensible boilerplate to wrap the existing boilerplate with, and incompatibilities are resolved just-in-time with more boilerplate.