Anthony

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

website: https://bucci.onl/about.html

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Last Notes

2026-10-16 12:16:00 UTC

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Asbestos applied as a fire retardant. The criterion "never used again" is setup for a motte-and-bailey fallacy. But asbestos is a reasonably close example. The history of technological progress is full of other examples if one is willing to read rather than push a favored ideology.

2026-09-23 15:06:53 UTC

You know what they say, old philosophers never die, they just become managing partners.
#philosophy #LinkedIn
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-008e2f63e0c31a603972385166018938.png

2026-08-13 10:18:47 UTC

Regarding the LB, https://fedi.kbg.sh/users/kevin/statuses/117085582358711627
There's an interesting thing about strongly typed programming languages, especially dependently typed ones (1), wherein if you know the type signature of a function there is sometimes only one implementation of it, and that implementation will have lots of nice properties (e.g. Philip Wadler's *Theorems for free!* paper, also Jose Oliveira's work, and the followups to these). It's a fascinating set of results that holds out the possibility of at least some amount of automatic programming that has desirable, provable properties concerning correctness, resource use, security, and so on.
However, that "some amount" is very important to remember. I'd argue that no matter how far such work is pushed, there will always be an infinite space of things one might wish to express in software that cannot be automatically programmed in that way. That's the Therac-25 space the LB evokes. We all know this intuitively, I think, yet in the various mystifications thrown up about computers and software and now LLMs it can be hard to remember.
For example, I'd say so-called "side effects" or just "effects" are still a large blind spot of these methods. Without effects functional programming does little more than heat up a CPU (but the heat is an effect oops), so if we're being snarky we might say functional programming without effects isn't programming at all. But in spite of the gazillion attempts to do so, you really cannot faithfully capture all side effects of interest in a type system, for the simple reason that the real world is open-ended.(2) There's a funny contradiction that functional programming languages could not exist were it not for irreducibly effectful computational architectures to exist *on*. Asking the CPU to execute an instruction, and all the statefulness this necessarily involves, is a "side effect" in this view of computation, which is absurd.
For these reasons I've found it fruitful to conceive of functional programming as an intricate bureaucracy sitting between the programmer and the real world.(3) Set up enough bureaucracy and you can comfortably pretend most of the real world isn't there most of the time. Some people do this for so long that they begin to think the bureaucracy *is* the real world (4); or they try to warp the real world till it becomes more and more like the the bureaucracy.(5) But the real world is oozy and eventually squishes around all attempts to constrain it in this way. Neglecting this is how people end up being harmed by digital technology.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #Lean #math #ComputerScience #theory #FunctionalProgramming #philosophy
(1) "leanslop" in the linked post refers to Lean, a dependently typed functional programming language that's being used to formalize mathematical ideas. We should always remember that Lean originated from Microsoft Research
(2) There's a long history of philosophical arguments hiding behind that assertion but there's no space to get into that here. A less contentious way to put it would be that the claim that all side effects worth caring about can be captured in a type system is a philosophical commitment, not a fact about the world, and therefore it's possible it cannot be done
(3) We use terms like runtimes, preludes, standard libraries, or APIs/ABIs (among others) for this bureaucracy
(4) "Touch grass"
(5) Financialization and neoliberalism, e.g.

2026-07-28 13:57:18 UTC

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As far as I can tell Cory Doctorow only ever just talked a lot. His views have always been pretty lousy, if one were willing and able to dig through the noise firehose he has persistently aimed at anyone near tech for decades, which admittedly is quite difficult.
He's recently come out as gleefully open to warmongering:
> What’s got me so excited is that we’ve got a new coalition in the War on General Purpose Computers: a coalition that includes the digital rights activists who’ve been on the lines for decades, but also people who want to turn America’s Big Tech trillions into billions for their own economy, and > **national security hawks who are quite rightly worried about digital sovereignty.**
[The Post-American Internet](https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2026-01-01-39c3-the-new-coalition-4a7a582ff5b7 )
Excited about forming an "unstoppable coalition" with "national security hawks"? "Digital sovereignty"? We know what that looks like. Another one driven power mad by tech.
Personally I don't believe this is cognitive surrender. I also don't believe he has an inner critic that knows LLMs are wrong. I think Doctorow has an internal editor that knows *other people* think LLMs are wrong, and that editor advises him to shape his word fountain carefully. He has his own agenda, and the fact that the overwhelming torrent of words he unleashes on the world sometimes includes combinations we find pleasing does not mean he holds beliefs anything like ours (for any values of "we" and "ours"). The guy is still invited onto "lefty" podcasts even though he clearly outs himself as a right winger over and over again, on the strength of a single neologistic insult to platform capitalism. I think the thing to spot is that the internal editor is loosening his editorial constraints, suggesting Doctorow no longer feels the need to fully dupe this audience. Maybe that's what has him excited.

