Tante nails it again. No notes.

That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it must’ve been LI.

Yeah, but he’s been saying this for a while, and I don’t think this is a new way of saying it that is particularly useful.

Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.

When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” trope has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists.

I think you can’t usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don’t understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.

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I just watched the whole thing. She makes a consistent case.

I felt a little called out by the being tolerant bit. I for sure haven’t had great success in talking to close people about their AI use. And I was maybe a little too cold to colleagues, who tried to get ahead of the AI literacy circus with good intentions, although I grudgingly agreed that they are right.

Maybe I don’t meet enough randos to get feeling on the level of pervasiveness of chatbots. Maybe it’s a personality thing; I worked myself out of depression mostly by disciplining myself and stopping to buy my own excuses, and that’s kind of how I approach every problem now. That sure isn’t a vibe that most people respond to.

There was one part of my AI beliefs that wasn’t adressed. Besides the “front-end” and “back-end” harms, that can be mitigated, the tech as a whole still seems trash to me. That may be boomerism setting in, but chatbots just feel counter to and displacing my positive vision for a social fabric, be it for responsible professional communities or for interpersonal connections.

(I do buy into the use-case for a context-sensitive search engine, e.g. for walls of legalese. But the current framing of the tools is just so harmful, even that use is hazardous as seen in the anecdote.)

Sounds kind of like the Baldur Bjarnason strategy but for your coworkers instead of your boss.

I can see the value of someone with a critical understanding diving into the technology, so they can talk others down from the ledge.

But you also need the social pressure to maintain some slop-free spaces. Not everyone can be asked to accomodate recovering slopaholics.

Not the Saudis, just a Saudi focused outlet.

House of Saud (publication, not the royals) asks if the Iran war was caused by AI sycophancy.

I’m reminded of the Kremlin reality distortion field that appears to have informed the decision to invade Ukraine.

I had the thought, that maybe the author could be intentionally trying to be mind-numbingly boring, but that just killed it. Into the slop jail!

Turns out, that uv also sucks now!

uv has a CLAUDE.md since January. Sooo, back to pip it is?

I tend to like her education takes. Like the first piece of hers that I read.

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I was low-key hoping for a technical philosophical article, which argues that to find any of this shit useful you need a distinctly american understanding of reality.

Kind of wild that the guy who popularized “enshittification” as a term will die on the hill that the technology which drives the industrial enshittification of all human media is fine actually, because some people find the plugins useful.

Ah, thanks! My expectations of node aren’t much affected I guess. Bun.js maybe?

Eh, straight pip with venv and pip-tools for support worked fine anyway. wrong uv!

As for systemd… time to look at the BSDs? Was Debian among the anti-slop projects? Would be nice if they took an interest in preventing the slopification of one of their core system.

Man, that harper piece is a full DnD alignment chart of the most online bay area weirdos you’ve ever seen.

Unfortunately the paper structure screams “AI senpai, notice me!”

AI coding agents seem bad at this job yet, but if you optimize for our benchmark…

I see two reasons why it’s ultimately not possible to recreate conventional social media success via Fediverse.

1. Some services are taylored to the needs of already-famous people who will tend towards bigger platforms to maximize reach and drag followers along (e.g. what Twitter used to be)
2. You can’t make a buck by cranking out content here. The possibility to make a living off your posting draws the most prolific posters to becoming professional creators for big platforms. You can’t really do that on Fedi unless you already have a dedicated donor base.

That said, I don’t think making more fedi things is pointless. But they are probably going to be smaller things, niche or local, particular to the interests of a couple fellas, points of human connection.