I read some post about how Mastodon consists primarily of shitposters talking in shitposts. I’m gonna do a poll, need to test that. Boosts highly appreciated!

So, do you speak shitposts?

@luca Yeah. It's fast fashion https://tante.cc/2026/01/15/software-as-fast-fashion/

The term "single use software" currently lives rent free in my head.

People use LLMs to create software specific for their needs. But neither can other people use it (hardcoded variables, no rights management, too specific), nor do they use it again (too specific, easier to produce a new one).

Single use software is not maintained. Nobody understands it or has an interest in keeping it working.

The creation of single use software feels cheap, but isn't. It takes time to create the software, it needs infrastructure and power. The time is experienced as short compared to how long it takes to create maintainable and reusable software. But once you take into account how many people benefit from reusable software, the single use software takes way more time to create than what it saves. The infrastructure and power costs are hidden because the data center isn't visible. The costs are subsidized by venture capital.

Like other single use items, single use software brings risks of unforeseen consequences. From data loss or leaks to issues for maintainers of reusable software (eg. verbal abuse, less motivation and lost income).

As an example of single use software is a German LinkedIn post of a person who slopcoded a HEMS (home energy management system). It took them more than a week. While open source projects like https://evcc.io/ already provide the same functionality. They could have used it for free or paid 100€ and got support for some additional devices. But they decided that they know better how it should work and now have a single use software. If it breaks there is nobody they can ask. There won't be updates and no community to discuss and develop new features. No organization will ever be interested in officially supporting it. And even if it works, it only benefits that one person.

(This doesn't mean people shouldn't build things that only they use. But they should enjoy doing so.)

Hey it's my birthday! ✨ 🐉

Here a drawing of mine from some years ago.
Two queens, a dragonness and a lady.

Friendly dragon is one of my favorite art theme ^^

#dragon #art #MastoArt #fantasyArt #fantasy #illustration #supportartists #NoAI

If I were my brain, I would simply chill out for once

For the past several months, I've been watching academics become righteously angry because AI allegedly solved a bunch of difficult math problems all on its own, only for it to be revealed that it was based on stolen work from human mathematicians all along because it can't reason.

It's like the comic of the grim reaper going from door to door massacring the room's occupants, except the reaper breaks in, steals everyone's shit, cuts them down, then leaves. It's happening now with all the game decomps, years of stolen work from human teams all wrapped up in a slop-coated bow.

Journalism is failing us so hard right now. Journalistic integrity is a perpetual struggle, but in this moment of need, it's failing utterly. I've seen article after breathless article declaring this is a turning point for games, like scrappy underdogs are stealing treasure from corporate dragons.

It's just... going over everyone's heads that this is a kind of settler-colonial violence, individuals imbued with the power of the State or of Company to spread out and destroy anything in their path so it can be claimed. These corporations need not raise armies; the people volunteer themselves.

It's why I believe the defining feature of this tech, the capacity to do harm, is *the feature* that excites these people the most. I'm convinced that if AI somehow hurt no one, they would not use it. That it might produce passable work is secondary to that harm. Harm is the true product being sold.

And media is complicit. Human decomp teams were illuminated with a suspicious light at best, if they were even noticed by outlets at all.

AI decomps now dominate the discussion in a "tee-hee, what is the Big Evil Game Corp gonna do now?" framing, deliberately obscuring what's actually happening.

The laziness of a thousand wannabe journalistic influencers repeats the message over and over again, lone hackers or creatives bucking the system and taking power back for the Little Guys.

Nah, man. They're just assholes, and their mandate is to move into a space and force humanity out of it.

In an interview, lesbian chef Melissa King says that sometimes her girlfriends get drunk and need to eat potatoes. ‘But I’m not a potato queer. I never have potatoes in my house. I have rice.’

That’s my sexual orientation from now on.

Rice queer

Zero Cool? Defrosted fifteen hundred and seven fridges in one night? Biggest defrost in history, front page, New York Times, October 12th, 2026. I thought you was black, man! Yo, man, this is Zero Cool!

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@0xabad1dea/112279265373393160

Thinking about this again as the train stops at Schiphol and an exhausted stewardess collapses into the seat across from me while three young boys swing their suitcases around dangerously taking selfies of their first trip to another country

Going 94 MPH on a Skateboard (New World Record). “I cannot believe how closely the camera car is following him — looks like only a few feet away. Bonkers.” The final run is breathtaking. Literally…I was holding my breath, https://kottke.org/26/10/going-94-mph-on-a-skateboard-new-world-record

This is like the time some kid asked me if I wanted some really vintage rock vinyls.

When I asked what he had he said.. Blink182

RE: https://mastodon.social/@RuthMalan/117451126577667494

I was swamped so this is getting out with just two weeks notice, so SUPER APPRECIATE the shares!

We'll be celebrating Merrelyn Emery and introducing more folk to the Open Systems Theory work that she poured much of her life into, because she saw it as a meaningful way to make our workplaces more the way we want them to be through participative practices of org co-design.

The release of the single “Baby Got Back” by Sir Mix-a-Lot is closer to the launch of Sputnik I, than it is to today.

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117432793782133308

This shouldn't be surprising to anyone who understands how the parlor tricks work, but it's hilarious that Facebook's bot that lets you trivially pwn its execution environment has all this stuff accessible for you to observe directly.

@MaddieM4 @glyph yes, a thing I've been saying a lot is that someone resorting to LLMs to solve a problem seems pretty well correlated with the problem being one that shouldn't have existed in the first place.

Last year I talked to someone who said a large and tedious part of his job used to be transcribing tabular data out of nicely typeset PDF manuals into a machine-readable representation that can be fed to software. And then he started getting an LLM to do that for him.

But the PDFs were generated by another part of the same company! Steam came out of my ears. Why the hell is the company making life difficult for _themselves_ in that way in the first place? The people creating the data should provide it in a machine-readable format _already_, so that nobody has to convert it back into one!

In fact they ought to have been doing that all along. The red flag of "this job was so tedious I outsourced it to an LLM" _shouldn't_ have been necessary. The fact that you were making life pointlessly difficult for other humans should have been enough. But I guess a lot of this kind of nonsense exists in the world just because organisational boundaries hide the costs to _this_ department from _that_ department who caused them.

(Also, with the right tools – I quite like the Python 'pdfminer' library – you can automate that process _without_ an LLM, and have, you know, testing and repeatability and far lower computational costs. If I were receiving a PDF of that kind from some organisation I had no hope of influencing, that's what I'd do.)

#Fensterfreitag aus einem Dachfenster in der Innenstadt von #Wien
Ich mag besonders, wie der "Kopfstein" am Fenster mit uns die sensationelle Aussicht genießt.
#Windowfriday

Tesla hat gerade ein absurdes Spielzeugauto präsentiert, das in keinem zivilisierten Land der Welt jemals eine Straßenzulassung bekommen wird (zum Glück). Männer auf Social-Media-Plattformen sind restlos begeistert. Schönes Bild für das aktuelle Niveau.

If it walks like a Nazi, and talks like a Nazi, and salutes like a Nazi, it might just be Elon Musk...

In a hilarious development I never saw coming, I think that some of my astrophotography is going to be published in the Wall Street Journal?!

@froztbyte

https://mastodon.me.uk/@pikesley/111336767858451005