2026-07-24 15:22:56 UTC

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Sorry to butt in, but as a computer scientist who's seen this sort of thing unfold since at least the 1970's---recalling Doug Lenat's "Automated Mathematician" and the hype surrounding it---I find the notion of math PhD students becoming dependent on software automation alarming and thought I'd ask a question or two, if you don't mind.
Has anyone explored in a serious way the pedagogical implications of having PhD students use automation in their *reasoning* work? There is some evidence that use of generative AI degrades critical thinking and other cognitive skills, which is a good enough reason to ask. We could be doing a disservice to students by persuading them to use such tools. Speaking from personal experience, more than once in my life I've written a computer program to solve a puzzle I still had no idea how to solve after writing the computer program and studying its output. Computer mediation does something to the reasoning process, and I'm not so sure we fully understand the implications. People have been teaching math without such tools for thousands of years; why take on an unknown possible risk like this?
More broadly, I cannot help wondering: what's driving the urgency that demands automation in math of all things? Automating the provision of life-saving devices and medicines to people who need them has a justifiable urgency. But math? This is not to say people should tediously calculate every little thing when there are helpful tools available. It's simply to ask: is there a better rationale than variations of "avoid tedium", "avoid mistakes", "go faster" or "everyone else is doing it", which seem superficially appealing but in the end are incoherent justifications (in my view)?

2026-07-22 13:04:37 UTC

Re: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116961677110890384
I've taken part in numerous computer science research projects that involved IRB review. I believe the system *can* work, even for cases like the above post. But Google and Stanford are bad actors that are taken at their word, and no system, IRB based or otherwise, is going to function properly if it cannot appropriately metabolize this reality.
I was once in a meeting where a Google X person gushed about a project that used smartphone sensor data to detect earthquakes. The calculus being set up here is that detecting earthquakes is a social good that outweighs any particular individual's right to privacy and even outweighs their right to know that their smartphone is being used in this way, let alone consent to it in any meaningful way. (*) Let me be clear and say I reject this framing, but it does appeal to a lot of people, even well-meaning ones. A mess.
#Google #IRB #ethics #EthicsReview #ComputerScience #research #ResearchEthics #tech #dev
(*) I assume there's some contortion involving EULAs whereby Google X can pretend that anyone using Android consented to having their smartphone's sensor data used for any future purpose Google et al. cooks up.

2026-07-17 10:56:27 UTC

Re: https://mastodon.social/ap/users/115587243049342870/statuses/116934718425134083
I believe at this stage CloudFlare provides security in a way analogous to how a protection racket provides security.
#CloudFlare #security #cybersecurity #infosec #web

2026-07-17 10:53:53 UTC

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This is a bit tangential, but I was reminded today of the question "who are the farmers?" one ought to be asking when considering enhancing the resilience of communities. If the farmers aren't doing well the entire community is at risk, yet they are frequently left out of consideration (except by people who think about resilience, I guess). So the question takes on a certainn urgency.
If we take seriously that code is to some extent "perishable", meaning it can bitrot, drift out of date with current conditions so badly that it becomes effectively non-functional, etc., then perhaps an analogy with farming isn't unreasonable. Proposals like "just fork the project" would have you give up a robust vegetable farm that reliably produces every season in exchange for a single vegetable harvest. In principle, if you're clever and well-resourced you could seed the vegetables and buy your own land and equipment and start your own farm. Regardless, that possibility existing does not equate the robust farm with the single harvest and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. This is another take on the Omelas analogy but one a little closer to my heart.
I think the question "who are the farmers in open source?" is very interesting. I don't think the answer is the obvious one.

2026-07-17 10:30:12 UTC

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I loathe CloudFlare, and strongly believe they do not provide security except possibly in the sense a protection racket does.

2026-07-16 15:09:34 UTC

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I don't know either, but I'm glad there are people thinking hard about it. My take about Torvalds, for whatever it's worth, is that he's made it clear that he is incurious about how power works on and through him, and he wishes to create a permission structure for others who are similarly incurious. Why anyone would want to publicly declare themselves a tool the way he has recently is puzzling to me, but in any case such people can do a lot of harm and no one should be granting their own power to them and enhancing their ability to do still more harm. Resisting such people is by extension resisting the power that works through them. How to organize significant and sustained resistance is beyond me, though I think diagnosing and naming the problem helps if only a bit.

2026-07-15 13:51:41 UTC

Yellow-orange skies from Canadian wildfire smoke, ever-worsening news about federal agents murdering an innocent person for no discernible reason, and the US continuing along its "war crimes as policy" trajectory. The Dystopia Index is high in Maine today.
#maine #dystopia #USPol #MEPol #ClimateChange #wildfires

2026-07-14 13:53:33 UTC

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It looks like it's easily convertible to the [Fano plane](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fano_plane ) by adding a few extra lines, so you could go full math nerd too.

2026-07-13 13:51:38 UTC

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I had similar thoughts skimming the table of contents. "The Role of Repetition and Mathematical Groups in Natural Discernment" seems especially bizarre to me as someone who's studied mathematical groups, but I may read it anyway.

2026-07-12 18:16:02 UTC

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The book is open access and you can download it directly from https://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2607186/book_9780262053624.pdf (linked from https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6161/Towards-a-Biosemiotic-Theoretical-BiologySign ; scroll down and click "Book PDF")

2026-07-12 13:20:10 UTC

@npub1fg4…mynu Seems to be right up your alley, if you haven't come across it already: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053617/towards-a-biosemiotic-theoretical-biology/

