Anthony

I'm Anthony and I'm a computer scientist.

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Last Notes

2026-11-02 11:39:13 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/users/jcoglan/statuses/117546100280123064
This is an excellent thread and I recommend reading the whole thing. I'd like to say that it's getting at why competent software developers are implementing gradient ascent while LLMs+test suites are implementing generate-and-test or hillclimbing. People who know and understand a codebase are able to make changes to it that have a high probability of being improvements according to however you measure that. Stochastic code generation filtered by a static test suite is expected to be orders of magnitude slower at achieving the same improvement. This is a fundamental GOFAI result (the "knowledge-search tradeoff" or the "representation problem") but it applies to a wide swath of optimization problems.
Let's also not forget that optimization generally can only occur in small worlds, while humans---software developers and users alike---exist in large worlds. Databases, physics engines and other simulators, and research tools all have an open-ended space of possible applications ("extension") that cannot be anticipated, let alone tested for, in advance. Understanding the intended inner workings ("intension") of such systems is crucial to building them in such a way that they can support and continue to grow with their evolving applications.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #software #dev #tech

2026-11-01 09:00:56 UTC

The daylight savings time switch in the US had me up at 3:30am. I remember the days when I used to go to bed at this time, but having a kid and getting into my 50s inverted my schedule. 25-year-old me would not believe this.

2026-10-30 09:45:23 UTC

Re: https://hachyderm.io/users/cczona/statuses/117528731214359194
It seems Tuta is being presented with a very easy path to snagging market share. You'd think this would be a no brainer.
#Tuta #TutaNota #Proton #ProtonMail #privacy #security #AI #LLMs

2026-10-29 15:35:22 UTC

Re: https://mastodon.social/users/404mediaco/statuses/117524674007745877
This article about the rotten culture of abuse within Proton is really damning. I don't understand how anyone continues to work there. I don't see how their products continue to remain stable, let alone grow at the rate the abusive CEO seems to want.
#proton #ProtonMail #abuse #AI

2026-10-28 12:38:01 UTC

Cognitively speaking, writing is different from reading. Production is different from recognition. You can learn to understand a language, both written and verbal, without being able to speak it. Human beings writing code is how they come to develop the theory of the application that they then use to produce better code, eliminate bugs and security problems, etc. Reading code produced by someone else is not a substitute.
"But there's a human in the loop" excuse doesn't pass a smell test and cannot hold up to scrutiny.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #code #tech #dev #pedagogy

2026-10-28 12:24:05 UTC

Re: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/users/boggo/statuses/117517521920952627
Just to add to this, it seems there is a commonly-held misconception that knowledge and skills are learned once and then kept forever, like a credential. That's just not how human bodies tend to work. Knowledge and skills are produced and reproduced and re-reproduced through use, practice, drilling, and interacting with others who use, practice, and drill similarly. If you lean on LLMs to code, do your thinking or do your writing, it is to be expected that you will start to lose these capacities. You might as well bring a forklift to the gym to lift the weights for you, too.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #KnowledgeWork #learning

2026-10-28 10:43:41 UTC

Re: https://fosstodon.org/users/libreoffice/statuses/117518007825825230
It turns out a beef hot dog is actually filet mignon if a person eats it and gives a thumbs up, according to the LibreOffice contribution guidelines.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #code #tech #Dev #FOSS #LOSS #LibreOffice #NoSlop #AISlop #slop

2026-10-21 15:53:49 UTC

Anthropic logged net loss of over $80 billion in first half of 2026
Anthropic's net loss widened sharply to $80.7 billion in the first half of this year, in large part due to a rise in the fair value of bonds convertible into shares of the ‌AI startup, according to a draft prospectus for a planned initial public offering that was reviewed by Reuters.
From https://www.reuters.com/business/anthropic-recorded-net-loss-over-80-billion-first-half-this-year-wsj-reports-2026-10-20/
Presumably this would be an audited figure, meaning people could go to jail for lying about it, as opposed to the various inflated claims thrown around for public consumption.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #Anthropic #Claude #CasinoEconomy

2026-10-21 12:58:03 UTC

AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software: Study finds coding efficiency gains get “absorbed” by human review “bottleneck.”
This result has been 100% predictable from the get go. Heavy use of AI coding agents transforms software development from stochastic gradient ascent to generate-and-test. Stochastic gradient ascent, even with an imperfect gradient, will almost always be faster than generate-and-test, sometimes by many orders of magnitude. It was predictable that human review (the "test" part) would become overwhelmed.
From https://arstechnica.com/ai/2026/10/ai-coding-agents-generate-more-code-but-not-more-software/
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #AgenticAI #agents #SoftwareAgents #CodingAgents

2026-10-21 12:42:12 UTC

"This time both earnings and prices are in a bubble"
In 1929, the cyclically-adjusted P/E-ratio (CAPE) of the S&P 500 reached 32.6x according to Prof. Robert Shiller’s data. This was 1.8 standard deviations above trend at the time.
...
If we correct for the earnings bubble, the current CAPE would be 67.6x or 4.6 standard deviations above trend, a bubble that surpasses anything ever seen in US history by an extreme margin.
Great Depression 2x.
From FT, *This is nuts upon nuts. When’s the crash?
*: https://www.ft.com/content/8e9337f8-9191-48e9-9289-a8defda89431 (archive link: https://archive.ph/Hjm7h ).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #bubble #USEconomy #economy #finance

2026-10-19 10:13:48 UTC

Hot take: POSIWID is wrongheaded in the sense that it lives in the same neighborhood as pronouncements that LLMs are conscious, sentient, alive, feel pain, and so on. Behaviorist thinking, which POSIWID is, yields prisons both metaphorical and actual. Cyberneticians, and management consultants (which this phrase's coiner, Stafford Beer, was), are not your friends. Intention and interiority matter, but POSIWID is all surface.
#AI #LLM #POSIWID #cybernetics

2026-07-17 13:03:57 UTC

Apparently 0 oil tankers transited the Strait of Hormuz on Wednesday and Thursday. It's astonishing to me how little public dialog is occurring on the massive, ongoing energy disruption this is causing and what the likely effects will be. Shades of COVID minimization and climate change denial, "urgency of normal", "vax and relax", "calmmongering", etc.
#oil #OilCrisis #energy #Iran #USPol #USWar #IranWar #StraitOfHormuz #ClimateChange #war #COVID

