“The time you enjoy wasting is not wasted time”

Same vibes as an addict going one day without their substance. “Day one was miserable, so I don’t see the point in sobriety.”

For me it went from “didn’t know it existed” to “not interested in playing it”.

Those are some good picks. I’m gonna copy them.

Influence being nondeterministic doesn’t make it less real. If a certain intervention has a 1% chance of producing a specific behavior, then across a large enough population you will see the behavior increase by exactly 1%.

Individual choice is real. But so are the impacts of cultural artifacts.

Do you have similar views on it. How do you rate them?

I do have similar views on social media, including Lemmy.

I think there are some anti-human biases baked into the structure of something like Reddit, where the headline+body are more accessible than the linked content, comments are ranked and nested, threads only stay relevant for a short period of time, and the most karma-maximizing strategy is to use someone’s comment as fodder to address a silent but large audience instead of actually directly speaking to the original commenter.

But yaknow, here I am, commenting on Lemmy anyway. 🫠

It’s not only ownership of a tool that directs how it gets used. A tool naturally makes some actions easier and more salient, while other actions become more difficult and fade into the background.

Take the gesture priority of iOS and Android. iOS took a radical departure from PDAs by activating scroll gestures more easily than text selection.

You can technically do both actions on both devices, but that tiny change in gesture priority turned smartphones into content-scrolling (and therefore content-consumption) machines.

It arises from the structure of the software, not who controls it. Apple didn’t decide to make people into content zombies, they just decided to put one handler ahead of another in the list of handler functions.

Every digital tool is faced with a million similar tiny dilemmas, where it can’t handle every use case at once, so it has to pick which behaviors to encourage. The way those dilemmas get resolved ends up deeply embedded into the tools themselves.

Okay fair, you didn’t assert no influence.

But you can surely understand how I could see AI as a tool which is exceptionally capable of carrying the philosophy of the “nerd reich”, compared to most other tools.

So it’s only a short walk from there to “well if AI isn’t a meaningfully potent vessel for their ideology then basically nothing is, so there’s no case that merits an abundance of caution.”

Note for those who missed it:

This is in reference to another thread, featuring an AI-generated meme: https://lemmy.ml/post/53349754

Also, worth noting that Audre Lorde’s famous “master’s tools” quote is often misunderstood: https://thinkpeakstudio.com/blog/quote-explained-audre-lorde-september-2026/

Also also worth noting… The whole idea of memetics is that cultural artifacts like images and tools influence the behavior of individuals who encounter them.

So insisting that tools don’t influence behavior while posting memes to try to get that proposition to replicate is just deeply strange.

Good time to remind everyone: There’s no such thing as Just a Tool

Enspiral comes to mind: https://www.enspiral.com/

Wow, Sony’s innovations include rootkits on music CDs you purchased, taking away your ownership of your games, and turning your entertainment devices into PoS kiosks for Sony Group Corporation.

They’re always looking for new and exciting ways to say “fuck you” to their users.

It really illustrates how far gone this regulatory regime is — that it’s even possible for a company to stay profitable while displaying such unending contempt for their customers.

?

Publish date has nothing to do with commit timestamps

Look, all I’m saying is, normal cybersecurity rules still apply. Don’t go running off to download and run code that’s hot off the press, with no track record, no established user base, developed by a rando who is visibly moving at a breakneck pace. Especially with any category of software that’s notoriously difficult to secure.

That’s not a lot of time for the developer or anyone else to review, test, or audit the code.

First commit 2 days ago

We use CLDR quite a bit — and coincidentally, we often jokingly call it TLDR.

In a good way, I hope?

Sancochos’s

There’s a certain style of sign:

• Centered text
• Inconsistent capitalization
• Way more different sizes/fonts/colors than necessary
• Strange punctuation
• Usually “Dear <blah>; <insert premise here>; <DRAMATIC REVEAL THAT blah IS STUPID>; <self-congratulatory conclusion>”

Idk what is broken in people’s brains that makes this specific pattern happen so much.

Edit:

Had to track down this sign hanging in my in-laws’ house.

(We have a house and a kid. We’ve been living together for 14 years. Idk man.)

There’s a long history of codegen fads. This isn’t the first one. (Though it does have many unprecedented aspects.)

Here are some thoughts to bring you comfort:

1. This can’t last. Everything from the economics of the vendors, to the inevitability of customers blowing their limbs off, to the diminishing returns on an AI-heavy process, to the depletion of the talent pool that makes responsible supervision/auditing possible, to impending model collapse… It has to end eventually. It may take a while, but it will happen.
2. In the meantime, with tokens being sold way below cost, you can get a helluva deal on some cheap custom software if you’re smart about where and how you use it. I’m “encouraged” to use AI at work, and 90% of my use is for peripheral tools to make my own workflow easier — not load-bearing production code.
3. It makes a fantastic cover for skunkworks projects. If you have a thing you’ve been wanting to do but can’t get it through the front door, use it as a “test project” for AI. You don’t have to actually vibe code it. Have Claude write some docs or commit messages or some esoteric test suite. Just something you can point to.

I’m not sure they can be compared fairly. Slavery and AI scraping do both have “unpaid labor” in common. But “unpaid labor” is hardly the most horrific feature of either of them. And to reduce them down to that metric so they can be compared ends up downplaying the unique horrors of each.

I think the important part to take from the quote is that: he knew it was wrong, he knew the degree to which it was wrong was extreme, and he knew it was wrong in a particular way that the world hasn’t seen before.