https://mltshp.com/p/1RMIB ““I LOVE ENGAGING WITH BRANDS”, 2026 edition”

America may or may not allow a living president to serve a third term, but there's nothing in the constitution about an AI Trump becoming a digital marionette run by "Yance Men" behind the scenes.

I'm not an expert gambler, but "Never bet against Philip K. Dick" has proved to be a surprisingly useful heuristic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mold_of_Yancy

Just remembered the time in Pittsburgh that I interviewed at a business that was set up in what used to be a residential home, the servers were in the master bedroom closet and wiring went through the vents... It was a four-square.

The AI boom has plunged a small Pennsylvania town into chaos.

Data centers will swallow 14 percent of Archbald, evict a trailer park, and border many residential properties. Who's to blame is a matter of fierce debate. #ClimateChange #ClimateCrisis #GlobalWarming

https://grist.org/energy/the-ai-boom-has-plunged-a-small-pennsylvania-town-into-chaos/

Everyone has a camera in their pocket there's no excuse for genAI album covers

what every artist wants:

layer 1
layer 2
layer 3

what every software gives:
layer 1
layer 1 copy
layer 1 copy copy

I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable.

"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going to liberate us all from economic drudgery, what's the point of "getting in early"? It'll still be there tomorrow and I can join the journey whenever it is sensible for me.

Part of the crypto grift was telling people to "Have Fun Staying Poor". That weaponisation of FOMO was an insidious way to get people to drop their scepticism.

I feel the same way about the current crop of AI tools. I've tried a bunch of them. Some are good. Most are a bit shit. Few are useful to me as they are now. I'm utterly content to wait until their hype has been realised. Why should I invest in learning the equivalent of WordStar for DOS when Google Docs is coming any-day-now?

If this tech is as amazing as you say it is, I'll be able to pick it up and become productive on a timescale of my choosing not yours.

I didn't use Git when it first came out. Once it was stable and jobs began demanding it, I picked it up. Might I be 7% more effective if I'd suffered through the early years? Maybe. But so what? I could just as easily have wasted my time learning something which never took off.

I wrote my MSc on The Metaverse. Learning to built VR stuff was fun, but a complete waste of time. There was precisely zero utility in having gotten in early.

Perhaps there are some things for which it is sensible to be on the cutting edge. I took part in a vaccine trial because I thought it might personally benefit me and, hopefully, humanity.

But I'm struggling to think of anyone who has earned anything more than bragging rights by being first. Some early investors made money - but an equal and opposite number lost money. For every HTML 2.0 you might have tried, you were just as likely to have got stuck in the dead-end of Flash.

There are a 16,000 new lives being born every hour. They're all starting with a fairly blank slate. Are you genuinely saying that they'll all be left behind because they didn't learn your technology in utero?

No. That's obviously nonsense.

It is 100% OK to wait and see if something is actually useful.

I heard the original script intended to be using humans as processing power instead of just batteries, but it took too long to explain
https://beep.town/@zion/116258793499415699

AI Trainer positions are so funny, like, get a job training an AI how to replicate your specialty? My specialty is being, generally, intelligent; I'm not interested in training my replacement on a 1099 Contract, and I'm not interested in possibly --maybe-- someday getting paid via PayPal or Crypto...

The best thing about being a nerd is the community, and if you think otherwise you need to find a better community.

Anyhow, make friends with nerds.

Pretty sure Nerds made AI because they can't talk to anyone, and everyone using AI is doing it because they desperately need a nerd to help them.

I guess I gotta watch Severance and create an all new Worksona...

If you want a good sense of what news articles really matter, Feditrends (https://feditrends.com/) is a ranked listing of sites being passed around fediversal social media.

Not a fan of when stores tell me how much money I saved, because I could've saved a lot more by not shopping.

Oh yeah btw. I made this No AI icon yesterday because I didn't fancy any of the other ones out there when I needed one. It's yours now too 😎

"Irony alert: Nate Cavanaugh — a college dropout with no government experience, no background in the humanities, and no apparent understanding of the grants he was terminating — defined DEI as 'decisions on the basis of something other than merit.' He said this while sitting in a deposition about his time holding multiple senior government positions for which he had no qualifications whatsoever. The lack of self-awareness is genuinely staggering."

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/16/turns-out-the-doge-bros-who-killed-humanities-grants-are-kinda-sensitive-about-it/

"To be racist is to see peoples of color as eternal immigrants. […] To be racist is to see White people as eternal natives." https://lithub.com/on-the-laughable-origins-of-the-far-rights-beloved-great-replacement-theory/
#politics #racism

"you're a man"
ad hominem

"you were born a boy"
sunk cost fallacy

"you were assigned male at birth"
false dichotomy

"you have xy chromosomes"
false equivalence

"you're mentally ill"
non sequitur

"you're invading women's spaces"
category error

"you'll never be a real woman"
no true scotsman

"you're normalizing a fetish"
strawman

"you can't change your sex"
skill issue

Imagine a newspaper publisher refusing to let libraries keep copies of its paper. That’s effectively what’s starting online, as big publishers block the Internet Archive from preserving news sites. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/03/blocking-internet-archive-wont-stop-ai-it-will-erase-webs-historical-record

Really feels like "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" run amok