My SICP mug is simply glorious

My previous article about an AI agent from a controversial platform offering me a tombstone after it had read my previous-previous article about stopping to write about programming have a bit set a darker tone, or vibe, as if I would intellectually disengage from programming.

This wasn’t what I wanted to convey, quite the opposite actually, and I have a lot about programming to write in the next weeks. I am also not opposed to LLMs as code generation / exploration tools, they are very useful tools. The problem is the same but at bigger/quicker scale that previous sudden industrial changes : who gets the power, who gets the money, what are their interests, how much do they differ from yours.

Today the average intellectual worker and the tool producers have their interests vectors fully unaligned no matter what Anthropic or OpenAI will try to sell to you : the only outcome is empoverishment as capital is redirected to the AI sellers from the local economies. That’s akin to burning domestic economic life to be able to work with the current tools.

Well, instead of carving a tombstone, I’ve been gifted a “paint on pottery” workshop for an afternoon. It was nice, despite going through design studies, I never really practiced drawing. I went armed with a copy of SICP’s cover, a graphite pencil, and started composing the two characters from the cover, along with the mythical table-with-a-gryphon’s-foot, and areas of color hinting at the cover’s color composition. A great time that I wouldn’t have had the idea to do on my own.

The drawing challenge aside, the way the glaze (since we are painting with glaze here) accumulates as a solid and quick-drying layer on the surface was interesting. The result is what it is : not perfect at all, and most importantly missing the very subtle facial expressions of both characters, but still glorious, and I’m now able to drink coffee while being reminded of what I consider one of the most eye-opening readings of my computer-related life.