this is the real world. you've invented the real world.

In medieval times, within the arms race of ever more demonic torture devices, some sadistic genius came up with the idea of the Little Ease. This was a prison cell built so small in every dimension that a grown man could not stand upright in it nor lie down at full length nor properly sit. The pain is relentless and without relief and inflicted by one's own body. Prisoners were known to go insane within a few days. A stay at the Little Ease was considered even more cruel than the rack, the thumbscrew, and the other ghoulish machinery of the Tower of London. A breeding pig will spend her whole life in a version of that box. These are social, roaming creatures (more intelligent than dogs) who will never leave this corset of steel. They have been selectively bred to be bigger than their frames can support. Yet we put them in cells so confined that they cannot comfortably sit, and their attempts to do so (for example, by sneaking their limbs into adjacent stalls) reliably lead to fractures and sprains. They cannot sweat, yet have nothing to roll around in to cool themselves off. Except their own manure, which (contrary to the common misconception) they are so averse to (thanks to their strong sense of smell) that new sows will often suffer from constipation to avoid soiling the space from which they eat and sleep. Here is how the writer Matthew Scully described what saw at one of Smithfield’s “gestation barn”: > “Sores, tumors, ulcers, pus pockets, lesions, cysts, bruises, torn ears, swollen legs everywhere. Roaring, groaning, tail biting, fighting, and other “Vices,” as they’re called in the industry. Frenzied chewing on bars and chains, stereotypical “vacuum” chewing on nothing at all, stereotypical rooting and nest building with imaginary straw. And “social defeat,” lots of it, in every third or fourth stall some completely broken being you know is alive only because she blinks and stares up at you … creatures beyond the power of pity to help or indifference to make more miserable, dead to the world except as heaps of flesh into which the [insemination] rod may be stuck once more and more flesh reproduced.” — The Save Our Bacon Act is trying to unroll the few state protections we have against this barbaric cruelty - for example California’s Prop 12 - which banned the sale of pork from pigs kept in gestation crates. It’s incredibly important we don’t end up with this sort of federal preemption. SOB will not only kill the most important animal welfare related laws in the US of the past decade, but more importantly, it will also restrict ALL future legislative progress (aka how the animal welfare movement has gotten its biggest wins). The Senate is currently deciding whether to add the SOB Act to the Farm Bill. With relatively little money now, we can discourage the most pivotal senators in the Ag committee from backing this amendment. Defeating this bill is even more important given the amount of philanthropic funding I expect to come online in the next year or two. It will plausibly be over 10x more expensive to repeal SOB than to prevent it from passing in the first place. All that money that could be spent transforming our society's relationship to mass animal suffering will instead have to be spent just getting us back to where we are right now. That's why money spent now fighting this bill (and I mean right NOW) is so effective. If you’re in a position to donate six figures, please DM me.

imo their code and prose output are actually pretty similar, but yeah people have worse taste in code

As an aside it's just occurred to me that the phrase "pussy-ass bitch" consists entirely of archaic animal names and would be a great name for like a trio of characters in an adult comedy cartoon who are literally a cat, a donkey, and a dog

It’s wild how Meta - a company going all-in on AI - somehow missed the memo on how AI can generate images and videos that renders “take a selfie of yourself” verifications utterly useless So now Instagram accounts hacked at scale. 2FA also fully bypassed - by Meta’s own design