2026-07-02 16:17:21 UTC

Hmm.
The announcement by Meta that they'll start selling AI compute potentially broke one of the pet narratives of the AI bubble: compute is so scarce that we need to spend all the money to build more. That story is the justification for crypto-turned-AI companies with poor fundamentals like CoreWeave to continue existing.
Nothing about stock or commodities prices makes any sense anymore so maybe tomorrow their stock will be up 2x.
#AI #AIBubble #CoreWeave #CRWV #Meta #StockPrice
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-66637d41b404b3581bbc68ca4c6a1018.png

2026-06-11 12:38:37 UTC

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@nprofile…s24j @nprofile…6e53
What is happening to the rsync project is that the developer has turned the latest version into proprietary software, denying the user 3 of the 4 freedoms.
Again I will repeat: documents are not "freedom".
The only solution to the problem is to keep using an old version, or fork the project from the last free version.
That is not the only solution, and I view the reductive thinking implicit in this as problematic. This is not meant to be mean, but I really think FOSS went off the rails when it stopped understanding itself as a political project, and where we are today reflects a serious loss of vision. Like, we have a tremendously important, widely used piece of software that permeates Linux distributions and is probably relied on by many millions of people (some of whom are not even aware they rely on it!) and our only response to a single individual claiming ownership over it is "fork it"? That's it? That's our only move? Frankly that's pathetic.

2026-06-11 10:39:57 UTC

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@nprofile…s24j @nprofile…6e53 This is one of the many reasons it is absurd to believe that "freedom" boils down to a document, license or otherwise. If you believe the license is what matters then you have no mental resources to even understand what's happening with a project like rsync let alone assess whether it's good or whether it ought to be different. None of what I'm saying is in any way new or complicated but a bunch of folks are struggling with it just the same.

2026-06-08 15:09:21 UTC

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@nprofile…xllk @nprofile…9a9e The terminal solution to the recursive equation FOMO = FOMO of missing out is "of missing out" repeating over and over and over forever.

2026-06-06 13:36:47 UTC

This rsync thing has me thinking about the difference between the "free as in beer" model of free software and the "free as in freedom" model the FSF originally put forward. There are important differences, and it's meaningful when a project changes from one model to the other, which is one way to narrativize what's happened to rsync.
I think "free as in beer" software is more appropriately called "Libertarian and Open Source Software", or LOSS. Among other things it involves no obligations on other people, and expects no obligations in return (*). But this means it's an everyone for themselves, anti-communitarian endeavor. We should be honest about this. We should also be honest when a project changes state from FOSS to LOSS, because that's a meaningful change, and actually is a loss in my view.
I continue to believe that enthusiastic embrace of AI/LLM coding tools is a leading indicator of an impending FOSS→LOSS transition.
It seems to me at least one driver of the uproar over rsync is that a bunch of people thought it was a FOSS project but it had, in a short period of time, converted into a LOSS project and the shock was jolting (understandably). As a FOSS project, rsync served a community function, leading people to depend on it, make assumptions about its longer-term stability, and so on. Those are reasonable expectations of a communitarian project. As a LOSS project, rsync is under no obligations to anyone and the maintainer(s) can change the software at any time, for any reason, at their discretion alone. It seems rsync is a LOSS.
#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #FOSS #freedom #rsync #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs
(*) Putting aside whether this principle is consistently applied or hypocritical.

2026-06-03 19:40:42 UTC

According to research by Ben Johnson in Inequality By Design, the level of inequality in the US today matches that of France in the run up to the French Revolution. If you think things are bad for the vast majority of people, it's because they are.
#US #USPol #economics

2026-06-01 14:04:43 UTC

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@nprofile…t3xt
Elites: We are going to hit you with clubs now
Software developer: There are ways to be hit by clubs that make my KPIs go up
Elites: Perfect

2026-05-31 13:09:59 UTC

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@nprofile…t3xt @nprofile…32kt By my count Anthropic's name appears in the report 7 times, and only in connection with its dealings with the US DoW. A charitable read of the one paragraph and its references is that the report lets Anthropic off the hook, laying most blame with the DoW. Indeed several of the mentions of Anthropic were about how the DoW labelled it a supply chain risk because of its public statements against using Claude for domestic surveillance, painting Anthropic is a positive light. By contrast, OpenAI appears 30 times, Google appears 26 times, Meta 38. Even DeepSeek appears 16 times. Given that Anthropic has just overtaken OpenAI in Monopoly money valuation, the discrepancy is noteworthy.
There is every reason to believe that the conspicuous absence of Anthropic's name from this quoted list isn't an accident. Anthropic has been extremely deliberate (and in my view cynical ) in their attempts to paint the company as the "ethical" AI vendor, which goes right up to having Chris Oleh able to say a few words in the room when the Pope announced his encyclical. There too the Pope seemed to be implicating Anthropic in his critique of AI, yet Anthropic was present and able to shape and craft how that critique landed and to suggest they were poised to rise above it. This is not an accident---they are quite adept at PR, and controlling the narrative is rule #1.

2026-05-21 12:28:50 UTC

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@nprofile…xaqk @nprofile…gc25 @nprofile…qll5
There is no training of AI or tracking from their search engine. Their search engine only uses AI when you want it to.
Unless they have blatantly changed their operation, this is a misrepresentation. Their URL literally used to be "kagi.ai", which you can browse on the Internet Archive if you were serious about understanding this company. Their blog at kagi.com still has posts with text like this, which I'm picking from just one of several posts on the subject:
"Not a lot of people know that Kagi started as Kagi.ai in 2018 and has a long heritage of utilizing AI""Our early efforts, however, enabled us to use machine learning to deliver answers to questions directly within the search experience, making us the only search engine besides Google and Bing able to do so when we launched the public beta in 2022""Our approach allows us to take advantage of the entirety of available human knowledge...Kagi acts as a gateway to the giant repository of human knowledge, patiently waiting to serve our needs""With the recent advancements in AI, our interest in exploring how it can improve search has reignited. Last year we published technology demonstrations for AI in search and AI in browser and today we are unveiling integrations based on this demos directly in Kagi search."Their future business model as stated in 2019:
"Imagine a world where the market grades AI assistants by their ability and offers them at different price points. Depending on your budget and tolerance, you can buy beginner, intermediate, or expert AIs""Instead of everyone sharing the same Siri, you’ll have your completely individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive"Etc. You'd have us believe they stopped these efforts---which require training on user data to be fully realized---and turn all this off unless users opt in? Not plausible. This is plenty of reason to believe they are collecting every interaction every user has with their search engine to train their AI assistants and realize this vision. You can't have your "individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis" unless Kagi is collecting data from you and training Mike, Julia, or Jarvis with it.
If one were inclined to, one could read Kagi's AI Philosophy and take note that what they are listing as the main limitations of using AI in search are not in fact the main limitations of using AI in search according to experts on this subject. To me this suggests they are not inclined to provide a good search and information retrieval experience based on the best understanding of how to do that. Instead they wish to provide the AI-based "question answering" experience that their blog has been detailing for many years.
they return blended search results
Yes. Blended into a slurry by AI.
But it’s clear you don’t like them
I stated facts as I know them, with the purpose of sharing information that other people might find useful when making a decision about whether to use Kagi. You can verify what I said on the two posts I linked previously as well as Kagi's own blog, if you cared to. What you're saying here reads as a typical dissembling tactic deployed to discredit unpleasant facts by labeling them as "only aesthetic" or "emotional", on the assumption that somehow aesthetics or emotions are less valid, which of course is a false assumption. That you are misrepresenting the practices of a company with a founder who's regularly expressed chauvinistic views (to put it kindly) reads to me as projection, or worse. Regardless of the motivation, this isn't about what I "like". It's about what Kagi has repeatedly stated it actually does.

