A homemade bench. #Iceland #photography #streetphotography #abandoned #decay #concrete #bench #graffiti

The phrase "what would move the needle on climate" is rich. We know what moves the needle on climate. We saw what moves the needle on climate in 2020. People with power just don't like the answers.

Software development practices spread using the exact same cognitive biases as beliefs in homeopathy

This is such a good point by Laura. Really consider it if you're feeling the pull to use AI stuff because someone you respect in tech is talking about how good it is etc. It's very likely they'll be profiting from that stance and if not, questions need to be raised about their naivety in general.

strangely most people do not want to go to space, a place that hates you and wants you to die this is both literal and metaphorical

How infantilizing --- you thought you were looking to find something that someone else wrote on the web. But woah! Now you've been "dropped into" an "interactive experience". Yeah, Google can just fuck right off with that. >>

Wow some terrible reporting about Google's latest horrible ideas about how to distort information access in the name of "convenience" (or something): techcrunch.com/2026/05/19/g... A short thread 🧵>>

This is the key, I think (re grad’s booing AI boosters). The very rich are leading a completely insular life cut off from not just non-rich opinions, but a distorted sense of what “work” is.

"GitHub did not name the compromised extension." 😐 techcrunch.com/2026/05/20/g...

“LLemdashes” https://wil.to/posts/llemdashes/ > These tools, to the extent they can or should ever be personified, want rid of me pretty bad — but not half as badly as they want to prevent another one of me from ever happening again.

Lots of tech companies are releasing surveillance specs & I’m reminded of the internal Meta memo to put facial rec in their glasses during a “dynamic political environment” because people will be too focused on other issues to resist. Companies think now is the right time to foist these on us all.

2016 web developer worries: "man, divs really are hard to center!" 2026 web developer worries: "there are 639 compromised npm package versions in tonight’s Mini Shai-Hulud wave"

Without a single exception, every "why don't the data centre people care about the bigger problem, [x]" gripe from centrist data centre fanboys is something that one of the groups raising concerns about data centres has also fought on, it's just they never, ever check

if you post anything on youtube, you can and should opt your channel out of this www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/dig...

im dreaming of a time when using ai is widely considered as embarrassing and big ai is viewed as a danger to the public on a par with big tobacco and big oil

There’s a point in every enterprising graduate student’s life when he or she realizes that a lot of the senior academics hate reading and writing. As in, they chose a career defined by written communication and they are livid to discover that they’ll be expected to conform. Blows your mind.

My kingdom for a tech ecosystem that will stop smothering me with apps and devices that constantly try to engage me in conversation against my will

My apathy levels for the industry are absolutely sky high and I don’t even have a dickhead boss making me hit token targets

it’s the tragedy of enclosure all over again and a lot of it’s bottom-up which is extra depressing

info on the github breach appears to only be available on xitter 🙄 , I fished it out for you. #github

Made some charts from a big new study that shows: - Climate pollution from new data centres in the US = to adding one new Australia - Higher pollution, power prices no matter the scenario analysed - DC growth undoes the impact of a modelled resurrection of Biden-era clean policies

there is an entire population out there who believes that everything they see online is addressed directly to them and must be replied to. these are the people who read "What did you think of this product?" on amazon and leave a 1* review going "I didn't buy it I clicked the link by mistake."

“The likelihood of PII appearing in AI training data is only increasing as public data ‘runs out’ and AI companies look for new sources of high-quality training data. This includes information from data brokers and people-search websites.”

I wonder if we'll see a new term for "the web" that's somewhat like "the dark web". Something that marks the open web as unclean, unruly, dangerous, bad and only marks the LLM filtered version as desirable.

if search engines stop directing people to other websites then there will be barely any incentive for people to write anything on the web, unless we go back to a pre-1998 blogroll/webring mode of discovery bsky.app/profile/tech...

it bears repeating that AI is a machine for destroying information

blogged: Google just spat in my face dbushell.com/2026/05/20/g... — go on then, one last blog before my holiday 🫩

I also want to say that I really appreciated the expression by @danmcquillan.bsky.social — we are indeed > witnessing due to AI, which is deeply historically and presently intertwined with psychology, the “severing of society from its previous moorings.” (McQuillan, 2026) doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

You can't tell the world you use AI for *just this small thing* without contributing to the legitimacy for the whole AI industry. You also can't use AI for *just this small thing* and think that you won't become the next *just this small thing*.

