prompters reinventing programming languages from first principles

"The latest model is really sensitive to semicolon placement"

elsegate round two can’t be far off now

We need a professional organization for people who went into software engineering and ended up having to invent or discover their own bespoke form of applied information systems, organizational, and user research as a survival mechanism

The prophet.

I think so as well, it’s why I find myself trotting out the ol’ ladder of inference all the gosh dang time. you can’t get off the ladder without climbing over beliefs, and you can’t even get *on* the ladder without making some meanings

in seriousness though, I stumbled into this can of worms (perhaps woefully unprepared) like two decades while doing some angsty religious-deconstruction journaling and filled a bunch of pages on the overlap between things I knew versus things I believed versus things I was convinced of lol

I don’t even claim to believe I know things, so this isn’t a problem for me /s

lol in the time I took to write this they deleted and reposted to correct a typo. updated version here:

unfortunately, I have a pretty strong sense of how much sympathy I’d get if I was ever injured by someone pissed off that I was taking too long to cross the street versus if I was injured by an unhoused person who has, arguably, even more reason to lash out at a random passerby

what is road rage if not a mental (or emotional) health crisis? what is a pedestrian just trying to cross the street if not an incident bystander? what is driving that endangers that pedestrian if not violence?

at first blush you might think it’s different in the one case it seems like a mental health crises leading to violence that causes injury to an innocent bystander

meanwhile the other…

I would argue is actually not as different as it initially appears

the number of times I have been asked to “run a survey to tell us what to build next” as if we could add a column to the roadmap spreadsheet called “objective importance” and then sort by that to achieve some form of perfection lol

Me fifteen years ago: aaah all these people further along in these careers than me need to write more about this

Me now: God damnit

also: forgive my cynicism lol, after a few tours of my own through the future-making factory, it’s hard to not to have visions of whiteboards-in-mostly-glass-rooms where a current loathsome reality was once workshopped as a visionary future to be built in service of interests that are not ours

yes, there is something very important in the role of imagination here. I think often about imagination as staking claim to the future.

through this lens: data is only useful to orient you towards lucrative positions in that territory, and then legitimizing your claim to a position (ie for funding)

even the title of one of the field’s foundational texts trades on eugenicist tradition: the inmates are running the asylum

meanwhile few talk about projects like enzo mari’s truly revolutionary Autoprogettazione? and what they might mean for digital lives

to get on a soap box: even when done from “human centered” principals, design (especially product design) can have a nasty paternalistic streak that becomes quite authoritarian. how users are talked about and arguments for why the designer knows best can even echo many eugenicist projects

if we take this just slightly too far i might say some of the authoritarian cultural tendencies here are also inherent to the approach brought to “UX” even at it’s “best”

the designer, then product team, decides what problems are worth solving, then compel the user to agree to their solutions

Haymarket’s Books Not Bars program receives an average of 50 letters each week at its post office box, many of them requesting books about Black liberation, radical poetry, and political history.