spoiler: it’s not going to be worth it once the subsidies end. AI is a doomed venture and everyone but the CEOs knows it

when i was 20 i moved into an apartment with a guy who lived there before, and he had to spend days on cleaning out all the layers of ammonia on the bedroom walls from his old roommate and then 2 months later it turned out there was still even more ammonia that needed a bit to reach the surface

recent events have been teaching me just how many things, both online and off, have been relying on the assumption that github will always be up for example: the flavor of arch linux i'm using has a mirrorlist ranking script that's failed multiple times trying to get a txt file from a github repo

it's interesting b/c there isn't really evidence that the code counts as license-free. if anything, that a.i. content in america can't have copyright would very much indicate the rules still apply but if anyone calls this out in court, and it works, 2+ years of software development dies overnight

i think a lot of this stuff is much easier to wrap your head around if you understand that the median american only attains information whenever the algorithms on tiktok/instagram/facebook decides to allow them, and if it does not appear through those avenues, it does not exist

you can tell how obviously flawed this whole debate is by noting how simply stating, in dry terms, what a large language model is — a fuzzy search that gives you fact-agnostic responses to prompts, weighed by likely relation — is enough to make a lot of these centrists foam at the mouth

🌸 As many a wise elder sage predicted 🌸 Note there's _zero_ mention here why this is good for users, only mentions why this is good for Microsoft…

seems like a great technology to build literally everything on

unfixable problem btw

to be clear, this is still a very subsidized cost, even if it's technically more expensive than before what's actually happening is the industry-wide realization that they'll need to convince investors they can jack up prices even further, so they need everyone to get used to per-token costs asap

again, this is predictable from information theory. the claims being made for genAI's abilities require breaking the laws of thermodynamics

it's objectively really funny that former crypto-bros hear that large language models use a thing called a "token" and they all immediately relapse into treating it like currency

we can make fun of these guys, and it is both fun and informative to, so you should but i do want to make it clear that if you're a tech worker currently writing about how evil the industry "has become", you're much closer to this guy in terms of awareness than you might realize

Something we don’t address enough is how many people, especially adults, do not have a working imagination.

one poison pill i've had to swallow recently was in understanding that, contrary to what i believed, most middle managers who use chatgpt and its ilk know fully-well what it does they're aware it is, philosophically, lying. so are they. they think that's how everyone operates, is by lying

for all the ways i hate tumblr (a website whose early design flaws were so significant, they're literally responsible for large chunks of negative aspects in modern internet communities) it's crazy that they solved photo galleries in social media a decade ago and nobody's replicated it ever since

when this all blows over, we need to do everything in our power to shame every single person who thought running 500,000 data centers on the likelihood-relation responder was in any way a viable economic business model i don't care how experienced you are. if you bought into this, you're a mark

In order to be worthwhile for investors, AI companies need to simultaneously: - increase demand 100,000x - increase capacity to support that usage - make a profit instead of a loss on each token Which, well, lol.

Commentary: You Can’t Even Watch A Movie Anymore Without Seeing Some Theme Explored https://theonion.com/you-cant-even-watch-a-movie-anymore-without-seeing-some-theme-explored/

Australia's cyber security co-ordinator just dropped what I think will be a very useful reaction meme

had recent blood work where the paper explanation was, and i quote, "followup to confirmed diagnosis of hypothyroidism" i do not have hypothyroidism. turns out my doctor ran my profile through one of these scribes, and it just invented the diagnosis after seeing i was a slightly overweight female

favorite brand of a.i. guy response to "large language models do not think because that's not how humans think" is "well what if i was stupid enough to operate like one. what if i never thought about any of the things i say. bet you feel pretty silly now huh"

didn't you put your phone in the pool because it was too hot or something?

hello hi yes so this makes sense when you understand that the sucess condition for an LLM is the production of a text-base, genre-bound performance of a plausible and acceptable answer to a given question. the question defines the expected genre.

always have to reiterate that all of this assumes the code generated from large language models count as "clean" code, when there's a very real chance it doesn't but the tech industry doesn't like to think about that, because if a.i. generated code can count as a gpl violation: uh oh. uh oh! uh oh

the most literal example of how society will, actively, shamelessly, ruin their own lives in the hopes that someone they hate might suffer slightly more

everything about the tech industry makes more sense if you assume, as a default state, that developers a) hate code b) hate computers c) think you're weird if you like code or computers d) will risk everything if it means thinking about code and computers less

AI has made forms of mental illness formerly only available to the stupendously wealthy accessible to the common man.