2026-05-20 23:41:36 UTC

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@nprofile…gc25 @nprofile…xaqk @nprofile…qll5 Take a peek through Kagi's early blog. Besides its founder holding some odious views he is regularly called out on, Kagi was meant to be an AI company from the beginning. The plan was for the search to exist to provide training data for the AI, which would then be sold back to users. They serve Google search results in the end if memory serves. Not a durable, trustworthy alternative to Google, in my estimation. I certainly wouldn't pay them.
See https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611 and also https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

2026-05-03 11:00:36 UTC

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@nprofile…t3xt I listened to an interview with Robert Dorschel, the author of this book, and found it illuminating: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-social-codes-of-tech-workers-a-contradictory-middle-class-in-the-making-robert-dorschel/b207a34d1660255b
The Social Codes of Tech Workers
The book identifies tech workers as a contradictory class formation, oscillating between a spirit of emancipation and yet another spirit of capitalism.
The oscillation is a degree of freedom allowing tech workers to take up or avoid solidarity-oriented perspectives as convenient. There's lots of space for bad actors.

2026-04-29 16:47:57 UTC

"KDE Connect has unexpectedly crashed". Oh no, KDE, I expected it to crash. It crashes every single time I turn off my bluetooth headphones, and always has. In fact I've come to think of the headphones' off button as a KDE Connect off button, that's how much I expect it to crash.
#KDE #Linux #KDEConnect #computers #software

2026-04-29 14:16:03 UTC

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@nprofile…t3xt Maybe I'm out of my mind, but looking at this graph, there appears to be a treatment and a subsequent effect: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
...which may or may not have to do with an internal culture that does things like this: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
and also this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers

2026-04-23 15:39:03 UTC

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@nprofile…0tw3 @nprofile…dqck
What a big huge dumb pile of bollocks this is
...
Yeah well, it’s a questionable categorization
Why?
I believe most credible evidence points at the likelihood that use of current generative AI leads to deskilling and prevails against upskilling. I also believe that you cannot make up with automated testing what competent human software developers avoid doing in the first place.
To me this paints a picture. Projects that allow AI use are choosing to trade off short-term gains for long-term losses. I want nothing to do with software produced with that mindset, and I question the judgement of people who welcome it. Any list that helps me identify projects heading in this direction is a great help, exactly how uBlock Origin is a great help against adware.
At a "philosophical" level, I don't think a software project that involves closed, proprietary tools (AI or otherwise) as a key part of the development process has any business calling itself "free and open source". People who only care about getting the end result faster might disagree, but to me FOSS has always been a political project, and that project is compromised by deeply incorporating proprietary technology, in my opinion. The means matter more than the ends in this view.
With all that said, I struggle to see how this is "bollocks" or "a questionable categorization". I think it's as vital as the FOSS/not FOSS distinction, or the adware/not adware distinction.

2026-04-19 13:30:06 UTC

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It seems to me that it's a bit worse than this, because the variability is probably long-tailed and there are buffering/queuing effects. When things go well, they go OK; when things go badly, they can go really, really badly. Anything downstream of something going well can also go well; anything downstream of something going really, really badly is unlikely to be able to compensate, and they risk "buffer overflow" if they try. I think in knowledge work and similar long-tailed tasks, increased volatility tends to mean things fail when they didn't need to.
This overall imbalance means that there are negative outcomes that are unlikely to be counterbalanced by corresponding positive outcomes at the system level, leading to net negative value. I think this partly explains why insurance companies are less and less likely to sell coverage to companies that heavily use AI in commercial policies: the actuaries have worked this out, and not willing to take on the extra risk.

2026-04-03 15:25:13 UTC

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Microsoft rushed Azure out of the gates under intense competitive pressure. Corners were cut. Fundamental principles of reliability and operational simplicity were quietly abandoned.
Meaning all this came straight from the top. "Intense competitive pressure" is self-induced.
Fortunately this kind of thing, rushing software out the door under self-induced competitive pressure, doesn't happen anymore. Organizations have learned their lessons about the perils of operating this way. (/s)
Layered on this chaos was an Azure-wide mandate: all new software must be written in Rust.
LOL
On a more serious note: LMAO
On top of all that, the org had a hard commitment to deliver the already long-delayed OpenAI bare-metal SKUs that had been promised for years. This work started around May 2024 with a target of Spring 2025 and was led by a Principal engineer who had evidently never tackled a task of that scale.
Fast-forward to March 10, 2025: OpenAI signed an $11.9 billion compute deal with CoreWeave for model training and services.
This detail really struck me. Microsoft's deep internal dysfunction drove OpenAI right into the outstretched arms of Datacenter Enron.
An unbelievable series thanks for sharing. I feel like @nprofile…w3p8 could make quite a bit of hay out of this one.

2026-04-02 12:31:33 UTC

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@nprofile…998j Their code is remarkable for how terrible it is. Learning from it would be a bit like learning how to be a chemist by studying the pollution from a chemical plant. As far as I can see, what there is in there to learn is learnable in a much better way from more conventionally produced software, courses, books, etc.
the commercial pressure to be great is something that we cannot feel
This feels like an apology for Anthropic, and I do hope you're receiving a nice paycheck for doing their PR for them. Otherwise you're doing their work for free.
I've worked in both corporations and startups. I've felt the pressure "to be great". I did not resort to whatever the heck resulted in a mess like Claude Code. Many of my colleagues can say the same.

