(With apologies to Diogenes the Cynic.

Though I think he would see a little of himself in Alice.)

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."

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?

Do you have some RSS feeds you're especially happy about? (I'm interested mostly in "general tech that won't drive you insane", but also science, leftie politics and "weird culture", for lack of a better term)

I'm in the process of migrating everything from Firefox to Vivaldi, and my feed collection in Firefox (using the Brief extension) had become a bit of a junkyard.

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't have both.

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.)

This is my bookcase for Very Special books. The Discworld collector's editions (with Great A'Tuin, in between the main series and the Tiffany Aching subseries - separated only because the Tiffany Aching books look great next to each other). On the shelf with the Klein bottle I have a collector's edition of The Little Prince, the Icelandic Sagas (found in a second-hand bookstore), the two limited-print science fiction novellas from Little Factory AB I've managed to get my hands on so far, and a 1967 Danish translation of A Thousand and One Nights.

Also some classics in fancy binding, collections by my favourite short story writers (Ted Chiang, Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino), and various other books that I feel need to be on display because looking at them makes me a little bit happier.

My Norse mythology subcollection also goes here. And on the bottom shelf (not visible in this picture) are some of my more treasured comics - the main one being an anniversary boxed set of Peter Larsen and Henning Kure's series "Valhalla".

This is the "main collection" - my entire living room wall. Yes, I actually removed the door to make more space for books.

It's mostly alphabetical, except the top and bottom shelves - the top is for books that 1. look good next to each other, and 2. aren't too tall to go there. The bottom is taller than the others, and is for books that are too tall for the other shelves - mostly comics and what some might call graphical novels. (a "graphical novel" is a comic for people who are too respectable and grown-up to admit that they read comics).

I haven't separated fiction and nonfiction, because I find that they overlap more than you'd expect. Where would you put a book about, say, Greek mythology? Or economics?

This is my computer science, maths and "related" bookcase, situated just behind my computer desk. Some of them are from my student days, some are older still (there's a C64 reference manual I've had since I was a small child in there), and some are later.

The top shelf is the "shelf of honour", where books that either have some special significance to me or that I get a little happier simply by looking at, sit. There's a gap in it, because a coworker has borrowed my copy of Christian Queinnec's "Lisp in Small Pieces".

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 to the book burning pyre. I would especially appreciate if your picture comes with a little story.

Semi-apropos, it seems the depression I've been struggling with for the last few years - everything is meaningless now because of AI - is spreading among mathematicians now.

A couple of years ago, I read HN for the last time. I'd long disliked the site, but I kept coming back because it was, at least, a source of news about the profession I work in and the subject that most of my life has been about (that is, computers). Then it got flooded with AI, AI, AI, and all I got from reading it was getting more depressed. So I substituted lobste.rs and stopped reading HN entirely.

Now, I strongly feel like I have to leave lobste.rs as well.

I get reliably more depressed and miserable whenever I read tech news now.

I am morbidly curious about what would happen if an open source repo added the full text of the Simple Sabotage Field Guide into a CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md.

this is too long. i've ben spiralling for close to four years - and even then, i'd only *just* managed to recover a bit from the 1½ years i spent in total isolation in the early days of the pandemic.

i can't keep doing this anymore, and i don't know what to do.

i am so fucking depressed. :-/

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.

but i don't think it's ever particularly fun for anyone to see everything you've spent your life on sinking into shitty irrelevance in real time - while people you once respected are gleefully cheering

every time i say something to the effect of "i don't think i've ever been this depressed in my entire life", it would be wise (but even more depressing) to wait a week or so.

somehow, it can always get even worse.

"i'm gonna pivot out of the hell of the software industry to [do something else seated in front of a computer]".

bad news: AI is going to destroy that too.

unless you're pivoting into flipping burgers, you're probably well and truly fucked

the last couple of years, one thought keeps coming back:

i wish i had died peacefully in late 2019.