Mx. Chara Aznable of Pnictogen

(formerly at mxchara @ seattle.pink)

Mx. Chara Aznable of the Pnictogen Wing, a DID traumatic plural system born in 1974 and living in Seattle.

Pronouns: They/Them

Public Key

npub1lq2v8799xdmm7rtszk8s79p2lpx5g5u08nvlgwym2zt47twepgcqg56g4s

NIP-05 Address

mxchara_at_cyberpunk.lol@momostr.pink

Profile Code

nprofile1qqs0s9xrlzjnxaalp4cptrc0zs40sn2y2w8nek058zd4p96l9hvs5vqpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dshl87mu

Publishing to

relay.damus.io

nos.lol

Author Public Key

npub1lq2v8799xdmm7rtszk8s79p2lpx5g5u08nvlgwym2zt47twepgcqg56g4s

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Last Notes

2026-09-03 22:44:08 UTC

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I don't like doing this. It ruins my day no matter how hard I throw myself into constructive activities afterwards, baking or learning how to navigate BSD or whatever. But how else can one break through the *armor*?
The techbros have been working on this narrative for so long, they actually believe it now. They still think of themselves as a liberatory force even as they thirst for police and military contracts and cozying up to politicians. They think that evil #Apple #1984 ad is somehow REAL and not a dystopian corruption and coöption of George Orwell for no better reason than spicing up sales for a friggin' personal computer.
The Apple corporation is not a hero of any story but their own.
~Chara

2026-09-03 22:39:09 UTC

"How can Silicon Valley be fascist, they made the Mac II" was a bit of #tech sector babble I wasn't expecting but welp there it is, unless the communications professor decides to delete it

2026-09-01 04:20:30 UTC

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oh that guy? that guy was an LLM huh? I guess I can't tell the difference these days

2026-08-30 06:12:42 UTC

There's a very serious issue which the #technology sector and its enthusiastic fanboys (mostly it's cis guys into this shit, guys who misogynistically pretend that women are too emotional and irrational to deal with computers) have clearly yet to grasp.
It's a deal-breaking problem they have and yet they have persuaded themselves otherwise: no human being on Earth or anywhere else can possibly trust what a tech enthusiast says or promises.
They have ZERO credibility.
(etc.)

2026-08-24 20:53:51 UTC

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I bet you that most of the hardcore fanbase of Yudkowsky and #LessWrong sophistry hasn't even read the fucking thing. If I may Godwin myself: that was also the case with *Mein Kampf*, which I've read bits of. It's trash, semi-coherent ranting mixed with grandiosity about building a great empire, and William L. Shirer (who was literally *in Berlin* when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939) said that most Germans he encountered, even if they were loyal to the regime, admitted they'd never read Hitler's book. It just *sucked* too bad.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:49:50 UTC

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Hence I very much doubt that Yudkowsky's writing contains much "rationality". It's really the **title** that matters, and the fact that its author is now a tech-sector cult leader in the #effectivealtruism mode (i.e. designed towards grovelling and toadying to tech executives, the only people who actually think that "effective altruism" is worthy of study and lavish donations of money.)
(etc.)

2026-08-24 20:43:10 UTC

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I can't overstress the degree to which the habitual discourse of the "intellectuals" favored by #tech sector geeklords, in spite of all the "rationalism" or because of it, is strictly a matter of strong emotions.
They don't write out logical syllogisms. They write soppy eulogies about how logic and Science™ are amazing and the answer to all life's problems, seasoned with various festering hatreds.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:38:58 UTC

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I'm sure that if I looked up *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality* on #YouTube I'd find dozens, hundreds, maybe **THOUSANDS** of well-argued refutations of Yudkowsky's ideology as explicated in his #HarryPotter fanfic. But there'd be ever so much more sycophantic praise and lengthy orations about Yudkowsky's genius, because sentimental hogwash is the element in which "conservatives" swim.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:36:56 UTC

