Kevin Riggle

Principal @ http://complexsystems.group. I keep people safe on the internet (trying). Looking at the world with an “anarchist squint” 🏳️‍🌈 https://twitter.com/kevinriggle

🏙️ Brooklyn, NY
🔗 https://complexsystems.group/publications

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Last Notes

2025-06-03 05:22:11 GMT

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If they’ve finally integrated LLMs with linting and type checking and so on and so on I could see there being less slop at the word-by-word level… which still leaves lots of room for more subtle forms of slop at the method, subsystem, and interaction (e.g. not writing security vulnerabilities) levels!

2025-06-03 05:13:39 GMT

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If LLMs really are great for coding, and only coding, the coding LLM people had better shoot the rest of the LLM community or something and take down their stuff because they are making y’all look evil

2025-06-03 05:11:49 GMT

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Also i dunno but it’s just really hard for me to be interested in trying the fancy expensive, high-investment versions of the tools when the free versions are all unfit for purpose. Like not just bad but wrong. There’s a bare minimum of purpose alignment that something has to meet for me to consider investing more deeply in it and ALL of the free stuff I encounter is so unfit as to be actively offensive

2025-06-03 05:02:52 GMT

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I like Thomas but I’m really fucking sick of this

2025-06-03 04:59:08 GMT

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I find that all of this makes me incredibly angry. Like, what the fuck are we doing here. Why are we doing this? Who are we doing it for?

2025-06-03 04:50:29 GMT

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“You can’t have a take on this if you weren’t using the latest tools last week!” Buddy I _HAVE A DAY JOB_

2025-06-03 04:43:51 GMT

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“You’re six months behind! You’re missing out!” No, buddy, I’m a cybersecurity consultant and not a moron

2025-06-03 04:43:10 GMT

I am flatly uninterested in letting an LLM execute arbitrary code as my user account on my laptop and maybe even sudo to root are you people fucking nuts

2025-05-22 05:35:11 GMT

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ai art? Or a shot you took?

2025-05-21 20:02:14 GMT

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“If you think your workers and colleagues are too stupid to recognize good tools that will help them do their jobs better, then... you are a bad leader and should step down. Because you've created a broken culture.”

2025-05-21 20:01:57 GMT

“If, as they say, AI tools are going to get better quickly, then let them do so and trust that smart people will pick them up and use them.” From @npub16sj…va89
https://www.anildash.com/2025/04/19/ai-first-is-the-new-return-to-office/

2025-05-18 17:33:41 GMT

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$28/year is a small price to pay for that kind of support

2025-05-15 20:16:41 GMT

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I don’t know why it added what looks like the Statue of Liberty carrying a top hat to the roof of that building, but … it definitely did

2025-05-15 15:48:41 GMT

Really feels like it’s finally time for a nonprofit open-web search engine, on the Wikimedia/OpenStreetMap model
https://www.theverge.com/news/667517/microsoft-bing-search-api-end-of-support-ai-replacement

2025-05-15 04:12:59 GMT

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2025-04-07 22:48:30 GMT

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it’s the same one (albeit please not the same physical object in both places)

2025-03-24 01:59:28 GMT

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I have been saying very much the same thing about healthcare that I said about education, that it's another keystone societal institution which in America has become fully captured by its administrative class and run only for their benefit, not patients, doctors, nurses, etc

2025-03-23 16:07:52 GMT

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We’ve spent billions of dollars and finally made computers worse at math

2025-03-23 05:09:52 GMT

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and it speaks to how thoroughly universities have been captured by and are run solely for the benefit of their administrative class

2025-03-23 05:00:15 GMT

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was this written by the Russo Brothers? Who were responsible for some of the most forgettable marvel movies, a franchise not famous for great writing to begin with. This was basically my problem with The Grey Man, such that I turned it off half an hour in, despite loving Chris Evans and Ana de Armas. It had these characters getting into a fight not because of who they were or what they wanted but because there was a line on the outline that said “second act conflict goes here”

2025-01-21 04:52:38 GMT

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Sure. Great. Now what do we do about it. (My plan is to wake up tomorrow, figure out what two of the hundred apply to my current area of effort, and then figure out how to use them to still kick the nazis in the nuts)

2025-01-16 07:14:53 GMT

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What’s Jellyfin?