2026-04-01 15:12:44 UTC

I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost immediately someone attacked me about my criticism. They tried the "take a look at COBOL and get back to me" angle.
Buddy. I've written COBOL. I spent several years working almost daily with a 3-million-line monstrosity of a COBOL program. I was working on another app that interfaced with it, but in that work I occasionally had to read the code and in a few cases modify it. Granted I haven't spent as much time looking at the leaked Claude Code source code (and won't lol), but nevertheless I confidently declare that Claude Code is worse. "Spaghetti code" doesn't come close to describing this thing.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #Anthropic #Claude #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #software #COBOL #LinkedIn

2026-02-11 19:21:03 UTC

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This is a good episode Mark, thanks. I wanted to comment on the Mehmet Oz clip you played. What he's describing the AI avatar doing is not just creepy or unlikely to work. It's physiognomy, the long-discredited pseudoscience that was a favorite among eugenicists and Nazis. The AI avatar he's describing is the American version of the Nazi Mischling test, and you can bet it'll be used to similar effect if allowed to proliferate.
RFK Jr. openly announces his eugenicist views as well. I think it's important to remember that while the tech and AI are bad by themselves, they are serving an even more sinister, eugenic purpose in the hands of these folks.

2026-02-11 17:25:45 UTC

A first essential condition on the cognitive is that cognitive states must involve intrinsic, non-derived content. Strings of symbols on the printed page mean what they do in virtue of conventional associations between them and words of language. Numerals of various sorts represent the numbers they do in virtue of social agreements and practices. The representational capacity of orthography is in this way derived from the representational capacities of cognitive agents. By contrast, the cognitive states in normal cognitive agents do not derive their meanings from conventions or social practices.
Adams & Aizawa, The bounds of cognition
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM

2026-02-11 16:14:56 UTC

CNN is reporting "Hiring picked up as 2026 kicked into gear, with the US economy adding a stronger-than-expected 130,000 jobs last month"
If you haven't been following this stuff for long, it might surprise you to know that "adding" 130,000 jobs in a month is a net loss. A jobs report like this would have been taken as a sign of a very poor economy even 15 years ago. The reason is that around 180,000 young people reach legal employment age each month in the US. Adding 180,000 jobs would be treading water. Adding 130,000 is effectively 50,000 new people without jobs, a net loss by the spirit of this metric.
Saying hiring is "picking up" and is "stronger than expected" is effectively saying "it could have been worse! 🤷 ". It's wild to see this positive spin on a very poor report.
It's extraordinarily fishy that the reported unemployment rate is not moving much in spite of these persistent and mounting job losses. I know why this is so please don't @ me a splanation. My point is that it, again, does not reflect the spirit of what this metric is meant to capture. It is wholly perverse now and should not be reported at all, let alone taken as a meaningful indicator.
#US #USEconomy #jobs #JobsReport #BLS

2026-02-11 16:07:02 UTC

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Google and Microsoft offer lucrative deals to promote AI, but even $500,000 won’t sway some creators
From https://www.cnbc.com/2026/02/06/google-microsoft-pay-creators-500000-and-more-to-promote-ai.html
Echoes of Matt Damon shilling crypto.
If the organic demand for AI were as high as we've been led to believe, what's with the big paychecks to shill it?
#US #economy #bubble #AIBubble #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

2026-02-11 15:02:27 UTC

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@nprofile…qll5 The history of these is quite wild. I believe Motorola was the last tech company to issue a century bond before Alphabet.
One thing it says to me is that Alphabet is not expecting the explosive profits from AI that the industry has been suggesting are forthcoming. Convertible bonds are what would allow investors to take advantage of AI upside. Century bonds are traditionally issued by slow-growing, stable businesses like Ford or Coke. There's no way for me to know for sure, but it feels like a desperate confession.
I hadn't remembered that Alphabet bought Motorola Mobility so perhaps they even had a ready-made playbook on hand. Interesting.

2026-02-11 14:00:09 UTC

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Alphabet sells rare 100-year bond to fund AI expansion as spending surges
From https://www.reuters.com/business/alphabet-sells-bonds-worth-20-billion-fund-ai-spending-2026-02-10/
Yeahhhhhh OK.
#US #economy #bubble #AIBubble

2026-02-10 13:26:44 UTC

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@nprofile…9wh6 If your phone is connecting to a cell tower, which is necessary to send and receive SMS, then you can often be tracked to within a few meters. If you leave it on always, then your movements to and from school, work, home, stores, etc. is logged and studied. I've seen academic talks as far back as the early 2000s about this; something on the order of 80% of individuals can be identified just from the tracks their phones leave in cell tower logs. I'm sure that percentage is higher now. Your phone has a unique identifier so as soon as anyone is able to link that identifier to your IRL identity you become an easy surveillance target.
Cell phones, even with just SMS, are a surveillance nightmare. People who care about that sort of thing are right to be cautious, in my opinion.

2026-02-09 18:44:03 UTC

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@nprofile…yl5a And who doesn't like a good detective story???

2026-02-09 17:46:50 UTC

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@nprofile…kmut It's true that it's an unfortunate name.

2026-02-09 16:50:07 UTC

I think abduction is a deeply underappreciated aspect of human reasoning.
#logic #abduction

2026-02-09 16:46:06 UTC

As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts
From https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-2026-02-09/
I read this and the first thing that came to mind was Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon saying "f@?k it he's dead / oh sh!t there's a horse in the hospital!" on General Hospital.
#AI #healthcare #DrOctagon #music

2026-02-09 13:52:59 UTC

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@nprofile…qcls @nprofile…dfnm I personally know more than one person who's spent years writing about some method, let's say TDD, going to conferences presenting their ideas etc, fully independently of their employer. Said folks are now slinging AI slop and writing about how great LLMs are. Blaming the employer doesn't pass a smell test.

2026-02-08 20:22:30 UTC

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@nprofile…pmkr That's what I had in mind. The key bit is that if our understandable human languages aren't moving up the complexity scale along with whatever it is we think we're representing about math, then "whatever it is we think we're representing about math" is as incomprehensible to us as "all of math". We don't have the language to express it, so it looks algorithmically random (i.e. incompressible)--even as we claim to have made an "automated mathematician" to produce math for us!

