k-punk demon hunter
@thelastinstance.bsky.social
The question is of moment, the repose and tranquillitie of infinite soules doth depend vpon it
writing: https://codepoetics.substack.com
plugins: https://vulpuslabs.com
music: https://wtrem.bandcamp.com
writing: https://codepoetics.substack.com
plugins: https://vulpuslabs.com
music: https://wtrem.bandcamp.com
Claude is such a funny little guy. I really think it’s a technological marvel in itself that any LLM can project such a distinct and characterful persona.
January 30, 2026 at 9:10 PM
Claude is such a funny little guy. I really think it’s a technological marvel in itself that any LLM can project such a distinct and characterful persona.
Look forward to the moltbook AITA threads
January 30, 2026 at 4:05 PM
Look forward to the moltbook AITA threads
“Thorium toothpaste“ is good, I’m nicking that
Ok, I'm going to have to write something less sarcastic about this, but this is... not wonderful.
More importantly, in the longer term, this isn't going to help anyone. This is volume over quality, rapid-slop. This is Thorium Toothpaste - let's use this for everything before we understand it.
More importantly, in the longer term, this isn't going to help anyone. This is volume over quality, rapid-slop. This is Thorium Toothpaste - let's use this for everything before we understand it.
January 29, 2026 at 7:59 AM
“Thorium toothpaste“ is good, I’m nicking that
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
If Bilbo had Chat GPT
January 27, 2026 at 4:24 PM
If Bilbo had Chat GPT
All the training material I've seen on writing AI prompts has been a straight split between the bleeding obvious and cargo cult bullshit
The government’s suggestion that rolling out 20 minute courses on writing “AI“ prompts, sponsored by Google, Microsoft and Amazon, is somehow comparable to the founding of the Open University (the Wilson government‘s, & Jennie Lee’s, proudest achievement), is an insult to our human intelligence.
January 28, 2026 at 9:32 AM
All the training material I've seen on writing AI prompts has been a straight split between the bleeding obvious and cargo cult bullshit
My dad recalls that his history teacher once said to him "Henry VIII? Let me tell you about Henry VIII: Henry VIII was a *bastard*...but *what* a bastard!"
#OnThisDay, 28th January 1547, Henry VIII, By the Grace of God, King of England, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, and of the Church of England and of Ireland in Earth Supreme Head, died.
Whatever you may think of him, he left an indelible mark on English history.
Whatever you may think of him, he left an indelible mark on English history.
January 28, 2026 at 9:27 AM
My dad recalls that his history teacher once said to him "Henry VIII? Let me tell you about Henry VIII: Henry VIII was a *bastard*...but *what* a bastard!"
The skill of shepherding an LLM to get the outcome you actually want involves developing a sort of fuzzy predictive model of the kinds of ways it tends to succeed and fail, which is difficult to formalise and teach
The user interface for LLMs is telling it what you want it to do in plain English. No wonder the skills workshop only takes 20 minutes.
January 28, 2026 at 9:21 AM
The skill of shepherding an LLM to get the outcome you actually want involves developing a sort of fuzzy predictive model of the kinds of ways it tends to succeed and fail, which is difficult to formalise and teach
lovely
January 27, 2026 at 10:50 PM
lovely
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
We laugh at the masses of right-wingers who cannot fathom giving a shit and so massively misunderstand us, but far more dangerous is the genre of right-winger who comes to understand with horror that sincere altruism exists in this world and sets their entire life towards frantically destroying it.
The original post.
“This is a hard pill for most of you to swallow but these MN agitators possess a fiercer faith in their cause than many Christians show in Christ, a faith proved not by words but by readiness to act, to sacrifice, to endure. I witnessed it.”
Ends in calling MNs communists.
“This is a hard pill for most of you to swallow but these MN agitators possess a fiercer faith in their cause than many Christians show in Christ, a faith proved not by words but by readiness to act, to sacrifice, to endure. I witnessed it.”
Ends in calling MNs communists.