2026-07-11 16:03:10 UTC

Re: https://infosec.exchange/users/lcamtuf/statuses/116901998490591428
> I don't find it surprising that people send LLM-generated docs, publish LLM-generated blog posts, etc. Writing is a chore and there's this big button labeled "get it done".
Writing can be many things, but a *chore*? That's not something I entirely understand. I don't mean to sound like I'm hollering at this single point from this person's post, but it's a sentiment I've seen expressed before and this was a convenient example (and what I say next is in the spirit of and amplifies the further point they make!)
There's an emerging theme in my last few posts today concerning means vs. ends. Science as a production process that spits out knowledge products. Writing as the necessary chore sitting between a person and "having another blog post" or "citation count go up".
Overfocus on the ends can lead one to think of the means as chores. Science is slow and boring, let's use AI to spit out the Good Science Stuff faster. Writing is a chore, let's use the AI to spit out Documents. Heck let's chain them together and have the machine do Good Science Stuff and then spit out Documents about it that we feed back into the machine and hey we can send the Documents to Funding Agencies to get Funding for our Good Science Stuff and spit our more Documents so that...and...to...so.... What were we doing again? Personally I think it's poisonous to focus mostly on ends. If I believed in souls I'd say it's bad for them. I guess I find the mindset confusing because long ago I came to think that the means are the ends. There are no other ends but the means. Yes, I well understand there are certain kinds of mandated writing that are tedious and unwanted. <a href="https://buc.ci?t=ai" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#AI</a> <a href="https://buc.ci?t=genai" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#GenAI</a> <a href="https://buc.ci?t=generativeai" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#GenerativeAI</a> <a href="https://buc.ci?t=llms" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#LLMs</a> <a href="https://buc.ci?t=writing" class="mention hashtag" rel="tag">#writing</a>

2026-07-11 14:34:11 UTC

> The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a phase of scientific enquiry in which we produce more but understand less.
From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07146-0
There are good points in this article, but the framing of the risk above is broken, to my way of thinking. In adopting an economic metaphor or production, it's taking for granted that there is a scientific *process* that leads to *products*, and that we can quantify how many of these products are produced. "We produce more".
I would argue that if we do not understand whatever is coming out of this process, then they are not products in any reasonable sense of that word. In fact I'd say this of any putative commodity: if a factory spits out a widget nobody knows how to use, then the factory has not produced a commodity, it has made an object. Commodities are commodious, adapted to a use or purpose, and human beings are the entities that have uses and purposes.
So, if we create machines that make knowledge-objects resembling the products of science that fewer and fewer people understand, we are not engaging in "scientific enquiry" or "knowledge production". In this view the phrase quoted above ought to be re-cast as "The proliferation of AI tools in science risks science". What exactly is enquiry for if not understanding more?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #science

2026-07-11 14:08:26 UTC

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> The core argument is that systems trained only on linguistic form cannot learn meaning, because meaning requires a connection to extralinguistic referents.
[The octopus test](https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf )---which really summarizes a vast literature on linguistics and language---supports this point of view. It's not some flippant thing Bender at al. are throwing out there just to be contentious.
> Even if we accept this premise
...
> it still does not apply to the systems anyone is talking about today.
What? Anyone who says LLMs have "capabilities", can "think", or "reason", or "code", or "do math" or "solve physics" or "write papers" or..........is talking about exactly this. What they go on to argue about grounding reads as missing the point to me. Training datasets about the world are not grounding in the world.
> On the contrary, some LLMs trained only on text can, in fact, tell you how to build a catapult
False. They can emit words in the shape of instructions for building a catapult, maybe, but only if something like that is in the training data. But this misses the point of the octopus test, which was that *catapult-like things were not in the available data*. An LLM cannot give you instructions to build something it's never encountered in training data. It might fake it a bit if there had been something similar in the training data, but it would almost surely fail to answer any nuanced question about the instructions. We've seen this time and again and it will always be the case. Arguing otherwise presupposes that human beings exist in an entirely closed-ended world that can be fully encased in a large enough but still finite space of natural language text plus whatever can be interpolated within that space. This assumption is plainly false, besides being nihilistic, bleak, and horrifying.
The "people don't believe stuff because it sounds sneering" is irrational tone policing, and is not serious. If your life were at stake, say, would you tell the emergency responder who's there to help you to leave because they spoke to you in a sneering way? Of course not. One tone polices about matters that don't matter.

2026-07-11 13:46:49 UTC

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I'd offer the following observations:
The fact that people motivated by vast amounts of money and power to criticize the term "stochastic parrots" choose to criticize the term "stochastic parrots" is not evidence that there is a problem with the term or the critique it implies. If someone has a critique, they should put it forward and defend it. Otherwise, pointing to "lots of people critique this" sounds at best like bad faith insinuation. Bender and collaborators have also put forward [the octopus test](https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf ), if one is feeling chauvinistic about the relative intelligence of birds.
The substance of Searl'e Chinese Room objection has never really been met by proponents of the belief that sequence-to-sequence maps somehow encase "intelligence" or "agency" or other cognitive markers humans have. Ken Aizawa and collaborators have written several nice articles on "the mark of the cognitive", trying to get at what we mean when we say humans are cognitive, and an immediate consequence of their work is that LLMs are not. By my read they don't go so far as to claim things like LLMs *cannot* be cognitive, but personally I think their work strongly implies that conclusion (they don't want to pick that particular fight is how I read them). A lot of these "debates" turn on the fact that to claim LLMs do something "cognitive", you must define precisely what you meany by that word, yet proponents of this view rarely if ever do.
In other words, and to speak of credibility, the burden of proof lies with the proponents of LLM "capabilities". Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, etc. Worse still, we've known about the ELIZA effect for 50-ish years by now, and since it is a powerful confounder it needs to be ruled out at a bare minimum before any further conclusions can reasonably be drawn.

