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There are many reasons not to take advice.

Period.

Life is incomprehensibly contextual. Still all of us find ourselves reaching for advice from time to time. It is important in those moments to recognize who you’re taking advice from.

Why is this important: Because advice is never only advice. Listening and following or even considering advice can be a way to lend credibility and power. It allows bad people to use that gained credibility to maybe say or do some other stuff with more authority than they are due otherwise.

I see this sometimes in programming circles, where blowhards and hustle culture type people’s opinions are shared and sometimes praised for telling truth to power. I say: resist the urge to engage with their arguments! Especially publicly. Seek kinder people. Seek people that have an interest in being more than just - to stay with the example - a 10x programmer who tells it like it is and doesn’t give a shit about your softie feelings. Most principles of being a good worker or a good person or a person you want to be - or however you want to phrase this - are not available only through a funnel of selfish individualist assholes.

Sometimes considering advice from bad people is unavoidable, because you are forced to see it. Resist the urge to engage with it. I speak from experience when I say that even a negative opinion expressed about what was shared - say in a thread in the work chat - will give credence to more than just the plain advice you’re (seemingly) discussing. Try to share advice from good people instead.

Now, there are at least two more things to consider here:

1. What even is a bad person?
2. Why not try to understand their points and meet in the middle?

Being a bad person is a relative term. I’m sure I am and have been a bad person in other people’s eyes and so - likely - have you. I think it is also a term used to label people with bad values. What are bad values though? Again, it’s somewhat relative. Or rather: It’s a question of priority. For example: Do I value safety over opportunity? Do I value individual expression over piety? There are many values and possible orders (and stabilities of those orders, from unchanging to ethical situationalism). The whole of socially accepted values within a group are what we call morality. Accordingly, you can be more or less moral relative to the current status quo in a social group and its approach to values or what is deemed good and bad.

All this is to say that as an active participant in the world you want to be a part of, that is, the imagined or real community of people you share values with, it is imperative to reflect those morals actively. Because every day you will be confronted with people and acts that need to be evaluated. Some will not pass muster. Others will make you reconsider, some will make you want to run away or start a fight.

So what is a bad person? Spoken from this “position from nowhere”: it is a person who actively threatens the morality of the group(s) you’re socially - by choice or not - belong to. People who try to renew or further a groups moral makeup have creds to do so. Bad actors just try to shake things up.

But spoken from my actual position, instead of a theoretical non-position: It is a person who puts self interest over everything, individualism and personal gain, over the betterment of all, a person who actively fights the institutions of social democracy, a person who shits on worker’s rights, a person who denies queer people or those of color their right to exist. But also people who, on a much smaller scale, think that kindness and empathy is for dumb softies. I say: Do not listen to these kinds of people even if their advice seems plausible.¹ It comes from a bad place.

The second question, about why not to meet in the middle and have calm discussions with bad people, is easier to answer: There simply is no need. The world of ideas is what should be discussed, not opinions. If you talk about other people they should be interested in positive change (i.e. make the world more aligned with what is good) and the discussion should be about empowerment and enablement. Only on the surface is it ever interesting to dissect a bad person’s opinion and sift through the shit to find a couple of pieces of gold. Engaging in this kind of behavior is not good use of time.²

There is plenty of good advice going around about the big things so here is my small piece: If you’re going to be on social media in the next weeks and months and years, block and mute freely rather than getting into spats and squabbles. Preserve your energy for the work. Keep your powder dry. —@kissane

Didn’t work exactly as I wanted (cc: @matt@isfeeling.social any chance for square image templates?), but I do love the Stellaris soundtrack to make my mind be interested in something else then just what’s happening right now. May want to give it a try if you own the game. Lots and lots of great scifi music (6 hours +).

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.@manton Is there a way to control what’s in the “description”(?) of a blog post shared to mastodon? I mean that “Follow on micro blog” part.

It has been a weird, unproductive day at work. I had a hard time concentrating. I was thinking about how AI critique often makes a strong case for humans as opposed to non-human actors and I was wondering what somebody like Bruno Latour - an enormously important figure in my time as a student of history of technology and science and beyond - would say to that. Himself a staunch believer in the co-construction of scientific facts not only by humans but also by non-human actors.