If you don't stop hiding behind the block button there will be consequences. You have been warned.

i've been calling them the zuckerbergs because i think he should be permanently associated with it until the day he dies

sometimes i think about how amazon convinced everyone to put voice recording devices in their homes, giving them one of the largest private surveillance states in modern history that they lost money on. because every time a tech company violates privacy it's somehow exclusively for stupid reasons

Going well fortune.com/article/why-...

putting this into the same category as linkedin scraping your chrome extensions with javascript to profile you aka "wait, why are you able to do that"

https://mike-sheward.medium.com/deleteduser-com-a-15-pii-magnet-c4396eb21061 Turns out a lot of companies just overwrite deleted users' email with a "deleteduser.com" email address and all you need to do to get a stream of personal data is register that domain and set up an catchall email address

something kind of endearing in the fact that someone can sincerely gain employment in a company named palantir *palantir*, working for **palantir** and then be like uhhhh i dunno man i didn't think the corporation known as ***palantir*** would be thaaaaaat evil there weren't any signs yknow

it's fascinating how everyone can immediately understand why it's a bad idea to make a computer that's people-shaped when it's a real robot (see all the QRTs with variations on the statement "we have cars") but when it's a large language model, everyone just assumes it can do everything perfectly

“The poet John Keats described ‘neg capability’: the ability to remain ‘in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, w/o any irritable reaching after fact &reason’…neurosci increasingly…[shows that]capacity to tolerate ambiguity—to sit w/not knowing—appears central to flexible, creative &resilient thinkng”🧪

when i have to go to one job board, i have to maximize my browser window or else it breaks, and if i go to another job board, i have to unmaximize it and then make it take up 1/3rd of my screen or else it breaks these aren't small organizations either. this is just how it's like now

having to cycle through a dozen websites to find volunteer work and i'm struck by how websites in 2026 are unusable in extremely basic ways like, css breakpoints that don't work, clickable elements that can't be clicked on, popups that can't be closed, box-shadows being in places they shouldn't be

Good morning from the <body> tag on a typical Squarespace website and its one hundred and forty eight classes, which is obviously a completely normal and sensible way to build good websites that work very well and are unlikely to cause any problems for generations of future maintenance engineers. 🤡

something noticeable doing job searching rn is how many expected qualifications exist not for the job, which otherwise does not need it, but for the hiring manager who wants to cut down on applicants see also non-tech customer service jobs suddenly requiring i.t. bachelors degrees

I will never stop laughing about that thread by Jonny where someone in his comments is saying that he just needs to use better prompts and jonny is trying to get the guy to understand that the code he’s posting is the _Claude source code_

More on the rationale behind “AI-washing”: builtin.com/articles/ai-...

having had this same frustration for years, the executives pushing it generally don't see a difference they've been confidently lying their way into huge salaries, and they think everyone who makes less money is worse at lying. a computer that lies for them is simple efficiency, in their mind

i've seen guys irl with the zuckerbergs on, and i cannot stress enough how nobody who wants these are anywhere in the ballpark of socially well-adjusted or even particularly fashionable they only want glasses that could conceivably look like normal glasses, otherwise it's harder to get creepshots

oomf was in a state of collapse

Say what you will about nerds, but back when only nerds made websites, they worked. You'd fire up your computer, go to a website, and it was actually there

the modern developer is ignorant to basic concepts about their own job, because that would require the desire to learn things they don't immediately need, and they fundamentally do not like coding or computers enough to care if you understand this, the current tech industry starts to make sense

something i've just caught onto today: lack of open volunteer positions. partly because everyone else unemployed is looking to volunteer for the sake of resume padding, but also because nonprofits can't even afford the resources necessary to find people willing to work for literally free

to be clear, the mere argument of vibe coding possibly breaking your website is a mark against vibe coding if there were actual "productivity gains", people would see it easily, in software that's more stable and with more features. that all vibe-coded software is at best neutral is a very bad sign