Mike Taylor 🦕

By day I am a computer programmer with Index Data, where I have been happily and gainfully employed for 20 years.

By night, I am a vertebrate palaeontologist with the University of Bristol, specialising in sauropods: the biggest and best of all dinosaurs.

I am an advocate for open access, open data and open source, and I'm beginning to think pre-publication peer-review might be a mistake. Supported #LFC before Bezos takeover.

Email: mike@miketaylor.org.uk
ORCiD: 0000-0002-1003-5675

#fedi22

Public Key

npub1pmq3hrjtd8xsnfdfvkwdc8zf6dtwnj2n5w4qjl9pxcwdfruzjl3s2dx8dk

NIP-05 Address

mike@sauropods-win.mostr.pub

Profile Code

nprofile1qqsqasgm3e9knngf5k5kt8xur3yax4hfe9f682sf0jsnv8x537pf0ccpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43qm4lnln

Publishing to

relay.ditto.pub

Author Public Key

npub1pmq3hrjtd8xsnfdfvkwdc8zf6dtwnj2n5w4qjl9pxcwdfruzjl3s2dx8dk

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Last Notes

2026-10-28 12:51:36 UTC

"I have a foreboding of an America … when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when … our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…"
— Carl Sagan.
https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-decline-of-america-unable-to-know-whats-true.html

2026-10-28 12:49:53 UTC

"Men first felt necessity then look for utility, next attend to comfort, still later amuse themselves with pleasure, thence grow dissolute in luxury, and finally go mad and waste their substance."
— Giambattista Vico explains the AI Revolution in the 18th Century.
https://www.openculture.com/2025/02/carl-sagan-predicts-the-decline-of-america-unable-to-know-whats-true.html

2026-10-28 12:38:30 UTC

The Trump administration has done many many things more harmful that this. But I doubt even they have ever done anything quite so straight-up dumb.

2026-10-27 19:28:45 UTC

"When you know you’re going to have a hundred professionals gathered in a room to listen to you, do the work to make it worth the audience’s while. Putting a talk together at the last minute is not a ninja move, or a mark of experience. It’s simple unprofessionalism."
https://svpow.com/2017/09/17/giving-talks-some-more-positive-thoughts/

2026-10-27 10:50:02 UTC

From the Times's daily briefing:
"US: Trump administration officials have taken soundings on backing Viktor Orban, the former Hungarian prime minister, for United Nations secretary-general, according to sources from several countries."
Because of course they have.
#AreWeTheBaddies?

2026-10-27 10:39:49 UTC

The worst choice made on any #Beatles album:
Following the sublime Yesterday with the mundane Dizzy Miss Lizzy. DML should simply have been omitted from the album, and the whole thing allowed to finish with Yesterday.

2026-10-26 19:52:54 UTC

I went to accept a peer-review request for the Journal of Anatomy. Clicked the Accept button, logged in using my ORCiD account, and was met with this.
Why in the name of all that is rational does Wiley need the right to update the research information and personal details of my ORCiD account?
Obviously I declined.
https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/media_attachments/files/117/508/923/150/517/490/original/0cf701f134b6b735.png

2026-10-23 14:36:05 UTC

I see we are now at the point that we need a "pro-democracy movement". Rather than, you know, living in a democracy.

2026-10-23 14:32:24 UTC

When AI vendors say "it broke containment!" they mean "we gave it ineffectively constrained broad powers in an insecure environment; please don't blame us when it exploits those powers in ways we didn't care to anticipate".

2026-10-22 09:08:00 UTC

Trying to categorize SV-POW! posts
As you may know, SV-POW! uses the excellent Rogue Scholar service to archive all our posts and to allocate DOIs. There's plenty more going on at Rogue Scholar, and one of the in-progress initiatives is an attempt to categorize scholarly blog posts. Martin Fenner, who created and maintains Rogue Scholar, has tentatively proposed a simple split into seven categories, and is seeking feedback.
http://svpow.com/2026/10/22/trying-to-categorize-sv-pow-posts/

2026-10-21 15:37:28 UTC

The word needs more Xenoposeidon art. Thank heavens for @nprofile…dlsl!

