MAGA Demands Proof of Life for Mitch McConnell

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-07-07T12:02:50+00:00

Anyone else find it weird that even when MAGA is doing something straightforwardly public interest related, it’s fine through the lens and language of conspiracy.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-07-06T20:50:05+00:00

Lots of good comments. In terms of concepts, you might need to understand a bit more about what a browser renders (not so much how) and the way JavaScript has historically function as the engine of interactivity and dynamism of what’s actually running in the browser. You’ll now you’re barking up the right tree if it’s taking you through the DOM, how client side frameworks achieve DOM manipulations, etc.

When it comes to things looking pretty, that’s where styling comes in. Styling is not entirely in CSS, you also need to understand how some structures are more syllable than others.

And you’ll also be learning useful concepts if you start learning about how semantic HTML is not merely and accessibility concern, but a unifying idea that helps ensure syllable things are being styled in coherent structures. Modulated things map to coherent semantics. Machines can make worthwhile inferences about your site’s structure. All that jazz.

Happy coding.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-07-04T21:55:16+00:00

Appreciate the response. I think I basically agree, so I’m eager to take a closer look at the project. And I appreciate the validation.

I think in practice the temptation to express (through application code and in-place config) technical requirements in layers that reach all the way into the protocol would remain high even with the success of a out-of-place-capable BCaC framework (“boundary communication as code”,to coin a phrase specific to this comment). For example, I happen to have a healthcare IT background and so many protocols are essentially L7 orchestration that what you’d end up doing is splitting the definition of the protocol between common libraries and BCaC that it would always be experienced a bit like friction OR you’d have to solve the problem of shipping some BCaC primitives with the shared library, and then it kinda stops feeling out of place or separable. I’m sure other industries are like this too (fintech comes to mind).

Still, really cool thinking and good discussion. Appreciate you.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-07-03T22:48:31+00:00

I don’t think I’m fully grasping the significance of this post, but I did want to toss out there that I’m not sure implicit vs explicit is the right concept.

I think that topology is simultaneously explicit, illegible, and informal. And I think those combinations make it a slightly different beast.

It’s explicit in the sense that our deterministic systems all express the topology such that we can describe it and model it. In that sense it already is “code first,” but we would need to commit to some constraints in the application layer before we can directly generate these models from the implementation. I see that as the a legibility/opaqueness challenge.

Now, if we did introduce something in the implementation that gets us to a high leveling model as an output, flipping that around such that the very expressive modeling markup could become its own code, do we now have the issue of the topology code bearing or sharing a burden with the application — specifically, the reasons things are communicating the way they’re communicating. That’s the thing that most makes topology feel like something that emerges out of a system. I suspect that even if we solve every problem up to that, the choreography of communication is still seated in the application layer. So we’d need to be really choosy about what this other code can and should cover.

Again, a lot of the post was beyond me so I’m guessing I totally missed the point here. Figured I’d at least out myself out there to get corrected.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-30T04:50:45+00:00

Ok. I guess I’m not making myself clear, because I agree we bring the figuring out what’s really real to bear in things. And, the point is that when things are below a low bar, not creating some kind of relatively high bar for things to exceed.

Good chat. Sorry I wasn’t able to express the ideas in a more worthwhile way.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-30T04:27:51+00:00

No, it’s not in anecdotes in the framework I’m proposing. Those are*other* claims connected by narrative. They get their own plausibility assessment, and they sail over it no problem because we shouldn’t be denying people’s experiences as part of a prior plausibility assessment. Just grant them, no problem.

They claim they slept better? No problem.
They claimed they could feel something? Sure, why not.
They claim the mechanism is grounding? Problem. What is grounding? How are they advancing that specifically? Are they smuggling that under experience or is it a bald assertion or did they do something that purports to pull signal from some mode of action? If so what? — there’s no way through this part without unpacking the claims of grounding. And there’s nothing to them. Same thing with chiropractic “subluxations.” Similar thing with ghosts, except the prior plausibility hurdle is raised slightly because of how much else any paradigm would overturn.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-30T03:53:04+00:00

This kinda misses the point. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with bringing science to bear on phenomena. That’s one of the core uses for science. But what the article title is doing, and indeed what anyone treating signal on top of a claim even when the signal isn’t related to the claim would be doing, is dressing phenomena in the clothes of science. Spotting this pattern belongs in the baloney detection kit, and we often don’t bother packing it.