2026-07-10 19:01:28 UTC

Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham on SpaceX and AI: "we should wish that it’s hype, because if it’s not, it’s a lot worse."
From https://global.morningstar.com/en-gb/stocks/jeremy-grantham-spacex-it-will-be-amazing-if-it-doesnt-collapse
#AI #SpaceX #hype #billionaires #economy #finance #investors

2026-07-09 15:42:00 UTC

update-notifier-crash on Ubuntu 24.04 wrote 1 Tbyte of garbage to syslog before I noticed and stopped it. I noticed because it filled the disk.
Unbelievably annoying behavior. I guess that'll teach me to ignore an update notification rather than figuring out how to disable it forever.
#linux #ubuntu #syslog #SpamLogging #tech #dev

2026-07-08 13:47:09 UTC

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> For there is one weapon that only we possess and which the billionaires and the warmongers can never take from us. One weapon which so frightens them they will twist their words into knots, they will spend the entirety of their vast fortunes trying and failing to convince us that we don’t possess it at all, they will claim over and over and without evidence that it is vanishing before our eyes even as it remains right there in our hands, clear and plain to hearts yet open to the world: the refusal to work.

2026-07-08 13:41:48 UTC

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> On the one hand, they threaten us with no work at all, with the misery and penury that comes from a lack of work, and therefore a lack of the means of living. On the other, they demand endless work, a work that wipes out all other avenues for thinking and being, that leaves us programmable and programmed, no space left in our minds for thoughts they haven’t placed there. Are we to merely acquiesce, to accept their scraps and the miserable conditions attached to them? Surely not. For if we accept these conditions, will they not impose even worse upon us? Will they not keep increasing their demands and decreasing our pay until we are working ceaselessly, and for nothing? What would compel them to stop? Already we have seen that their greed for money and for power is so voracious it will tear through buildings and through bodies, it will murder many people, it will poison the air and the soil, it will bring great storms upon us. So there must be an end, and it is only we who can bring that end about.

2026-07-08 13:27:02 UTC

> Only a mind so subdued by slop and propaganda and advertising, a mind unpracticed in observation and inquiry and imagination—only such a mind could be complacent as its pockets are picked to fund that most terrible of horrors.
[Into the Gap](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/into-the-gap )

2026-07-08 13:08:14 UTC

I found this to be excellent: https://mass-driver.com/article/from-human-hands
**From human hands.**
*We don’t use AI in any of our design or production processes. Here’s why.*
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ImageGeneration #fonts #typefaces #art

2026-07-08 12:48:48 UTC

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> Low levels of code literacy are acceptable in the industry.
My experience isn't representative, but that's something I've observed in industry as well. Code that isn't understood tends to be treated a bit like a cyst. The trouble is that over time the codebase becomes more cyst than functional.
I've been in the position to hire software developers multiple times over my career, and I eventually converged on a pretty simple technique. For the technical interview, I'd ask them to bring code they've written and that they understand, and explain it to me. It was intended as a literacy test. The trouble is the interviewer needs to be relatively code literate to understand what they're observing in such an interaction.
I had a technical interview long ago where the interviewer sat me in a room, gave me a printout (!) of code, and asked me to highlight all the issues I could find with it. When I was done we walked through it and I explained my observations. In retrospect that was a literacy test, too. Using a physical printout is a brilliant move.

2026-07-07 17:04:00 UTC

Microsoft hates Doom, creates doom.
#computer #games #gaming #id #IdSoftware #IdTech #Microsoft #XBOX #Doom #Quake

2026-07-07 16:55:42 UTC

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> "how will LLMs change the demand for code?"
Regardless of where you stand on any of what follows, I submit there far, far superior sources to someone like Hank Green if this is genuinely a question that's of interest.
Green is paid by organization(s) aligned with the AI industry, and has demonstrated he will frame his content around the ideas these organizations are pushing. The AI industry has a very specific take on this question in furtherance of their own goals. This show/channel/person could not be more biased, in that sense. I view them as a force of *mis*education. As you note, it works by superficially aping entities like PBS that people trust, and functions to "science wash" content that has a manipulative purpose.
PBS has its issues, no doubt, but it's a member-station-supported non-profit organization with federal licensure requirements. PBS is supported by member station dues, some of which in turn come from individual donations to the member stations. Till 2025 it was also funded by CPB, which was formed by an act of Congress in 1967. All of this entails a fair amount of accountability for content. It is a categorically different organizational structure from "science commentators" on Youtube, and treating the content of the two as similar because of superficial resemblances in production quality is very dangerous, in my opinion.

2026-07-07 16:10:35 UTC

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Putting aside that the existence of "Youtube science communicator" as a group is indicative of serious problems, Green is an AI shill spreading critihype, among other things. Broken down here: https://youtu.be/4lKyNdZz3Vw (the bits about SciShow, but also how irresponsible and damaging it is for someone like him to be posting the stuff he does).
He's problematic in other ways but I can't be bothered to dig up the links.

2026-07-07 13:27:27 UTC

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ugh not Hank Green.

2026-07-06 18:17:16 UTC

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Francophone world feeling the heat lately...
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-ef7d3c75ea27e6fecee1f1b9cd782952.png

2026-07-06 13:54:18 UTC

It's like having a second brain.
#fungus #LeafyBrain
https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-2839a5616ef1ccaba357d28d8cbdd2d0.jpg

2026-07-06 12:25:10 UTC

Regarding that last boost: no one's ever built a "1 GW" data center anywhere. It's also absurd to use a measure of power for a computing system when what matters computationally is throughput, latency, and storage capacity.