2026-10-20 15:45:35 UTC

"Thus when Trump says that “We’ve given a lot to Ukraine,” who, exactly, does he mean by “we”? He cut off all economic and military aid to Ukraine as soon as he took office. Here’s total support for Ukraine, by country, since January 2025:"
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-traitor-in-chief
Countries that have given more aid to Ukraine than the USA since January 2025 include Germany (more than 30 times as much), the UK, Norway, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Netherlands, France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Finland and Poland.
https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/media_attachments/files/117/473/993/749/000/890/original/bca96ae7354a2701.png

2026-10-20 09:49:20 UTC

"You know what would make my phone better? If it didn't have a headphone socket."
... said literally no-one ever in the entire history of the universe.

2026-10-20 09:26:10 UTC

I laughed way too much on re-reading this:
https://svpow.com/2026/04/16/on-the-evolution-of-the-atlas-axis-complex/

2026-10-19 18:08:19 UTC

No AI comments. None. No exceptions.
Yesterday, an AI posted a comment on this blog — or tried to. It was superficially helpful, relevant to the top of the post it was on, and turned out to contain that characteristic blend of things we already knew and things that are (subtly or blatantly) wrong. Needless to say, we shoved it in the spam folder. This is a good moment to remind everyone of our AI policy: …
http://svpow.com/2026/10/19/no-ai-comments-none-no-exceptions/

2026-10-16 13:22:22 UTC

"So, Elon's network is now a security liability for every country on Earth, because at any time the United States can just switch it off.
And no treaty or agreement with the US can ever be trusted again, not when they are all subject to the President's whims. Every election might be a new mad king."
https://bsky.app/profile/jovial-jovian.bsky.social/post/3mxxdcou7rc2h

2026-10-15 06:44:09 UTC

From the Times's daily briefing:
Ukraine: Drone units have been forced to cancel missions and others have been left virtually defenceless against Russian jet-powered drones after speed restrictions were imposed on Elon Musk’s Starlink service
So now there is no doubt about what side Musk is on. If there ever was.
More here: https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/elon-musk-ukraine-starlink-news-ttmqz6khr

2026-10-12 06:59:43 UTC

From The Times's daily briefing:
US: President Trump’s call for Ukrainians to choose a new leader means Russia and the United States both now believe President Zelensky should leave office
Well, quite.

2026-10-10 22:29:30 UTC

"If you are familiar with an app, armed with your desire paths and motor memory, you have a lot of capacity to just ignore new menu items, new panels, and new complexity – provided it doesn’t get in your way. New AI option? Turn it off. New tab? Never click on it. New alternate way of doing things? Just continue with the old way."
https://unsung.aresluna.org/they-take-one-look-at-the-ui-and-abandon-it/

2026-10-02 07:02:25 UTC

"The idea that outright racists who shout slurs at brown people in the street can be placated by lowering the number of small boat arrivals this quarter is absurd."
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/the-return-of-race-politics-036

2026-10-02 06:33:00 UTC

"This week, Suella Braverman — who was born in Harrow, educated at Cambridge, and lives in Hampshire — took to the internet once again to insist that she is not English - ostensibly because of her ancestry, but in reality because of her race. It’s like watching a wounded animal feast on its own intestines, a grotesque parable about confusing short term and long term incentives."
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/the-return-of-race-politics-036

2026-10-01 07:36:28 UTC

So, so important to understand:
"The model is not lying to you. Lying would require it to have a concept of truth. It is bullshitting you. It produces plausible-shaped text with total indifference to whether the world matches. When it’s right, it’s right as a side effect of its training data, not out of conviction. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong with exactly the same confidence and exactly the same beautiful prose.
That’s not a bug in the model. That is the model."
https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/07/20/llm-models-are-bullshit-engines/

2026-09-24 20:33:07 UTC

"You treated visitors to your website with the same respect that a restauranteur would treat patrons who had sat down to eat a meal; it would be exceedingly weird and creepy if you were to film them eating, or if you wrote down every word they said to each other and sold them to a stranger, or if you sniffed them while they ate and then said “I think I can guess what brand of perfume you’re wearing, can I order some more of it for you?”"
https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/

2026-09-24 20:32:09 UTC

"You didn’t read the terms of service. You didn’t agree to accept cookies. I didn’t consent to having my site pulled into the training model for that AI system that’s going to use to sell the fruit of my labor for profit. I didn’t agree to have my activity tracked across all these different websites and cobbled together into a creepy and inaccurate profile of my preferences that gets sold without my permission. Nobody asks for anything, they just take it. "
https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/

2026-09-24 14:21:54 UTC

#InternetOfShit
#FridgesShouldNotBeSmart
#TheresNothingDumberThanASmartAppliance

2026-09-24 12:45:25 UTC

"If you believed otherwise, our apologies for not communicating more clearly to begin with."
I love this. They're actively taking on the blame for what might have been the reader's misunderstanding. It's the opposite of the kind of nonpology that begins "I'm sorry if you were offended by ...", which puts the blame on the hearer.

