Cassandra is only carbon now

Sometimes I write intimate eschatologies or words about technology and math. Sometimes I make things by burning them with light or squeezing them through a small, hot tube. Sometimes I push water with a stick while sitting in a tiny boat.

Pronouns: she/they
Joined Fediverse On: June 15, 2017
Website: https://www.xgranade.com/
Newsletter: https://newsletter.xgranade.com/

Public Key

npub1hzvzdrx8mnxqy9m4xupkce4krf564qac2yfpupw9w80r88z8zkxsw5lzy3

NIP-05 Address

xgranade_at_wandering.shop@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqst3xpx3nraenqzza6nwqmvv6mp56d2swu9zys7qhzhrh3nn3r3trgpzpmhxue69uhkummnw3ezuamfdejs9pnqhv

Publishing to

nostr.wine

Author Public Key

npub1hzvzdrx8mnxqy9m4xupkce4krf564qac2yfpupw9w80r88z8zkxsw5lzy3

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Last Notes

2026-02-20 22:08:55 UTC

No, opposing LLMs isn't "purity culture." I've seen this now from quite a few different people, and I disagree vehemently. It is good, actually, to have moral principles and hold to them, even when people with more money than you find said principles annoying.

2025-09-22 03:32:10 UTC

Had an interesting conversation about how to represent villains in media, partly prompted by a fictional story that wound up accidentally being about Charlie Kirk, despite having come out well before the shooting.
But still, it's an interesting thing to reflect on sometimes: how do you make a character so abjectly terrible that no one will root for them?

2025-09-15 07:37:09 UTC

Maybe one of these days I'll be foolish enough to write a longer post about it, but *wow* did the protocol discourse last month ever leave me still more sour on ATProto than I was before — and that was even before Bsky-the-company went to bat for Kirk.
Obviously, you do you, but I definitely came away from that discourse with the understanding that work on ATProto is, until something substantial changes, concentrating power in corporate hands.

2025-09-11 22:21:30 UTC

This is Bluesky's moderation policy, in case anyone is wondering why I want nothing to do with Bluesky PBLLC, ATProto, the whole mess.
(source: sent by someone I know via a private Discord server, shared with their permission)
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/115/187/988/701/945/328/original/dad66c11ec341707.png

2025-08-18 23:18:08 UTC

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Just fuck it. Fuck C, fuck C++, fuck that whole gatekeeping culture.

2025-08-18 23:15:34 UTC

Of all things in fediverse culture, the one that will always get to me is that shitting on Rust is such a sure fire way of getting boosts. The tech gatekeeping on here is sadly very real.

2025-07-24 19:09:08 UTC

I understand, but I don't understand, how approximately ten anti-feminist reactionary women can bring every major credit card company into line with their hatred of all things horny and/or queer.

2025-07-15 23:35:43 UTC

God damn it, why the fuck is Jupyter pulling this shit?
https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/config/details.html#llm-suggestions

2025-07-13 16:58:18 UTC

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uncertainty being epistemic: you don't know the truth about something, but there is a definite answer that you could in principle learn
uncertainty being ontic: the actual underlying truth is itself uncertain.
Pretty much all uncertainty you will run into in your own personal life is of the first kind. There is an answer you could in principle know, but for whatever reason don't currently know.

2025-07-13 16:53:15 UTC

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I am begging people to please find a second analogy for uncertainty.
(Setting aside that *the whole point* of Schrödinger's cat is that uncertainty in quantum measurements is ontic, not epistemic, a conclusion he found unpalatable and thus decided to mock.)

2025-07-13 16:50:05 UTC

No. Schrödinger's cat isn't a thought experiment that makes any goddamned sense. It was designed (by a serial pedophile, no less) to be confusing and ridiculous.
Just drop it. You do not need Schrödinger's cat to make sense of anything, not sexual assault (e.g. "Schrödinger's rapist"), not the genocide taking place in Gaza, not even quantum mechanics itself.
You will be better off just explaining what you mean than hanging onto a pedophile's shitpost.

2025-06-30 19:00:42 UTC

Oh, fuck, Zoom updated.

2025-06-12 18:08:54 UTC

I'll never cease to be amazed and horrified at people who are more upset about a burning dumpster or a few burning robotaxis than sweeping someone's entire livelihood into the trash, disappearing and kidnapping people of color off the streets, or straight up murdering Black people. Property damage is not the same as violence against living, breathing people, and folks need to get some real perspective. Like yesterday.

2025-05-19 18:03:19 UTC

Thesis: ChatGPT is destroying education, students keep using it to cheat on homework and exams.
Antithesis: ChatGPT has no understanding of facts or semantics.
Synthesis: Homework and exams don't measure understanding of facts or semantics, and can be fooled by plausible-sounding bullshit.

2025-04-10 22:41:34 UTC

Why does Discord look entirely different again?

2025-03-25 06:51:46 UTC

If you run a program that's deterministic, then by definition, your experiences with that program will be typical of its expected behavior. There's some important nuance there about making sure that the input you provide is the input you mean to provide, hence reproducible builds, containerization, etc.
But still, that's by contrast with programs whose behavior is inherently stochastic. There, it's easy to fool yourself into believing the program "works" when you just got lucky.

