It's more than reading. Peoples' patience for long-form anything is dying, and I'm guilty too. Too often I'm on my phone with a movie playing in the background. When it ends, I can't even tell you what happened. It was just noise in the background, to raise the dopamine floor of twitter even higher, and because nothing goes in long enough to remember, nothing interesting comes out in conversation.
You know it never occurred to me I could look things up before. Everything I've ever known I learned orally. Even C. I remember sitting on pappy's lap, watching him wave his hand to draw out an asterisk in the air. "A pointer..."
Literary culture is so confusing.
Anyway, the editorial rule is to spell it out on the first use and then to abbreviate it:
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) announced today...
...NASA says...
Many articles fail to do this and assume insider knowledge. It's all fine and good after you look it up or if you're an expert and familiar with the topic. Good for you. For everyone else, in other disciplines, or lay people, or for students, it's nice to extend the courtesy of spelling it out once.
Acronyms I can handle. What I've always hated is aNz style compressions. a11y, a16z, stuff that you can't even guess at a decoding unless you know it already.
Derrida was worried that people were merely imitating his style of thinking without the substance, but it's fine for AI to do it to humanity-in-general. OK.
Different models, similar number representations. Different models for different languages, similar concept representations. They have to learn all of this from human text input, so they're not divining it themselves. It all makes a strong case for universal grammar, IMO.
What if we turned the regional love for megaprojects into something actually useful like a canal from the UAE through Oman, to permanently weaken Iran?
At some point you just have to spend spare cycles on ideas you think matter. What's harder than rejecting an idea is rejecting a finished, working product. And if your team says "I wish you had worked on something else", that's great, but if you're not my boss and and they're happy, who cares? And sometimes even your bosses. If you believe in something hard enough you will build political capital by meeting work obligations and spend it down working on your baby.
Also, nothing has changed! Claude will still yes-and whatever you give it. ChatGPT still has its insufferable personality, where it takes what you said and hands it back to you in different terms as if it's ChatGPT's insight.
'Fuck' is every part of speech simultaneously because it doesn't mean anything.
I just want it to be clever and load bearing. Back to the food lens: like an ice cream shop called Daddy's Ice Cream, stylized as Daddy's [Ice] Cream, a name that would recast even "Vanilla", selling a flavor called "Chocolate Paint". You have to work to figure it out. Is it a non sequitur, a Valentine's Day tradition, or a failure of prep? It doesn't force you to be the straight man in a bit. You have an out. The words are literally clean. It's not 'ha, I am about to sexually submit to my food, and eating is a blowjob'.
This is clever but it’s self defeating because it’s tasteful. It’s a good joke. I felt like John Waters was saying it to me. And the painful thing to me is the tastelessness.
They’re exactly as cringy as each other actually, but your self-righteous point is well taken. Sure, agreed. I have class consciousness now. I am awakened. As if I would ever make this some random cashier’s problem.
I don’t really think that’s a proportionate solution to a minor annoyance. So far the advice I’ve gotten has been:
- restructure my relationships
- say something psychotic like “let’s go to a different neighborhood so I don’t have to say two words for dessert”
But you are all misreading this as a cry for help or advice. It is a bit. I even say the goddamn fucking words! I just think they’re cringey and I was commenting on my distaste for that feeling. I don’t have a cellarful of champagne either. I have bad news about the Easter bunny.
“You sound like a whiner”. Get a sense of humor maybe? Or failing that at least display the self composure and grace I so lack and pound sand.
Fucking performative fucking profanity is fucking gratuitous and is fucking clearly only fucking there so you fucking know I fucking smoke fucking Camel Lights. It’s not fucking musical. It doesn’t fucking enhance the fucking thought or it’s the wrong fucking emotional fucking register for the fucking material. It’s just fucking there.
Wait no, I see what’s happening. I am sorry. Deeply and I mean it. I was cruel to you. When a person does what you just did it is itself typically a dominance move. Those questions scream passive aggression. They are too close too early to be anything else. I read concern trolling. I read elaboration as escalation. I missed confusion and concern. And I was drunk on how annoying I found that to be, because getting into it on a forum can be thrilling. And when you replied to something so simple and dripping with sarcasm with complete earnestness, it snapped me out of my stupor, and made our conversation clear. Yes, I have called a cookie a basic bitch. I found that somewhat grating. It is conceptually true that you could avoid it. There are social pressures that disincentivize avoiding it. Everything else is drama and joke and rhetorical flourish. Recast in this light, I am embarrassed by what I have said to you. We have barely been speaking the same language because the language is the layers as much as the words.