Y7 Reading Group: Winter, Pynchon, Ludd

Following Pynchon’s Consideration of Luddism, some thoughts: One interesting aspect not raised by Pynchon, which seems topical of this moment, are the crossovers between the Inclosures Acts and the Luddites: the Inclosures (~1650-1900) legislated against the commons to privatise, removing traditional, ambiguous, negotiated folk rights of land usage with structured, unambiguous legal titles. While the Luddites strove against newly mechanised, quantifiable production processes, rewarding the controllers of standardised machinery. The Luddites were perhaps an inevitability after the enclosures act, dispossessing families with access to materials and land to find labour in cities and become the waged and labourers, dispossessed of communal historic capital; the Luddites are perhaps a response to the further displacement of the already dispossessed.

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Is Claude an innie or an outie?

§ goodClaude, bughunter and other internal commands The commands file has a section of internal-only commands that are hidden in external builds: bughunter, commitPushPr, ctx_viz, goodClaude (which is disabled and hidden, we will never know what it did), ultraplan, ultrareview, teleport, and ant-trace. These exist only in Anthropic’s internal build. There’s also a rich set of feature flags for experimental modes: PROACTIVE (autonomous agent), KAIROS (an assistant/brief mode), COORDINATOR_MODE (multi-agent orchestration where Claude spawns worker agents), AGENT_TRIGGERS (cron job scheduling for agents), VOICE_MODE, and BUDDY (the companion pets).

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exodarkforestrylaoinisation

One of those days I sift through what’s on hacker news and find there’s something I don’t find too objectionable, in that it faintly affirms something I’ve said years ago - that the biggest impact of AI isn’t so much what it can do, but how it will change and reframe how we think about the medium and ecosystem in which we operate online, and how we consider it a space in which to operate (as much as the nature of the work we put there).

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Grab any old shit, that will do

I’m obliged to use Teams as part of the stack of software at my institution. I have just accidentally noticed that, somehow, Microsoft has linked a LinkedIn profile to my account. I signed up for LinkedIn last century, when it was radical rather than a bland Facebook-for-suits owned by Microsoft. I was even more unsurprised to see that somehow a completely unrelated LinkedIn profile was associated with my name. Great Job, Microsoft, filling the internet with junk information to justify your acquisitions.

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You know you can say my friend rather than a friend of mine

it’s fewer words and less grammatically weird and looks more like you thought about what you were saying before you emitted it

jtnimoy.net when I started my Masters programme in Media Arts, jtnimoy was already there, creating incredibly complex work code and packaging it up for Director schmucks despite being younger than me, a lesson in humility. And though I never spoke to her, I followed her RSS feed, always curious about updates and news, migrating through accumulated RSS feeds in Windows clients, to OPML exports into Google Reader, then The Old Reader, and now back to dedicated local clients, I find JT had passed some years ago. Though I would always be a stranger to them, their RSS feed persisted, not marked out with a 404 marker in my reader. How sad to find a gambling company occupying their URLs, updating with LLM content. Desecration in digital spaces happens so rapidly, so perfectly, so effortlessly, so purposefully; even RSS endpoints are mimicked, preserved, inhabited for impersonation.

jtnimoy.net when I started my Masters programme in Media Arts, jtnimoy was already there, creating incredibly complex work code and packaging it up for Director schmucks despite being younger than me, a lesson in humility. And though I never spoke to her, I followed her RSS feed, always curious about updates and news, migrating through accumulated RSS feeds in Windows clients, to OPML exports into Google Reader, then The Old Reader, and now back to dedicated local clients, I find JT had passed some years ago. Though I would always be a stranger to them, their RSS feed persisted, not marked out with a 404 marker in my reader. How sad to find a gambling company occupying their URLs, updating with LLM content. Desecration in digital spaces happens so rapidly, so perfectly, so effortlessly, so purposefully; even RSS endpoints are mimicked, preserved, inhabited for impersonation.

Web: Autofac or Second Variety?

The ‘got ours, now let’s fix this mess’ of ‘Poison Fountain’ seems rather performative. HTTP get twice and check the results are the same? Further there’s no indication of how the ‘poison’ data is generated. There were commits to Git for Grok some time back showing they were already having to filter data from social media that was excessively aligned with X’s userbase and discursive style from its own search ingress; this will be no different.

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Someone is wrong about the internet! I have to agree with Levine here. On many fronts, I feel uncomfortable agreeing; Doctorow has a long list of achievements, and is prolific in a manner I cannot fathom. Yet I’ve always had the ick from the anonymity-as-a-right, libertarian tinged approach he presents. It’s always struck me a complex: rejecting big tech from an IBM laptop, decrying Microsoft (with which I cannot disagree) while arguing for the ad-hoc world of Linux and open software. There is a self-selecting hierarchy, tinged with libertarianism, at the heart of the old Wired-descended open software world: a meritocracy of engineers, driven by donations and labour surplus, groundless and fleeting as capital, westward ho in the electronic frontier, overwriting what might have been with John Perry Barlow’s naive laissez-faire view that early entrants will sort things out themselves, on their terms. Anonymity, ever at service of the theoretical hero-journalist we all are, overturning evil regimes, in denial of the mendacious and abusive adventures it enables far more frequently. The lousy platformised web we’re stuck in now is the natural evolution of those metastasised narratives of unfettered expansion, inevitably yielding to mass consolidation without oversight. There may have been a more innocent time online, but that innocence showed the way for the deeply cynical nihilism that is Bezos and Zuckerberg’s domain now.

It’s not even a word, it’s a number: Dictionary.com (it’s not even a dictionary, it’s a website) ’s word of the year Is this the tyranny of data-fuelled analytics, where loaded statistical findings come to be reinterpreted back as our culture? (it’s not even a culture, it’s just how skullfat manifests language tensors)