2026-02-08 18:40:14 UTC

I'm tinkering with an argument based on algorithmic complexity that if it were possible to make something like an "automated mathematician" or "automated scientist", then these would be expected to eventually produce outputs that we humans would be unable to distinguish from random noise.
Getting the whole argument just right is fiddly, but the basic idea is this. You feed some kind of theory into the AM/AS, which is a black box. It churns on this and spits out a result, which is added to the theory (I'm neglecting the case that the result is inconsistent with the theory). It can now churn on theory + result 1. After doing this long enough, it's churning on theory + result 1 + result 2 + ... + result N. Whatever it spits out will be dependent in particular on results 1 - N. Unless you know these results, you will not be able to understand what it outputs. I.e. it will look like noise to you. If the AM/AS is appreciably faster at producing results than people are at understanding them, there will be an N beyond which no one can understand the output. It'll look like random noise.
If you're into software development, this would be analogous to a software system that generates syntactically-correct code and then adds it to a software library it can then call. If you were to run this long enough, virtually all the programs it generated that were short enough for human beings to read and understand would consist almost entirely of library calls to code generated by the system. You'd have no idea what any of this code did unless you studied the library calls, which you wouldn't be able to do if the system were expanding the library faster than you could read and understand it.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether this is a desirable thing to do and whether it's happened yet. I would offer, though, a question to ponder: what reason is there to believe that a random number generator hooked up to an inscrutable interpreter produces human flourishing, for any given meaning of "human flourishing" you care to use?
#tech #dev #mathematics #AutomatedMathematician #AutomatedScientist #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ThoughtExperiment

2026-02-08 15:32:07 UTC

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@nprofile…dfnm This really makes me wonder whether the decades of constant blog posts about method, such as software craftsmanship, *-driven design, agile, extreme programming, etc etc etc (event sourcing, the hexagonal architecture, etc etc etc etc etc dear lord there are so many), were all, ultimately, not serious. If a single technological advance coupled with hype and corporate pressure is enough to convince people to throw all of that out, how serious could it have been, really?

2026-02-05 16:15:10 UTC

Economy looking wobbly eh?
#US #economy

2026-01-31 20:39:46 UTC

The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
Truth and Politics, Hannah Arendt

2026-01-31 19:24:20 UTC

i just tried to type cd .. while viewing a PDF 🤦

2026-01-31 14:19:21 UTC

Finally had a pipe freeze. We have an unfinished basement that usually stays above 40℉, plus I monitor it, so I wasn't concerned. However, it looks like there are localized areas of the basement that get colder than the spot I'm monitoring, and last night it got down to -10℉ outside. Apparently that was enough. The problem looks like it was localized to one spot right at the pressure tank, and hitting it with a space heater for 10 minutes was enough to clear it. It looks like nothing's damaged. Got lucky.
It looks like I'll be doing some insulating. This is the longest, coldest cold snap I've experienced here and the bright side of it is that it's alerted me to a trouble spot as well as the limits of our current systems!
#maine #weather #cold #FrozenPipes #plumbing #insulating

2026-01-30 16:40:38 UTC

Another read of this is that four organizations claim the right of ownership over "nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings". A cultural archive they claim is worth around half of US GDP, an immense sum.
Frankly it reads to me like an admission of their own guilt.
Spotify and the three main major record labels sue Anna’s Archive for $13trillion for “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings”
From https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-major-record-labels-sue-annas-archive-13trillion-allege-brazen-theft-millions-files-3925977
#culture #music #AnnasArchive #spotify #UMG #WarnerBros #Sony #lawsuit

2026-01-29 19:51:30 UTC

The phrase describing this behavior is "state terror". It is not "enforcement" or "operations". This is inexcusable.
ICE agents shatter window, leave 1-month-old baby, mother in car after Portland arrest
Video shows federal immigration agents leaving behind an infant and broken glass after detaining a Guinean immigrant with no known criminal history.
#maine #ICE #ICEOut #Trump #USPol #StateTerror

2026-01-29 19:23:05 UTC

Would the perception that an LLM chatbot is speaking to you be dissolved if they were deterministic instead of stochastic?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #Claude

2026-01-29 18:03:08 UTC

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@nprofile…evxm It's possible this has come full circle because I'm always chasing my own tail.

2026-01-29 17:53:00 UTC

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@nprofile…evxm I wonder what prompt they used to induce Claude to output this text.

2026-01-28 15:51:37 UTC

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@nprofile…qgyc They propose adding AI slop features to SearXNG. I suspect they're OK with slop-coded features too. You should carefully read these issues if you are going to depend on and recommend this engine.

2026-01-28 15:49:37 UTC

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@nprofile…evxm It's an important development for many reasons, but one is that there are many people now arguing something like this: because of double descent, we don't need to worry about the bias-variance tradeoff anymore. With enough compute we can continuously lower the bias, and with enough data we can continuously lower the variance. It takes a bit more subtlety to tease out why this is a reasoning error. It unfortunately meshes well with prevailing prejudices in thought, especially among technologists (the theory-free ideal, Han's notion of dataism, etc.), so it's a tricky argument to land. I like Brighton's notion of "the bias bias" for this: preferring ever-increasing model complexity really is a bias, unjustified by either evidence or theory.

2026-01-28 15:30:40 UTC

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@nprofile…5k9x The type of docility demanded of us arguably makes us less than human, and in this respect it really is anti-human. This assemblage is certainly anti-imagination, for instance. The "AI subject" is an entity that doesn't think or create, and self maintains this status.

2026-01-27 20:42:16 UTC

I've added 3 domain blocks in the last few weeks, the first time I've had to do this in quite some time. I'm now blocking a nicely symmetrical 111 domains.

2026-01-27 20:29:01 UTC

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@nprofile…n8q3 I don't have the foggiest idea what you are saying nor why you chose to say it.