2025-01-16 04:53:39 GMT

What's the least-maintenance way to get a working home Plex server set up? Let's say I've ripped a bunch of Blu-rays on to a little home NAS, because for my sins I've developed opinions about MPEG compression settings.

2025-01-02 21:29:17 GMT

Eagleson's Law: Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months, might as well have been written by someone else. (Eagleson is an optimist, the real number is more like three weeks.)
—fortune(6)

2024-12-24 18:26:17 GMT

Lewis's Law of Travel: The first piece of luggage out of the chute doesn't belong to anyone, ever.
—fortune(6)

2024-12-12 18:20:21 GMT

What I’m taking from this is that software engineers spend most of our time on engineering software, and writing code is (as expected) a relatively small portion of that work.
Imagine this for other engineering disciplines. “Wow structural engineers seem to spend most of their time on meetings and CAD and relatively little time physically building bridges with their hands! This is something AI can and should fix. I am very smart”
https://fortune.com/2024/12/05/amazon-developers-spend-hour-per-day-coding/

2024-11-06 01:12:09 GMT

In case you need it tonight, here’s a minute of my girlfriend’s guinea pig hanging out in a pumpkin
https://files.ioc.exchange/media_attachments/files/113/433/344/291/522/544/original/47dcac413dbf89d3.mp4

2024-10-01 03:47:05 GMT

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admin should stop trying to dox you

2024-09-24 01:14:04 GMT

I really don't want to be, like, "I am the only person who's good at cybersecurity," but I do feel like I spend an _AWFUL_ lot of time asking, "And what is our threat model?" over and over and over again, even with ostensible security people

2024-09-18 21:32:43 GMT

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oh of course. The law of perverse incentives strikes again. More competition is not always better!

2024-09-14 19:03:07 GMT

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Straight out of a Ball canning publication (complimentary)

2024-09-13 20:44:15 GMT

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The shorthand I have for this now is "eating the sound", and once heard in others it cannot be unheard, but it's hard because it really does sound great in my head

2024-09-13 20:43:04 GMT

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Like seriously I spent way too long doing this, thinking I was doing it "right" and it should sound good, before the evidence of my senses, listening to the recordings, and my vocal instructors' repeated feedback, eventually caught up with me and forced me to painfully acknowledge that I was wrong.

2024-09-13 20:42:02 GMT

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And my first and most concrete suggestion, which it took me a ... lot of pain ... to really internalize, doing vocal stuff growing up, is:
If you're going for that big, deep, resonant announcer-style voice, and it sounds good to you inside your head but not on tape, you are probably focusing the sound inside your head. Focus the sound right behind your front teeth and you'll hear a marked difference in the quality of the recording.

2024-09-13 20:39:09 GMT

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Some combination of practice, production values, and getting used to hearing the sound of your own voice.

2024-09-05 16:59:37 GMT

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'Transformative' in this case means not so much in a technical sense, like modifying the HTML, but at a social level the intent or purpose of the use. In e.g. the Google Books case the courts found that reproducing copyrighted material to provide a search function was transformative
https://www.copyright.gov/fair-use/summaries/authorsguild-google-2dcir2015.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authors_Guild,_Inc._v._Google,_Inc.

2024-09-04 22:00:33 GMT

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the Wayback Machine is pretty obviously a transformative use under fair use, and even the original controlled digital lending program should have been not transformative but still fair use. Removing the restrictions and going full pirate library was pretty obviously not transformative and not fair use and the courts rightly found against it

2024-08-05 18:32:20 GMT

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Thanks for the clarification!

2024-08-05 18:07:40 GMT

Well that’s exciting. Got my first round of drive by abuse. The Masto report/block UI is … bad.
“You are aware that this breaks specific server rules”—of my server or theirs? The basic question of “to whom am I reporting this” should have an obvious answer

2024-06-07 20:29:19 GMT

"What I'm asking [us] to do is build a better world for [ourselves], for everyone around us, and for all other life on the planet—and as a SIDE EFFECT we will deal with #climate change! And as a SIDE EFFECT we will deal with physical pollution!" –@npub1lq5…6wl7
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c8riA6Mk5gU

2024-05-22 03:57:11 GMT

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The ongoing erosion of my ability to tell where information I enter into any random text box on my computer is sent and stored has me increasingly tempted to switch back to a 386 and WordPerfect 5.whatever for MS-DOS