2026-07-06 12:23:30 UTC

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This is not a "plan", it's carnival barking.

2026-07-06 00:15:33 UTC

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Who'd want to use the meat machine in their skull any more than is necessary to usher in the singularity?

2026-07-05 23:11:36 UTC

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Hmm, yes. It makes sense. I don't think many do, frankly. I've asked software developers I've known over the years and virtually all admitted some variation of the same sentiment. I think it's a tragedy we don't teach this better. There is so much brilliance recorded in source code.

2026-07-05 20:12:51 UTC

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One of the "coders" interviewed was an odious toadie of Jeffrey Epstein, one has some awful views including homophobic ones, and several others have become horrifyingly AI-pilled in recent years. I think I'll pass on this one I'm afraid to say.

2026-07-05 12:53:43 UTC

Re: https://social.wildeboer.net/users/jwildeboer/statuses/116860157329810170
I realize this is beside the point, but personally I view the fact that code review is not considered interesting as a serious failure of computer science education. I'm invested in the latter, so it stands out for me.
On the whole writers tend to love to read. I think they love it in part because their education led them to realize that learning to read well is both a good in itself and helps you become a better writer. Programming languages were designed to be human readable so that humans could read them. Yet we have a couple generations of people writing code most of whom were never explicitly taught how to read it, let alone learn to love reading it.
#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming #ComputerScience #ComputerScienceEducation

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

2026-06-05 13:24:35 UTC

In other words Ladybird is no longer a free and open source software project. It is, in an important sense, closed source now.
"Proprietary" means having owner(s). If the maintainers are the only ones allowed to introduce changes, they are establishing an ownership relationship over the codebase. I.e., it's a proprietary project, and that is the sense in which it's closed.
This is the destiny of most projects that go AI, in my opinion.<li><a href="https://exquisite.social/users/thomholwerda/statuses/116697078838020135" target="_blank">https://exquisite.social/users/thomholwerda/statuses/116697078838020135</a></li><li><a href="https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/" target="_blank">https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/</a></li>
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #web #WebBrowser #browser #tech #Ladybird #FOSS #OSS #OpenSource #ClosedSource #ProprietarySoftware

2026-06-01 14:04:43 UTC

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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

2026-05-21 20:51:33 UTC

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> Zealotry has no real place here.
Look, I tried to be polite. But fuck right off with this transparently bad faith ungrounded accusatory horse shit. You're blocked now.
@npub1c24…0kcs @npub1e5z…p90v

2026-05-21 18:35:51 UTC

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> Again - it’s entirely possible to use Kagi without a single piece of AI. Which was the point of the original post.
Again---this is a misrepresentation. I take your posts to be purposely obfuscating at this point. Bye.

2026-05-21 12:28:50 UTC

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> 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:<li>"Not a lot of people know that Kagi started as Kagi.ai in 2018 and has a long heritage of utilizing AI"</li><li>"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"</li><li>"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"</li><li>"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."</li>
Their future business model as stated in 2019:<li>"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"</li><li>"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"</li>
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](https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html ) 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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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

2026-05-14 13:18:31 UTC

Last night we saw a fairly large bird on the fence that we couldn't identify, and only caught a blurry photo of it. After asking around, it seems it may have been an osprey! Now I'm impatient for it to come back so we can get a better look/photo.
#maine #birds #birding #osprey

2026-05-03 11:00:36 UTC

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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 17:26:41 UTC

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The KDE Connect I'm using is the small app that helps different devices communicate. I mostly use it to send URLs and files between computer and phone. As far as I know it cannot handle email.
I've played around with KMail/the KOrganizer suite as a potential Thunderbird replacement. I found it to be OK but not great, in the sense that if I had to I could live with it but there are several things about it I wish were different. At one point I switched from Thunderbird to Betterbird in the hopes that it'd provide some buffer against AI Mozilla is/will be putting into Thunderbird. Switching from Thunderbird to Betterbird was trivial.

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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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

2026-04-27 13:24:32 UTC

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I have been considering this question too, since I've relied on Ubuntu for awhile. I hate to say it, but I've come to think that Gentoo or Guix may be the only reasonable options right now. I say "I hate to say it" because both are supposedly quite difficult to set up and administer compared to a distribution like Ubuntu. I have not used either so cannot speak from experience, only from what I've read.
I considered Debian for awhile, in part because it's familiar and relatively easy. However, as an outsider to that project I'm concerned about some of their internal discussions concerning AI. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually decided to accept AI-generated code submissions in certain cases, or allow AI to "review" things. Once that crack opens a flood follows, if experience is any guide.
I'm of a mind that as annoying as it can be, compiling your basic tools from source code that you can peg to a specific version (pre-AI-slop-contributions) is the only way to really avoid AI at the OS level. This situation cries out for a community "No AI" distribution, frankly, but I haven't seen anything along those lines yet (such things might exist but I don't track all this that closely)

2026-04-26 13:29:41 UTC

I profoundly dislike Discord and I wish people would stop pushing me there. The UX is poor for such a widely-used service.

