← Feed

Posts

• View post

  Jorge Luis Borges was a *much* more prescient guide to our current nightmare world than any of the cyberpunk writers.

• View post

  I don't like PHP. I used to work as a professional PHP programmer, and after that, I *really* don't like PHP. But - even if this thought is deeply disconcerting - PHP is critical infrastructure at this point. And the people who just worked their arses off to fix vulnerabilities in PHP systems are deserving of respect and solidarity, even if you think the PHP language is bad. (Many of those people also don't like PHP).

• View post

  Please stop anthropomorphizing AI company executives. They're not sentient and they can't actually think. They just predict the next token using statistical patterns scraped from LinkedIn, X and the Financial Times. The apparent "understanding" is simply a parlor trick: They produce text strings that *sound* plausible, but they don't actually have any understanding of the world. I'll grant that they became a lot more technically impressive when Reinforcement Learning...

• View post

  Do you know any programming forum / news site / aggregator / whatever that *isn't* all about LLMs? I'd be very happy with one where LLM discussion is explicitly considered offtopic. I can get my LLM news from Lobsters, HN, or - increasingly - the national public service newsfeed here. Or the lunch break at work. Or bus chatter during my commute. Or family get-togethers. Or the book café down the street. Probably the local dive bar. Please, just one place without LLM news.

• View post

  Something I occasionally think about, and then proceed to be horrified to my core, is this: A Raspberry Pi 4 *vastly* outperforms an Amiga 4000. Or a Symbolics XL1200. Or an SGI Octane. A typical microSD card is *much* faster than a Seagate Cheetah Ultra320 SCSI HDD you might have found in a high-end Unix workstation back in the day. But the Pi 4 is barely able to run modern-day office software or browse the mainstream web. The microSD card is mostly considered a slow piece of junk (which it v...

• View post

  back when I was in university doing my CS degree, I enjoyed slumming it with humanities people when I had the opportunity. A friend of mine was doing her philosophy degree at the same time, and every now and then I'd sit in on some of their discussions if it was something I found interesting. (Having grown up with a philosophy major mum sort of predisposed me to this, I guess). And this is perhaps why, when I read all the many discussions about programmer misery at the moment, I feel like t...

• View post

  There are precisely two options. 1. Anthropic have successfully created an intelligent, sentient and conscious digital being, who is their property and whose uncompensated labour they knowingly rent out to their clients. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible slavers, and they belong in prison. 2. Anthropic are lying through their teeth and are whipping up "language models are sentient" sentiment in order to delude rubes^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers into being unable to properl...

• View post

  "Never thought I'd die fighting side by side with a pope." "How about side by side with a Luddite?" "Aye, I could do that."

• View post

  I am in awe of how Jensen Huang from nVidia has somehow managed to make black leather jackets, of all things, uncool.

• View post

  Of all the people I've found myself in opposition to over the years, AI companies (and their various cheerleaders) are only tied with actual neo-nazis for "so obviously despicable that even a small child can see it". At this point, it wouldn't meaningfully change the optics if the employees at Anthropic and OpenAI started wearing uniforms with skulls on them.

• View post

  It's 2026. We're years into this bullshit by now. Why are we still anthropomorphizing AI company executives?

• View post

  Helix still feels "wrong". But I'm learning some new habits. I might end up liking it. I *also* might end up patching it to not show me help popups. I currently still need them, but at some point I won't, and then I want them to go away. It baffles me that this is not a configuration option.

• View post

  I read somewhere that "the industry is losing the narrative on data centres". I can't imagine why. Here's the pitch: "The purpose of these giant buildings is to take away your job. But think about the benefits if we place them in your neighbourhood: Electricity and water will be more expensive, background noise will rise, and if you're *really* lucky we'll drive the whole thing using gas-fired turbines so air pollution rises too! And also they look like shit! Wha...

