I don’t remember what crisis was going on when we first released this book, but I remember there was one and it got in the way. So now it’s on sale, in the middle of 87 other national/global crises.
(It’s on all platforms, if you boycott the ‘zon try your favorite)
www.amazon.com/That-Special...
oh god I can only imagine
A half lesbian pride flag/half trans pride flag
it’s lesbian visibility week!
and trans lesbians are lesbians too
(we’re also v good at kissing just thought you should know)
another drawback to all the disinfo floating around about AI causing outages over the weekend: it means you're not primed to see the connection between these two events
teaaaa
llms are in the business of providing answers, whether they're good or not. humanists are in the business of asking questions. yr strength is in yr mind! some of the great joys of life are striving to understand, to feel out the edges of concepts, to expand rather than narrow our worlds+minds. <3
tbh I'm not too focused myself on getting anyone in software development to change their minds. I just think it's good to stay curious, especially online. how do you understand what makes someone qualified to talk about these topics? what do you know about the gap in your understanding?
there are always requirements that exist outside the context of the machine.
for example... redesigning, for example, the structure of a 100 level course that's taught by multiple faculty members and is a major requirement... would you think it's good enough to dump a syllabus and some requirements in as a prompt and take the output and go?
tbh I think it's dangerous to assume that humanists by trade can't understand or talk to people who work in software development. code isn't some magical incantation, it's more analogous to complex and bureaucratic institutional processes that lead you to get from point A to point B.
also footnote. if you copied the solution on stack overflow... you know that. actually worked for someone. 😐
I'm currently deep into a complex ren'py project to prep for a hopefully less complex ren'py project this summer and I cannot imagine the nightmare that I would produce for myself like, next week, if I tried to generate code for that in claude. and this is such a lightweight project.
the technical debt produced by this kind of code goes crazy. "it's just like when we went on stack overflow and copied some guy's solution." yeah I still do that all the time. did that last night. and then I make the mental effort to transfer that into the context and standards of my codebase.
if you're a dev producing 25k lines of code you're not doing your actual job. there's no way you can do the larger, non-code, conceptual parts of your job and actually review the code you've generated and write appropriate tests for it.
the stuff that claude does well, is stuff that a junior developer who knows the context of the codebase, could produce better code for after being there for six months.
sometimes it's hard to write code because you're missing context about the codebase, integrating or interacting with an area you're not familiar with. no problem, claude can look at the context! but in the olden days we would actually talk to each other in meetings to understand the why.
is it well commented? will you be able to explain what it does and how you decided that in six months, if something breaks? did you write the tests yourself? did you review the tests that claude wrote?
it's really not that complex, and I would argue using claude to code can create worse problems than using claude to generate, say, an academic paper, because if you ship that code in production... that's code that stays around indefinitely. working, until maybe it doesn't.
😔😔😔
Studies show that overreliance on these digital tools causes cognitive decline, but if current events are any indication, nobody’s making much of a contribution anyway. Go ahead and use A.I. however you like.
the next time you ask chatgpt to write an email....be aware that mr. whitehead knows it is contributing to your cognitive decline, but supposes your cognition in particular isn't much of a loss
this is so fun!
Love this!!! 💖
And if you are outside the UK but your books are available there sign up for ALCS (it’s free until they owe you money and then they take a one time fee out of your first payment). I get a wire transfer for a few hundred bucks a year from it.
oh my god, I’m so sorry
good selection
EMDR can make such a huge difference!
YIKES
My manifesto:
thebookseller ig account saying NEWS: some editors uploading confidential manuscripts to ChatGPT to read quickly, agent claims
the guardian: I wrote a novel using AI. Writers must accept artificial intelligence – but we are as valuable as ever | Stephen Marche
the walrus bsky account: Authors are using AI. Publishers know it. And now, says publishing consultant Thad McIlroy, authors are being forced to lie about it. One cancelled horror novel didn’t just end a career—it exposed an industry-wide reckoning.
idk guys when i see a lot of similar headlines insisting that editors & authors are all already embracing AI, i don't assume these things are true. i assume there are a lot of very rich people with an unpopular product pushing a particular narrative in my industry!
oh my god