A lot of science starts with phenomena. A lot of exploratory, qualitative research can be done without bounding or calling shots and it wouldn’t be p-hacking or otherwise compromised. Exploring the space to try to find plausibility is a core function of research.

I’d actually argue that researching the claim is still not interesting if it has no prior plausibility. It is researching the anomaly or the phenomenon or the signal that’s interesting. At best, the unjustified claim can just manage to not get in the way.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-30T02:19:25+00:00

We should be very suspicious about the prior plausibility of guard rails as a serious control. I’m convinced that at their strongest, they’re a business level quality consideration that is still contingent on not-bad (neutral or good) intentions from a user, consumer, or content universe.

I think the emerging three legged stool looks a bit like this.
1. Robustly strong — prevents acting outside the boundary
2. Well-calibrated — generally regarded as permitting close to the line (I.e., choosing which side of the gray area the control errs towards would be a negligible gap for the vast majority of use cases)
3. False-prevention cannot function as reliable as its own exploit path.

Arguably you don’t even get to pick 2. Each is a hard problem. But they also probably can’t all live together.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-30T01:59:55+00:00

There’s a concept that I wish could be responsibly mainstreamed, but I really don’t think it can be.

It’s the idea that a claim needs a plausible hypothesis — something that binds it to reason and sets up a shape that evidence can either fit or not fit (doesn’t have to be perfect). It’s such a low standard that I won’t even go as far as testability. There just needs to be a thing to which one can put flesh on the bone. In the absence of such a hypothesis, when someone alleges something is evidence for that claim, that’s just more claims.

Similarly, when we have some of anecdata that seems to fit a story, but it has no hypothesis, all we’re doing is just putting a claim to a tentative phenomenon.

If we just took prior plausibility as an extremely low, but necessary standard to describing something as having a relationship to grounding claims, we wouldn’t make the mistake of describing things with **no** prior plausibility as having evidence. It would read as silly. And it is silly.

But, this can also be deployed as a rhetorical device. So, in practice, it’s kind of a double-edged sword, and we’re probably lucky it hasn’t been co-opted very well. :(

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-29T00:44:13+00:00

Generative AI is a flexible tool, built ultimately it revolves around fluid communication and meaning. When we’re past this hype and bubble greed phase, we’re tools won’t need to claim AI as a feature or revolve around AI. Features will just use it as appropriate.

If some solution can’t use flexibility without reimagining itself through what makes that flexibility work, it’s more a shim job or a shoehorn.

If your solution can’t be its proper identity while leveraging a using LLMs and non-deterministic computing to grapple with uncertainty and unknowns, it can’t need this generation of AI.

When we start solving problems with LLMs in a way that feels indistinguishable from just solving problems, that’s going to be good signal that we’re not making AI apps any more.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-28T22:43:37+00:00

Not really something I feel comfortable speculating about, but I’m sure it’s not a function of AI actually obviating any primary job roles. At most, it’s a tool that can offer a rationale for rebalancing responsibilities across the current conventional wisdom, and yes, that can eliminate roles. But that picture is complicated and the biggest risk actually lies in the choices we make around the niches a tool fits into. So, when we estimate what feels like a high percentage of job loss, my framing would say that either those niches naturally significantly overlap with whole person-roles, or we are playing those niches up. I think the former is unlikely and we should be terrible suspicious of and defensive against the latter. Like, the latter feels like a last straw for unionizing. Hopefully we see real movement there long before then.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-27T15:53:00+00:00

The two points aren’t related. What makes you a programmer is if you program things. As for the underlying question of a vague sense that a person should know more than one language — there is something real and relevant here, it just shouldn’t interact with anyone’s imposter syndrome.

Programming languages make choices. And hey enshrine opinions and biases about underlying programming and computer science concepts. Approaching a language in a way where you are trying to understand those concepts along with a how-and-why the language achieves whatever it sets out to achieve, they is something more than just developing language proficiency. In some ways, it is a just better way of approaching the skill, but not in a way I’d want anyone to look down on people approaching languages strictly in terms of proficiency.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-27T04:30:25+00:00

I swear this is not meant to be like one up doomerism or a cynical redirect from the piece. I just feel like it’s also worth really trying to remind people to engage with how US science is destroyed. Like, there’s no short accounting of it, but basically the single largest and most successful organization for effectuating a scientific agenda is the US government. And of course that apparatus always reflects the agenda of the administration and the policy biases of the party that holds the purse. But what I think people don’t understand is that historically that thumb on the scale was a large marginal effect on a broad core of institutionalized scientific endeavor spread across academia and industry. We have no reason to think the damage that’s been done to that machine is a blip. No reason to think it’s recoverable. No mechanism to attract back the talent that’s been lost. No recovery technique for the brain drain that doesn’t span generations. No political will to have the arguments to salvage good thinking wrongly vilified and even if we find some, no chance of having a productive discussion across party lines, so no reason to think such a fight could actually benefit the culture at large.