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There's scarcely any genuine **debate** among these right-wing nerds because they've a priori ruled out most of accepted and collectively decided human knowledge as "woke" and corrupted by Marxism and so forth. Their fanatical anticommunism has eaten away at their intellects to the point that they're now coming up with half-assed reinventions of existing fields and concepts, because they *refuse* to engage with the larger intellectual community.
(more)

2026-08-24 20:34:27 UTC

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The #tech sector and the elite #programming and #computing culture are boiling over with nerdbros who babble about "debate" and "logic" and "rationality" while--exactly like E. Z. Yudkowsky--preferring the monologue as their method of discourse. They're isolated, insular, frankly very *lonely* people who out of psychological necessity have convinced themselves that they ought to be able to reason out the nature of reality without leaving their computer desk.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:32:21 UTC

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Hence the fundamental premise of *Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality* is, I suggest, in bad faith: Yudkowsky wants to present the *appearance* of logical disputation and dialectical materialism (by writing fiction about it) without any actual willingness to risk his ideas in debate.
#Debate therefore has become a doublethinkful, deceitful word in contemporary parlance.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:28:45 UTC

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Hence Yudkowsky's *Harry Potter* fanfic isn't necessarily a bad idea but I know from attempting to interact with Yudkowsky on Twitter and with the #LessWrong people on their insular forum that Eliezer Yudkowsky is a person with very few ideas and very little inclination to defend them through logical disputation.
To quote *Videodrome*, the monologue is Yudkowsky's preferred mode of discourse.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:25:35 UTC

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That way Nietzsche could feasibly claim that he himself wasn't saying "God is Dead!" even though, of course, that's how every carping #Christian fanatic interpreted Nietzsche's fable. They do that with everything: Christian fanatics of that sort have erased all subtle distinctions among different sorts of writing from their understanding. All texts are "literal" to them (i.e. they're physical objects that can be used to hurt people with.)
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:23:04 UTC

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When Nietzsche wanted to pass along the news that maybe God was dead, he wrote a fable about a madman with a lantern, going around looking for evidence of God, peering into everyone's faces because surely if God were to be found somewhere it'd be in *human belief*. Did anyone around Nietzsche still believe in God? His fable, a very small part of *The Gay Science*, suggests that all such belief had died out of the world, at least the European world.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:21:03 UTC

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Hence I am only *slightly* surprised that E. Z. Yudkowsky felt that *Harry Potter* was an ideal vessel into which he could pour his own ideas. There's a lengthy tradition of philosophical writers employing fictive frameworks in which they can present (for example) dialogues between characters intended to elaborate philosophical ideas in a speculative manner.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:19:01 UTC

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The *Harry Potter* books, however, are very dilute and copious while telling an extremely slight story about characters who get very little genuine development or depth of backstory.
Fanfic writers salivate over such fiction because there's *so much room* to add more. It's almost like the very characters themselves are crying out to anyone with better #writing ability than Jo Rowling: "Please, *please* give me something more to do!"
(still more)

2026-08-24 20:16:14 UTC

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You'd practically have to rewrite all of #MadokaMagica from the ground up in order to make your new material feel as though it *belonged* there in Mitakihara City with Madoka and her friends. There are, I am sure, #fanfic writers equal to that task, but they're likely to have better creative priorities than expostulating upon the "methods of rationality".
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:14:27 UTC

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Consider the opposite extreme: could one write something like *Kaname Madoka and the Methods of Rationality?*
Anyone can write anything, hypothetically, but #MadokaMagica is such a dense work, supported by a tremendous amount of skillful world-building by its principal author Urobuchi Gen and his collaborators, that one would have work hard to cram "methods of rationality" in there among the mahou shōjo.
(cont'd)

2026-08-24 20:10:17 UTC

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First I'd like to remark that #HarryPotter seems bizarrely *apt* to this kind of nonsense precisely because there's so little substance to the writing. "Harry Potter" is a stock character practically, shepherded from book to book through that lowest form of #magic that can be found in fiction: **plot magic**, i.e. arbitrary happenings where it's clear the author wants a pre-decided outcome more than they want to figure out how to make that outcome plausible.
(more)

