RE: https://masto.ai/@transworld/116864660315314957
This is HUGE because being prescribed a controlled substance means you're put in a database with the DEA.
This means any trans person prescribed testosterone is in a database and can be targeted by our transphobic government.
This is protecting trans folks in addition to making it more available.
The absolute brain damage that developers have sustained when being subjected to "login expired" messages at a formative age without anyone telling them that this is not normal and should not be emulated.
Just now: "Your login session has expired, please log in again" … "another device is logged in to the account, please enter the token code shown on the other device".
So… the device is logged out because it might be untrusted, but is also the root of trust for new logins?
Cool.
Not a subtoot so much as a synthesis of several rounds of discourse:
I get, but vehemently disagree with, using AI products. I get, but with a very heavy heart, promoting AI products when it's your job to do so and when your ability to eat and have a home are contingent on doing so.
What I do not fucking get, and what can fuck off forever, is spending one's life trying to tell anti-AI Luddites (in the pro-labor sense) how wrong we are and how we need to be nicer to AI vendors.
Computers, in particular those that are attached to a network, should be called "obfuscation machines"
This is a classic example of where people miss the forest for the trees. Yes, there are probably tasks here or there which a codebot could get mostly right. But those “speedups” don’t matter if I’m fighting bugs later because of it.
A huge part of why I’m able to go so fast is because I’m taking my time and getting things right from the start. I can move fast because I know I can trust the code. I can move fast because I’m not constantly finding dumb bugs. There are bugs, to be sure. I’m not perfect. But the bugs are usually minor oversights which are easily caught and fixed. I can move fast because the architecture is sound and I’m not constantly finding deep bugs and rewriting things.
If I offload even simple things to a codebot, I either have to fix it up myself until it’s at my standards (which would take just as much time as writing it) or accept slop because that’s the easy thing to do. If I accept the slop, then I end up with a sloppy, buggy code base that I’m constantly fighting.
Fighting with the code is what takes time. Not writing it. Fighting with it.
So yeah, I can cheap out now and pay through the nose for it later or I can invest human time now and get a piece of software that actually works for us, our customers, and our users.
the fact that LLM use is more rampant in software development compared to seemingly any other industry is probably a sign that most programmers don't have moral standards and never did
We think of single-color LEDs as being monochromatic, but they really aren't.
RE: https://mastodon.online/@tarakiyee/116864478747652698
This one is really good and aligns a lot with what I have been thinking about lately. We got a lot of work ahead of us.
RE: https://eigenmagic.net/@vampiress/116859241032699772
“I poisoned my own mind.”
More and more programmers are writing retrospectives like this — and a huge THANK YOU to Elissa for doing so — where they discover that Programming Is Not Special.
It is particularly interesting to read this from a solo game developer who is both a programmer and an artist, who began by thinking the programing isn’t art, and discovered by an emotionally torturous process that it actually is.
I would kill or die for Larry the cat.
Paul over at https://sdcolab.org might have found the problem with the laser cutter...
“Responsible use” of LLMs isn’t a thing! On the next Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 live stream, sava saheli singh joins @alex and me to discuss the problems with AI “harm reduction” frameworks in edtech.
Monday, July 6, noon Pacific
https://twitch.tv/dair_institute
Looking for anything on Ecosia's union busting in 2025.
Employees were sick of being treated like shit and tried to form a workers' council (Betriebsrat) and Ecosia went full union buster and fired as many as they could.
So far I can find only Glassdoor reviews, nothing else online.
(I do have confirmation that it happened much as described in the Glassdoor reviews.)
(no, nothing on Ecosia search either)
You gather your most expensive people into a room to make your most important decisions. Then, somewhere in the second hour, the room quietly gets worse at making them. Not the people. The room.
I now travel with a portable CO2 monitor. Outdoors it reads around 400 parts per million. In a closed meeting room with a handful of people in it, I have watched it climb past 2,000. The photo here is a real reading: 2,143.
That number matters more than it looks. Researchers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory put people in a chamber and varied only the CO2. At 1,000 ppm, performance dropped significantly on six of nine decision-making measures compared with a clean-air baseline of 600. At 2,500 ppm, seven of the nine fell substantially, some into a range they called dysfunctional. A separate study out of Harvard found cognitive scores declining as CO2 rose, with the steepest losses in exactly the domains you called the meeting for: strategy, planning, and using information under pressure.
Continue reading on my blog because it's too long for here. https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
This isn't a new idea of course, many people have been working on this. I am just deeply disappointed by how some "Open Source" organizations basically just argue that "AI is here to stay and what can you do, don't exclude people who want to slop their way into your project" which really shows how limited their understanding of what all this open source infrastructure and code is about.
It's not about being able to download C files. It's about humane politics. About using technology to increase people's agency and wellbeing.
Hadn't considered this, but it's true. One thing the slopocalypse has done is given professional computer touchers the same bone-chill fear that professional computer touchers have long been happy to force on the unwillingly computer-afflicted: a genuine dread of clicking the update button, knowing both that they have to do it, and absolutely can't trust whatever's going to happen because the people behind that button have taught them they can't be trusted.
Share! 🎉🎉
It's official.
After my three-in-a-row successfully Kickstarter funded and backer fulfilled campaigns for Ultimate Cybersecurity Careers Guide, Digital Safety in a Dangerous World, and Technofascism Survival Guide (100% fulfilled on July 1st)...
Kickstarter approved my campaign for my fourth self published book...
Recovering After Gen AI.
Campaign will launch on ▶️ Monday, July 6th.
⭐ Visit my campaign page to sign up for notifications. No obligation to pledge.
Gen AI will END because:
- Datacenters cannot be sustained due to laws of physics (Harvard Science Review linked on campaign page)
- Financial bubble will burst, @davidgerard estimates 2027. Economists I cite say "soon."
What do we do about:
- Population wide psychosis and cognitive atrophy?
- Environmental nightmare: droughts and heatwaves?
- Damaged power grid?
- Most popular software inoperable or buggy as hell through massive AI slop tech debt?
- An entire generation of youth without jobs?
- Seniors retiring without juniors to promote?
- Immense skills loss in the workforce?
I will interview psychologists, economists, engineers, psychiatrists, technicians, and environmentalists for their insights.
🗓️ Campaign launch, Monday July 6th.
🗓️ Estimated October 2026 publication.
Share! 🎉🎉
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/kimcrawley/recovering-after-gen-ai
@mhoye they're more than "in the way" now. They're a threat.
I'm afraid to download some interesting #linux add-on to solve a problem … because I don't know if the app's been vetted by anyone I'd trust, whether it includes AIslop or malicious back-doors, whether it's funneling my usage stats - or, worse, my personal info - to some bad actor …
I'm among those fearful of updates now.
Quite a change: I enjoyed tech before, wrote & ran my websites. Now I'm just a retiree who wants safe computing.
I think the biggest blind spot in FOSS is that for most people most of the time, computers aren't liberating or empowering at all, they're just in the way. They're an unwanted layer of complexity that's been forced into the gap between them and whatever they're trying to get done.
We've had a chance to microdose on that experience with the proliferation of silly IoT widgets - wtf is this, why is there a computer here I'm trying to make toast - but IMO haven't really absorbed the core lesson.