2026-04-25 13:23:58 UTC

The typical webapp login process for me is anywhere from 5 to 7 steps, and I'd say I give up about 5-10% of the time after the 2nd CAPTCHA. I can't imagine this is good for anybody, and it almost surely does not reduce abuse either. Just a swirling dark pattern feeding on itself. Everyone likes to ape post-9/11 airport "security" for some reason.
#tech #dev #SecurityTheater #DarkPatterns #UI #UX #security

2026-04-24 23:09:07 UTC

Looks like governor Janet Mills vetoed the Maine data center moratorium that recently passed the Maine legislature. Extremely disappointing, and out of step with what's increasingly looking like a winning electoral strategy. Very few people want data centers. They destroy neighborhoods, don't create good jobs, and don't bring wealth into a community. They raise electricity rates 50-100%, possibly more in the long term.
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/04/24/politics/janet-mills-vetoes-maine-data-center-ban/
#Maine #DataCenters #NoAI

2026-04-23 15:39:03 UTC

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> 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.

2026-04-22 13:54:17 UTC

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> Musk and his colleagues have the good fortune of living in a moment when there is no structural actor capable of challenging their dominance. The working class has virtually ceased to exist as an organized force. Absent pressure from below, political parties themselves offer no meaningful opposition to Muskism. The effect is paradoxical. On the one hand, the lives of capitalists are made easier when they can intensify the exploitation of their workers and purchase influence in politics with little resistance. But it also means they have no incentive to restrain their most antisocial impulses or consider the long-term consequences of their actions.
> Muskism typifies this tendency: if Fordism and post-Fordism were both, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism is oriented toward social war. The relative thinness of the Muskist mode of regulation is symptomatic: the working-class antagonist is so weak, the social war so asymmetric, that there is no need for a negotiated peace. At the moment, the strategy seems to be working.
#USPol #WorldPol #geopolitics #Musk #Muskism #Fordism

2026-04-22 13:52:21 UTC

> In broad strokes, these are some of the main elements of the Muskist regime of accumulation. Fuse with the state by becoming a monopoly provider for essential functions. Concentrate production while prioritizing resilience, independence, and control. Sell technology for national and individual self-reliance in a hostile world filled with racialized others. Accelerate digitization to make everything programmable, including and especially the human brain.
> ...
> This is the other side of the Muskist mode of regulation: a vision not of shared prosperity but of violence. The fan contract for those inside the walls of a fortified West, and expulsion for those marked as illegitimate. After both the models of Fordist industrialism and post-Fordist outsourcing and globalization have receded, Muskism holds out the prospect of a purified community of survivors.
> ...
> In many ways, the ICE incursion was Muskism in action: heavily armed agents equipped with data analytics dashboards and facial-recognition software, using high technology to purge those migrants deemed out of place and punish their “woke” enablers.
From [Muskism As Fordism](https://lpeproject.org/blog/muskism-as-fordism/ )
#USPol #WorldPol #geopolitics #Musk #Muskism #Fordism

2026-04-21 19:34:32 UTC

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A typical reply to this on #LinkedIn : "I can't parse your layer cake of sarcasm but I use AI to _________"

2026-04-21 15:04:06 UTC

I just spent a solid 5 minutes confused about why my noise-cancelling headphones were not cancelling noise before realizing they were turned off.

2026-04-21 14:42:01 UTC

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I often wonder how much of this absurdity reflects a failure of computer science education to convey to students what exactly computer science is about. In my (admittedly biased) view, someone who understood what computer science is would immediately recognize "JSON prompting" as "impoverished computer programming of an unreliable machine". If you understand your theory, a bunch of unavoidable consequences follow from that simple observation. You save yourself a lot of time, trouble, and uncertainty, and can even forecast the future!
#ComputerScience #ComputerScienceEducation

2026-04-21 14:14:49 UTC

It's hilarious (*) that "JSON prompting" is a thing and AI people say "prompt engineering is dead; you should be JSON prompting".
You mean to say it's more effective to use a structured syntax to instruct the computer to do what you want? That's amazing! But I feel like I've heard that somewhere before? 🤔
💡 I wonder whether having a process that rewrites the JSON you enter into other JSON according to some rules---also expressed in JSON of course---would be helpful sometimes?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLM #Claude #PromptEngineering #JSONPrompting
(*) Hilarious in the facepalm sort of way.

2026-04-21 13:30:30 UTC

One of the things I'm finding stunning about the Vecel breach is how many people are saying "I had $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER of OAuth apps authorized to my $VERY_IMPORTANT_ACCOUNT and had to go through them all". I have like 2 OAuth apps authorized on any account that matters to me, and I review them fairly regularly and remove ones I don't use or don't remember. I also never accept "allow all" for any app. Apparently I'm weird in this way? I just feel like not doing this is akin to using "password" for all your passwords.
#tech #dev #security #cybersecurity #InfoSec #Vercel #breach #OAuth #AI

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.