2026-09-23 13:38:16 UTC

I woke up this morning and the name Beth Orton was in my mind for some reason. I didn't even know who she was — author, actor, musician, whatever. (I know. I'm ignorant.)
Well, she's a musician, and I picked an album of hers more or less at random to listen to: Sugaring Season https://bethorton.bandcamp.com/album/sugaring-season
I like it *a lot*. This could be a big discovery for me.

2026-09-21 07:52:28 UTC

#ShareGoodNewsToo

2026-09-20 08:03:49 UTC

"This steers me to ask whether dark archives can be justified. Yes, we can computationally check checksums and run as many automated tests as we like, but the only way truly to know whether an item remains usable is by actually letting someone use it."
— @nprofile…fd3p at https://eve.gd/2026/09/17/vaults-and-locks-that-fence-them-from-the-public-eye-and-use/

2026-09-11 11:40:47 UTC

"I’ve asked ChatGPT and…"
That’s it. No need to say more. All those years speaking about "fake news" and "checking your sources" just to blindly repeat a random series of letters assembled by a stochastic algorithm? Seriously?
I don’t care about your credentials, I don’t care about your experience. With a couple of words, you gladly announced that you are obliterating them and refusing all forms of free will. Goodbye!
https://ploum.net/2026-09-09-ai_policy.html

2026-09-11 11:36:43 UTC

"If you find yourself typing a prompt to express your idea, then just send me that prompt. I’m not interested in what an algorithm would do with your prompt, I want to know what you asked in the first place. I care about you, the human."
100% this.
https://ploum.net/2026-09-09-ai_policy.html

2026-09-11 11:35:42 UTC

"I’m one of those people deeply interested in all the extraordinary stuff other humans have to say. Unfortunately, life is already too short to hear them all. I need to make a lot of choices. That’s why I will not tolerate any attempt to steal the little time I’ve on this planet by making me interact with stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content."
https://ploum.net/2026-09-09-ai_policy.html

2026-09-09 14:02:12 UTC

"My estimates of the cost of applications range from €5.3 million to about €43.5 million. Even the lower estimate exceeds the €5-million value of the GenAI for Africa grant, making it very likely that this scheme has been a net drain on the research system."
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-04060-x

2026-09-09 08:47:50 UTC

"Legal, journalistic and political institutions exist to insist on some sort of accountability, even when public attention is in short supply. Political overpromising and evasion is bad enough as it is, without being forced to think that up is down and wrong is right. If this behaviour is simply overlooked then it will get worse, as has been the case in the United States."
All true. But what struck me most is that the USA has become the punchline for this kind of thing.
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/scandals-cost-nigel-farage-dear-eventually-bdmqq5zrl

2026-09-03 09:00:22 UTC

From the Times's daily briefing email:
" US: JD Vance has speculated that the Antichrist could be “walking among us” and said he would not be shocked if the world was already in “end times”."
Hmm. If only there was some way to recognise an Antichrist.
https://www.thetimes.com/us/american-politics/article/jd-vance-antichrist-may-walk-among-us-fct8kxt6j

2026-09-02 07:36:18 UTC

"When you work with a format as complex as yaml, it is difficult to be aware of all the features and subtle behaviors it has. There is an entire website dedicated to picking one of the 63 different multi-line string syntaxes."
Wow. I knew YAML was too complex for real use, but I had no idea it was *possible* to invent that many multi-line string syntaxes.
https://ruuda.nl/2023/the-yaml-document-from-hell

2026-09-01 13:29:59 UTC

I can't believe they're saying "Major versions of Firefox now land every two weeks" like it's a GOOD thing.