I found out that he died:

“Latour died from pancreatic cancer on 9 October 2022, at the age of 75.”

And I hadn’t even known. At one point I knew a lot about Latour’s work. Closely reading it, applying to a field study of non-academic sociologists on twitter, way back when. That study failed to produce anything, really, but whatever: I spent almost five years positively swimming in “ANT” (actor-network theory) as my framework for describing my “subjects”.

I once saw Latour speaking in the Humboldt University in Berlin. I had to search for it a little, but I believe it happened on 2016-05-12¹:

163. Bruno Latour † Philosoph, Paris On a possible difference between earth and the globe (12. Mai 2016)

I asked him, since he tried to abstain from criticism and instead engage in rediscription of what was more less established (the process of making science), why he wasn’t doing it for the humanities as well. And indeed he was a merciless critic of the epistemic practices and traditions in the humanities at large as well as in the social sciences. Whereas he would go out of his way redescribing the actual physical work that is done to produce a scientific fact, he would merely criticize the work in social fields and not look at how these fields construct knowledge. (And so on.)

I still remember how, in the middle of commenting I suddenly got very excited - there I was, commenting in front of a large audience - on a specific issue that - let’s be honest - had only tangentially to do with the main topic of his talk, but clearly showed that I had lived in this mans thoughts for many years. It was exciting. And the closest I ever came to talk to him.

I also remember his answer. I put my question in a way that asked for patience with the humanists: As “subjects” of an academic anthropology, why would we take what humanists do as the only expression of the humanists process? Why not take the time to look? Latour answered, that he felt, that he had given enough time to the humanists and related my comment to his then new project modes of existence. And that was it.

I still remember that there could’ve been a little more said and done. And I’m also sure that the a - possibly new? - field of an antropology of the humanities would be interesting - has anybody tried to do field work in this way? I’m sooo out of academia… - but I also remember how I somehow knew that this was possibly my only chance to actually make that small, human connection to a person that had opened up the world for me. I’ll always be grateful for his amazing ability to make me rethink everything and get excited about the process of doing the hard epistemic groundwork in the hard way, because that’s how you end up with new insights.

I think that Latour was… is so important to me is because I found him. During my studies we had read the Berlin Key essay, but it was me who took on the ANT head first, by myself, out of sheer intrinsic interest. And I guess because Reassembling the Social had recently become available for purchase and was a perfect entry point for me.

Thank you Bruno Latour.

The following is a rant fed and sustained by worries about the hollowing out of workers rights and democracy as a whole.

It’s not important at all, but it’s interesting to note that Apple has made another recent ad that’s as bad as the hydraulic press one where they destroyed all the instruments. In this one, it shows their AI tool being used by someone who didn’t do their work to fake their way through a meeting. Apple ads used to always show their users as experts or creative thinkers. Now they’re workplace liars. www.youtube.com/watch

— Anil Dash on Threads

And (this one’s a quote Post, I have embeded the quoted post, so it’s easier to read here):

Been trying to explain for years that all of this — the hyper-investment in AI, the “gig economy”, the constant layoffs and attacks on workers rights under the guise of attacking DEI — it’s all a pretense to undermine labor. It’s the single, unifying principle behind all of it.

RE:

Perplexity CEO offers to replace striking NYT staff with AI tcrn.ch/4f3cdyh

techcrunch.com/2024/11/0…

— Anil Dash on Threads

It’s hard not to see the first post as another example of undermining labor. It’s not the expert workers that matter anymore. In the eyes of companies, we’re are supposed to be consumers. But what really eats at me with the recent Apple Intelligence ads is that they are funny to me. They are well acted and written and could almost be comments on the idiotic and soul-crushing AI hype, if it weren’t for the appalling twist, where AI saves the day.

I mean, look at this ad:

Isn’t this actually super sad? Instead of resolving this situation together - “Honey, I’m so sorry, but I forgot your birthday…” (You gotta face the fucking music!) - AI is used to LIE TO YOUR PARTNER. And afterwards the protagonist is portrayed to feel good about themselves. What a genius!¹

And AI is not used here to enable experts to do better work, which is the only use case for AI that makes even a modicum of sense. Instead it is used to show us how inept we are and how we need AI to feel like geniuses (because we are not).

