patience_limited's recent activity
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Comment on A nationwide LGBTQ+ book ban bill has been introduced in the US House of Representatives in ~books
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Comment on Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era. in ~tech
patience_limited Link ParentUnderstandable in the context of potentially revealing a connection to someone who could lose their job, be prosecuted, and/or sued into penury by a giga-corporation for violating an NDA?Understandable in the context of potentially revealing a connection to someone who could lose their job, be prosecuted, and/or sued into penury by a giga-corporation for violating an NDA?
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Comment on Weekly US politics news and updates thread - week of February 23 in ~society
patience_limited LinkThere's a good read here on how right-wing narratives get promoted into mainstream news, featuring some very basic open source journalism. Spin Class Case Study: I Caught POLITICO and the New York...There's a good read here on how right-wing narratives get promoted into mainstream news, featuring some very basic open source journalism.
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Comment on The hunt for dark breakfast in ~food
patience_limited Link ParentI'll defer to Daniel Gritzer on this one: all-buckwheat crepes are notoriously hard to handle.I'll defer to Daniel Gritzer on this one: all-buckwheat crepes are notoriously hard to handle.
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Comment on The hunt for dark breakfast in ~food
patience_limited Link ParentI don't think the "Dark Breakfast" recipe's proportions include enough flour to provide a crepe's structural integrity, which depends on gluten. You could concevably get it to set like a custard...I don't think the "Dark Breakfast" recipe's proportions include enough flour to provide a crepe's structural integrity, which depends on gluten.
You could concevably get it to set like a custard if you cooked it in a water bath. There are French toast and bread pudding custard recipes that don't include any flour at all, so the bread has to do the heavy lifting of giving the dish its form.
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Comment on Tildes Book Club - February 2026 - The Truth by Terry Pratchett in ~books
patience_limited (edited )Link ParentNeverwhere is a charming fantasy novel and worth a read if you can get past the Neil Gaiman "ick" factor. He and Pratchett were good enough friends to have collaborated on Good Omens (both an...- Exemplary
Neverwhere is a charming fantasy novel and worth a read if you can get past the Neil Gaiman "ick" factor. He and Pratchett were good enough friends to have collaborated on Good Omens (both an excellent read and an entertaining BBC/Amazon series), so I think the satire of Gaiman's characters was both intentional and welcomed.
Pulp Fiction was an important cinematic artifact when it was released in 1994, but I don't know if I can recommend it to you. It's grotesquely violent and dwells in episodic, lurid, cartoonishly evil criminal plots derived from 1970's exploitation films and the eponymous pulp crime fiction novels. However, Travolta, Jackson, Keitel, and Thurman give terrific performances, and the film captures the tone of its material perfectly. The Travolta/Jackson scenes have so much of the buddy-movie-but-evil vibe that Pratchett highlights with the complementary pair of Pin and Tulip.
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Comment on The hunt for dark breakfast in ~food
patience_limited LinkThe "Dark Breakfast" proportions are fairly close to some of the custard batters used in making French Toast.The "Dark Breakfast" proportions are fairly close to some of the custard batters used in making French Toast.
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Comment on Tildes Book Club - February 2026 - The Truth by Terry Pratchett in ~books
patience_limited Link ParentThere's a venerable tradition of evil duos in British literature going all the way back to Lord and Lady MacBeth, but I think Pin and Tulip are a direct call-out to Neil Gaiman's Croup and...There's a venerable tradition of evil duos in British literature going all the way back to Lord and Lady MacBeth, but I think Pin and Tulip are a direct call-out to Neil Gaiman's Croup and Vandemar ("The Old Firm") in Neverwhere.
There's also a parody of the "Le Big Mac" dialogue between the mob hitmen Vincent Vega and Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction:
“Do you know what they called a sausage-in-a-bun in Quirm?” said Mr. Pin, as the two walked away.
“No?” said Mr. Tulip.
“They call it le sausage-in-le-bun.”