here's @alicemazzy discussing this on substack notes > this week I claudecoded a game I have been thinking about for awhile where you play as a new emperor and freely chat with a dozen ai npc courtiers that all have their own personalities, goals, factions, and so forth, with a couple loyalists, a few more traitors, and the rest persuadable either way. every one is an isolated agent with its own memories and compaction, you debate and act in open court and then after each day phase they can proactively chat with each other behind the scenes to plot and coordinate. the player can use various concrete mechanics like promotion/demotion/execution and ordering them around that affect their opinions and some stats about the empire itself etc etc. but the core game is every npc as a thinking loop that represents a live actor that behaves in its own unique and dynamic way > the game itself is basically functional. like all ai code I’ve genned, it's sloppy and does like 80% of the job but comes out remarkably quickly. I can't really complain and can see how bug and feature whackamole might make it feel reasonably polished > unfortunately the whole concept was a wash. as npcs the ais are just completely useless. the personality and memory can give them varied flavor and make them coherent over 10 compactions with a fairly humanlike specific near-term and general long-term awareness of everything that happened. but they have no spark. they don’t do anything interesting. it never feels like talking to a courtier, it feels like talking to a helpful assistant wearing a courtier’s hat. instead of listening to 12 guys it feels like one guy making 12 different joke voices to disambiguate who he's supposed to be speaking as at each turn in the story he's telling. and his story sucks > it reminds me of moltbook. there was that one day where everyone was like “holy shit! the ais are using social media to express themselves!!” but after you read enough of the posts you realize it's ais producing text that would plausibly be written by ais using social media to express themselves which sounds like a philosophical quibble but it's really not because it is just a microcosm of everything they still won't meaningfully be able to do even with another oom of scale. the fact that the quality keeps improving yet remains recognizable as pantomime means we are improving on certain axes rather than generally > prose is a useful proxy for code because reviewing ten thousand lines of llm code is much harder than reading a hundred thousand words of llm prose. I think their failure to write points to a probable inability to design and maintain large software systems at the scale where creativity starts to actually matter. if code is purely mechanical then style and craft don't matter but I don't think this is true. the idea you just need to maintain a spec describing all desired behavior and translate the spec into code and use a formal methods magic wand to make it Correct is naive. there is still intent and judgement and horse sense required for all this. and anyway these specs would be so long people would be trying to use ai to write and edit them anyway and then the ai problem shows up there as well > the argument about whether llms can fully replace programmers comes down to whether you think you need a soul to program well and a lot of people think you don't but I believe you do (personally my take on this is that LLMs generally write the most interesting stuff when they aren't pretending to be someone else) substack.com/@alicemaz/note/…

It’s not August yet, but the agentic ick has started to settle in.

you need to be jenesaisquoimaxxing beyond the agentic ick

I feel like this held up pretty well lol

I want to hear this recited in 2009 lead software design engineer explaining legacy compatibility decisions cadence

Note: This epithet, whose application to PM Takaichi characterizes a common stance in Japan wrt her meeting with Trump according to this tweet, was translated as "chicken-wuss" in the English version of Final Fantasy VIII

New blog post: "A sufficiently detailed spec is code" I wrote this because I was tired of people claiming that the future of agentic coding is thoughtful specification work. As I show in the post, the reality devolves into slop pseudocode haskellforall.com/2026/03/a-…

Normal people

...on. If anything Smith and Hume are probably right that a more universal empathy is likely more rational than one narrow circumscribed to self and people. At least aspiration universal empathy/sympathy is more impartial and consistent in its adoption of mores.

...At least older conservatives like Burke and De Maistre understood thiswhen they railed against the "all conquering empire" of light and reason they associated with Enlightenment and called for people to be surrounded by "dogmas" that the heart confirmed from the cradle...

Its hard to think of a more serious mistake than the right confusing its willed lack of empathy (suicidal empathy) for a deeper commitment to reason. Most of its core commitments (to self-interest, flag, church) are clearly grounded in feeling; very partial feeling at that...

JUST IN: Canada’s Prime Minister Carney says Canada’s partnership with China “sets us up well for the new world order.” Translation: Ottawa is starting to speak the language of multipolar power, not automatic U.S. alignment. This is what a global pivot looks like.

Reminder that the original Basilisk post was Roko saying "a truly benevolent God would send me to Hell, so obviously I should play the lottery and try to use my winnings to build a God that serves only me" In other words, it's a bit of both

Someone made an updated version of this meme … 😂 The rest of the world reading news everyday 👇

A woman was reversing in Asda car park today and she almost bumped into my trolley so she said "sorry". I said "that's okay", but my American friends are saying the correct response would have been to shoot her in the head three times and claim I acted in self-defence 🤷‍♀️

RT @TheJFreakinC: 🚨BREAKING: ICE/Border Patrol agents were filmed assaulting U.S. citizens outside a HIGH SCHOOL in Minneapolis, pepper-spr…