2026-01-27 20:10:22 UTC

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What do these people actually mean when they shout that man is a machine? It is, as I’ve suggested, that human beings are ‘‘computable’’ (berechenbar), that they are not distinct from other objects in the world, in any way deserving of special respect or even attention. This then leads, at first gradually and then with exponentially increasing speed, to a view of human beings as mere objects who—no! Not who, that—can be exploited, inducted in killing machines, imprisoned, tortured, killed (providing they are ‘‘enemy combatants’’). It leads to the American military sponsoring programs to produce robot soldiers. What is then left of Norbert Wiener’s vision of the human use of human beings? And does not our world show us with utmost clarity how far we have already come?
I want here to emphasize, especially to this audience, that all this is not the fault of the computer. Guilt cannot be attributed to computers. But computers enable fantasies, many of them wonderful, but also those of people whose compulsion to play God overwhelms their ability to fathom the consequences of their attempt to turn their nightmares into reality.
#AI #ComputerScience #human #life #TormentNexus #machinic

2026-01-27 20:02:52 UTC

Perhaps the most (in)famous and illustrious American computer scientist and acknowledged principal pioneer of the discipline now known as artificial intelligence (AI), Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’ It is significant that the English language distinguishes between ‘‘flesh’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘meat’’ on the other. The latter is dead and may be eaten, thrown in the garbage, fed to pigs, and so on. Flesh, on the other hand, is living matter and, as such, deserves the respect and dignity for life of which, among others, Albert Schweitzer spoke eloquently. The word ‘‘merely’’ in Minsky’s sentence means essentially ‘‘nothing but,’’ that is, also not deserving unusual respect. His statement is a clear reflection of a profound contempt for life that, as I see it, is shared explicitly by important sectors of the AI community, the artificial intelligentsia, as well as many scientists, engineers, and ordinary people. Daniel C. Dennett, an important American philosopher, once said that we must give up our awe of life if we are to make further progress in AI.
From Weizenbaum, Joseph (2007). Social and Political Impact of the Long-term History of Computing
#AI #ComputerScience #life #brain #mind

2026-01-27 13:38:52 UTC

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@nprofile…9jpc Personally I feel like no left-leaning politics in the US is ever going to fly until leftists grapple directly with their eugenics problem. Granted I am not in a position to say with any certainty, but from where I sit I see almost no evidence that this is happening at all. Nowadays a lot of lefties I know are flirting with "nothing important can happen unless we're sitting in a room together breathing on each other", but will not wear masks, use proper ventilation, or monitor CO2, let alone actively care for one another. Ignoring COVID like this is doing the fascists' work for them.
So yeah, I share your skepticism.

2026-01-27 02:05:59 UTC

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@nprofile…evxm I don't know for sure, but the large number of parameters and large training sets of the popular LLMs strongly suggests they train them past the interpolation threshold, which would mean they cannot be overfit.
If you trained an LLM with only demonstrably true statements, they would still output false statements. They have no representation of truth at the level of the sequences they emit.
"Hallucination" is therefore a human judgment about the human user's reaction to LLM output and is not reflective of any semantic content of that output. All LLM outputs, whether they appear to have semantic content or not and regardless of whether that aligns with the user's expectations, are thus hallucinations in a sense.

2026-01-26 17:15:58 UTC

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It took the three of us a bit under 2 hours to dig out from the roughly 18" of snow (slightly more maybe?). One of us is a four year old who loves being a snowplow. His favorite book right now is The Little Snowplow. There were a bunch of woodpeckers at the feeders, undeterred by the weather. We can get the car out and both the postal truck and the propane truck have clear spaces to do their things. I need new boots.
No grand ideas about the universe came to me, but I did realize something about Bénabou cosmoses I didn't know before so that's something.
#maine #weather #snow #thoughts

2026-01-25 19:01:36 UTC

Looks like the snow has started here. If we do end up with the 12-18 inches the advisories have been warning about, it'll be a mess.
On the bright side, lately I've been doing a lot of informal thinking while shoveling snow. I'm turning over an informal argument grounded on Chaitin incompleteness that if our physical universe has continuous space-time, then we must make non-computable leaps in our theories in order to increase the fidelity of our understanding. "Artificial scientists" running on computers will always have inescapable limits that don't apply to human beings. It's exactly the sort of wacky thing that makes for good shovel thinking.
#maine #winter #weather #advisory #SnowStorm

2026-01-25 18:09:25 UTC

Now I wonder if putting $INSTANCE$host$ in a post will do what this one does:
https://sharkey.nomaakip.xyz/notes/ahvkpg5d2pnx0005
This is a test of $INSTANCE$host$ .

2026-01-25 13:17:09 UTC

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@nprofile…t3xt You can solve Towers of Hanoi, a problem we give undergraduate computer science students who are learning about recursion, in six orders of magnitude more time, space, code, and cost. What's not to love?!?!

2026-01-24 17:33:20 UTC

Should I click the "Update payment details" link in the "Payment Declined" email from hokpjubswctfnf.46903405027342@33ucek.c7qp5x.ra7x5j.us? It's possible I forgot to update my account information with 33ucek.c7qp5x.ra7x5j.us Inc, Who can remember so many accounts anyway?
#spam #phishing #scam

2026-01-24 16:27:53 UTC

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Well, we didn't quite get down to -20℃. More like -18℃, around -1℉. Plenty cold still. Definitely in the dangerous range, especially with the wind chill. I think I'll stick by the wood stove today.
We're meant to be getting 12" of snow or more Sunday going into Monday, but right now it's sunny. Forecasts keep changing wildly so I'm not sure what to expect yet. That much snow will mean 2+ hours of shoveling, which I'm not looking forward to I have to confess.
#maine #winter #cold #Arctic #weather

2026-01-24 14:03:29 UTC

Something to know about Maine is that according to Wikipedia the population is around 1.4 million, placing it 42nd out of 50 in terms of population among US states. Average population density is a bit over 41 per square mile (the NYC area tends to have over 10,000 per square mile, by contrast). According to the 2010 census (again from Wikipedia), 94.4% of people here are (non-Hispanic) white.
Doing the arithmetic, there are roughly 78,400 non-white people in this state. Under the assumption that the targets of certain federal agencies are not white, wouldn't searching Maine be a waste of resources? Unless those resources were not in fact intended to efficiently find people with unfavored immigration statuses, say. You don't go looking for needles in one of the biggest haystacks.
To be clear I am not saying other places should be trageted. I am saying that the facts speak to ulterior motives.
#maine #uspol

2026-01-23 22:46:48 UTC

Bracing for -20℃ temperatures tonight. The temperature is dropping pretty rapidly now.
#maine #winter #cold #weather

2026-01-23 18:13:23 UTC

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@nprofile…5k9x Latent diffusion models were conceived as a way to efficiently represent very complicated probability distributions. They have a wide variety of uses, though I'd say many of those uses are the ones that large corporations invested in "big data" are concerned with. I've found in my time working for and with corporations that once you ascend far enough up the chain you're almost certain to encounter people whose primary drives involve "capturing the knowledge" of the people who work below them (seems like a form of Marx's notion of dead labor). Latent diffusion models promise to be able to do this. There may not be a single "killer app", but many individual applications that are together serving this background disposition. Adobe sticks image generators in its various creative tools to let people more quickly do things they were already doing such as remove backgrounds from photographs, smooth out noise, or upsample. These are all tendrils of the same phenomenon, it seems to me.
But I can't say I know for sure; I'm just spitballing. They've probably confessed some of their motives in their earnings calls.