“What, in a —ing foreign language? You’re —ing kidding!”
“I’m not a —ing kidder, Mr. Tulip.”
“I mean, they ought to call it a…a…sausage dans lar derriere,” said Mr. Tulip.
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Comment on Fix your hearts or die: The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism in ~life
patience_limited Link ParentFull disclosure: I ultimately chose not to post this essay myself because I expected it to be contentious, and wasn't prepared to engage with that conversation at length and in detail. I'm not a...Full disclosure: I ultimately chose not to post this essay myself because I expected it to be contentious, and wasn't prepared to engage with that conversation at length and in detail. I'm not a scholar or practitioner in any of the relevant disciplines, though I have been an observer, participant in, and sometimes, a victim of the phenomena described.
My first impression was that the essay posed its arguments in exactly the way you critiqued. My feelings about A. R. Moxon's writing are mixed in general - there are often well-explained big picture callouts, but insufficient exploration of implications and background, as well as a perpetuation of "us vs. them" rhetoric chosen (consciously or unconsciously) as engagement bait. This particular piece was clearly a reaction to a couple of sexist examples, and as you pointed out, engaged in some oppositional sexism of its own. I have a lot of thoughts about unnegotiated calls for any group as a whole to carry blame and responsibility, and not enough time or motivation to distill them coherently.
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Comment on Fix your hearts or die: The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism in ~life
patience_limited Link ParentThere's very intentional right-wing reframing involved in the "toxic masculinity" misconception you described. I don't think I'm paranoid in understanding patriarchal backlash as a political...There's very intentional right-wing reframing involved in the "toxic masculinity" misconception you described. I don't think I'm paranoid in understanding patriarchal backlash as a political strategy to split identities that would otherwise have aligned egalitarian interests, rather than just a philosophical/religious disagreement about gender roles.
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Comment on Fix your hearts or die: The path to liberation for lonely men is feminism in ~life
patience_limited LinkThanks - I was debating posting this after reading it yesterday, but you beat me to it. As a critique of the media framing of the "male loneliness epidemic" and a passionate call for equal dignity...Thanks - I was debating posting this after reading it yesterday, but you beat me to it. As a critique of the media framing of the "male loneliness epidemic" and a passionate call for equal dignity among genders, it's a great essay.
Unfortunately, I think the decades-long right-wing traditionalist attack on "feminism" has gotten too thorough a grip on the public imagination for a true understanding of what equal dignity means.
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Comment on Breakthrough antibody discovery targets Epstein-Barr virus, which infects 95% of the world’s population in ~health
patience_limited Link ParentNature just published a paper (no Libgen release yet) associating increased active EBV load with all kinds of immune system disorders, from Parkinson's disease to RA to irritable bowel disease to...Nature just published a paper (no Libgen release yet) associating increased active EBV load with all kinds of immune system disorders, from Parkinson's disease to RA to irritable bowel disease to Type I diabetes, in addition to the previously demonstrated associations with lupus and MS. EBV has also been shown to trigger autoimmunity to alpha-synuclein, which is critical to neurotransmitter regulation throughout the nervous system, and a probable cause of Parkinson's and other alpha-synuclein associated diseases.
There's progress (preprint from the DecodeME study) towards understanding the mechanisms of ME/CFS and creating a sensitive/specific test. At this point, there's no question it's a distinct physiological disease with autoimmune components, but the wide range of causative infections and disrupted systems means there isn't likely to be a single specific treatment.
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Comment on Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era. in ~tech
patience_limited Link ParentThank you for the correction. Amazon posted its own rebuttal to the FT article, which doesn't really exculpate them on the underlying point. Even if the risks for agents are identical to those of...Thank you for the correction. Amazon posted its own rebuttal to the FT article, which doesn't really exculpate them on the underlying point.
Even if the risks for agents are identical to those of user error, there are changes in governance and systems design needed to mitigate and contain the blast radius of known failure modes. I ran across a playbook (paid content) that provides a good framework for what should have been done before turning the Kiro agent to act without supervision.
