Yet another way to put this: - Compilers, interpreters, libraries, etc. allow you to run an abstract program on a concrete platform. - Language models give you a heuristic answer to the question "what could a concrete program having abstract properties X, Y and Z look like?"

Me: Heh, you're the fourth person in one week that I've heard joking about wanting to switch careers away from programming because of AI. Them: ... Me: ... Them: I wasn't joking.

"Capable LLMs require a logic of dominance and of disregarding consent of the people producing the artifacts that are the raw material for the system. LLMs are based on extraction, exploitation and subjugation. Their politics is violence. How does one ...Acting ethically in an imperfect world

the "open source LLMs running locally" idea is very naive nobody in the OS community has the resources to build an LLM "from scratch" - mainly ppl use a variant of Llama - meta's LLM - trained on stolen data that was cleaned by underpaid workers in global south - and thus exhibit the same biases

Experience has taught me that the busier a dev team looks, typically the less they're actually getting done.

Vibe coding is not "just another abstraction". Abstractions are constraints on thought, not freedom from having to think. An abstraction without constraints is as nonsensical as a board game without pieces or rules.

Boosters want to reduce the discussion to evaluating the performance of tasks, bc that discussion never ends: just release a new model or redefine a task and take it from the top The real and unanswered criticism is that this tech *implies and requires* a social arrangement that is deeply harmful

The AI hype train is on the fast track towards technofeudalism. This is why I keep asking people to look out the window and show me something different. Unfortunately enough people are along for the ride and don't care where we end up.

It's marketing for the corporations whether you want it to be or not. Because they want you to believe that they've created a machine god instead of something powered by humans being hidden from view and being exploited to give the appearance of "intelligence" that doesn't exist.

Why isn't the left excited about a handful of billionaires stealing all of humanity's digitized cultural output and using sweatshop labor to distill it into a funny kind of database, causing all kinds of societal, environmental and economic harms in the process?Truly a mystery for the ages.

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

incredible: outsourcing work to the lowest cost bidder has not increased productivity

What a time to be alive for people who have been pushing the systems perspective in software.

I can’t believe you lefty Luddites hate tech so much that you embrace mRNA vaccines, heat pumps, electric bikes, hybrid work, renewable power (and awesome advancements in storage), space telescopes, and hot/cold running water but reject the planet destroying plagiarism enrich the worst people bots!

I regularly see people wondering how it's possible that there are so many musicians and writers and film makers and artists from a tiny nation like Iceland. And the answer is really simple: State funding for art education and artists. I literally get a salary from the government to write books.

Everybody’s talking about the destruction of consumer electronics and that’s bad, but basically everything in modern life has a computer in it. Hospitals, airports, transportation, shipping, medical devices, farm equipment, and point of sale terminals had a good run

"the left is ignoring the usefulness of AI" no it's more like it is kind of central to left leaning politics that causing massive negative externalities for your own personal convenience is a shitty way to live. you're just saying you do not like the implications of this position

hard to escape the feeling nobody gives a shit about anything

So is programming. Which is why "vibe coding" is bunk. You have to think through exactly what you want the program to do, and only writing the code will force you to actually think it through properly.

It’s easy to think writing is mainly the transcription of ideas you already have—that is, until you try to write something worthwhile, and you find what you thought were saying transform into something far more interesting in the process. This skips that last step, and that is *not* an improvement.

this is fine https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/116080909947754833 > So I started looking through Claude commits on GitHub, there’s over 2m of them and it’s about 5% of all open source code this month. > I saw the same class of vulns being introduced over, and over, again - several a minute.

this reminds me of seeing people learning to program who are at the stage where they think about programs mostly syntactically, as making a sequence of symbols that represent instructions. that's not what programming actually is and it's a category error to produce it as though it was

> For the first time in my life, I’m suddenly wary of meeting other "computer programmers" in the wild. I feel like there’s a decent chance we won’t actually have much in common, let alone values or morality. ratfactor.com/tech-nope2

This is fantastic, and it's something that we've been saying for years. When companies say that are using "AI for climate change", they are referring to much smaller models used for doing things like climate modeling. Massive generative AI models are NOT USEFUL for mitigating climate change.

Naurattaa kyllä vähän, kun 40-luvulla köyhä sodan runtelema maatalousvaltainen liki kehitysmaa onnistui päättämään ilmaisesta lounaasta kansakouluihin, mutta vuonna 2026 aamupala olisi kommunismia, johon ei vaan riitä rahkeet.

Principles/approaches I’ve argued for and adopted in my career got me good results & have helped my own and many peers’ growth. Yet it feels like I’m always “losing” in that what “wins” in the industry often directly conflicts with lots of it. It’s increasingly harder to deal with the dissonance.

"you can build a C compiler (with heavy caveats) in 2 weeks for $20k, all you need is a C compiler" is a laughable boast

”I don’t want to ‘just put it in copilot’ because accuracy matters“ shouldn’t become a conversation about the extra work I can do to check, confirm and correct the errors of the thing that’s ’saving time’. There‘s this thing called reading, let me do it.

A short lesson on the Theory of Constraints draganstepanovic.substack.com/p/your-ai-ge...

I used "smooth-brained" as a dig until a father of a boy with lissencephaly -- the medical term for the condition -- wrote me an incredibly patient note to explain what his son had to deal with. This phrase is a gratuitous insult to parents and children who are already suffering. Don't use it.

and ridley scott, one of the greatest artists who ever lived--who fully knows this, by the way, and has commented on it--just goes "I wanted to make the texas chainsaw massacre of star wars" because he does not want to control how you see him, he's just telling you something interesting

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

"I never had high expectations of this industry, but it still managed to disappoint me." <- This

> They say “oh, no” even as they keep pressing the “do horrible things with a machine made by horrible people” button again and again, just because they think it’ll boost their productivity by 5-10%.

Among my many beefs with LLM-based systems is I refuse to agree with the future of technology being limited to a poor copy of the most popular bad ideas of the past, but stolen.

The end result of outsourcing most of your thinking is pretty predictable. The end result of outsourcing it to something that can't actually think is <chef's kiss>

In this age of "AI", that old dragon of measuring dev productivity by output has reared its head again. The idea that "coding = productivity" still has a strong grip on our industry. But what if coding is really when we're *least* productive? codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/c...

We who cut mere stones must always keep in mind our team's quarterly OKRs.

fwiw I don't think it is possible to build genAI in such a way that it benefits workers rather than capital because it is fundamentally based on non consensual extraction of labour to get going. what would it actually mean for the workers to own the means of production here

Seeing people in software dev who, a minute ago were talking about ethics, accessibility and sustainability, disregard the unethical nature of the tech and switch to using LLMs tells you everything you need to know about why the software industry continuously enables horrible things

Mafia goon: Nice house you got here...it'd be a shame if something happened to it Media outlets: Mafia goon rules out use of force. Expresses regret at the mere thought of it

Right on cue, here are the push alerts from the 3 major newspapers lmao

Whoa! Mind blown: the s/ORIG/NEW/ syntax predates Unix:

The Nobel Peace Prize becoming so prestigious that wars are fought over a head of state coveting it is some real monkey paw stuff for Alfred Nobel.

What a great time to be staking your entire institutional infrastructure on a US company.

One thing that now even the most hopeful have to admit, is that the unctuous European tactic of flattering, praising, massaging Trump has been a catastrophic failure and made things worse.

I stopped trying to debate software developers on LLMs a while back. It's fruitless. Even if they could be budged on empirical grounds, they are explicitly fine with using tools that are themselves deeply unethical.

from Patrick McDonnell's book The Super Hero's Journey: