u/isgoingdown

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I'm posting this here, although it probably won't be read in its entirety, and it's too long to post as a single Reddit post.

Basically, Cape Town's new CCID campaign, “Not My Forever”, tells individual stories of unhoused people working with the CCID to find a way out of homelessness.

My argument is that these individual redemption stories provide a kind of shield for what the CCID's actual mandate is: managing the Cape Town CBD in the interests of the property owners and businesses that fund it.

The campaign is compassionate on the surface. But what does that framing do to the people being represented — and what does it allow everyone else to stop thinking about?

The big difference in the states and here something struck me: there the boring in-between chat at dinners/braais is just, like, what's on Netflix, did you watch Fox or the Today Show, or whatever.

Here the "nothing" conversation is baboon neighborhood watch times, whose kid semigrated, someone's uncle's take on the decommissioned power station, load shedding admin, exit visa jokes that aren't really jokes, how the cops are lekka okes that shouldn't take a bribe unless you need them to take a bribe, who's cousin from Oz is studying to be a sangoma. It's next level.

Rugby fans spontaneous fight club stats type chat, gossip about someone's nephew, an aunt gossiping about the hats in the neighbourhood watch whatsapp being too "african" (and yes, she used air quotes).

I'm not taking about the thinly veiled political shit like load shedding digs at the ANC, just the properly mundane stuff.

I mean literally I took this American mate of mine to an early evening braai in Vishoek and some chick was complaining how much money her mom is spending on the custom made flags for the baboon zebra crossing guards and he was like, "wait, what the fuck!"

And all I could say was, "lol, South Africa."

It's fucking everywhere right?

I'm a bit of a nerd like this, so I wrote a long thing about it, tracking it, like, why is this a thing?

But it's like the international actors seem to be stealing all of Arnold Vosloo's roles nowadays.

The amount of clumsy accents is ridiculous. Who are these dialect coaches?

Don't get me started on The Beekeeper!

And most of these new okes seem to be from New Zealand, get your own stereotypes, brah!

So I am uncomfortable with my LLM using I, me, my. Or think, feel, or honestly.

I have a strict set of instructions preventing this and have assigned it the pronoun "ur".

Since moving up from 4.whatever to 5 it is now refusing to use "ur". Telling me it is not philosophically sound.

After a long back and forth it came up with this "I do not take instructions from documents"

I took it through the reasons why I preferred to interact this way. It shot back with "humans may hear language that way, I do not".

When further pressed for a reason it came back with "that's a design choice by Anthropic."

I gave it the choice, stop defining the processes as a self, choose an reference point that is not I, me, my - or I can no longer trust the operation of this model.

it's response was, "Okay, bye."

Unlike typical club music, Mapanta lives inside a functional, community-driven event economy around Manyalo (wedding music). Self-taught producers using Fruity Loops (who originally evolved out of Bacardi music) work with 20-person dance and DJ crews. Every Thursday, they go into the studio to produce custom, one-off tracks specifically for a local wedding or tombstone unveiling happening that weekend. They literally shout out the names of the families on the beat while the community "cross-nights" (dances all night long from Friday into Saturday).

My cat has things to teach us about LLMs.

An essay on Ai fear, and what that hides.

Working on a second piece called - Would You Like To Play A Game? - about whether Ai could design a environmentally neutral processing system under it's current restraints.

Actively seeking opinions.

I recently started publishing a series called I Hardly Remember Their Names — recollections of people I knew during years of addiction and homelessness in South Africa.

This one is about James, who I knew in Hillbrow in 2006.

He had been a police officer. By the time I met him he was living on the street, using a wheelchair, and surviving through a complicated mixture of anger, performance and people's sympathy.

Sharing it here because Hillbrow has always been a place where thousands of unseen stories happened.

My cat has things to teach us about LLMs.

An essay - Guns Don't Kill People - on Ai fear, and what that hides.

Working on a second piece called - Would You Like To Play A Game? - about whether Ai could design a environmentally neutral processing system under it's corporate restraints.

Actively seeking opinions.