Mackenzie Seeley
@maxsilver.bsky.social
Product Director / Software Dev Manager, primarily using Ruby/Rails/Rust in ed-tech & LX. Mostly full of bad jokes. Love FMV & int-fiction. Tenno. Michigander.
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right?
IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If—
CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother?
IKARI: Look, let me answer the question.
CHOTINER: Sure.
IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If—
CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother?
IKARI: Look, let me answer the question.
CHOTINER: Sure.
September 23, 2025 at 8:22 PM
CHOTINER: So your son is 14, is that right?
IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If—
CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother?
IKARI: Look, let me answer the question.
CHOTINER: Sure.
IKARI: It's complex, Isaac. If—
CHOTINER: And the “robot” he pilots, that’s actually the child of an alien you keep crucified in the basement, which is possessed by the spirit of his dead mother?
IKARI: Look, let me answer the question.
CHOTINER: Sure.
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children
Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children
The state’s elimination of vaccine mandates is a courageous first step toward decluttering itself of any excess kids.
www.theatlantic.com
September 4, 2025 at 10:11 PM
Florida Decided There Were Too Many Children
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
Today I wrote about a general tendency to accept atrocious premises, and the need to reject fascism's false choices in order to find expansive and imaginative paths forward.
Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything.
www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything.
www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
There Is No Trolley Problem
We actually aren't constrained into atrocious premises by thought exercises. Obstacles are a reason to fight, not an excuse to quit. Our friends and neighbors aren't distractions..
www.the-reframe.com
August 24, 2025 at 3:02 PM
Today I wrote about a general tendency to accept atrocious premises, and the need to reject fascism's false choices in order to find expansive and imaginative paths forward.
Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything.
www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything.
www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
As always, Moxon cuts through the bullshit like a knife:
"Whenever you're dealing with an argument that you know is wrong somehow but are unsure of why, the best advice I have to give is to ask: "in what way is this argument founded in the premise that some people matter and other people don't?" "
"Whenever you're dealing with an argument that you know is wrong somehow but are unsure of why, the best advice I have to give is to ask: "in what way is this argument founded in the premise that some people matter and other people don't?" "
Today I wrote about a general tendency to accept atrocious premises, and the need to reject fascism's false choices in order to find expansive and imaginative paths forward.
Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything.
www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
Breaking the premise, embracing the obstacles, pursing everything.
www.the-reframe.com/there-is-no-...
There Is No Trolley Problem
We actually aren't constrained into atrocious premises by thought exercises. Obstacles are a reason to fight, not an excuse to quit. Our friends and neighbors aren't distractions..
www.the-reframe.com
August 24, 2025 at 4:27 PM
As always, Moxon cuts through the bullshit like a knife:
"Whenever you're dealing with an argument that you know is wrong somehow but are unsure of why, the best advice I have to give is to ask: "in what way is this argument founded in the premise that some people matter and other people don't?" "
"Whenever you're dealing with an argument that you know is wrong somehow but are unsure of why, the best advice I have to give is to ask: "in what way is this argument founded in the premise that some people matter and other people don't?" "
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
⚓️ New Article: Glue work in times of crisis
Glue work in times of crisis
I first heard the term “glue work” in the context of software engineering.
Glue work describes all of the behind-the-scenes stuff that keeps a thing (a team, a project, a movement, whatever) together.
In the coding world, it’s things like mentoring junior devs, unblocking someone who’s stuck, writing documentation, updating a broken readme, and so on.
Over on Bluesky, there was some chatter this week about how many folks seem excited about everything (social systems, the environment, public health, etc.
gomakethings.com
August 20, 2025 at 2:53 PM
⚓️ New Article: Glue work in times of crisis
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
the thing about "phd experts in your pocket" is you can basically just email real ones
August 10, 2025 at 1:38 PM
the thing about "phd experts in your pocket" is you can basically just email real ones
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
A lot of people are learning that cowardice won’t save them in real time. Might as well be brave.
August 1, 2025 at 10:36 PM
A lot of people are learning that cowardice won’t save them in real time. Might as well be brave.
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
warframe's previous story-driven expansion was about '90s-stolgia, dating, and boy bands. the next one? well...
!["I've not delved into things like historical records, the kind of thing that could distance you,” said Bott. “I've really tried much more to refresh my familiarity with [war poets], the men who were on the ground describing things. I think the idea of war poetry in itself might seem ironic, but it's not rendering something brutal whimsical in the slightest. It was finding a way to communicate what Wilfred Owen calls 'the pity of war distilled.' ... Drawing attention to it and saying 'This is the reality of what we suffer. This is what war is. This is what we went through.'"
Warframe also boasts a long history of using music to bolster its space opera – up to and including full-band songs with lyrics and lore, so many of which now exist that this year’s TennoCon featured a nearly-stadium-sized concert with multiple vocalists and a pyrotechnics show (Ford played bass in the band). The Old Peace leans into this particular penchant, albeit in a more somber way than 1999.
"The song sung by the Sentients to one another as they crossed the deep gulf of space [to Tau], it's got that kind of pioneering vibe to it, but it's also got a fatalistic vibe,” said Bott. “There's a direct inspirational link between 'There is some corner of foreign field that is forever England' and 'Who but we shall distant die on that far shore forlorn.' It's that same sense of 'We know that we are fated to eventually perish on some literally alien landscape,' but that is our nature, that is our destiny.'”
