I find it increasingly hard to engage with work or other aspects of my life where I’m required to engage with “AI” (large dataset involving generative machine learning systems built by big tech). The moral injury of needing to use them knowing the ethical issues or decide whether to mention those issues to people excited to use “just a tool” that is helping them is SO MUCH every day.

A year or so ago a web search turned up a link that I visited and then the javascript on the page locked up vivaldi so hard that my machine crawled to a halt and I couldn’t even get activity monitor to load to force kill it and had to hard boot the machine.

Since then I’ve run with JS off by default since lord knows what lurks on any given page, even “credible” ones. I continue to be saddened by how many pages show nothing or just a “JS required” message. :(

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117352210982789672

A thing I find horrifyingly fascinating: the medical ethics folks have long come to a pretty strong consensus that it is wrong to harm people or use their bodies non-consensually in pursuit of knowledge that could literally save lives.

In software, however, we’ve decided it’s fine to reverse a decade’s progress on reducing tech carbon emissions as well as destroy the minds of workers in less wealthy places … in pursuit of maybe faster software development.

I suppose I have to pay the very $$$ fee for the 5 unit class but I am officially enrolled for a graduate course!!!

This talk is so good. What is software even for really? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0-6-f94n_9M

This is the second to last weekend for Lake Washington Blvd in #Seattle being more welcoming to people not in cars. I went out on a Brompton ride today (then climbed up to Beacon Hill to get groceries on the way home which ooof my legs). On Labor Day, Sept 7, Ryan Packer is doing a bike ride starting from Judkins Park! https://bsky.app/profile/typewriteralley.bsky.social/post/3mudsiuqzis2i

Woot! We have pre-ordered Star Trek: Zero Point written by @charliejane at our local comic shop Crow’s Nest (https://crowsnest.quest)! I had never been myself and they have two (2!) bodega (?) cats! Sadly they did not want pets (from me).

https://www.comicreleases.com/2026/07/idw-october-2026-solicitations/

Kiddo’s middle school has sent out the back to school welcome. It includes required and optional supplies. It’s all pretty normal stuff. Except stuff like “1 ream of printer paper for Science teacher”. Seriously? We can’t fund printer paper for the science teacher? #Seattle

My partner drove us because the facility isn't reasonably reached by transit (on a Saturday anyway) and the I-90 portal sign as we enter Seattle reminds me
non-drivers are second class. We live a little over 1 mile west of this sign, very close to light rail and multiple frequent bus lines. All these destinations are at least 2 times as long by transit.

We went on the tour of the Brightwater (water) treatment plant in #KingCounty #Seattle. We live in a beautiful place that many people are working hard to keep it that way and make better.

https://kingcounty.gov/en/dept/dnrp/waste-services/wastewater-treatment/facilities/brightwater

I had a work meeting this morning where someone apologized for asking folks to add stuff to rows (each person’s name was pre-filled) in a spreadsheet, as if there was some better way to do this particular task. But a spreadsheet was a perfectly accessible and reasonable way for people to do this! A familiar user interface which provides a format suitable for processing if needed. Not everything needs to be an LLM or a snazzy new UI.

Only downside is after this I biked south via the trail next to the Beacon food forest and then east on Columbian Way PBL only to discover a screw that holds the half toe clip onto the right pedal was gone which resulted in a dangerous dangling clip. So no LWB ride yet this weekend.

Biking the vote as often as possible! #Seattle

Today's poetry is by Rumi. From Gold, translated by Haleh Liza Gafori. #poetry

Normalization of deviance is a hell of a thing.

As per usual this whinge is entirely omitting the many ethical concerns I have. I just find it baffling that this is considered a good "tool". Even when used by a relatively careful operator, the generated output is often bad in ways that require intense and unsustainable effort by a careful user to avoid large mistakes!

Which I knew because I had spent hours going thru this code. Problem though: the "analysis" described a bunch of the calls as being gRPC. Which I knew immediately was wrong.

I don't understand how everyone is so excited by these tools. Yes it can generate a report that is subtly wrong faster than I can generate one that may have different errors. But I don't see why I should consider this an improvement.

I used claude recently to try to analyze and report the underlying call patterns to remote services in a fairly complicated function in a python library. All of the client libraries were available in venv as source (& my prompt specifically included where to find them). All calls involved were http based and mostly json req/res. The "analysis" was very detailed and authoritative. It included file paths and line numbers and was, at a high level, correct.

Something I am really loving in Ukrainian is that as I learn vocabulary and how words form, I am exposed to a variety of words that come (ultimately) from proto-slavic as well as adoptions in different time periods from Latin or Polish or very modern ones. When I learned Spanish I just didn’t have the knowledge of other languages to notice this except some obvious English examples and Japanese loan words (from languages I knew!) are mostly nouns.

RE: https://det.social/@jlink/116722225601188311

This post reminds me how annoyed I am we call it "prompt injection" at all. The phrase is clearly meant to invoke pre-existing forms of compromising software. Only those methods are labels for techniques that require the existence of particular classes of bugs – unintended behavior – in software. "Prompt injection" is just how LLMs work. A Claude Skill is just scantily clad "prompt injection"!