2026-04-06 19:09:23 UTC

Re: https://social.coop/users/scottjenson/statuses/116352800579635299
> Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon
If this were not a disingenuous strawman---because it's impossible for one thing---I'd ask "why not?" I wouldn't invite the "AI People" I've encountered into my house either, because I've found them to be unpleasant and I get to choose who enters my space. This solution has worked quite well for me over the years.
It seems to me that what this person is saying is that people should give up the power they have---namely, their power to exclude people and topics they don't wish to interact with---because it favors them. That's a typical rhetorical move of AI boosters: demanding you give up your power because you having and exercising that power inconveniences them.
> any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
One should ask why this person chose to use the most offensive possible metaphor to make their case for inclusion. It's almost as though they don't believe the argument their words are shaped into resembling.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #AIBoosters

2026-04-02 12:31:33 UTC

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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

2026-03-31 14:24:29 UTC

For reasons that aren't even clear to me, I'm about 1/3rd into Barry Jay's *Reflective Programs in Tree Calculus* and about 1/10th into Frank Waaldijk's *Natural Topology*, which I've been reading side-by-side. Smashing these two into each other is pretty fascinating, even as I'm not sure what to make of the mixture yet.
Having sat with the notion for about six months now, I think Jay's critique of the Church-Turing thesis has legs. I don't see clearly yet exactly where and how the limits of computation manifest in his own system(s), which of course they must. But I think he's correct that this thesis as it's colloquially presented (and taught to students, including me!) is misleading at best and false in a certain important sense. Apparently he is regularly called a crackpot for forwarding this critique even though it's straightforwardly demonstrated.
Waaldijk's book is more of a constructive mathematics exploration. In this it is closely related to computer science, but it's focused on traditionally mathematical notions like topological space. The latter is usually quite complicated, but Waaldijk shows that the core concept of compact space can be represented with finitely-branching trees, making these spaces amenable to computation. Since we imagine physics taking place in spaces that are topological (among other things) there's potentially an interesting bidirectional flow of ideas between computer science and physics.
Jay calls his central notion "natural trees". Waaldijk calls his central notion "natural spaces". In both cases I think the intended sense is "with minimal artifice".
#ComputerScience #computation #math #mathematics #topology

2026-03-31 12:18:30 UTC

Here's one for the dystopia/AI Hell files: https://jaigp.org
> **Journal for AI Generated Papers**
> Where humans and machines are welcomed.
> The Open Prompting Journal Built Collaboratively by its Community.
One positive I can think of is that folks who wish to "collaborate" with machines can congregate there, giving the rest of us a clear signal about who to block, ignore, critique, ridicule...
cc [@olivia@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/olivia ) [@Iris@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/Iris ) [@dingemansemark@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/dingemansemark ) @npub1e2z…n97d @npub15xv…0jms
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AntiScience

2026-03-30 18:56:09 UTC

Microsoft Copilot putting ads in pull requests on Microsoft Github is expected behavior.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #github #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment

2026-03-30 13:00:50 UTC

The "correction", when it comes, is going to be ugly. The quantities of misallocated capital involved in this AI mania look to be even more staggering than previously reported.
I worry that few smaller companies or startups will survive, and the country will be pockmocked with half-constructed data centers and obsolete equipment. This is not like the dot-com crash that left useful and unused fiber networking.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/private-credits-exposure-to-ailing-software-industry-is-bigger-than-advertised-d80da378
hashtag#AI hashtag#GenAI hashtag#GenerativeAI hashtag#software hashtag#tech hashtag#dev hashtag#AssetBubble hashtag#PrivateCredit

2026-03-29 18:35:19 UTC

[@davidgerard@circumstances.run](https://circumstances.run/users/davidgerard ) here's one for your bsky files, if you haven't encountered it already: **Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds** https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/bluesky-leans-into-ai-with-attie-an-app-for-building-custom-feeds/
Attie.

2026-03-28 18:14:00 UTC

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If I could have someone kicking the back of the chair while another chair is lowered onto my lap and someone coughs on me, I might just lose myself in the experience!

2026-03-28 18:10:17 UTC

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I'm there with you. I understand how enormous an undertaking it would be to do something like fork the Linux kernel. However, acting like we're trapped because it'd be hard is premature surrender, and I don't think anybody who actually cares should be advocating for that. I question the motives of people who talk this way. I'm old enough to remember all the people who said Linux would never be accepted, there'd never be a viable alternative to Windows or Office, etc.

2026-03-28 17:30:30 UTC

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Please miss me with incoherent fatalism. If you want to roll over that's up to you but untag me first.
@npub17ux…329m

2026-03-27 14:36:23 UTC

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I think there's a decent chance he's a spoiler for Collins, and/or a spoiler for any legitimately left candidate. Given his background, I'd characterize him as right-wing, not progressive. He says progressive-sounding things publicly, but his background and previous actions suggest right-wing leanings. Propping up a candidate like this in Maine serves the center-right Democratic leadership *and* the Republican party.
That's how I've been thinking about it, anyway.

2026-03-27 12:39:19 UTC

> French first lady Brigitte Macron and other spouses of world leaders. "It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility. Since our environment is designed for people, humanoid systems are uniquely suited to navigate and operate within our world. They fit well."
> "Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato," she continued. "Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous. Literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history. Humanity's entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient, and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytic skills and problem solving and adopt in real time to a student's pace, prior knowledge and even emotional state. The byproduct — a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person."
From **Melania Trump pitches robots as potential educators for American schoolchildren** https://www.cbsnews.com/news/melania-trump-robots-educators-kids-humanoid-systems/
The horrors and clowns of the bread and circus.
#AI #GenAI #GeneartiveAI #robotics #education #MagicalThinking #dystopia

2026-03-25 14:33:49 UTC

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The economy, politics, and tech is centering around how to keep the deca- and hectobillionaires fully insulated from the problems they directly cause. As far as I can see they are not sawing off their own ladders or anything like that. They are consolidating their position at the tippy top. Their position there does not depend on the masses being educated, literate, or particularly skilled anymore. Instead, it requires the masses to be docile. I will start believing that this situation is changing when the masses are no longer docile, but there's not much evidence of that, at least not in the US as far as I can see.
It's possible the wealthy and powerful have miscalculated and current automation is not enough to allow them to retain an acceptable lifestyle while being fully decoupled from the masses. However, I don't see this as a foregone conclusion, even as I personally believe it is probably true.