January 27, 2026 at 6:36 PM
We laugh at the masses of right-wingers who cannot fathom giving a shit and so massively misunderstand us, but far more dangerous is the genre of right-winger who comes to understand with horror that sincere altruism exists in this world and sets their entire life towards frantically destroying it.
My broad position on this is that it's probably bad for you to think you're special, but it's also bad for you to be so terrified of thinking you're special that you can't metabolise your own unusualness; there ought to be a no-biggie way of going "well, I seem to be quite an outlier on this axis"
You can't write the most successful book series in human history and maintain a coherent commitment to the virtue of not thinking you're special
January 27, 2026 at 11:51 AM
My broad position on this is that it's probably bad for you to think you're special, but it's also bad for you to be so terrified of thinking you're special that you can't metabolise your own unusualness; there ought to be a no-biggie way of going "well, I seem to be quite an outlier on this axis"
JKR herself is not privately educated, but writing into and through a tradition of "school stories" set in exclusive institutions, whose primary audience was also not privately educated. Boarding school in particular means parents absent (often an enabling condition for children's fiction).
Reminder that British journalists have a weird fetish for Harry Potter because it's a fantasy world where nobody mentions how fucking weird it is that everybody was privately educated in just five schools
January 27, 2026 at 10:04 AM
JKR herself is not privately educated, but writing into and through a tradition of "school stories" set in exclusive institutions, whose primary audience was also not privately educated. Boarding school in particular means parents absent (often an enabling condition for children's fiction).
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
if you squint a little, "all due respect" is a universal quantifier over an empty set
January 27, 2026 at 7:55 AM
if you squint a little, "all due respect" is a universal quantifier over an empty set
An era that, for all its other faults, thought that children should have the best and most imaginatively open-ended of the arts, not just targeted content precision-engineered to monopolise attention while delivering thin didactic platitudes about the value of teamwork
You can find these on YouTube. 70s Sesame is 🐐, just absolutely wild experimental stuff. “Hey boss, what if Phil Glass did some animated music videos for us?” “Sounds good”
There are episodes of Sesame Street from the 70s and 80s that are paced like the Deer Hunter. 12 minutes of a camera pointed at a fire hydrant while children play in the water. Insane.
January 26, 2026 at 8:43 PM
An era that, for all its other faults, thought that children should have the best and most imaginatively open-ended of the arts, not just targeted content precision-engineered to monopolise attention while delivering thin didactic platitudes about the value of teamwork
If I were in the unlikely position of having to teach a class on Badiou I’d lead with a screening of Casablanca
January 26, 2026 at 8:08 AM
If I were in the unlikely position of having to teach a class on Badiou I’d lead with a screening of Casablanca
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
𝙔𝙤𝙪’𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙗𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙮 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩—wax was a bad call. I should’ve flagged heat resistance as a 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 instead of assuming you’d stay within 𝘴𝘢𝘧𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘴. That one’s on me.
January 25, 2026 at 9:43 PM
𝙔𝙤𝙪’𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙗𝙨𝙤𝙡𝙪𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙮 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩—wax was a bad call. I should’ve flagged heat resistance as a 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘥 𝘳𝘦𝘲𝘶𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 instead of assuming you’d stay within 𝘴𝘢𝘧𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘥𝘦 𝘭𝘪𝘮𝘪𝘵𝘴. That one’s on me.
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
Theres an emotional seasickness you get if you're ever close to someone who strays too far from sanity and it's very odd feeling that on a global scale
January 25, 2026 at 10:29 AM
Theres an emotional seasickness you get if you're ever close to someone who strays too far from sanity and it's very odd feeling that on a global scale
I don't especially like The Traitors - it gives me the fear, because I read it as a staging of the sort of collective-insanity shenanigans that would likely result in my being thrown down a well. I sort of know human beings are like this but prefer not to think about it most of the time.
January 23, 2026 at 3:44 PM
I don't especially like The Traitors - it gives me the fear, because I read it as a staging of the sort of collective-insanity shenanigans that would likely result in my being thrown down a well. I sort of know human beings are like this but prefer not to think about it most of the time.