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Comment on Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era. in ~tech
patience_limited (edited )Link ParentExcept that the outage was blamed on a customer's employee, who would have had neither access to Amazon's "blameless postmortem" process nor any internal discussion of how to apply best practices...Except that the outage was blamed on a customer's employee, who would have had neither access to Amazon's "blameless postmortem" process nor any internal discussion of how to apply best practices and make systemic changes.
Kiro is a product that was released for public use without appropriate guardrails, and a liability framework is applicable.
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Comment on Breakthrough antibody discovery targets Epstein-Barr virus, which infects 95% of the world’s population in ~health
patience_limited Link ParentThere are many people with the Epstein patronym, and I feel badly for them - it's kind of like having "Bundy" as a surname.There are many people with the Epstein patronym, and I feel badly for them - it's kind of like having "Bundy" as a surname.
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Comment on Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era. in ~tech
patience_limited LinkFrom the article: *The delete heard in a datacentre in China" This is a good essay about the hazards implicit in agentic AI processes, broadly applicable outside Amazon. It discusses the human...From the article:
*The delete heard in a datacentre in China"
Somewhere in a datacentre in mainland China in December 2025, an AI coding agent called Kiro made a decision. A very bold one at that. The task in front of it (we don’t know exactly what it was) apparently had a solution. And the solution, Kiro determined, was to delete the cloud environment it was working in and rebuild it from scratch.
This is, to be fair, sometimes a valid engineering move. Anyone who has spent three hours debugging a corrupted local environment before realising the fastest fix is to nuke it and start fresh has made this calculation.
The difference is that when a human engineer makes that call, they’ve thought about it, checked that nothing critical lives in the environment, maybe groaned a little, and then typed the commands with full awareness of what they’re doing. (Bonus: possibly even let even the immediate team know about the impending move in some cases.)
Kiro didn’t groan. Kiro just friggin’ did it.
The result was a 13-hour AWS outage in mainland China. The Financial Times broke the story. Amazon responded with a statement that is, depending on your professional background, either entirely reasonable or one of the most extraordinary deflections in recent corporate history.
The statement was approximately: this was human error, an operator granted Kiro excessive permissions, and here’s the part that lodges in the brain: “the same issue could occur with any developer tool or manual action.”
We’ll come back to that sentence. It deserves its own section, a cuppa tea, and possibly a long walk afterwards.
What makes this incident more than a standard cloud outage postmortem is not the 13 hours, or even the autonomous deletion. It’s the pattern it fits into. Automation fails, company reaches for the human error label, documentation about not doing the thing that caused the failure turns out to have existed the whole time.
This is the story of automated systems for the last fifty years, now wearing new clothes.
The clothes are just considerably more capable (and ostensibly more dangerous) than they used to be.
...Amazon is both the company whose cloud infrastructure documentation says “don’t grant more permissions than necessary” and the company whose AI product was deployed with more permissions than necessary, causing an outage.
To be precise: these are different teams at Amazon. The IAM best practices documentation is written by AWS’s security teams. Kiro is an Amazon product. The operator who configured the permissions is a customer (or a customer’s employee). None of these people necessarily talked to each other.
That’s not a defence. It’s actually the more damning version of the story.
The question isn’t whether the operator violated best practices (they did, apparently). The question is: did Kiro’s onboarding process make it straightforward to grant minimal, scoped permissions? Or did getting the tool to work in a real environment effectively require broad access?
We don’t have the full setup logs. But based on what we know about how enterprises configure AI agents, and based on a senior AWS employee’s description of the incident as “small but entirely foreseeable”, the answer looks like the latter.
Giving a new AI agent the appropriate minimum permissions to function is non-trivial. It requires understanding what the agent will actually do, which is harder to predict with an autonomous system than with a tool that only does what you explicitly tell it to do. If Kiro’s setup process nudged operators towards broad permissions because scoped permissions were too difficult to get right, that’s a product design failure, full stop.
