#VibeCoding your MFA

Ever since iOS 7 I can't watch Apple's design videos without thinking they are built from a completely incorrect starting premise and goals.

"UI gets out of the way of your content"
"hides when not needed"
"only appears when the user needs them"

The details hardly matter when listening it feels like all of this has completely the wrong goals from the start.

yes machine please write for me

Classical violinist plus Led Zeppelin rocker = joy

https://youtu.be/22PORnPB-Yw?si=0hbN_EseWvPkJQ9Y

@justkwin Quite apart from my disillusionment with Apple, there are zero circumstances whatsoever in which I would move into Trump’s fascist dystopia.

My wife just shared with me that one of her colleagues has her son at home for a two week visit right now.

He's a student at Harvard. His visa has just been revoked and he cannot return to the US.

His life, his academic career, all his belongings - just cut off. Extraordinary. What a global humiliation this US fascism is.

The sigil was drawn in salt and ash, the candles lit at the pentagram points, the incantation declaimed.

There was a shimmer - a demon appeared.

"Curious. What ritual is this?"

"I got it from ChatGPT. I included all protections in my prompt!"

"I see," the demon said and stepped out of the sigil.

#MicroFiction #TootFic #SmallStories #vss

@whakkee Take as many pics and vids as you can: they grow up so fast.

About the misgivings that you mentioned before: this "OMG what have I done?" phase that you are experiencing is well-known and well-documented. Trust me it will soon transform into one of the strongest bonds that there is in life.

And then at around 6 months of age, he will enter the adolescent phase and test you again. All obedience will fly out of the window and it will be back to basics for a while. But that too will pass.

I think we should tell Gen Z that Head Cleaner's "Play Both Sides" was the 🔥 album of 1986

@whakkee Happiness is a snoring dog

Yes, It Is Just Like The Nazis
Hey so remember Anne Frank? The Jewish young girl who hid in an attic and was killed by the Nazis? The emblematic person we think of when we think of victims of the Holocaust?

She did not die in a gas chamber or in a death camp. She died in a temporary' detention center for the mass deportations which preceded the death camps.
She was in that camp because a patriotic neighbor ratted her out to the German deportation force. She died, not of a bullet to the back of the head or choking on gas, but of typhus. She contracted typhus because the Nazis couldn't realistically deport people at the rate they wanted to, because before the death camps their infrastructure couldn't handle the sudden influx of ethnic minorities they had decided to imprison, and because they didn't care about the consequences of that so their deportation detention centers were unhygienic and prisoners were underfed and overcrowded.

And she was picked up by the deportation force not because she was an illegal citizen but because, just like the US is doing with asylum seekers, she was part of a formerly recognized class of citizens who were legally redefined to lack citizenship by a new administration.

Anne Frank is exactly like the children who have already died in the United State's detention camps. Exactly. Down to the very last detail. There. Is. Not. A.
Single. Difference.

So unless you want to fucking tell me that Anne goddamn Frank was not a victim of the Holocaust, y'all can shut the fuck up with that "stop making concentration camp comparisons, you're diminishing the suffering of the Holocaust" bullshit.

Its also worth noting that her family TRIED to flee to the US and was denied. She was in that camp partly because the US refused to let her refugee family immigrate.

If you’ve ever wondered how normal people let fascism happen, you’re currently playing through the tutorial level.

Boost if you want less generative AI in your tech in 2025.

I need to be very clear, that the push towards "vibe coding" - that is, deliberately deskilling people - is because AI code assistants are an (increasingly expensive) subscription service.

If you know how to code, you can just write Python, C, Java, R, PHP, whatever for free and make things. You may not own the tools of production, but at least you're not renting them.

If you have been deskilled so you only know how to vibe code, you will be paying for that privilege forever.

This also goes, by the way, for researchers who are starting to be convinced they don't need to learn how to be scientists anymore, because "the AI" can just do the science for them. Nope.

A lawsuit filed in February accuses Tesla of remotely altering odometer values on failure-prone cars, in a bid to push these lemons beyond the 50,000 mile warranty limit:

https://www.thestreet.com/automotive/tesla-accused-of-using-sneaky-tactic-to-dodge-car-repairs

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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/15/musklemons/#more-like-edison-amirite

1/

As you look at your 401K in shambles, keep in mind that someone in this administration made an “investment" that earned 2,100% _in one hour_.

If you knew what they knew, you could have made $2.1M from $100K today. Or if you're an asshole billionaire, a lot more.

Good luck investigating this insider trading. Guess which branch of government is in charge of monitoring this illegal behavior?

Do not travel to the USA. It is no longer safe FOR ANYBODY.
https://youtu.be/1U51rP0vlCM?si=ZUt0kMsrVGJR3Tzd

Just noting here that I found it much easier to write satirical political fantasy about the UK electing an ancient Lovecraftian horror from beyond spacetime as Prime Minister with a mandate to eat everyone's brain before the real-world USA basically said "hold my beer ..."

Happy 20th birthday to Git! The first version control system I ever used and still my favorite (even if I liked Mercurial’s UX better)! GitButler did a great blog/retrospective here https://blog.gitbutler.com/20-years-of-git/

Imagine being the person who, 30+ years ago, solved the problem of moving the mouse diagonally to a submenu closing the submenu because the mouse passed over another element – just add a short timeout before switching to a different submenu – and then living to see every application on the planet reimplement menus without that behaviour.