Brian Will

Programming education videos ( No actual lake measures up to the ideal lake for which I yearn.

[Brian Will @brianwill]

@valigo Maybe I just don't use it enough, but is it actually all that buggy? Every time I've used it, it seems...fine.

It feels like the real is that people want just one place for all their games and integrated social stuff, so they reject any Steam alternative out of hand.

[aLec robBins @alecrobbins]

taking the kind of shit that saves your progress

[Yoko Ono @yokoono]

Who will win the World Cup?
A child who believes in a peaceful world.

[Enguerrand VII de Coucy @ingelramdecoucy]

Frasier: The Video Game. Could never get past the art gallery opening soirée level, though

[Handsome B. Charming @CTachio83984]

siskel: the robots in pacific rim are large and they are in charge, i think this is one of the best movies about robots in the ocean of the year

ebert: were they in charge? the situation was chaos

[Handsome B. Charming @CTachio83984]

SPEEDING IN A SCHOOL ZONE??? ITS A FUCKING ADULT LEARNING ANNEX, I DON"T CARE HOW BAD THEY ARE AT READING THEY UNDERSTAND HOW A CAR WORKS

[Brian Will @brianwill]

@CentristMadness @JamesArthuwxcj Kundun!

[microplastics rectifier @facetedcarapace]

Never once in my entire life have I remembered whether it's going to be Labor Day or Memorial Day . I'm convinced they switch places sometimes.

[Greg the Sorcerer @gregthesorcerer]

Tweets from the 18th century

[Sridhar Ramesh @RadishHarmers]

@gran1te_mtn https://t.co/k0pN3nCXAZ

[Brian Will @brianwill]

@nise_yoshimi I really liked the first third, and then Bryan Cranston died instead of his boring son

[Brian Will @brianwill]

@autogynefiles I think you're thinking of the likelihood of two goats sharing the same birthday.

[Mini Modu @MinModulation]

because it's good marketing and investment to use hyperbole, and many people do genuinely believe most people should be churned into bio-mulch, so you they shake each other's hands. since nobody can do anything about it even if they get angry, there's literally no reason to stop

[Brian Will @brianwill]

Elon retweeted this. Belief in natural aristocracy used to be something most libertarians tried to hide.

Weird that he also tries to push a populist version of techno utopia. Seems incompatible with the inflated self-regard of the would-be aristocrats.

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

Civilization and almost all human progress have been created by a talented few for the benefit of the many.

The key to sustaining this is maintaining the conditions that allow exceptional individuals to arise and excel.

Only then is the dysfunction of the average safely diluted and rendered non-lethal to themselves and everyone else.

Most find this reality hard to accept.

[yoshimi red @nise_yoshimi]

BREAKING: Keir Starmer has turned red and started moving faster around the arena and has gained a new attack in which he spits fireballs

[Brian Will @brianwill]

@johndoe18411073 @celinedionysus_ Why do they advertise with that photo when a random shot from the actual movie looks way better?

[Anti-UNATCO Aktion @new2posting]

This is basically what I've been going at for a while, and I think you're getting the pulse on something that a lot of self-described Butlerians keep rhetorically dancing around but never make explicit. "The scam IS the threat" is an incoherent position because it's primarily borne of cope, and it resolves multiple uncomfortable and contradictory positions at once. It lets you start a feel-good posting crusade against a field of tech as ontologically evil without grappling with whether it generates helpful assistance and value for its users, it lets you dismiss over a billion users as rubes rather than fellow workers making conscious rational choices about the tools they use in their jobs, and because it's totes a scam you don't even need to organize!

People yell at you when you post this because confronting cognitive dissonance is uncomfortable, and realizing ones own positions are a series of nested motte-and-bailey statements is especially uncomfortable. But again, have you considered that the cope is the point? The contradiction between "this is a scam" and "this is an existential threat to being human/democracy/my favorite heckin' webcomics" is an untenable contradiction full stop, but it's also the structure of the contradition that makes it function on an emotional level.

The actual serious reservations about AI assume that the technology works, that it continues to improve, and asks about the structural consequences. Which is how historically the left responded to other transformative technologies like industrialization, electricity, computing, etc. None of them involved going "but what if it's all a scam?!" but whether the gains were socialized or not. The actual substantive position involves public stakes and benefits from compute infrastructure, enhanced data privacy, antitrust enforcement so we don't end up with Weyland Yutani vs Umbrella Corporation vs the world, the boring and hard stuff that requires doing actual politics and winning elections instead of falling for AI video "Hollywood is cooked!" engagement/monetization bait for the 134235134th time and dunking on it for an audience of a few thousand demoralized left twitter posters, at least half of whom have never read Capital.

When people talk about AI in good and evil terms, I think there's this trend I've noticed, ever since tumblr banned porn and its former denizens recreated Eternal September across the internet, where online leftists will talk about a thing in a purely moralistic way and then conclude "it's evil so OBVIOUSLY it doesn't work/is fake." WHERE IS YOUR MATERIALIST ANALYSIS? The people talking like this about AI are voicing a real felt sentiment about the alienation of getting AI generated emails, surreal 2024 era slop images with 12 extra fingers, people forgetting how to write, the idea that something being created no longer implies that there was full authorial intent behind it. But it doesn't translate to a coherent political project because the actual political question isn't "am I personally distressed by the existence of this?" but rather "what are the institutional/ownership structures and laws that would help humanity instead of turbocharging extraction for a few?" Aesthetic offense and revulsion at old things changing is a feeling, not a strategy, and it easily turns self-destructive/counter-productive.

There's also an allure in saying "it's all a scam!" for some people because it let's them say "I am a smart person who does not fall for things." There's big status rewards for people who correctly call scams immediately. Even though in say the .com crash, people who said "this is all fake" got more immediate clout than those who said "the technology will become incredibly transformative even if a few companies fail." There's a built in "heads I win, tails you lose" caveat to the "AI is all a scam" angle, collapse = "I am right!" while no collapse = you get to keep moving the goalposts on what "this tech doesn't work" means. See Zitron et al.

Not enough people are emotionally ready for what happens if a catastrophic collapse of the industry doesn't happen. Google's profits topped $132B in 2025, meaning that if OpenAI collapsed tomorrow, they could assuredly consolidate with a fire sale discount.

[Brian Will @brianwill]

@cmuratori @the_remirth I know you specifically (unlike some others) have addressed it, but I don't think you give it the proper weight. Usually you emphasize culture and education, which I think is a dead end critique if we're serious about making software better.

[Brian Will @brianwill]

This is the angle I think the performance crowd (Muratori et al) misses: corporate software tends to collect requirements and priorities that you and I recognize are stupid but which the organization cannot, and this greatly slows down the org and the software it produces.

[rain @rtroar]

This is great. I worked at msft for years and you hit at the heart of the problem: do they care about excellence? No. Not at all. Not only do they not care, but as an organization they cannot recognize it.

As to “what is run doing that makes it 5x slower” I can give some insight:
- it has to initialize COM (most likely multithreaded apartment). That’s going to do at least one, but more likely 100s of cross process hits to the registry.
- it likely saves history in the registry, also cross process to read from
- it’s likely full of TraceLog telemetry statements, which involves many std::string and std::map operations (oof for perf)

All of those things “make sense” when your organizational goal is X and your job is to make your bosses bosses boss smile.

In my experience everyone halfway decent leaves or gets managed out without 5 years OR is promoted like crazy (with their work somehow never seeing the light of day). It’s a very strange place to work.