2026-01-23 17:42:58 UTC

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@nprofile…5k9x This is not quite an answer, but to the extent that corporations are the main purchasers of image generators, the promise seems to be similar to what LLMs promise. Confine human endeavor to a small, controllable world that seems "creative", but is incapable of generating a true challenge to the powerful. Here I am using Leonard Savage's small vs. large world distinction. The former is like living in a chess game according to the rules of chess; the latter is like living in the real world, where you can knock over the board, refuse to play, draw a smiley face on the Queen, etc etc etc. If chess grandmasters convince people that all of society's concerns should be decided over a chess board according to the rules of the game then they've locked in their power because there is no rule of chess that allows you to suspend the rules of chess. That's how I've been seeing the value of AI (to the powerful) lately.

2026-01-23 13:45:28 UTC

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@nprofile…wry4 If it quacks like a Ponzi scheme...

2026-01-22 20:46:09 UTC

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@nprofile…hvze Oh no that's horrible.
The one that was plaguing me today was on a shopping site, but wasn't an ad. It's become fairly common in product views to have a set of images of the product, with a set of thumbnails below or alongside the current main image. The one I was viewing changed the image if you moused over a thumbnail, and popped up a zoomed version of the image if you moused over the main image. The net result was that placing your mouse nearly anywhere resulted in something popping into your view and covering up a sizable proportion of the page. The frenetic popping and unpopping made it easy to lose track of where your mouse pointer is, which led to even more frenetic popping and unpopping. Since I use a screen magnifier most of the time, the popped up stuff took up 90% of the available screen real estate. The net result was deeply frustrating, and I closed the page and moved on with my life.
The individual features are all useful. I like being able to see several different images. Being able to zoom the image is nice at times. However, the way they were all crammed together was poor, at least for me.

2026-01-22 18:15:50 UTC

I wonder if there's a psychological price that a web developer has to overcome to make a non-trivial web page with no pop-ups of any kind. It seems like a compulsion.
At least in the way I use computers as a low vision person, pop-ups are extraordinarily anti-accessibility. Yes, even tooltips and alt-hovertext, depending on how they're done. Some websites are close to unusable because of these things.
#tech #dev #web #DarkPatterns #accessibility

2026-01-22 18:04:23 UTC

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@nprofile…t3xt It serves a community purpose, collecting a list of people to block in one convenient place.

2026-01-22 17:31:15 UTC

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@nprofile…evxm While I was noodling on what I read on Wikipedia about Aristotelian hylomorphism, what occurred to me is that the functional programming notion buries form, in a sense, and that might be the relation. These things function to compose two processes that could be separable. One builds up a structure from parts; the other breaks down the structure, computing something about the parts+structure along the way. What's lovely about hylomorphisms is that they can go directly from the initial part to the value computed without ever building up and breaking down the structure. The structure remains implicit, in other words. You might say the I/O process a hylomorphism encompasses has an implicit form built into it. I don't know if that's the reason for the use of this term in functional programming, but I suspect something along those lines might be.

2026-01-22 16:18:20 UTC

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@nprofile…evxm The only hylomorphism I'm familiar with is the computer science concept, so I'm not sure I'd be able to follow you there on first read. I do feel like I'm seeing a tendency in the fields I do follow towards a panpsychism or pancognitivism that I read as an attempt to breathe a form into non-living matter that explains how it becomes animate, alive, evolving, or what have you. The attempts I'm aware of feel circular, but then again I'm not super knowledgeable about such things.
Channeling Hegel, I think Han is saying that associations of words lack comprehension: there's no single concept that encompasses what the words are saying into a unified whole. So, word associations are accretive: you can only add more, never synthesize. In my mind it's a bit like gathering more and more 2-d points of a circle without ever realizing they lie on a circle; you have a growing mess of data with no comprehension, no finality or completion in the form of the circle. I think there's a case to be made that computers by themselves are not capable of bridging this gap in general: humans must be involved because we are able to make leaps of logic that are uncomputable. Which I suppose is a kind of experience.

2026-01-22 14:26:54 UTC

I put the text below on LinkedIn in response to a post there and figured I'd share it here too because it's a bit of a step from what I've been posting previously on this topic and might be of some use to someone.
In retrospect I might have written non-sense in place of nonsense.
If you're in tech the Han reference might be a bit out of your comfort zone, but Andrews is accessible and measured.
It's nonsense to say that coding will be replaced with "good judgment". There's a presupposition behind that, a worldview, that can't possibly fly. It's sometimes called the theory-free ideal: given enough data, we don't need theory to understand the world. It surfaces in AI/LLM/programming rhetoric in the form that we don't need to code anymore because LLM's can do most of it. Programming is a form of theory-building (and understanding), while LLMs are vast fuzzy data store and retrieval systems, so the theory-free ideal dictates the latter can/should replace the former. But it only takes a moment's reflection to see that nothing, let alone programming, can be theory-free; it's a kind of "view from nowhere" way of thinking, an attempt to resurrect Laplace's demon that ignores everything we've learned in the >200 years since Laplace forwarded that idea. In that respect it's a (neo)reactionary viewpoint, and it's maybe not a coincidence that people with neoreactionary politics tend to hold it. Anyone who needs a more formal argument can read Mel Andrews's The Immortal Science of ML: Machine Learning & the Theory-Free Ideal, or Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics (which argues, among other things, that this is a nihilistic).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #coding #dev #tech #SoftwareDevelopment #programming #nihilism #LinkedIn

2026-01-21 17:39:38 UTC

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@nprofile…66ln I've had good experiences with Kile (https://kile.sourceforge.io). It's a KDE project but should be installable on any flavor of Ubuntu with sudo apt install kile on the command line or with whatever tool you use to install software. I haven't written book-length things with it, but I have used it for articles and I don't see that it'd falter on longer works. I don't have any experience using Markdown in it, only Latex. I don't know if it can even handle Markdown.

2026-01-20 18:42:16 UTC

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@nprofile…sd57 It's interesting how different people experience such a thing differently, especially with regards to whether it's a positive or negative experience. I tend to associate noise with disaster! Though I can see how the silence after the noise could be chilling.

