Big news!
I'm launching a tiny Mac app 🥺🔍🤏

:tinystart: It's called TinyStart, and it's a lightweight Launcher and Emoji picker for macOS!

Unlike Spotlight, TinyStart is super fast at showing results and launching apps. It never becomes overcrowded with search results you don't need, and it lets you open URLs, perform web searches with custom search engines, and quickly open folders in Finder.

Oh and yes, I think the Emoji picker is pretty good too. It's everything the default macOS Emoji picker isn't: it's fast, it lets you insert Emojis in any text field, it isn't picky about keywords, and it learns your favorite Emojis over time.

Get TinyStart at https://tinystart.app: it's €5, you pay for it once and future updates are free!

also I made a lil' video to show you what it looks like:

"I used AI. It worked. I hated it." by @mttaggart https://taggart-tech.com/reckoning/

This is a really good blogpost. And I"m sure it'll make some people unhappy to read whether they're pro or anti genAI. What's good about @mttaggart's blogpost is he talks honestly about how using Claude Code did actually solve the problem he set out to do. It needed various guardrails, but they were possible to set up, and the project worked. But the post is also completely clear and honest about how miserable it was:

- It removed the joy from the process
- If you aim to do the right thing and carefully evaluate the output, your job ends up eventually becoming "tapping the Y key"
- Ramifications on people learning things
- Plenty of other ethical analysis
- And the nagging wonder whether to use it next time, despite it being miserable.

I think this is important, because it *is* true that these tools are getting to the point where they can accomplish a lot of tasks, but the caveat space is very large (cotd)

reminder that anthropic ran (and is still running) an ENTIRE AD CAMPAIGN around "Claude code is written with claude code" and after the source was leaked that has got to be the funniest self-own in the history of advertising because OH BOY IT SHOWS.

it's hard to get across in microblogging format just how big of a dumpster fire this thing is, because what it "looks like" is "everything is done a dozen times in a dozen different ways, and everything is just sort of jammed in anywhere. to the degree there is any kind of coherent structure like 'tools' and 'agents' and whatnot, it's entirely undercut by how the entire rest of the code might have written in some special condition that completely changes how any such thing might work." I have read a lot of unrefined, straight from the LLM code, and Claude code is a masterclass in exactly what you get when you do that - an incomprehensible mess.

"There is no purpose to better machines if they do not also produce better humans."

https://frankchimero.com/blog/2025/beyond-the-machine/

"Setting aside the moral arguments—"

You mean the power and water.

"Setting aside the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the industrial-scale plagiarism. The brazen theft.

"Setting aside the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the maniacal, suicidal inflation of the bubble. Arguably the greatest single mis-allocation of resources in history, aside from war.

"Setting aside the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the willful destruction of creative livelihoods, the willful destruction of education itself.

"Setting aside the destruction of art, writing, and schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the purposeful degradation of human cognitive capacity. The planned and designed addictive dependency.

"Setting aside the cognitive degradation, the destruction of schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water, and—"

Don't forget the ghoulish ethical camouflage used to obscure, indeed to erase, the responsibility for decisions in budget austerity, insurance claims, regulatory oversight, medical decisions, court filings, and even real-time combat.

"Setting aside the monstrous mechanisms of official irresponsibility, the cognitive degradation, the schools, the financial madness, the copyright fuckery, the power and water—"

Are you going to say it doesn't work?

"IT DOES NOT FUCKING WORK"

#ai

Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." is not just a statement about a tool being tainted by its origin. It's about what kind of tool a "master" would create: Whips. Chains. Violent suppression.

That's the meaning: You cannot just take tools whose purpose and politics is dominance and violence and "make them liberatory". This goes deeper than "just" embedded politics or lofty talks about ethics, it comes down to what kind of relations you believe do and should and must not structure the world.

As an ethical AI user, I begin each session by asking the chatbot to give a stolen data acknowledgement. It is an important first step toward justice.

Hilarious. Brave new world.

how much compute is there in a beautiful night laughing with friends??

I think one of the funniest things is how frontier labs spout how AI is writing their code, but the reality is that the products they ship are buggy, resource hungry messes. It's kind of the worst advertisement ever for both their products and their worldview.

Great news everyone thanks to my significant advances in modern algorithmic analysis I am personally able to outperform a warehouse full of specialized GPUs by five orders of magnitude with a single ARM core for one one-millionth the cost in 0.1% of the time by training the "cp(1)" command on only the GCC source and then compiling the output of that program with GCC.

The resulting compiler - which I'm calling "mhoyecc", or as I've taken to calling it, mhoye plus cc, passes 100% of GCC's tests.

Because the world needs another blog post about AI? 🙃
https://freelancing-gods.com/2026/02/14/ai-and-moral-injury

Mostly, a distillation of thoughts prompted by a range of other posts and musings, along with grappling with some feelings.

I may regret this at some point, but I felt the need to put down in writing how I feel about this moment in the tech industry.

It is not kind. You may well be insulted by it. If you are... then you really should question yourself.

https://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/selfish-ai

#AI #LLM #Programming

Hell yeah 😎

“This will result in the largest ever accumulation of power and wealth in the hands of a diminishing few, while the legitimate needs of the people, from healthcare to education, are met with ‘let them eat chatbots’. That *is* the intent and why AI is a project of class domination.” — https://disjunctionsmag.com/articles/why-leaving-big-tech/

the whole ai-bro shtick about "ai democritizes art/programming/writing/etc" seemed always so bs to me, but i couldn't put it into words, but i think i now know how.

ai didn't democritize any of these things. People did. The internet did. if all these things weren't democritized and freely available on the internet before, there wouldn't have been any training data available in the first place.

the one single amazing thing that today's day and age brought us is, that you can learn anything at any time for free at your own pace.

like, you can just sit down, and learn sketching, drawing, programming, writing, basics in electronics, pcb design, singing, instruments, whatever your heart desires and apply and practice these skills. fuck, most devs on fedi are self taught.

the most human thing there is is learning and creativity. the least human thing there is is trying to automate that away.

(not to mention said tech failing at it miserably)

“Microsoft chief Satya Nadella warns Thing People Don’t Want boom could falter if people continue not to want it”

Who wants to be the one to explain markets to the head of a multi-trillion dollar company? Is he just used to people not wanting Windows and it selling anyway?

Two stories of accountability:

in 2013, Aaron Swartz took his own life, unable to bear the situation, after he downloaded just 70 GB of academic articles from JSTOR, facing $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison.

In 2025 a company worth $4.5T downloaded over 500 TB of copyrighted books from Anna's Archive, LibGen, Sci-Hub, and Z-Library, to train their AI models without paying for them, defending it's actions as fair use, noting that books are nothing more than statistical correlations to its AI models.

https://torrentfreak.com/nvidia-contacted-annas-archive-to-secure-access-to-millions-of-pirated-books/

I have neck pain from all the nodding

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/jan/18/tech-ai-bubble-burst-reverse-centaur

Armin Ronacher, who even very recently has previously has been very pro ai agent vibecoding to the point of criticizing critics, seems to have stepped back and asked the question: are AI coding agent users all experiencing mass delusion... including himself? https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/1/18/agent-psychosis/

Conversation on lobste.rs is also interesting https://lobste.rs/s/0pxvyd/agent_psychosis_are_we_going_insane