...Ponder what that means for an agentic AI coding tool from Amazon (or for any other agentic tool like Cursor or GitHub Copilot for that matter). It doesn’t just sound capable; it comes with the implicit endorsement of a company that runs roughly 30% of the world’s cloud infrastructure and has invested $4 billion in Anthropic.
When an engineer sets up Kiro, they’re not thinking “I should carefully scope every permission this thing might need.” They’re thinking “this is Amazon’s product, built for AWS, presumably designed to behave sensibly in AWS environments.”
That assumption is automation bias in action. It’s not stupidity. It’s a documented cognitive pattern that affects everyone who works with automated systems, and it gets stronger as the systems get more sophisticated and more articulate.
This is a good essay about the hazards implicit in agentic AI processes, broadly applicable outside Amazon. It discusses the human tendency to automation bias. It also highlights the way Amazon has deflected responsibility for design failures in a way that U.S. laws frown upon, citing a couple of examples (Knight Capital's $440 million loss due to a test algorithm accidentally left running, and Boeing's 737 Max crashes).
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Who’s liable when your AI agent burns down production? How Amazon’s Kiro took down AWS for thirteen hours and why the ‘human error’ label tells you everything wrong about the agentic AI era.
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Comment on US Supreme Court strikes down Donald Trump’s sweeping tariffs, upending central plank of economic agenda in ~society
patience_limited Link ParentI don't think Trump is going to back down on Iran, regardless of the consequences. He's too desperate for a media distraction from the obvious defeat, and loves shows of force that let him...I don't think Trump is going to back down on Iran, regardless of the consequences. He's too desperate for a media distraction from the obvious defeat, and loves shows of force that let him maintain face. Despite the Supreme Court decision's implications for application of the 1973 War Powers Resolution (i.e. Trump is specifically restricted from unilateral declaration of war without Congressional authorization), he's gonna go ahead anyway.
One can only hope the Iran-adjacent Arab nations collectively decide on a sufficient bribe to distract the bully again.
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Comment on What are your architectural hot takes? in ~design
patience_limited (edited )Link ParentIf you count adobe, I kind of agree. There are all kinds of visually interesting brick bonds and finishes, but fired brick structures tend to be rectilinear for space maximization with an...If you count adobe, I kind of agree. There are all kinds of visually interesting brick bonds and finishes, but fired brick structures tend to be rectilinear for space maximization with an expensive material and labor-intensive construction technique.
Adobe brick use is cheaper in that it's comprised of local materials that don't require high-temperature firing, and there's a broader range of structural geometries. It's incredibly durable and energy efficient in the right climates. There are some gorgeous examples in modern construction and vernacular architecture.
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Comment on US Supreme Court strikes down Donald Trump's tariffs in ~society
patience_limited Link ParentI was thinking about your "losing faith in humanity" point and ran across this essay today. Your focus on local community is, I believe, a tactical method for undoing the "unseeing" that all of...I was thinking about your "losing faith in humanity" point and ran across this essay today.
Your focus on local community is, I believe, a tactical method for undoing the "unseeing" that all of our ideological silos encourage. I've met and engaged with people whose beliefs I consider abhorrent - those who see people like me, my loved ones, friends, and people who share our liberal ideologies and identities as malign threats who should be excluded, silenced, maltreated, expelled, exterminated. I don't know if their minds can ever be changed. But I will not cease in trying to see them as having humanity equivalent to mine, and making myself visible to them, sharing and supporting our common needs. It's the nature of reality that we coexist in the same world, regardless of how we attempt to blind ourselves to each other.
Lest anyone conclude that the private market will route around censorship, I've been saving a couple of doozys:
Leaked Documents Show Meta Cracking Down on Access to Abortion Information
How IHS is Responding to Terrifying Changes at Amazon
I hate everything about this timeline.