This Apple Intelligence ad where an executive presents a document in a meeting that they haven’t read based on AI summarized key points reminds me of the Google ad where a dad asked an AI to write a letter on behalf of his kid to their favorite artist.

These are both examples where it provides negative value for AI to perform the task instead of a human. I don’t want coworkers regurgitating ChatGPT summaries of documents instead of sharing their perspectives.

www.youtube.com/watch

— Dare Obasanjo on Mastodon

I would like to claim that things are not so dire in Europe. Maybe there isn’t anybody trying to replace striking workers with AI agents (yet), but right-wing governments destroying social democratic foundations exist here, too.

As a fellow immigrant to Finland sumarizes in the Guardian:

I feel a sense of unease as Finland’s prime minister Petteri Orpo’s rightwing coalition government has set about slashing welfare and capping public sector pay. Even on two teachers’ salaries my partner and I have felt the sting of inflation as goods have increased by 20% in three years. With beer now costing €8 or more in a city centre pub, going out becomes an ever rarer expense.

Those worse off than us face food scarcity. A survey conducted by the National Institute for Health and Welfare found 25% of students struggling to afford food, while reductions in housing benefit mean tenants are being forced to move or absorb the shortfall in rent payments. There are concerns that many unemployed young people could become homeless.

Healthcare is faring little better. […]

The current government, formed by Orpo’s National Coalition party (NCP) last year in coalition with the far-right Finns party, the Swedish People’s party of Finland and the Christian Democrats, has been described as “the most rightwing” Finland has ever seen – a position it appears to relish.

I do not want that mix of hyper-capitalist tech-bro authoritarianism that is so en vogue across the pond with about half of the people over there (it seems). Quite the opposite, I do believe that regulated markets and organized workers and a strong social net leads to a strong middle class which in turn leads to prosperity and more equality for all.

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Changelog

• 2024-11-04 - Created this note

Note

Being a lighthouse keeper or an archivist or a programmer working on a legacy project. If find there is a certain amount of romanticism attached to being a maintainer of things. Jobs like this are often somewhat unthankful and invisible, but nonetheless important. They can also be incredibly rewarding. Take these snippets of an article on the deep sea cable industry:

Shipboard life lends itself to a strong sense of camaraderie, with periods of collaboration under pressure followed by long stretches — en route to a worksite or waiting for storms to pass — without much to do but hang out. — The Invisible Seafaring Industry That Keeps the Internet Afloat

One thing I do enjoy a lot is text to speech and I think that this is an example where statistical models have helped to make TTS more natural sounding and therefore more useful.

Don’t get me wrong: The AI voices do get intonation as well as decisions of what to read out loud and how (“Roman 11 Jinping” instead of Xi Jinping) wrong all the time, but it is still a boon in my book, because I wouldn’t be able to consume some of the longer form content without it.

But with TTS I can listen to interesting articles while walking the dog, cooking or doing rote tasks at work. That’s pretty great.

When it comes to longer form (semi-)academic articles, I have noticed it can work as a “first pass”. I frequently have to re-read passages before I would claim I have consumed that content. Nonetheless: it’s a great supplemental way to consume content while doing something else.

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I won’t lie. Switching back from #omnivore to #readwise has made me consume more stuff in the last few days. Good, feature-rich apps make such a big difference.

Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash

A great, if very long read (at least as far as recommendations in blog posts are concerned): Donella Meadows - Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System. This is an essay about how to go about effectively changing a system - like a society - from a systems analysis perspective. It presents a list of leverage points (“These are places within a complex system (a corporation, an economy, a living body, a city, an ecosystem) where a small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything.") and explains their ins and outs. Here’s the list:

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

1. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).
2. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.
3. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).
4. The lengths of delays, relative to the rate of system change.
5. The strength of negative feedback loops, relative to the impacts they are trying to correct against.
6. The gain around driving positive feedback loops.
7. The structure of information flows (who does and does not have access to information).
8. The rules of the system (such as incentives, punishments, constraints).
9. The power to add, change, evolve, or self-organize system structure.
10. The goals of the system.
11. The mindset or paradigm out of which the system — its goals, structure, rules, delays, parameters — arises.
12. The power to transcend paradigms.

