attention all impostors masquerading as friends: you are eligible for an upgrade to friend status as long as you return the original friends unharmed
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the older I get, the more I understand my grandfather
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So-Called "AI" Cannot Program
I contend that it is impossible for so-called "AI", by which I mean the crop of convolutional neural network-based pattern-filling tools that is currently in the throes of a hype cycle that puts crypto and NFTs to shame, to meaningfully do programming. As more and more of the mind bogglingly rich tech oligarchs lead their followers into the delusion that these tools are useful in any way remotely comparable to their cost, I think it's worth taking the time to articulate exactly why this is, even if it's already intuitively clear to the more thoughtful practitioners of the craft.
We must begin, as always, with a clarity of the term under discussion. "Programming", in its broadest sense, is the act of making a computer do something—but "do something" is itself vague, so we'll need to dig a little deeper into that. To understand it, please bear with me as I establish some useful terminology.
A Brief Meander into the Philosophy of Language
Let's talk about syntax and semantics. If you're a programmer, you may be familiar with these terms as they're used to discuss programming languages. If you're not, that's fine too. I'll do my best to explain them in brief.
Syntax and semantics are two related ways of talking about an abstract structure. Although the concepts were originally developed to describe human languages, they can be used by analogy for all sorts of things, which is what I'm building up to here. They're very useful particularly for understanding how humans[1] relate to those structures and relate those structures to the world as they understand it.
"Syntax" is simply the structure itself, in all the technical detail of how it fits together. The syntax of a human language is the way its words and sentences fit together, what's "allowed" and "not allowed" by the subtle and mercurial rules we all internalized as children (or adults, for second languages and beyond). In English, "ran boy" is not a valid sentence due to the language's semantics, although most native speakers would probably guess that it means "the boy ran". Noam Chomsky wrote "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an example of a sentence that is syntactically valid despite being nonsense.
The fact that that sentence is nonsense is the domain of "semantics". Semantics are the human interpretation of a structure, the meaning we ascribe to it and to the best of our ability share with those around us. For example, although the syntax of the sentences "みなさんはピッコロさんが大好きだよ！" and "Everyone loves Piccolo!"[2] are completely different, their meaning—their semantic content—is exactly the same. And that meaning is something that humans bring to them, not something that is in any way intrinsically associated with those particular wiggly lines in that particular order.
Although syntax is a very useful concept in its own right, in this post I really want to focus on semantics. So remember: semantics is meaning, and specifically it's meaning applied to a structure from outside by humans.
A Better Definition…
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im gonna put the "bee" in "be right back" *buzzes away*
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Let me begin by saying: fuck Nintendo. Their insistence on ruining the lives of people who do anything they disapprove of with the products they sell, regardless of whether that thing is illegal let alone harmful to them, is despicable. It creates a chilling effect on vital efforts towards digital preservation that extends far beyond their own products, on top of just being a heinous thing to do to fans of their games. The regard in which they consistently hold their back catalog as assets on which they could one day collect rent speaks to a deep-rooted capitalistic mindset among the businessmen who run the company that is in no way outweighed by the positive things written below.
All that said... Welcome Tour evinces an attitude somewhere in the company—somewhere widespread enough to get this game made and translated—that I find deeply admirable. Unlike the obvious touchpoint ASTRO's Playroom, this is a tour of the Switch 2 in the most thorough possible sense. It takes the player not just through the most charismatic features like HD Rumble 2 or the mouse control scheme, it shows off every square centimeter of the system in a very literal sense. Players walk across circuit boards and computer chips and learn about exactly what they do. Every meticulous design decision is laid out for the player to see.
The result is a game that's intimately concerned with the physical and design structure of the device it's describing, and that invites the player to share in that concern. It trusts the player to care about the craftsmanship with which the console was created, and it provides tech demos to guide them towards understanding it by directly demonstrating technical concepts like framerate, HDR, and VRR.
And, yes, this is in service of convincing buyers that the $450 or whatever they laid out for this device was worth it by framing it as a meticulously designed luxury product. But it's also taking a stand and saying that thoughtful, humanistic design is what defines quality. In an era when every corporate product is racing to become the worst version of itself that might still be salable, when overhyped prediction engines that can only produce statistically-average slop are hailed as the future of content, this is a dramatically heterodox position for Nintendo to stake out so stridently. I'm impressed and honestly heartened by it—not enough to look past the company's myriad acts of destruction, but enough to say that I'm very glad that Welcome Tour is the way it is. -
tits out for pride month
detailed image description
spock swings a large bladed implement and cuts a hole across kirk's chest, revealing his tits
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if I were willing to get tattoos based on media properties that I didn't help create, "bearer seek seek lest" would be high on my list
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I've noticed myself becoming more interested in the course of the Roman empire recently. But surely there's no deeper reason for that.
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whenever we get around to doing spelling reform for English, we should go whole hog and ditch the crusty old Latin alphabet for the latest and greatest in orthographic technology. that's right I'm talking about Hangul. it's terse! it's featural! it's visually attractive! vote Hangul 2025
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I learned from Zandra the other night that French basically does not have a graceful way of expressing the equivalent of "fuck <something>". It has plenty of curse words but none of them function as a transitive word roundly condemning something the way "fuck" does in English. It's just one of the strengths of the language—although by contrast, French is evidently better at stringing together a long series of curses.