RE: https://infosec.exchange/@beyondmachines1/116667890787158422 I want everyone in tech to make it excruciatingly clear what their bosses are worth. Nobody forced them. They dove straight into this with enthusiasm on top of the assholes who wanted to consolidate power over everything and […]

A great way to maximise productivity and efficiency would be to retain talent and keep employee attrition rates as low as possible, and yet companies prefer to churn through staff.. It's almost always about consolidating power and control even when that hurts the business. Same with aggressive […]

Real talk: the real "supply chain risk" is that you treat your open source "supply chain" like shit and assume that we will all take any amount of abuse from you and just keep doing volunteer labor forever without ever complaining. And, equally real talk: most of us—myself included—actually do […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@campuscodi/116649022439044971 I mean, agents are like the most credulous noobs ever? And, well, people hate them and their purveyors and proponents have a low view of consent, so… YA LOVE TO SEE IT!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@pojntfx/116645092758641265 This has been the norm for software engineering for a while. Credulity, careerism, and "go along to get along" have been ascendent for at least a decade.

From the article in the LB: "In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike […]

Companies that would rather their product is a steaming pile of shit that falls over in a light breeze than grant their employees a single drop of leverage are obviously leaning heavily into the ai mandates.. We're finding out how much of a steaming pile of shit your product can be without […]

RE: https://raggedfeathers.com/@lilithsaintcrow/116603572788067820 Some of them are also doing it because they (or their investors and boards) are also invested in one of the big labs.

RE: https://tldr.nettime.org/@tante/116603384370030013 They've been killing it slowly for 20 years. I didn't see it back then when people warned about it, but it has been clear for a while now.

"It is difficult to get a person to understand something when their comfort depends on their not understanding it." – paraphrase of a quote by Upton Sinclair This applies to everyone who still expresses any shock, surprise, or disbelief at actions by or statements of Donald Trump, his […]

RE: https://mstdn.social/@Strandjunker/116597631922567904 I understand that it feels really bad right now, and the Republicans (along with the complicit dominant, moderate Democrats) are abominable, but this take is ahistorical (or rooted in a bizarre notion of what makes a time period "sad") […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@adhd_coffee/116595275870812142 Part of the reason this is true, as with a variety of disorders, is that one lens we can examine ADHD through is the poor design of industrialized society. I'm actually a lot happier unmedicated and more creative, too. But, without […]

I regret to give anyone this information that didn't already have it, but "the left for AI" as a cluster of ideas both a) exists and b) is infopoison of the highest order

RE: https://mastodon.social/@stanfromireland/116580665468633547 Stop trusting, paying, and using GitHub, and Microsoft-controlled products more broadly.

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@mhoye/116580626273339937 The list of characters is amazing: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1X82z_jKx__7uq3a4qvghwJyzq4wuBstcxJFunDGlY0s/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.bg9julf7bowf

RE: https://kolektiva.social/@Hex/116574880618208585 Yet another great reason to learn to weld…

RE: https://kind.social/@azteclady/116541949904645692 RFK, Jr. already working to ban it, probs.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116545795468891062 Tag yourself! I'm the person considering / preparing for a late-in-life career switch to the trades.

RE: https://agilodon.social/@thirstybear/116511164526660575 The industry has been overrun by careerism and promo-driven development for at least a decade, now. LLMs are just the latest expression.

RE: https://universeodon.com/@tafnn/116507931997137941 For no reason in particular, a reminder that churches are fundamentally political entities and should not be automatically granted status as tax exempt charitable organizations eligible for tax-deductible donations.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@marick/116501902045893953 This probably doesn't go far enough. If a person's contributions don't continue to improve over time, it's entirely reasonable to reassess their earlier contributions, which, particularly for white English academics, were probably assessed […]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@jmeowmeow/116506353937399315 I've had watters @ gmail.com since like 2004? It was handy for the first 10 years or so? Now it is overrun by other people with the same surname treating it as a placeholder to avoid providing their actual address. It's barely useful, now.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116500367830872431 The insidious practice of simulating financial results in order to attract investment from credulous fund managers stewarding other people's money (public employee pensions) is longstanding, widespread, and heinous. It becomes a key […]

Something I find myself doing a lot right now is writing little local scripts to generate web pages from data using e.g. templating libraries rather than a full blown generated static site frameworks or whatever. Feel like I'm searching for some lost stage we skipped past where we had handy […]

worth remembering how short and simple the 15th Amendment is, as well as how sweeping its grant of congressional authority is. the idea that this doesn't cover a ban on racial gerrymanders is transparent horseshit