This list is a great starting point to think about systems change, because it includes lots of examples, which makes us understand the terms and the order better.

What I liked most about it:

It renewed my interest in paradigms and how to play with them strategically. Realizing, once more, that paradigms are not truth, but epistemic tools seems evermore important. It also gels nicely with what I yesterday remarked about myth making: Myth making might be a good name for practice of feeling in the dark while we do not know how the new paradigm should look like and therefore have difficulties in describing it fully. At the same time I could see the fatalistic turn as an expression of a new - pessimistic - paradigm. However I’m unsure if its potential is bigger in describing why things can’t and won’t work and we just have to endure than in realizing there is a way out - because the fatalistic turn is an expression of absurdity, in the end. Here’s what Donella had to say about changing paradigms:

So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science,7 has a lot to say about that. In a nutshell, you keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm, you keep coming yourself, and loudly and with assurance from the new one, you insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded.

Systems folks would say you change paradigms by modeling a system, which takes you outside the system and forces you to see it whole. We say that because our own paradigms have been changed that way.

As somebody who has spend an absurd amount of time with Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Mannheim, Latour and so many more that I have since forgotten about (or didn’t make the effort to name here), as a student of history of technology and science I felt an echo occurring within me when reading these words: That of the historically inclined person¹ recognizing that my approach to the world in recent years - after having to, but kinda also wanting to, switch fields (from humanities to programming) was missing a crucial part: I was not doing theory enough!

Loved this one from Andrew Dana Hudson (who is on Mastodon: @AndrewDanaHudson@wandering.shop): Space is Dead. Why Do We Keep Writing About It?

We can still dream of space. But we ought to do it not turning away from what we need to go through - system change - before we go beyond. And system change - if at all possible (I do have my doubts) - start with myth making.

I always get so emotional thinking, dreaming about space exploration. I do have a hard time not thinking about this in “manifest destiny for our species” terms. And maybe it’s still the case. But we need to incorporate the here and now into it, namely the climatecrisis/polycrisis.

The moon landing happened because capitalism and American empire actually had a rival. These forces had to prove they could outrace, outplan, and outspend communism and Soviet empire. It was probably the biggest PR campaign of all time, if you don’t count our bloated military. But such grand flexes are not necessary in our current capitalist realist status quo. When there’s no alternative, who are you trying to impress? I do think we can go to Mars, and beyond, if we want to. But we’d have to decide to do so, collectively and democratically, probably not even as a nation-state but as a species. We’d have to put aside capitalist and nationalist competition. We’d have to take up more pressing moonshots first — decarbonization and climate repair — and then keep that momentum of big public spending flowing. So if you want to write a story about space, that’s where I think it should start. How do we get through the bottleneck of climate collapse and polycrisis, through to a better system that offers more expansive possibilities?

P.S.: There is also a companion short story: The Weather Out There

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#omnivore is shutting down (kinda, the sources are available and you could in theory host it yourself, I think, but who wants to do that…)

So… back to #readwise? I guess…

Another thing related to what I said about loosing interest as soon as something has taken VC money: If the pricing is not immediately obvious I also loose all interest. I’m rarely going to hunt for prices. If I do, I am more often than not disappointed. Case in point:

godspeedapp.com I had to email them to learn about their one-time purchase option. And to nobody’s surprise it was too expensive (I think it was like 200$ for two years of updates?).

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Not gonna lie: In comparison to #node and #php the package and version management of python is pretty janky.

pipenv/pyenv makes it bearable, but it’s still kind of a mess.

P.S: PHP’s version management is bad, too. PHPBrew is the best option. But since I use Herd/use a Container, it doesn’t matter as much. Composer is great though.

P.P.S: You can get lost in the weeds with JS/TS package management, but just using npm or (my fav) pnpm and nvm for version management is rock solid.

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