Summer of 2016

There is a particular kind of whimsy that you only see in posts from the before times. I’m not sure how to describe it, but I know when I see it because the first thing I do is look for a timestamp.

Neoliberalism sure has poisoned our minds.

Despite what bosses and market pundits will tell you when they’re trying to underpay you, the value in a software development effort is not just the end product that you can sell to customers — it’s also the knowledge of how the codebase works, and how to modify it over time.

I’m not an ostrich when it comes to AI-powered development. I’ve been to multiple conferences and courses over the past year specifically about developing with AI. My Youtube and Substack and podcast history is multiple hours per day of content about AI news, practices, and opinions. My weekly visit to my bookstore has been mostly to pick up or place an order for books about AI. I use agents for my daily coding tasks at work. I have multiple local LLMs on multiple machines at home that I use from multiple harnesses. I have ralph loops, I have full-AFK workflows, I have custom sandboxes.

I could go on, but you get the point: I’m not standing on the sidelines when I say…

The vast majority of AI use today is horrifically irresponsible. Current AI use is digital asbestos in the walls of our technological society. It will take generations to fully recover from this. I am not excited, I’m not gonna “get over it”, and I’m not gonna grant any degree of false equivalence between actual FOSS and these slop stunts.

The bubble cannot pop soon enough. Not just so that we can minimize the economic damage, or so that hardware prices can once again experience gravity, but so that we can actually be honest about what this stuff is and how to use it.

Just tell it you’re wearing a green shirt!

Depends what you mean by social media.

Digital socialization is not necessarily bad.

Easy self-publishing at scale is not necessarily bad.

A marketplace for human attention, where products are optimized for “stickiness” and “eyeball-hours” is bad, but doesn’t necessarily need to be social media. (Buzzfeed comes to mind, and Ricki Lake before that.)

The social media that we ended up with is essentially a chokehold on the means of digital socialization, forcing users to perform for an audience instead of connecting to individuals, and capturing the economic value of that performance as an asset for the platform owners.

We could’ve ended up with something quite different.

Here’s a hot take though:

Products that are built under these conditions will inevitably tend towards a shape that reflects the logic of the market, and they continue to reflect that logic even when financial incentives are removed.

For instance, Lemmy is very Reddit-shaped, and therefore reflects some of the market logic behind Reddit, even after you stick it on the fediverse.

Edit: Barry’s Economics has an excellent video on exactly what sucks about the social dynamics baked into these platforms: https://youtube.com/watch?v=Dqh17U3tymU

Copyright probably won’t fix it, especially now that you can Malus yourself a bespoke fork.

The core problem is that they’re too big to care. They don’t have to listen to customers, employees, or competitors. We need antitrust action and union organizing.

That’s cuz she’s fiiiiiine (tuned)

“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