LLMs are not designed for a purpose. They are not designed for a group of related purposes. They are not a product of design. They are a mechanism of design which is being reactively presented as solutions for whatever purposes seem to have the most revenue potential.

Good piece by Jefferson Pooley on how LLM-powered “research” tools like Google’s “Deep Research” and Elsevier’s “AI Discovery” likely strengthen the “Matthew effect”: highly-cited authors are amplified while undercited (often female) authors are increasingly ignored: blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

What happens when the sources dry up, because Google is no longer sending traffic? Where will it get its answers from then? We’re heading into a deeply weird period for the internet, where sources and facts are replaced by fancy autocomplete and generated bullshit.

I've talked about this with a lot of different smart people lately but it is truly amazing to see how much the tide of public opinion has changed against the tech oligarchs and executives.

https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/52116 When I say that people have known for years that the most widely used coding environment in the world was inherently insecure, I mean it. Here's the issue being discussed in 2018.

“Hidden Signals Can Hijack AI Voice Systems - IEEE Spectrum” https://spectrum.ieee.org/voice-ai-audio-attacks > Research shows sounds unheard by human ears can hijack models’ behavior The entirety of the “AI” ecosystem has been built in perfect ignorance of basic security practices.

People have been warning for years that many of the software development tools everybody is told to use were fundamentally insecure—in this case MS’s VS Code—and now that long-ignored vulnerability has exposed another standard tool, GitHub https://x.com/github/status/2056949168208552080#m

“Google just spat in my face – David Bushell – Web Dev (UK)” https://dbushell.com/2026/05/20/google-just-spat-in-my-face/ > Google’s idea of “modern web” is a deskilling effort that should deeply offend developers to their core.

“On Google declaring war on the Web” https://tante.cc/2026/05/20/on-google-declaring-war-on-the-web/ > This is a literal revolution but one against the participatory web, against us: The goal is to take away the web and guide people into Google’s abstraction on top of it.

Let's look at the view. #Iceland #photography #streetphotography #nature #landscape #naturephotography #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #concrete #window

Will never stop saying this, in the face of AI, book publishing had (has) an amazing opportunity to double down on everything - taste & curation (acquisition), nurture writers, editorial rigour and integrity, quality production & copyright protection. If they lose any of this to AI, they’re fucked.

The idea that water impacts from data centres are "made up" or "fake" is a nasty right-wing / tech shill talking point that seems to be getting more and more disconnected from reality every single day

Oh god everyone is saying “enshittifying” again and while I know WHY it enrages me It’s still another example of folks truly thinking them not knowing anything including basic pattern matching Is only impactful when a white man insults the Black woman who actually framed the discourse

Sometimes it’s not “enshittification” ( it almost never is) It’s either - this person was lying and you don’t want to examine how you missed it - it always was at this horrific level but for people you refused to even acknowledge - you thought the horror was a justified consequence

I am very cranky that "it used to work on my machine and now it doesn't so I'm going to make it everyone's problem" is considered reasonable political analysis by so many people.

Heads up. He is/was in a lot of starter packs, too, so check yours if you've made one so you're no longer recommending a rapist.

“Wire mother?”

me over a decade ago: startups are a cult everybody then: nahhhh startups today: it's inject-yourself friyays!!

Straight hockey players? In this economy?!

“A University of Michigan researcher told the AP that Whisper created false text in 80 percent of public meeting transcripts examined.” Consider saying “no” if your doctor wants to use “AI transcription” for your appointment.