2025-03-16 02:15:32 UTC

The English language can, at a rough cut, be divided into several groups of words:
• Those words I can spell correctly.
• Those words I can spell surprisingly correctly.
• Words I get about 50/50 on.
• Words I can never spell right, but can always get close enough for spellcheck.
• Words for which spellcheck completely gives up on me, and for which I need to find some Wikipedia page mentioning the word so that I can copy and paste it.

2025-03-04 17:06:40 UTC

Because I'm [REDACTED], instead of doing what I need to be doing, I just went down an almost hour-long rabbithole on Wikipedia about voting systems.
It really strikes me that the idea that voting systems should accurately represent the opinions of the majority is just taken as sacrosanct.

2025-02-08 20:48:29 UTC

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I could dissect why; perhaps the FOSS movement could have better prepared for this moment if the Right to Read had instead been the Right to Make Art, the Right to E-mail Your Friends, or the Right to Be Trans Online.
But ultimately, there's grief under it all. It's not praxis, it doesn't help us survive this moment, to reflect on what could have been. It is human, though, and I will posit that it's OK to grieve that. Perhaps I'm just being selfish because I do grieve it. Still.

2025-02-08 20:45:30 UTC

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I grieve it because what we lost is what we so desperately need right now, in this moment. A fascist movement has successfully compromised huge swaths of human communication, including both social media and person-to-person communications — but we've lost so much of the resilience of the pre–Web 2.0 world.

2025-02-08 20:43:19 UTC

The internet has come so far and changed so much in my lifetime, but I also grieve almost every day for what we've lost along that journey.
Decentralized networks used to be the default, from IRC to Usenet. When they were centralized, adversarial interop allowed things like Trillian and Pidgin to flourish. So much more used to be client-side, so that you owned your data in a meaningful way. Perhaps most importantly, it used to be much easier to put your stuff on the web.

2025-02-07 05:09:32 UTC

No messaging app on a phone can be more secure than the phone itself, so why bother with Signal?
This is why threat modelling is so important: there are absolutely a *lot* of threats that Signal protects you against, even on a phone that leaks too much data to Apple and Google.
It is both true that Signal is very worth it, *and* that to get the most out of it across the most threat models, your phone itself should be as secured as you reasonably can get it.
https://kind.social/@EnfysBook/113958146467673520

2025-01-31 20:04:28 UTC

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At the same time, it is still amusing and can, I argue, serve to inoculate people on the sidelines against some kinds of fascist rhetoric. Building morale and solidarity doesn't win arguments, and doesn't defeat fascists, but it's also not nothing. Pointing out absurdity is a tool, one that is wildly overestimated by liberals, but it is a tool nonetheless.
(2/2)

2025-01-31 20:02:49 UTC

Generalizing something I said in replies, but I have read many times and definitely understand why it's not effective to call out intellectual inconsistencies on the part of fascists.
As per Sartre, "they know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words."
(1/2)

2025-01-23 02:22:54 UTC

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It is, unfortunately, the best option I've found so far. I share your sighs, in any case.

2025-01-20 06:03:53 UTC

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Like how do you go from "here's why microbenchmarks are important for detecting performance regressions" to "yolo, lets add an ouija board to every node in our server farm" in twelve months?

2025-01-20 06:02:48 UTC

This is absolutely the least important thing about the whole AI fad, but it is very surreal watching the same software engineers who harped on about unit vs integration vs regression testing, TDD, matrix builds in CI, error telemetry, and everything else they said helped make reliable and correct software all collectively going "ah, fuck it," and trusting everything to a broken game of Boggle.

2025-01-17 17:45:46 UTC

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It's been a few days, with a lot of misunderstanding in replies. That's on me for not communicating my point effectively, so let me expand on and clarify.
Suppose you encounter "HTML isn't a real programming language" as an example of gatekeeping people out of tech. It's a real and really awful canard that techbros use, even now.
Very roughly, you can respond in one of two ways:
• Expand the definition of "programming language"
• Challenge the idea that programming is necessary to be in tech

2025-01-16 00:40:10 UTC

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That also begs the question of *which* Portishead album? They're all very different from each other!

2025-01-16 00:37:56 UTC

The Stranger is always there with the news you somehow never really needed to know, but also kind of did.
Never change, Stranger. Never change.
https://stockroom.wandering.shop/media_attachments/files/113/835/236/213/120/381/original/d7482e673f715c91.png

2025-01-15 22:29:28 UTC

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AI grifters have basically invented a new "fact," that LLMs can be "programmed," and built a whole epistemological chain to back that up. Where does that leave non-experts trying to critically evaluate AI claims?z

2025-01-15 22:27:16 UTC

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It's another way that AI grifting is a bleak mirror of earlier "intelligent design" grifting. Academic publishing is a complete disaster, and at the same time, is held up by institutions like Wikipedia as a marker of scientific legitimacy — and to some degree, rightly so. After all, there's not a better system already out there that people outside of a field can use to evaluate knowledge within a field.
So we're left with a situation where someone can just piss in the knowledge pool.

2025-01-15 22:24:42 UTC

One more thought on the whole Wikipedia / "prompt engineering" thing: AI marketers have abused the absolute hell out of weaknesses in the academic publishing system in order to manufacture the idea that "prompt engineering" is real.
Namely, preprints exist due to extensive problems in peer review and for-profit publishing. It's become the standard in many nascent fields where for-profit publishing has less of a chokehold.
But then AI grifters capitalize on that to just say whatever they like.