I'm sure all of you have already read my Apologia for RSS (the very first post on this blog!) and I'm sure you're all reading this in an RSS reader you've chosen for one reason or another. But does your RSS reader show you everything a post contains, or is it hiding the deepest, juiciest quips and chatter from you?

I've been on Tumblr since its heyday back in 2011, and it's now the only social media I can really say I use regularly^[1]. One of the aspects of its culture I appreciate tremendously is the concept of "chatting in the tags". Tags in Tumblr are snippets of text attached to both posts and reblogs, but only the original instance. If you reblog a post, that reblog doesn't include the tags of whoever you reblogged it from.

Although tags were presumably intended primarily for cross-referencing posts on the same topic, Tumblr culture has adopted them as a way of writing sotto voce commentary on posts, visible only to people who are following you specifically without escaping into the larger network. Sometimes people use this to be funny, sometimes to relay anecdotes, sometimes to be catty. Universally, it gives a window into the personality of the person you chose to follow, above and beyond just their curatorial decisions about what to post.

Even on one's own posts, tag chatter provides a means of adding a bit of commentary that's tangential to the post itself, of a different tone, or a little more personal than they want escaping into the wider network.

One of Tumblr's virtues, and in fact one of the main reasons I still use it at all, is that it provides RSS feeds for every user. These are the main way I read the website at all! What's more, these feeds actually contain that user's tags. For the technically-minded among you, the feed entry looks like this:

<item>
  <title>
    gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like&hellip;
  </title>
  <description>
    <p><a class="tumblr_blog" href="https://perfectday1972.tumblr.com/post/792148193180827649/gonna-be-a-lover-for-a-minute-reblog-and-put-in">perfectday1972</a>:</p><blockquote><p>gonna be a lover for a minute, reblog and put in the tags the last movie that you LOVED like intensely loved like 5 stars on letterboxd LOVED</p></blockquote>
  </description>
  <link>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</link>
  <guid>https://www.tumblr.com/nex3/824507509470625792</guid>
  <pubDate>Sun, 09 Aug 2026 14:40:35 -0700</pubDate>
  <category>PlayTime</category>
  <category>although todayhat was a rewatch</category>
  <category>most recent new one was Chimes at Midnight</category>
</item>

Those <category> elements are the tags. Neat! But totally useless in practice unless a reader actually displays them.

My…

I don't love all of Suresh's framings around LLMs^[1], but I do appreciate that his closer exposure to them has given him the perspective to write this piece. This matches my experience very closely. I've so far managed to avoid participating in the false zealotry he describes, but I'm not sure how much longer I can manage it. My colleagues have not. I can hardly blame them.

Meanwhile, it's extremely clear to anyone who hasn't succumbed to the reality distortion field that this monomania is completely corrosive to the organization. Suresh documents the realities of this corrosion, although I imagine most people reading this have seen it in one or another aspects of their lives.

Personally, I'm just doing my best to grit my teeth and try to do good work as best I can, both professionally and personally, until we get back to a point where the managerial consensus is once again that "quality" is a real thing that exists. Until then, I suffer.

---

1. I feel that a hard-line zero-tolerance standpoint is necessary due to the myriad negative externalities and the strong tendency for "well I can see it being a bit useful for X" being taken in bad faith as a broad license to use it "where it makes sense". Even in cases where they're not strictly enforceable, zero tolerance policies establish a culture and enable enforcement of…

There's so little we in the global north can do to aid the historical struggle of Palestine. We can try to sabotage the military-industrial machinery, although that risks serious legal repercussions. We can send money, although many people have little to spare and finding trustworthy recipients is difficult. Or, for no money and no risk, we can choose not to buy entertainment products that Palestinians have asked us to boycott. But for reasons I cannot fathom, even this is beyond so many people!

has anyone ever given a name to the bird that appears in the first shot of the Twin Peaks intro?

1:1. where's that squarephone

Me: heh heh more like "France"
Frantz Fanon: fermez vos gueles >:-[