I loved my A3000 so much, one of the best computers I've ever owned
New on Lectronz: Acorn Archimedes A3000 Replica PCB https://lectronz.com/products/acorn-a3000
#Retrocomputing
#Retrocomputing
Acorn Archimedes A3000 Replica PCB
Acorn A3000 replica Printed Circuit Board
lectronz.com
January 23, 2026 at 12:28 PM
I loved my A3000 so much, one of the best computers I've ever owned
One of the joys of playing CoD, I'm given to understand, is that you get to be called unspeakable things in all the languages of the world
There's a special, Balkans-only Internet that the rest of the world isn't allowed to know about, where they call each other slurs that would kill anyone else stone dead.
January 23, 2026 at 10:07 AM
One of the joys of playing CoD, I'm given to understand, is that you get to be called unspeakable things in all the languages of the world
Voodoo Queens
Posh Spice
Emma Harner
Back To The Planet
Bikini Kill
Posh Spice
Emma Harner
Back To The Planet
Bikini Kill
Five concerts you've seen with women lead singers
Goldfrapp
Ladytron
Kesha
Tricky/Martina Topley-Bird
Whale
Goldfrapp
Ladytron
Kesha
Tricky/Martina Topley-Bird
Whale
Five concerts you've seen with women lead singers:
Sade
Aterciopelados
Patti Smith
Björk
Arch Enemy
Sade
Aterciopelados
Patti Smith
Björk
Arch Enemy
January 22, 2026 at 4:47 PM
Voodoo Queens
Posh Spice
Emma Harner
Back To The Planet
Bikini Kill
Posh Spice
Emma Harner
Back To The Planet
Bikini Kill
Reposted by k-punk demon hunter
Woo is the mind killer.
January 21, 2026 at 5:24 PM
Woo is the mind killer.
In my 20s I would automatically wake at about 3am after a night on the drink, expel impure liquids, rehydrate copiously, then go back to sleep in the happy confidence that I would be more or less right as rain. It stopped working that way some time in my 30s and has never really worked since.
One thing I do believe is: if you drink non trivial amounts of alcohol it makes a huge difference to how happy you will be the morning after whether or not you also drink lots of water before going to sleep. If you do the hangover can often be negligible, whereas if you do not it can be miserable.
January 21, 2026 at 10:46 PM
In my 20s I would automatically wake at about 3am after a night on the drink, expel impure liquids, rehydrate copiously, then go back to sleep in the happy confidence that I would be more or less right as rain. It stopped working that way some time in my 30s and has never really worked since.
They all seem to be symptoms of a common cause, which is the consolidation of a political class whose outlines are still a bit obscure - we know who many of the villains are individually, but I for one don't really understand how these issues are knitted together around a common set of interests
i will never not repeat "the failure on palestine, the consolidation of the border regimes, and the rapid deployment of transmisogynistic propaganda destroyed what is left of anglosphere civil society" etc
January 21, 2026 at 6:30 PM
They all seem to be symptoms of a common cause, which is the consolidation of a political class whose outlines are still a bit obscure - we know who many of the villains are individually, but I for one don't really understand how these issues are knitted together around a common set of interests
First time working with jsx and I hate it so much. This is the hell you front-end folks made for yourselves?
January 20, 2026 at 4:57 PM
First time working with jsx and I hate it so much. This is the hell you front-end folks made for yourselves?
Read this by Kate Manne - substack.com/home/post/p-... - and it collided with my thinking more recently about incentive structures, which are "socialisation" not in the sense of sedimented attitudes and expectations (which a pedagogy might dislodge) but in the sense of active and ongoing conditions
She Who Has Never Feared Men
The antidote to himpathy is not (always) harshness
substack.com
January 20, 2026 at 11:36 AM
Read this by Kate Manne - substack.com/home/post/p-... - and it collided with my thinking more recently about incentive structures, which are "socialisation" not in the sense of sedimented attitudes and expectations (which a pedagogy might dislodge) but in the sense of active and ongoing conditions