2026-09-01 07:45:34 UTC

"Experts warn that decaying infrastructure and decades of underinvestment have made the [UK]’s water supply a vulnerability that could be exploited, in particular by Russia. That scenario has been underscored by heatwaves and drought, exacerbated by climate change.
A loss of supply could occur as a result of deliberate contamination, a cyberattack targeting automated systems, infrastructure failure caused by power loss or fire, or environmental factors such as drought."
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/environment/article/water-risk-shortage-5xzr3spzk

2026-08-31 06:52:15 UTC

"The campaign to reinstate Pluto – with its passionate advocates, ongoing debates, occasional protests and petitions – seems to be largely confined to the US. “It is more of an issue in the United States,” says Metzger. “This was the one we discovered.” So, the planet’s demotion was a source of wounded pride? “I’ll admit there was some of that – among the public, not the scientists.”"
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/aug/31/forbidden-planet-was-plutos-2006-demotion-a-big-mistake
Incoming: executive order reinstating Pluto as a planet and renaming it "America"

2026-08-29 09:57:16 UTC

"My personal equivalent to "touch grass" is "touch fossil." Sometimes I just have to do that, to remind myself that life as a paleontologist is more than emails and pushing around bits and bytes."
— Andy Farke at https://bsky.app/profile/andyfarke.bsky.social/post/3mu634uda322x

2026-08-29 09:13:15 UTC

Dear all Billionaires,
THIS is what you want the world's reaction to be when you die.

2026-08-28 17:06:26 UTC

Listening to Miner At The Dial-A-View by Grandaddy. Not at all the kind of thing I usually listen to, but my word it's compelling.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_2j-wYLXAA

2026-08-28 10:56:59 UTC

""There will be no refuge for violent extremists who wage war on our civilization and plot to undermine law and order, destroy critical infrastructure, assault political opponents, or conspire to conceal their crimes from authorities," Rubio told Fox News."
This is rather a beautiful self-own.
https://reason.com/2026/08/27/rubio-uses-terrorism-law-to-ban-secure-email-service/

2026-08-28 10:53:55 UTC

"the State Department announcement states that the group "builds and operates the digital infrastructure for violent Antifa cells and other far-left militants across the world"."
https://reason.com/2026/08/27/rubio-uses-terrorism-law-to-ban-secure-email-service/
This left me wondering ... Is there a list anywhere of violent acts committed by Antifa cells?

2026-08-26 16:20:03 UTC

OMG OMG you guys!
This is the BEST thing!
Chinese Robot Olympics, specifically the football.
https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:4ap35rus77cg3lzju2v43jxn/post/3mtypoe7g6224

2026-08-26 14:07:46 UTC

"A decade or more ago there was a robust ecosystem of libraries and museums sharing items from their collections on the open web, but now they’re all on Instagram and other walled gardens. I think that’s wholly inconsistent with their institutional missions. I hope they come back some day."
— Alan Jacobs at https://social.ayjay.org/2026/07/30/a-decade-or-more-ago.html

2026-08-24 11:11:46 UTC

- reply

@nprofile…dqv0 re you mobile on the water?

2026-08-24 11:09:20 UTC

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@nprofile…yw7z Took me three :-)

2026-08-22 21:34:37 UTC

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@nprofile…fd3p I am running out of ways to say "I'm so sorry", but it really feels like there is not much else to be said. I'm so sorry.

2026-08-21 16:33:50 UTC

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@nprofile…fd3p Jeez. Half say through this post I thought it was great news about weight gain! Ugh, I am so sorry.

2026-08-21 16:19:54 UTC

I've heard so many variations on this observation, but this one from @nprofile…nkz8 may be the best:
"The big difference between a writer and all the people who say they want to be writers is that writers write."
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/the-hellbound-horror-of-gcses-cbc

2026-08-21 10:47:32 UTC

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@nprofile…c5l4 @nprofile…e762 I am very much of your party on this. LLMs have their uses, but the bad uses far outweigh the good. And the ludicrous financial pyramid scheme that they've enabled is going to have catastrophic consequences when it collapses.

2026-08-21 10:22:00 UTC

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@nprofile…c5l4 @nprofile…e762 I share your distaste. But I've found it's good for this kind of thing — when you know what you want to find but you don't know what it's called; and where, if its answer is wrong, it's trivially easy to determine that.

2026-08-21 09:14:24 UTC

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@nprofile…c5l4 @nprofile…e762 Ha! Indeed it is! I should have thought to try this myself.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6a8816dd-2a44-83eb-ba63-d2d35f20be88

2026-08-21 09:11:42 UTC

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@nprofile…c5l4 @nprofile…e762 It's bizarre to me that it's not the default.
Maybe it's configurable somewhere down in the nest of dialogues?

2026-08-21 07:45:43 UTC

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@nprofile…e762 Thanks. I just ploughed through, eating up the fifteen crash-and-recover cycles, but if you're interested in following this up, I will make a reproducible setup for you.

2026-08-21 00:14:34 UTC

Current state: frothing impotent rage at journal submission systems.

