My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

If a serious company talks in earnest about “AI” empirically increasing productivity, odds are they mean revenue per employee Basically that’s revenue divided by number of employees And you can see what is likely to happen when customers are locked in and you lay off employees every quarter

If you’re worried that AI seems to be as intelligent and emotionally authentic as you are, maybe that says less about AI than it does about you.

some of the very real, specific harm perpetuated by Grok and Elon Musk’s nonconensual porn machine: www.404media.co/grok-nudify-...

😂

whereas, the pitch for genAI is to spend gravity bending amounts of money and resources to make copies of things we already have. it's a completely baffling idea that inverts all prior ideas of what good technology or business looks like

historically, tech was an infinite money printer because you can write a program once and then sell it or its utility unlimited times. you can keep building atop existing things and not have to duplicate effort on remaking things that already exist

I'm about to fly to Belfast, but it would be great to see even a couple of pledges when I land. I'll owe you a pint.

"On The Crank Spectrum" > Being a card carrying member of Team Words Mean Things is challenging on the best of These Days exple.tive.org/blarg/2026/0...

Has someone put together what the figure is for Microsoft licences at the European level? Because, let me tell you, we can really beat the crap out of that cost with options that work way better than Teams. The total gain from all Omnibuses is €12bn — we can beat that with *just* this.

Where’s that post about how the citizens didn’t know that Rome had fallen until nobody showed up to repair the bridges?

this is because none of these products were designed. Emphasis on designed. Design is the satisfaction of a purpose. If the purpose is an anticipated possible future then... I'm sorry, that wasn't design.

whenever someone pushes this idea of "we just need to find the killer app then this thing will be huge" it's game over

also being right about what? my taxes? how an automatic transmission works? if LLMs are sustainable? I'm sorry, but until we're talking about these as products and demanding the makers assert the exact uses they are appropriate for, then this is other people doing marketing for them.

having principles is so passé

This is genuinely scary now. The plausibility still falls apart like wet paper as soon as you look into it, but considering how far this scam has evolved in what, three months, I absolutely dread where we'll be by this time next year.

"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind." No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded.

We are demanding that EU co-legislators reject attempts in the AI Omnibus to remove a key transparency safeguard from the AI Act. We cannot open a loophole that would let providers exempt themselves from the AI Act’s high risk requirements with no transparency www.accessnow.org/press-releas...

Google are *proactively* supporting ICE by voluntarily providing data without legal requirement to do so. Look at this list: "Google also turned over Thomas-Johnson’s IP addresses, phone numbers, subscriber numbers and identities, and credit card and bank account numbers linked to his account." 🧵

no need for concern everyone they will address this by volume, because you see once they get 1,000x as many users they'll be able to blow $5 trillion to earn $1.4 billion so they'll be able to then cover 28% of the $5 billion they're spending right now

What does the person in the mirror want? Why do they copy me? If I smash the mirror, have I committed murder?

jeeeeeeesus: theintercept.com/2026/02/10/g...

NEW: Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff ‘joked’ with employees who had traveled to the United States for a Salesforce all-hands meeting that ICE agents were in the building keeping tabs on them, 404 Media has learned.

now that i'm thinking about it: • google got everybody to seo the shit out of their websites • it hoovered up that information to train its answer bot • it now cuts out other websites completely • why continue to play along

Uh. I'm not working on an engineering team right now. So I don't have pessonal experience. But from what I'm hearing? It's not looking good. No, backlogs are not getting shorter. There are more "projects" in flight though as people let AI churn on problems.

It really sucks that the "merchants of doubt" around "AI" water usage are so good at spreading doubt. Because the water usage *is* bad, and even if data centers somehow magically created additional water, they'd still be bad for all the other reasons that data centers are bad

we have reached memeception

This is key, and why relying on "lived experience" of these products is misguided & dangerous. We should listen to people's lived experience of oppression in healthcare, & of what their needs are. But that does not mean taking people's impressions of the cognitive hazard machine at face value

Our product can show you what's outside the window that's right next to you, perform a Google search slower than you can yourself, and misinform your surgeon mid-procedure, causing a catastrophic failure that will injure you for life. The entire economy is propped up on it

Right, fellow Welsh learners, I am taking the plunge: My new structured practice program is ready for early birds at just £5 pcm until 31 March. Properly learn all the grammar your course skimmed over, expand your vocabulary, and grow your confidence! ymestyn.cymru #dysgucymraeg

A tiny dilapidated house with a modern touch. #Iceland #Reykjavik #photography #landscape #nature #naturephotography #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #trees #sky #grass

Post a banger that is not in English. The Sugarcubes: "Regína (Icelandic Version)" www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXUl...

Age verification? When I was growing up we only had one TV channel in Iceland and it took Thursdays off to give the employees a break.

Leadership: "AI is so good it writes almost all our code" Status dashboard:

One of my favourite facts about Iceland is that there are about 75 Eagle's nests in the country, scientists know where they are, but because the White-tailed eagle is endangered here that knowledge is guarded like a state secret. So if you ever meet a biologist that knows, he will not tell you.

One of the wickedest things Wes Streeting has ever done is push politically convenient falsehoods about suicide rates amongst young trans people. We have new data from the National Child Mortality Database that exposes the truth he tried to cover up.

You know it’s a bubble when all the boosters seem to have forgotten basic economics. Like the effect of supply and demand on pricing.

Do yourself a favour and take a moment to appreciate all the feather textures on display here. What an amazing creature! An uncommonly beautiful Common Raven #birds

Almost exactly three years ago, this thread on "AI" in healthcare and the kinds of things likely to go wrong in that context:

That Harvard Business Review study on “AI” use at a 200 person tech company “causing” stress, and burnout does not mention layoffs. Most tech cos have been doing sizeable layoffs “Employees burning out from overwork after layoffs reach for ‘AI’ out of desperation” would be a very different story

The saga has left Thomson with a rare distinction. She is one of the few people to be mentioned in the Epstein documents – her name appears 38 times – and emerge with their reputation enhanced. “I’m now the cool mum because I’m in the Epstein files for the right reasons,” she said.

As always, great products destroyed by shallow, status hungry sociopaths rising to positions of power within an organization, and fucking up because their goals are misaligned with the goals of the product/teams/users.

And here is my story: ‘Absolute hell’: Irishman with valid US work permit held by Ice since September www.irishtimes.com/world/us/202...

man about to invent the greatest science fiction movie ever made "i knew i wanted to do a scary movie on a spaceship with a small number of astronauts" this is how artists actually talk

They have now removed the Pride flag from the Stonewall Inn. Erasure. Just like the Nazis. gaycitynews.com/trump-rainbo...

(Sorry I can't remember who, but someone was making the point about several of these studies that the evaluation scenarios are always set up to accommodate the affordances of the synthetic text extruding machines. The "humans" are just asked to adapt.) >>

If your study is framed as asking whether "AI" does X as well as humans do, it's fundamentally misguided and I'd argue not scientifically sound. A short 🧵>>

kind of funny that an olympian said they are here to represent "compassion, respect, and love for others" and some people automatically knew that was a statement against them

I think I said this a while ago while arguing with people who said that bots can do law / medicine. The difficulty in practice is not simply knowing the symptoms of a clinical presentation. It is understanding that you have to ask people questions to make sure you understand what is happening.