2026-08-24 20:07:43 UTC

There's been a fair amount of chatter lately on a weirdly specific phenomenon pertaining to the #HarryPotter fandom, which is the strange part played by a certain "Harry Potter" fanfic well known to those engaged with combating the pernicious influence of #effectivealtruism and other "dark intellectual" cult idols which have fed into the fascısm of the #technology sector.
(more)

2026-08-17 17:32:38 UTC

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Mister Mxyzptlk might like to have a word with you! =D

2026-08-17 12:23:44 UTC

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But names *do* mean something and they cling hard to that principle, but only in a nightmarish #marketing way. They talk about "nominative determinism", i.e. they notice that certain names seem to flourish and do well while other names don't.
They see the power of names but they don't understand it.
(etc.)

2026-08-17 12:19:53 UTC

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In contrast to all this elaboration and soul-searching and all the deep thoughts that invariably come up when the concept of **#name** and naming is up for discussion, #tech enthusiasts tend to have a doublethinkful attachment to names. Their #programming habits tell them names don't matter. Pfft you can name a variable anything! Foo, bar, fubar, etc.
(cont'd)

2026-08-17 12:15:32 UTC

She liked it because it reminded her of a true hero, someone who (like Jeanne d'Arc, tragically) found that he was good at war and soldiering and struggled to find a sense of purpose *without* these things.
He liked it because it satisfied unspoken internal Tomlinson family rules. It was an acceptable "white person name" like Brent or Dirk.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:42:19 UTC

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I know that @npub16sj…va89 and @npub1fdr…lvhs and other mainstream #technology commentators loathe me for saying this, but all their chatter seems totally irrelevant in the face of a tech sector that simply *does not want people to own computers*. The bosses realize they're threatened by individuals good at computers so now they want to take the gift back. The scum classes weren't ready for it, I suppose is how they see it.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:39:58 UTC

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All the demands of #capitalism drive #software and the Internet and the World Wide Web towards maximal bloat, maximal unreliability, maximal chaos.
In this chaotic landscape #startup companies have a free playground in which to offer workarounds, "solutions" (ohhh so many **solutions** pouring out of #technology founders), layers of abstraction, and finally they've abstracted away the **computer** altogether. They don't want people to own one any more.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:34:42 UTC

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Put all the manifold utility of #web deployment aside for a moment. I am not saying that people shouldn't deploy applications to the web, or even that they shouldn't use #JavaScript and #NodeJS although I feel that far far too much emphasis has been given to such tools.
The resulting "world wide web" is hideously slow and janky and jam-packed with advertising and glitches and advertising disguised as glitches, and clearly this is considered to be extremely profitable.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:31:52 UTC

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Tim Berners-Lee and the other originators of #HTML, the backbone of what we now call the "World Wide Web" or sometimes simply "the Internet" (for so many people, web browsers are their only portal to the Internet, by design) wanted a method of displaying static structured information. Methods of dynamic HTML generation were soon introduced however, and then came the "Web 2.0" fascist counterrevolution. Yes I think that's a fair summary of what happened to the #WorldWideWeb with the advent of Netscape and the Andreessen era.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:28:50 UTC

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Making C and C++ and low-level #programming languages in general into an **inner mystery**, a secret and furtive thing which only a special few #tech brainiacs like John Carmack (you know how productive he is, John Carmack once of #Meta) know how to do properly, required the construction of a different sort of computer programming, far more loosey-goosey and playful and accessible to "everybody".
Enter #web development! =D
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:18:20 UTC

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Elon Musk and Sam Altman are still slap-fighting over the "open source"-ness of #OpenAI and #xAI (they still exist right? kinda?) and so forth, squabbling over possession of an empty slogan.
There's nothing whatsoever **open** or **free** in the material and physical reality of high-tech corporate affairs. They want everything locked down and metered, and 99% of the population condemned to use the lowest-quality products.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:14:53 UTC