"'We've been made to die,'" added Kingsley.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:5gdejlhcswjbzraadoltdpps/bafkreicywwyi7z6w7jmdv7lyurxi6b46aq75ttttrya4raatjmoysnz5wm@jpeg)
July 19, 2025 at 10:52 PM
warframe's previous story-driven expansion was about '90s-stolgia, dating, and boy bands. the next one? well...
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
I think about this constantly
July 13, 2025 at 4:06 PM
I think about this constantly
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
yes it’s a big mystery why people who think empathy is evil don’t become therapists
The idea that conservative ideology should be equally represented in everything is ironically a very liberal idea
June 20, 2025 at 3:36 PM
yes it’s a big mystery why people who think empathy is evil don’t become therapists
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.
t.co/JXeTALBPds
t.co/JXeTALBPds
June 19, 2025 at 11:23 AM
Amazing: MIT researchers revealed how ChatGPT etc are destroying our brains and booby-trapped the report to expose those who want to use AI to ostensibly summarize the results.
t.co/JXeTALBPds
t.co/JXeTALBPds
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).
![Text generated by an LM is not grounded in communicative intent, any model of the world, or any model of the reader’s state of mind. It can’t have been, because the training data never included sharing thoughts with a listener, nor does the machine have the ability to do that. This can seem counter-intuitive given the increasingly fluent qualities of automatically generated text, but we have to account for the fact that our perception of natural language text, regardless of how it was generated, is mediated by our own linguistic competence and our predisposition to interpret communicative acts as conveying coherent meaning and intent, whether or not they do [89, 140].”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:uj2g526vwfe3qnpuskjexeyp/bafkreiappchidtcrrumnegykz4uq6chvznuu6fg4pbutw5y7yjaab2iczu@jpeg)
June 17, 2025 at 3:33 PM
A major danger of LLMs is that humans are SO predisposed to attribute knowledge to any entity that uses natural language fluently. We cannot imagine that a machine that outputs natural-seeming speech/text doesn't have cognition. Brilliantly articulated by @emilymbender.bsky.social et al. (2021).
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
As of this morning, Deploy Empathy is only 9 (!!) copies away from selling 5,000 copies
So I’ve reduced the paperback to $£€ 10. If you’ve wanted to get copies for your team, today is the day!
**today only**
🇺🇸 www.amazon.com/Deploy-Empat...
🇬🇧 www.amazon.co.uk/Deploy-Empat...
So I’ve reduced the paperback to $£€ 10. If you’ve wanted to get copies for your team, today is the day!
**today only**
🇺🇸 www.amazon.com/Deploy-Empat...
🇬🇧 www.amazon.co.uk/Deploy-Empat...
June 11, 2025 at 10:33 AM
As of this morning, Deploy Empathy is only 9 (!!) copies away from selling 5,000 copies
So I’ve reduced the paperback to $£€ 10. If you’ve wanted to get copies for your team, today is the day!
**today only**
🇺🇸 www.amazon.com/Deploy-Empat...
🇬🇧 www.amazon.co.uk/Deploy-Empat...
So I’ve reduced the paperback to $£€ 10. If you’ve wanted to get copies for your team, today is the day!
**today only**
🇺🇸 www.amazon.com/Deploy-Empat...
🇬🇧 www.amazon.co.uk/Deploy-Empat...
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
LLMs turn your job into mostly code review, a task everyone famously loves to do and is good at
June 1, 2025 at 7:38 PM
LLMs turn your job into mostly code review, a task everyone famously loves to do and is good at
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
If you have no idea what your users might want and no interest in finding out, simply promise investors that you're building an app for everyone that can do everything, and therefore will have everyone in the world as your addressable market (wow!) with the global GDP as potential revenue (wowza!)
the "everything app" is the must-have startup idea of the season for most wildly overrated sociopath dipshits in silicon valley.... if you suck as a human being and have an extremely punchable face you have got to be developing a superapp right now
May 16, 2025 at 3:33 AM
If you have no idea what your users might want and no interest in finding out, simply promise investors that you're building an app for everyone that can do everything, and therefore will have everyone in the world as your addressable market (wow!) with the global GDP as potential revenue (wowza!)
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
This is a great post about the magic mixture that made Bell labs work. I especially like this bit because it accords very strongly with something I've always believed.
"Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"
"Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"
May 12, 2025 at 11:25 PM
This is a great post about the magic mixture that made Bell labs work. I especially like this bit because it accords very strongly with something I've always believed.
"Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"
"Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?"
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
As somebody said quite a long time ago - why should I bother to read something nobody's bothered to write?
I feel like whenever someone suggests using AI to deliver documents in less time, there is an implicit "don't worry, nobody is actually going to read these" attached to it.
April 25, 2025 at 6:05 AM
As somebody said quite a long time ago - why should I bother to read something nobody's bothered to write?
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
I feel like whenever someone suggests using AI to deliver documents in less time, there is an implicit "don't worry, nobody is actually going to read these" attached to it.
April 24, 2025 at 10:01 PM
I feel like whenever someone suggests using AI to deliver documents in less time, there is an implicit "don't worry, nobody is actually going to read these" attached to it.
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick
“You can’t say people are our most important product and then treat them like shit.” - Jim Sinegal, co-founder of Costco
April 20, 2025 at 11:09 PM
Costco is a really popular subject for business-success case studies but I feel like business guys kinda lose interest when the upshot of the study is like "just operate with scrupulous integrity in all facets and levels of your business for four decades" and not some easy-to-fix gimmick
Reposted by Mackenzie Seeley
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."
LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything
: Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'
www.theregister.com
April 12, 2025 at 11:43 PM
1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal but
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.
2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but
3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So
4. Now the LLM code points to malware.