2026-03-24 14:51:16 UTC

I feel like there's a population of crypto and crypto-adjacent tech people who legitimately don't understand why a long, hard-to-guess string that is stored and shared in cleartext is very different from a password and cannot be substituted for one. I feel like a bunch of these folks don't understand why.
I'm not going to name and shame but I'm in the midst of a conversation on this, which is why it's top of mind.
#tech #dev #crypto #security #cybersecurity #InfoSec

2026-03-23 12:15:54 UTC

I feel like most of Trump's statements regarding the attack on Iran should be read as market manipulation.
#US #USPol #Iran #economy

2026-03-22 15:06:00 UTC

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I think it means that investors expect Altman will be able to pickpocket $100 from every person on the planet every year forevermore. The company valuation is the capitalization in present value terms of expected future revenues, after all!

2026-03-22 13:18:41 UTC

I think it is meaningful that Marvin Minsky, sometimes called the "father of AI", seemed to hold human beings in low regard.
Here's John Searle in 1983:
> Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
> Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".
I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a *disdain* for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.
It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #intelligence #GenAI #GenerativeAI

2026-03-22 13:09:08 UTC

Re-reading *The Soul Gained and Lost:
Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project* by Phil Agre as catharsis. [Here](https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/shr.html ).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

2026-03-20 13:23:33 UTC

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I have had the same experience. I co-founded a startup in 2016 that managed to secure a funding round, and the VCs themselves were giddy about announcing it as widely as possible. I've consulted for startups both before and after that, and as far as I'm aware every one of them that secured funding rapidly announced it. This explanation from Bluesky does not pass a basic smell test.

2026-03-20 13:21:06 UTC

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I second both points!

2026-03-20 13:16:01 UTC

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Bitcoin opened the climate-destroying proof of work floodgate and now we're here.

2026-03-19 13:03:29 UTC

A good review of reasons insurance companies are pulling back from insuring companies that lean on generative AI. Point 4, "The main problem is not just the error, but the incentive not to see it" is especially damning: use of AI not only obscures audit trails, it sets up perverse incentives against accountability, pushing costs and risk to other parts of an organization, its customers, or society. The net result is that whatever "local" advantages AI may provide turn into downstream risk that cannot be easily accounted for. Insurance companies are (rightly) allergic to this state of affairs.
Another example of how (whole)-systems thinking is very helpful for parsing the effects of technology changes like this.
https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/89367
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AgenticAI #GPT #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #ActuarialScience #insurance

2026-03-18 15:36:16 UTC

**Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs**
> Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.
From https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/workers-who-love-synergizing-paradigms-might-be-bad-their-jobs
I tried reading this article replacing variations of "corporate" with "LLM" and it works. Right down to the "LLM Bullshit Receptivity Scale (LBSR)".
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #CorporateSpeak #Bullshit

2026-03-17 17:36:59 UTC

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Similar for me. I know people who are down with some preventable illness at least part of a week, if not parts of several weeks every single month during the winter. This is not something that happened this much prior to the COVID pandemic, and I'm honestly at a loss to explain why people tolerate it.

2026-03-17 16:47:13 UTC

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Maybe I'm rude but I ignore it if I can and if I can't I say "I don't get how you tolerate being sick so often."

2026-03-16 23:32:25 UTC

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Seems it's time for an LLM-free Linux distribution, perhaps forking useful projects before they went off the deep end.

2026-03-16 13:26:46 UTC

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I think you've hit on a brilliant new design methodology: SDD (Superstition-Driven Design).

2026-03-08 16:02:11 UTC

Something I've learned from Ruth Ben-Ghiat: aspiring authoritarians purposely engineer situations in which people are invited to give up their values and morals and make decisions that compromise their sense of right and wrong. Moral decay, moral injury, and subsequently moral collapse become so intolerable that afflicted people will blame anything else but their own choices or the leader they threw in with, which of course are the only proximate causes it would be helpful to implicate. The more compromising decisions they make, the more they are drawn into the authoritarian's orbit.
There is no question that it is indefensible to use generative AI systems as they are currently constituted, especially the commercial ones, once one becomes aware of how they are made and operated and the destructive consequences they have already had and will surely continue to have. Among the many reasons using these tools is indefensible is that they represent an authoritarian invitation. You're invited to trade your morals and ethics for a bit of convenience, a reduction in friction, a learning experience, a rhetorical flourish, or maybe (a kind of) status. You thereby align yourself more and more with people who say things like "water is fake" or "fuck earth" as they make the computer systems enabling the horrors we're watching unfold on social media. You start to tell yourself stories, complexifying stories that explain why it's OK you did this thing that you know is not OK. You move in the direction of people who are already telling themselves stories like this. Maybe their stories have superior analgesic qualities to yours.
Nobody needs to go down this path.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ethics #morality #authoritarianism

2026-02-09 18:44:03 UTC

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And who doesn't like a good detective story???

2026-02-09 17:46:50 UTC

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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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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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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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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?