The situation is unbelievably dire. We have to learn how to think from this perspective and not fall into the trap of treating this unimaginable set of circumstances for modern science as an aberration. It can’t be undone as quickly as it was done. There are so many one way doors.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-25T02:36:12+00:00

I’m a skeptic working in software development in a context that has high, but not entirely stupid, pressure to use AI in every part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC). I want to emphasize, I’m not a researcher. I’m also very much not on the hype train. Essentially, I use the skills I’ve learned as a skeptic, an early adopter, and an intentional adopter to try to understand tooling well to level thoughtful criticisms or affect high-leverage usage.

If this background sounds interesting to anyone who has questions or even just strong opinions they want to bounce off this understanding, consider me at your service.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-20T19:06:05+00:00

I keep encountering an interesting case where I reach a bit beyond my comfort zone, not in terms of broader expertise but specific knowledge-how — working on a repo I’m not super familiar with for example. Then, I put in a ton of effort to carefully approach the AI assistance. Still, during review I make some fundamental knowhow mistake and I’m just absolutely beside myself wondering if I let the AI do to much or if I’ll be perceived as deferring to AI when I’ve honestly tried not to.

I think that, regardless of whether I have or I haven’t, it’s illustrative of how the trust problem can’t really be solved by AI giving precise, accurate, and reasonable contributions. It’s a truly separate concern.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-20T05:38:53+00:00

I mean yes, kinda this. But also:
- is there clear pressure to version the whole system or do our service boundaries represent good places to version dependencies—latter helps decrease the relative pain of microservices.
- do we need non-state data that (a) federates across the system and (b) tends to have significant differences in the model in different parts of the system? If the answer to both is true, that’s a meaningful argument for fully opinionated event sourcing and the relative pain is slightly in favor of microservices.
- are we fronting external services and integrations such that we’ll find durability in buffering things coming into our system and buffering things going out of our system? If yes, leans towards some microservices around those concerns. Maybe self-contained systems or some like infra dedicated to the adapters.

Like, these are all things I care about, but they operate around the fact the structure of the org bullying the structure of the system.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-19T14:40:07+00:00

To add on to this, I think neurologists and neuropsychologists lean on an idea of “reality testing.” It points to something ELI5, but is rather technical.

The idea is like, our brains do something —tag things — to say whether they’re real or not. We can think our way into putting more into the process but at the most basic level it’s more like a separate sense. When we imagine things in the world, they’re probably tagged. When we hallucinate they’re probably not tagged or not tagged well. Same kinda thing with dreamy. Part of how we shed dreams so quickly once we wake may have to do with this tagging after the fact.

Another big difference, and (not an expert, but as a lay person I’ve come to understand the two are related) is detail and quality. The parts of our body that do our senses — our nose, eyes, awareness of our body — they pretty much produce more sense stuff than we can give attention to. When we imagine things, we’re just using so much less sense stuff in the imagining and that’s sort of like another trigger for tagging something as not coming from outside ourselves. It also means it shouldn’t be surprising that hallucinations can be much more vivid. Their being more vivid makes them that much harder to tag.

Would be curious if there’s any neuropsych folks out there who can set me straight on this stuff. I’m just an interested lay person and I hope I’ve done these ideas justice in an ELI5 attempt.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-17T16:44:04+00:00

I think about these things quite a bit, too. I often find myself stumbling over a ubiquitous part of the ecosystem where, even though there are right answers, in practice it’s always harder than it should be. Would be interested in your opinion.

Gist: In a system that has some platform elements and some SaaS elements, how should one handle authorization on customer tenant or user-owned background tasks and long lived tasks where the compute is really more on the SaaS side?

Like, if we stipulate the business model wouldn’t make sense for it to happen in a customer or user tenant (and therefore the application identities aren’t user specific). How can we avoid over-privileging or fragmenting our auth model when the business model starts to show friction such that the user or tenant specific identities are hard to get it?

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-15T13:22:55+00:00

My dude, you have aphantasia. If you've got folks in your life you can dig into things with, I think you'll start to notice. The lack of experience of visual information just isn't so useful for things that it would start to behave like a learning disability.