To oppose something is to maintain it... You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road. —Ursula K. Le Guin

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@mitchellh/116484051725139878 There are too many good reasons to minimize or eliminate one's GitHub usage and footprint: the increasingly flaky service and clunkification of the web UI, in-band advertising for their slopIfication tools, their recent switching of […]

i think the idea that you need to get stuff done every day without stopping has probably been the most harmful ideology to real productivity that takes advantage of highs and lets you rest at your lows

RE: https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/116454951993011445 A few years ago, I ran into a former Amazon project manager who kept openly, unironically insisting that software engineer fungibility was the measure of a well-functioning software org. They use "builder" because "prole" would be too […]

RE: https://social.mei-home.net/@mmeier/116453266695870491 I am no fan of the LLM-based coding shenanigans, but this particular aspect makes sense to me. People tend to do things they believe will have useful effect. I've worked at ~1.5 companies where writing documentation was consistently […]

RE: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/116444082987742643 My favorite quote from the linked Dijkstra piece is this bit: "…some people found error messages they couldn't ignore more annoying than wrong results…" Which sums up much of the sentiment I observe about the use of LLMs to […]

RE: https://mastodon.social/@simple_sabotage/116443429242121680 My favorite thing about the simple sabotage field manual is that it's basically an own goal bingo card for the wave of tech startups that embraced the "rethink everything from first principles" pseudo-philosophy over the past […]

Today I am thinking about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo for, umm, no particular reason.

RE: https://techhub.social/@Techmeme/116395793079686966 It's gonna be like that episode of Better Off Ted where they have Ted's daughter tell people they're being laid off. Also, a sociopath with no personality and limited (if any) self-awareness may not even need a particularly large model to […]

RE: https://cosocial.ca/@dyckron/116393348006809372 If the world wasn't a complete shit show, we could have some fun with the names of world leaders and their homophones.

RE: https://social.vivaldi.net/@lproven/116385638367341889 A bit harsh. I like it!

RE: https://mastodon.social/@simple_sabotage/116386098353620013 This is actually a pretty good terse description of a major source of accidental complexity in software.

RE: https://flipboard.com/@404media/404-media-qvt3vv94z/-/a-qoIXNx-4Q-i9Qb4-DwsX5A%3Aa%3A4082434389-%2F0 If you think there's any chance that law enforcement might ever be interested in the content of your Signal chats, and you don't want them to have access to them, then setting up […]

The latest prompt injection vector just dropped: https://github.blog/changelog/2026-04-07-dependabot-alerts-are-now-assignable-to-ai-agents-for-remediation/

RE: https://social.coop/@scottjenson/116358483636690335 Confronting and criticizing advocacy of harmful ideas and technologies is not analagous to hostility toward people based on innate characteristics. The false equivalence is, itself, harmful. The fundamental problem with the original take […]

Since we are AI discoursing again today, I just want to say: I'm sick of it and I don't want to hear about it any more. I am doing my best to contribute to the discourse in a positive and respectful way. But at the end of the day I'm just very tired, and _really_ disappointed in a lot of people.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@elizayer/116347406749184382 In fact, much or the publicly available evidence is that software that has been largely implemented via coding agents is *worse*, notably recent Microsoft product releases and Claude Code itself.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/116339351277198152 Much of this goes back to Tim Ferris and his "4-hour Work Week", in which call center workers for hire in Asia did what people want AI to do now. It's no mistake that many things labelled "AI" between then and now were, in fact, those […]

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/116324988415693534 Who else is 0% surprised that the slop machine is all slop?

I know it's probably too much to hope for, but it would be great if "agentic coding" faceplanted so hard that the concept became a laughingstock and never recovered. Again, it probably won't happen. But it would be kinda great if it did.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@annaecook/116313411969753640 The more I see this kind of thing (Karp's comments), the more inclined I am to believe the continued proliferation of such thinking is the legacy of initiatives like Project Paperclip, where we rehabilitated the image of Nazi scientists […]

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/116304329542531320 This brief thread is actually pretty good context for why the software industry is particularly vunlerable to LLM-extruded text— The industry has been built on pseudo-information (i.e. "bullshit") for years. So, in a lot of cases, having […]

Man, LLMs really drive home the lesson that people differ *greatly* in how much the care whether the statements they make are true.

OH: “AI programming tools have made the best programmer you know slightly more efficient, and the worst programmer you know infinitely more insufferable and dangerous.” FUCKING CO-SIGNED

I personally consider "I asked ChatGPT to generate a response to you" not witty but a form of an insult. Don't do that please. If that is how you want to talk to people at least don't tell me. It's offensive.