2026-08-20 23:18:21 UTC

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@nprofile…e762 Nope. It crashed again on figure 7.

2026-08-20 23:17:31 UTC

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@nprofile…e762 CORRECTION: it crashed when I did Anchor As Character for each of figures 1–5, but not for figure 6. Fingers crossed it's got over itself!

2026-08-20 23:12:56 UTC

AWESOME new feature in #LibreOffice! Every time I change the anchoring of an image to "as character", the whole program crashes!
And I have 19 figures to paste and arrange into this manuscript that I want to get submitted tonight.
_sigh_
Welcome to the shiny digital future.
CC @nprofile…e762!

2026-08-20 21:49:40 UTC

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@nprofile…m0rx @nprofile…kyv9 @nprofile…5lsr @nprofile…4grq The big thing missing from Signal, for me, is the ability to come out of ALL chats to a list where no one has its contents displayed. In WhatsApp web, it's as simple as pressing Escape. I love that. I want it in neutral when I'm not using it.

2026-08-20 21:30:19 UTC

Is there a more ambiguous but evocative line in all of popular music than "Fat Charlie the archangel files for divorce"?

2026-08-20 19:55:22 UTC

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@nprofile…galm Yeah. It's still spam, though, just consent-washed.

2026-08-20 18:45:22 UTC

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@nprofile…galm Right? And I never subscribed in the first place. Just logged in with my Google account so I could read one piece that I needed to link to from a blog I was writing. Absolutely scummy behaviour. And the Athletic had a good reputation.

2026-08-20 17:57:09 UTC

"“You’re a racist and you need to alter your behaviour so that you’re competing with five times as many talented people for your next promotion,” is just never going to be an easy sell - and large organizations charged the same people who commissioned our ‘how to sit in a chair’ e-learning with delivering it."
https://dmitryopines.substack.com/p/woke-10-and-human-resources

2026-08-20 13:51:57 UTC

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@nprofile…dqv0 Not if you had just made yourself a sushi roll for lunch and were eating it in the sunshine in the back garden when the rain started!

2026-08-20 12:56:57 UTC

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And when I follow the "Manage Account Settings" link, I have to log in, and am then confronted with the follow page which I have to respond to before it will let me continue.
https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/media_attachments/files/117/127/944/425/220/650/original/5f8d286441c274bf.png

2026-08-20 12:52:27 UTC

This is atrocious behaviour. And from a supposedly reputable journal.
https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/media_attachments/files/117/127/925/516/975/239/original/63b40c76d4e475d6.png

2026-08-19 21:46:41 UTC

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@nprofile…chus Clues By Sam is *the best*.

2026-08-19 21:44:07 UTC

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@nprofile…u6st Thanks, that's good to know.

2026-08-19 19:52:14 UTC

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@nprofile…5dxw Oh, I assumed as a Prog Metal guy you'd be familiar with Neal Morse and co. I'm sure you know his drummer, though — Dream Theater's Mike Portnoy.
Here's a sample track:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL5u8nCI8FY

2026-08-19 19:47:53 UTC

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@nprofile…5dxw Will you be any chance be at Morsefest UK in September?

2026-08-19 18:54:27 UTC

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@nprofile…dqv0 I'd never heard of these. But now I've looked them up, they seem like a good idea.

2026-08-19 18:43:49 UTC

New personal rule: if any website asks me to do more than one Click On All Traffic Lights panel, I'm closing the window and moving on with my life.

2026-08-19 16:48:43 UTC

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@nprofile…dqv0 Gosh, yes. Al-Qaeda could never in their wildest dreams have imagined their attack being even 1% as successful as America has made it.

2026-08-19 16:47:21 UTC

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@nprofile…galm Well, I guess there are no guarantees. But I definitely used to get MUCH better and quicker responses this way than via official routes (where those even existed).

2026-08-19 16:17:02 UTC

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@nprofile…03e4 @nprofile…5tp0 @nprofile…u2c9 Looks like our CI only cares about major.minor, and uses the most recent patch release in that series.

2026-08-19 16:13:46 UTC

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@nprofile…5tp0 @nprofile…u2c9 Thanks, that's helpful affirmation.

2026-08-19 15:55:45 UTC

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@nprofile…u2c9 I have upgraded my local installation, and sure enough it has made the `govulncheck` reports go away. Is it good practice to update my project's `go.mod`, or to leave it more liberal in what it accepts?
#golang

2026-08-19 15:25:41 UTC

There is one thing I really miss from when I was on #Twitter.
When some company treats you badly, and you can't reply to their email because it's from a noreply@somecorp.com address, and the feedback form on their website refuses to submit claiming something is wrong with all the fields you filled in, but it won't tell you what ...
It used to be that you could tag them on Twitter with a complaint and get a near-instant response from a human.
Now I am going to have to send an actual letter.