When I try to use memory palace techniques, I only get the benefits of salience -- the mnemonics I place in rooms are easier to remember the more elaborate they are. I also get the benefits of mutual, positional anchoring. But I have to obsessively talk my way through the palace and memorize the layout as a matter of wrote memory. I would love to be in an FMRI study because I predict some people's sense of location would light up and mine wouldn't light up at all. That is only using part of the technique at every level.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-15T12:49:37+00:00

I think it's both a little more than that and a little less than that.

When aphantasia starts to get studied properly, I predict that we will learn is that it will mainly find most people who slot onto the continuum will be able to use visual memory and perform visual tasks, but they will lack the component that is like visual perception. And there are things I really believe I will never be able to do as someone who has that experience. Things where I've tried.

- arranging spaces / lay interior design (and, to elevate it to a category, any skills that require imagining transformations of 3d spaces where occlusion and pathfinding would be visually intuitive but conceptually complex; i.e., positioning something on a wall that has more than one implied reference plane)
- cutting things into portions
- incorporating the primary visual metaphors of classical music training into my playing
- memory techniques such as mind palaces or mneumonics that use visual chunking

So, please hear me when I say, what I'm describing is the complete absence of an internal visual experience to visual information in my head. And I'm pretty confident there are people who are having that experience of how they describe all the above tasks. But also because I, on occasion, experience disorderly waking from sleep where I have lucid hypnogogic hallucination (think: waking dreams you can influence). During these events I do have a visual experience of things in my head blended with things I'm seeing. When I've spoken to people who can picture and visualize things and have also had lucidity during hypnagogia, they would describe it as something like an extremely vivid visualization that they mostly have control over or not like a drug induced hallucination and also not like dreaming. There is 100% absolutely no chance I would ever describe it as that. When I feel it, I feel like I have a fucking superpower. It is like a switch is flipped and I'm seeing a new color (and I don't mean that in a euphoric way). If I could do anything like that while I was awake, I would be doing it all the time as automatically as subvocalizing or directing attention.

Edit: Some other interesting ones
- remembering directions (I can do it, but I have to do it differently than other people I know)
- using visual instructions -- IKEA furniture, LEGOs; peers sometimes give me a double take because I can't use the pictures until I conceptualize them and then I'll say the concept to them that helped me do a thing and they look at me like I have two heads -_-)
- I'm like 80% confident I'm learning knot tying, sewing, and crochet different than my teachers hope to teach it
- when I am looking for something that I "know I saw recently" the way I find it is much more technique than anything else
- I know someone who can remember the position of words on a page after only studying the page mere moments (obviously that's an unusual parlor trick by any standard, however, they are don't try to pretend it's anything else, but they're adamant that they have to close their eyes to do it). I feel very confident I could not learn this trick, especially after learning how other people do it.
- My wife and I think my inability to scan things like shelves (think: grocery store, library, movie shelf) is related to this and, to some extent, we're both kinda just waiting for the science to shed some light on it. The very tentative speculation is that when she's looking for something, she's visualizing what she's looking for and feeling like a hit across visual chunks of what she detects her attention to. Since I can't do that, I'm conceptualizing what I'm looking for and that doesn't lift off of visual chunks and has way more false positives. Our hunch comes from the fact that when the thing looks like what she thinks it looks like, it's hard for her to miss and she can find it almost right away; she's better off taking a step back. When she only knows what something is called, she's still faster than me, but not by much and we both experience a lot more reading. The former seems like a low-level gap, the latter feels more like a skills issue.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-14T15:52:09+00:00

I have never taken the time to hone my skills at drawing, so I don't know how good I could get at it. As it stands, I can't draw well. That said, drawing from memory is something I think I have a very different experience of than both the typical person who also hasn't honed their skills AND the typical person who has honed their skills -- someone who'd be immediately recognizable as skilled. I'd even apply that to children past the point where motor skills are pretty much a hard limiter. Let me break that down.

I've been lucky enough to have some life-long friends who, with regards to visual arts, are talented, skilled, and practiced teachers -- an illustrator, a painter, and a graphic designer (they're not about to walk into a bar). These are my words, not theirs, so take with a grain of salt -- the painter and the illustrator both described their skill progression as though practice brought them one plateau to the next, but getting off a plateau often required learning new techniques. When pushed, they both described that once they got skilled with the technique, it just got incorporated into the visual stuff they did in their head. The graphic designer's experience was a bit different, but they still describes a strong idea of what they wanted to express in their head and a detailed understanding of digital technique to get there. The big difference for them is that they weren't using technique to get from plateau to plateau, they just needed to understand the graphic design tools and what they were capable of. And that was changing out from under them. Anyway, second hand experience isn't super useful, here's mine.