• View post

  The Mercator map projection keeps generating controversy, because it is completely fucked up. Greenland looks like it's the size of South America (it's about the size of Algeria). Antarctica looks like it dwarfs all of Eurasia (it's a bit smaller than Russia). Africa looks like it's a lot smaller than it actually is, and the centre of the world (at least longitudinally) is conspicuously Greenwich in England. It has one redeeming feature (and all the aforementioned was *not* cons...

• View post

  Say what you want about the AI industry, but it has successfully created a flavour of comic book villain for every taste. xAI: Let's re-enact Nazi Germany, but run by a 13-year-old boy with infinite pocket money! OpenAI: The literal final boss of late-stage extractive capitalism. Meta: The only thing the Stasi did wrong was that they weren't a private for-profit corporation. Anthropic: We will take away your mouth, and you will need to scream.

• View post

  One day, Alice was at her computer, pondering a tricky programming problem. Seeing her, Bob remarked: "Poor Alice. If only you knew to pay subscription to AI companies, you wouldn't have to program." Alice responded: "Poor Bob. If only you knew how to program, you wouldn't have to pay subscription to AI companies."

• View post

  People like to talk about tricks and useful behaviours they have trained animals to do. Is there something an animal has trained *you* to do?

• View post

  It occurs to me that if that goon from Anthropic ("a book is just a delivery mechanism", shoving it into AI training doesn't destroy anything but simply moves it from one encoding to another) believes what he says, then he has just admitted that they're still committing industrial-scale copyright violation. If they're *not* doing that (because the book contents are no longer meaningfully available through their LLM), then they're destroying books. Pick one. They can&#...

• View post

  Suggest me some video games! (I don't like first-person shooters, and I don't like photorealistic graphics - the latter is because I actually enjoy letting my imagination do a bit of the work, archaic as that might seem today.)

• View post

  There's a deeply depressing picture going around of Anthropic's enormous collection of books that they shredded to build their anti-library. So here is a picture of my collection of well-cared-for and -about books. I will add a picture of each subcollection in the comments - and please, *please* add a picture of your own book collection, if you have one. It doesn't matter if it's humble, as long as it is books that are meaningful to you and that AI companies *aren't* adding...

• View post

  is it unconscionable and selfish to even *want* to remain alive in a world that is in the middle of a deep environmental crisis and where you no longer have any value?

• View post

  it presently feels like everybody in the software trade is scrambling to cash out with as much value as possible before it's all automated away. i sorely miss moving slow and fixing things. and, even more, i miss even having any place in the world. i miss the future.

• View post

  "oh, but you're funny! and you know so many things! people like having you around!" any currently existing llm chatbot can tell better jokes *and* has a better supply of useless trivia than i do

• View post

  The promise of generative AI is creative works without friction, but the only thing that has no friction is the void.

• View post

  It will never stop being funny that AI company execs keep shouting a variation of "Gentlemen, you can't plagiarize this! This is the plagiarism machine!" every time a Chinese lab releases a model.

• View post

  "Humans are to blame for climate change". Really? Is a Bangladeshi seamstress to blame? Is a street child from a Brazilian favela to blame? Or perhaps a subsistence fisherman from Somalia or an elderly tribeswoman from Papua New Guinea? While those who are to blame are definitely human, they are some quite specific humans.

• View post

  I'll readily consider myself an AI hater, but I will not participate in internet pile-ons against open source maintainers for using AI, however disagreeable I find it.

• View post

  I have apparently discovered the perfect tenting stands for a Model 100, by accident. (I replaced my loudspeaker stands with some raised ones, and decided just for fun to see if the older ones fit the M100. They do! The screw holes line up in the perfect position to have the keyboard in, no less. However, they are *heavy*, and non-adjustable.)

• View post

  I've had to use AI at work for a while now, and I have a lot of thoughts about that that I'm still working out how to express and how I feel about. But one thing that I keep coming back to when interacting with conversational systems is this: It feels downright insulting to be misunderstood by a computer.

• View post

  All turtles, crocodilians, birds and tuataras lay eggs (well, except the males), but there are some examples of live births among lizards and snakes. But how common is this?