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C is what made the #Linux miracle possible and the #tech elite are very into that.
There's not space here to go into the disastrous corporate corruption underlying the Linux community and fanbase, or the way in which the words #FreeSoftware have come to mean basically nothing in a world where "open source" is a mere buzzword in the mouths of Sam Altman and Elon Musk. There's not a particle or glimmer of actual #freedom anywhere in this scene, all because Linux nerds have tended to like money and power. Lots of it, all the time.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 07:08:32 UTC

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Hence Linus Torvalds repeating the oft-heard claim that "Generative #AI" slopbots are now excellent at coding C, even if they're maybe bad at other things, must be taken as the simple invocation of a magic talisman, a sacred mystery. C is Good™, so Good™ that its Goodness™ touches everything pertaining to C. Of *course* #Claude or #ChatGPT or whatever can speak perfect C! C's perfection graces the LLM with perfection.
After all there's probably at least a few percentage points of C code somewhere in the fantabulous innards of the "generative AI" miracle.
(cont'd)

2026-08-14 06:54:08 UTC

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Back to the superspecial status of the C #programming language and the convergence of the tech sector around #web deployment as the **only way** to do anything on a computer.C
is now an object of nigh-religious reverence, as I've said. The hardcore grindset dudes who went into #computing chiefly because it was the easiest alternative to *work* they could think of—scamming money via high-tech #startup—don't know how computers work! But they do know the letter **C!**
(cont'd)

2026-08-13 02:48:33 UTC

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Anyone seeking an explanation for why Linus Torvalds and a million other awful nerdbosses like him seem perplexingly to believe that the #LLM is stupendous at writing computer code, look no further! **C** is an object of worship of a very special sort, a holy of holies in the #tech world. John Carmack, one of the emptiest human beings I've ever encountered on Twitter, is revered as a god simply because he's supposedly a dab hand at C programming.
Is he? What exactly does John Carmack do with his time? I think he dropped the feeble interest in #rockets.
(cont'd)

2026-08-13 02:45:43 UTC

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One of the weird gizmos that Andreessen and his cronies afflicted #HTML with was *JavaScript*, a programming language of sorts and a terrible one, and yet just think of how many applications (not even *Internet* applications!) are now suspended on the tatty. dirty, cobweb-festooned thread that is #NodeJS.
It's been the one of the strangest things to watch slowly *congeal* into place as corporate #software orthodoxy: the web browser has become a strange sort of virtual machine, a sandbox for application development so tempting that there are programmers who refuse to leave it because they see it as bringing **unity** to #programming! At last, the one true programming language has emerged, and it's JavaScript.
Or C. But C, you see, see what I did there, is the **inner mystery**.
(cont'd)

2026-08-13 02:40:12 UTC

"Web 2.0", the curse of the modern age, or whatever age this is, can be largely credited to #Netscape and Marc Andreessen and his co-conspirators, who figured that the easy way to make yourself popular in the high-pressure and very new #Internet market of the early 1990s was to put out a web browser full of weird new gadgets and gizmos and little programmatic tricks for doing things chiefly of use to criminals. Yeah it's another #crypto sort of thing: all tech scams boil down to the same few patterns.
You know how much those geeklords love *patterns.* They write gaseous books about them, heaps of books.
(cont'd)

2026-08-12 18:59:21 UTC

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as you wish! as I said, I myself wanted to hear how the world reacted to the eclipse—the rush of abnormal wind caused by unequal heating of the earth's surface along the path of totality, the sounds of animals reacting. but I was in a remote spot in Oregon away from crowds and not too near the midline of totality

2026-08-12 18:55:30 UTC

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I think some phenomena are more fittingly received in silence, yes.

2026-08-12 18:52:42 UTC

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I think there are *respectful* human beings, not just "Western" dorks trained to applaud and laugh at anything no matter how majestic

2026-08-11 03:22:52 UTC

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oh my that's patient work with the tip of a knife I am guessing, great job