2026-08-19 13:55:46 UTC

"Checking out a parallel copy of our Go repository and telling the AI to rewrite the whole thing in Zig while I work on something else just so I can keep my job. I hate this shit so much. My job has usage tracking and quotas. I don’t use it for actual work, I just spin it up and disregard the output.
– An actual software engineer"
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

2026-08-19 13:51:51 UTC

"… watching someone with a spectacular amount of money on the line fire their highest performers because they were achieving that performance without LLMs."
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

2026-08-19 13:50:29 UTC

"In one extreme case, I have seen an executive confess that they had never even used ChatGPT or any AI tool in their life, immediately after producing a technical strategy for an organisation with $2B+ in revenue which was entirely centered around AI."
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

2026-08-19 13:50:06 UTC

"There have been several occasions where I have seen someone, apropos of nothing, blurt out almost word-for-word “AI is changing everything”, only to concede moments later that their organisation does not currently use LLMs for anything, and indeed, that they cannot name a single thing that has changed other than they get some use out of ChatGPT (frequently the free-tier)."
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

2026-08-19 13:49:14 UTC

You what feature I _really_ want in #Mastodon? The ability to use Markdown in my posts, so _italic_ is italic and **bold** is bold.

2026-08-19 13:48:36 UTC

"In every sufficiently large business we have observed (say, with 500+ employees), we have noted that continued advancement, and increasingly continued employment, has started to require repeated professions of belief in the transformative power of AI for said business. I am not talking about providing ideas about how to use AI in the business – I mean religious profession, declarations of faith."
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

2026-08-19 13:47:30 UTC

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@nprofile…tg2e Haha, very easy to believe!

2026-08-19 13:44:43 UTC

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@nprofile…tg2e I bet you're right!
Although this DOES seem on a different level from, for example, businesses in the mid-to-late 90s talking about how they were going to benefit from the Web.

2026-08-19 09:43:53 UTC

"Many publicly traded companies are putting out announcements about their AI productivity gains when I know for a fact that the businesses have done nothing other than purchase Copilot licenses and declare victory."
https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mania-is-eviscerating-global-decision-making/

2026-08-19 08:52:09 UTC

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@nprofile…vhdg … and THAT is Go's superpower.

2026-08-19 08:15:59 UTC

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@nprofile…zq23 I don't think I could summon the energy to take a proper interest in a local team, but your real-time re-enacting of historic seasons is a neat idea!

2026-08-19 08:15:17 UTC

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@nprofile…mm9s Thanks, I'll miss you guys.

2026-08-19 08:15:00 UTC

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@nprofile…hznz :-)

2026-08-18 21:12:25 UTC

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@nprofile…lvgx @nprofile…6ewq @nprofile…66sz @nprofile…7s77 True true!

2026-08-18 21:12:09 UTC

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@nprofile…n0jn Ha. You're right of course. Of course.
I'm not sure if that makes it worse or better (or at least less bad). It should at least reduce the distortion of fairness.

2026-08-18 20:49:33 UTC

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@nprofile…kxnc Yes, exactly!
I think the way to think of it is to realise the club that we loved is already dead. We're just letting corpse go.

2026-08-18 20:24:35 UTC

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@nprofile…fd3p And two kittens are so much cuter than twice as cute as one.

2026-08-18 20:24:21 UTC

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@nprofile…a0lg Thanks, Pete. If you're staying on board, I hope you find a way to enjoy it.

2026-08-18 20:10:42 UTC

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@nprofile…fd3p Glad to hear it!
I know you're more of a dog person, but our eldest and his wife just got a pair of kittens this weekend, and I thought you might enjoy this photo of them.
https://cdn.masto.host/sauropodswin/media_attachments/files/117/118/325/320/330/629/original/87cf27d8fdb320d2.png

2026-08-18 20:07:09 UTC

"Large/long-scale industry studies [of LLM use for programming] show a clear trend – output is up (more code, more commits, bigger diffs), but outcomes don’t reflect that trend. If anything, the average team is taking longer to ship worse software. If ever we needed proof that software development isn’t a production process."
https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/08/12/ai-software-development-what-does-the-data-say/