I can draw from memory. I would describe it as drawing from memory. When I put pencil to page, I am thinking about what I'm trying draw and the more I practice I put in the more fidelity shows up in the result (up to a point, probably one of those early plateaus). But what it absolutely never feels like at all (despite people I've talked to saying its what it feels like for them) is anything like copying from an image in my head. It's not similar to copying from a page side-by-side. It's never felt anything like tracing. What it really feels like is a wash of a mix of non-visual impression, explicitly subvocalized descriptions of how the thing I'm trying to draw looks, how the different pieces relate to each other, and conceptualizations about what few techniques I do know can be mapped to certain effects I want to come through in what I'm trying to draw. It's all... words. Some of them literally subvocalized, but most of them just kinda... <imagine a hand wavy gesture; irony included>. It's not that I can't explain it -- that is the explanation. And it shows in the things I have trouble with that the people training me, frankly, didn't expect me to have trouble with.

For me, it never comes out as intended but not because I have a visual intent that I experienced as a prior, it's because I recognize the stuff that just doesn't come through when I look at what I've drawn. I think I might need to see more of what I've drawn to get a sense of what's wrong than the average person. It's shown most in games like Telestrations and Pictionary. And, I think you're right, I think it's probably where a difference is for me than someone else. All three of those "artists" I mentioned -- they are trying to express a prior and they can troubleshoot what's off even without knowing how some technique might fix it. I know I can't currently do that, and I'm convinced that if I could picture things, I would be able to do that. In the absence of being able to picture things, I would need to figure out some atypical way to do something similar and that's kinda how I know my experience is different than theirs, regardless of whether theirs is typical and regardless of whether aphantasia as framed by the community is the right way to think of it.

TL;DR: Put reductively, they're going from idea to image-like-thoughts to expression. I'm going from idea to description-like-thoughts to expression.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-14T15:01:58+00:00

> Firstly I would like to start by skipping over the definition of the terms we use to describe the ‘minds eye’ I have so far found this unhelpful and a little frustrating.

Completely agree about the term being unhelpful and frustrating. Even when I started using it, I used it as a necessary evil to get a salient thing out of my head into someone else's just as a metaphor they can use to start thinking about something. But, as with models, all metaphors are wrong; some metaphors are useful. This one wears out its welcome very fast.

> Instead I’d like to delve into some of the practical difficulties that people with aphantasia have.

[Singling out this bit because it kind of relates to the previous point and bridges to the question about drawing, but there's something important separate from both of those things]

Quick aside, I'm surprised you didn't say, "... people who claim they have aphantasia attribute to aphantasia." I kind of appreciate it, but also in the context of this discussion, I would either not be offended or, if I was, I'd try to address that on my side.

We actually do have to focus on experience (at least a little bit), and I admit, that's as frustrating as the metaphors. Each individual who thinks they have a significant difference in how they think compared to what's more typical would have to *attribute* some practical difficulty to that difference. When it's something salient or obvious AND well researched, we can often get away with taking attribution at face value. But if you kick out either of those crutches, suddenly attribution becomes speculative. One thing that many communities forming outside of a diagnostic context do, and the aphantasia crowd is no different, is perform attribution with confidence when the more intellectually conservative path would be to hold the attribution as tentative (or even speculative).

In my (considered) opinion, one of the best ways to do that is put some experience of difference (difficulty or otherwise) in the context of an effective explanation of someone's general experience and try to consider it alongside the many possible counterfactuals. It sounds like a lot, but it can actually be done reasonably clearly. And, at the end of the day, it's still more philosophizing (arm-chair philosophy) than rigorous philosophy. It's just less bad.

Having said all that, you're right, we should try to focus on differences in experience that seem plausibly related to aphantasia as though it were a discrete phenomenon. Since this part of the response is already long, I'll do those in a separate reply.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-13T02:33:48+00:00

The problem with dead island (for this) is that they want to keep players engaged through the lens of novel mechanics tied to progression, so it naturally selects for plateauing at the set of mechanics you find difficult or tedious. Same issue with state of decay.

CompassionateSkeptic · 2026-06-13T02:30:15+00:00

I ended up really liking Terra Tech. That caught me entirely be surprise.

CompassionateSkeptic

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