2026-01-20 13:38:51 UTC

Am I to understand from this that SearXNG is in the process of becoming AI poisoned?
https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2163
https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2008
https://github.com/searxng/searxng/issues/2273The last issue hasn't been active since 2023 but the 1st one has been active recently and the middle one last summer.
#SearX #SearXNG #SearchEngines #AlternateSearchEngines #MetaSearchEngines #web #dev #tech #FOSS #OpenSource #AI #AIPoisoning #AISlop

2026-01-19 14:54:33 UTC

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@nprofile…d8se Yes. It's partly why I'm so critical: Nature has played a large role in uncritically spreading AI disinformation. Till they reined it in arXiv did too. Corporate marketing in a lab coat is still corporate marketing, and I don't think scientific publishing platforms should be publishing it next to scientific communication as if these two forms of communication are of a piece. I also think crithype is a real phenomenon. There are ways to present a fuller picture of a technology, including the voices from corporate labs while staying within the bounds of the scientific, but it seems Nature has chosen not to do that, at least as far as I can see.

2026-01-19 12:35:04 UTC

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@nprofile…d8se I wouldn't call someone from Anthropic an expert. They're a businessperson with significant amounts of money, reputation and their own livelihood on the line. We need to get out of the mode of ignoring deep conflicts of interest like this, especially when they seem to be driving the viewpoints expressed.

2026-01-19 12:32:34 UTC

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...and now the power's back on. I think CMP's alerting system could use a bit of calibration. It's currently saying my road does not have power.
I always give it a bit when the power comes back because more than once it's come back then gone out again shortly after. I think this outage might be over though.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 12:20:47 UTC

I love the quiet of a power outage, especially when there's snow on the ground. These breaks in the otherwise relentless grinding of the world machine are such a relief. I suppose people uaccustomed to it find it unsettling.

2026-01-19 12:14:15 UTC

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Now they're saying 11am. Yeah.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 11:55:04 UTC

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CMP is saying there are roughly 2,000 people without power, about 1,100 of whom are in Alfred, about a third of the town! Looks like it's a local outage, a good sign.

2026-01-19 11:50:42 UTC

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Central Maine Power is claiming power will be restored here by 7:15am, about half an hour from now. But as I recall that's what their alerts said last time, at least until it became clear it would be an extended outage. So I've hunkered down in case this one lasts awhile.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 11:44:16 UTC

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We didn't get that much snow, but the temperature is hovering near freezing so it's wet and heavy. Probably tore down some tree branches.
A couple years ago we went a good five days without power (about a day in between two longer outages when we did) but haven't had one since till now.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-19 11:26:15 UTC

Power went out at 5am here in Alfred. The fire alarm beeping because of the power loss woke him up, which in turn woke me up. Good thing. Fire's stoked now.
#maine #CMP #PowerOutage

2026-01-18 21:43:22 UTC

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To spell that out a bit: the other major strands of programming involve a bureaucracy intended to suppress the messiness inherent in the stateful behavior of digital machinery. The ubiquity of notions like leaky abstractions, weird states, bugs, exceptions, errors, faults all point at (a) the messiness is intrinsic; (b) the messiness is negatively valenced, meaning to be suppressed.
The future lies in embracing statefulness and effectfulness in self-modifying code. Unlike the bureaucratic procedure of rule-based coding, this style of programming is more like surfing, or performance, or gardening. Your task as a programmer is to plant a seed of code that unfolds into something beautiful. I'll leave as an exercise for the reader what the soil is in this metaphor.
(I'm only half joking!)
#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics

2026-01-18 21:37:02 UTC

Weird thought of the day: the revolution lies in imperative programming.
#ComputerScience #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #politics

2026-01-17 21:04:33 UTC

The backyard scene after last night's and today's snow.
#maine #snow #winter
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-afcc3f53bd5dfd5224ef6bbf9f27e383.jpg

2025-12-20 19:20:47 UTC

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@nprofile…2rm9 @nprofile…2xyh I use phanpy with snac and it works well.

2025-12-08 15:58:55 UTC

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@nprofile…xej4 I've been tracking @nprofile…0cr3 's fork on Codeberg: https://codeberg.org/rereading/arcalibre . It's a bit strange to put a no-AI fork of something on Github, the AI slop platform, in 2025.

2025-12-07 13:54:37 UTC

For anyone tracking what's going on with generative AI appearing in the eBook software calibre, the calibre developer seems to be asking us to avoid his software:
In a GitHub issue about adding LLM features:
I definitely think allowing the user to continue the conversation is useful. In my own use of LLMs I tend to often ask followup questions, being able to do so in the same window will be useful.
In other words he likes LLMs and uses them himself; he's probably not adding these features under pressure from users. I can't help but wonder whether there's vibe code in there.
In the bug report:
Wow, really! What is it with you people that think you can dictate what I choose to do with my time and my software? You find AI offensive, dont use it, or even better, dont use calibre, I can certainly do without users like you. Do NOT try to dictate to other people what they can or cannot do.
"You people", also known as paying users. He's dismissive of people's concerns about generative AI, and claims ownership of the software ("my software"). He tells people with concerns to get lost, setting up an antagonistic, us-versus-them scenario. We even get scream caps!
Personally, besides the fact that I have a zero tolerance policy about generative AI, I've had enough of arrogant software developers. Read the room.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #calibre #eBooks #eBookManagers #AISlop #AIPoisoning #InformationOilSpill #dev #tech #FOSS #SoftwareDevelopment

2025-12-05 17:49:11 UTC

Ughhhh, et tu calibre?
New features
- Allow asking AI questions about any book in your calibre library. Right click the "View" button and choose "Discuss selected book(s) with AI"
- AI: Allow asking AI what book to read next by right clicking on a book and using the "Similar books" menu
- AI: Add a new backend for "LM Studio" which allows running various AI models locally
Release: 8.16.1 04 Dec, 2025; or here on their GitHub
Calibre is one of those pieces of software that I use from time to time but don't follow closely. I wasn't aware they'd been sipping from the poisoned chalice.
#calibre #FOSS #OpenSource #books #eBooks #eBookManager #AIPoisoning #InformationOilSpill

2025-11-30 14:50:07 UTC

If Cloudflare really is "verifying" that I'm human with its obnoxious widget, why does it do this for multiple web sites and over and over again for a given web site? Shouldn't it be able to verify I'm human once and for all? What exactly are they doing with their sprawling control of all these web sites if not adding value through economy of scale?
#Cloudflare #SecurityTheater #surveillance #web #tech #dev #DarkPattern