Much of AI "productivity gains" come from managers implicitly trusting an LLM to do a good job, and suspending the onerous micromanagement that humans employees get subjected to.

You can do that without paying Anthropic a single penny. It just requires letting the experts you hired do their jobs.

I believe that vibe coding — irrespective of whether it’s useful for enterprises, which I doubt — is being marketed towards consumers in a deeply unethical way. One that’s worryingly reminiscent of multi-level marketing schemes like Herbalife and Amway, or the crypto grifts of the 2010s.

I believe that Replit’s decision to target younger people at a time when they’re struggling to find work, or are convinced that the future workplace has no use for them, is deeply predatory.

Any creator that promotes Replit without being transparent about the likelihood of building a million-dollar app, or about the costs of building software with AI, is either willingly complicit in a cynical, harmful scam, or otherwise promoting a technology that they themselves do not understand.

One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

…

LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

…

Many of the proposed use cases now look like borderline fraudulent pseudoscience to me.

The intelligence illusion seems to be based on the same mechanism as that of a psychic’s con, often called cold reading. It looks like an accidental automation of the same basic tactic.

By using validation statements, such as sentences that use the Forer effect, the chatbot and the psychic both give the impression of being able to make extremely specific answers, but those answers are in fact statistically generic.

The UK government's plan to teach 10 million British children how to use VPNs may be one of the most ambitious IT education projects ever launched. Experts have praised the scheme, saying that a deft combination of incentives and peer education make it more likely to succeed than other, comparable initiatives.

"With the rise of autocratic governments worldwide, VPN-literacy is more essential than ever.” said one expert, “This bold project definitely comes at the right time.”

Banksy has unveiled a new sculpture of a man stepping off a stone base with his face obscured by a flag. The overnight installation in Waterloo Place, London, was revealed in a video shared by the artist, and has drawn fans of his politically charged works.

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone.

All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

To get to guillotines, you have to change society. By the time you’ve changed society, you don’t need the guillotines. If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of the French Revolution and the USSR.

… the language we are using about AI adoption is very similar to how Clayton Williams described rape.

“It’s happening whether you want it or not.”

“Better get on board if you know what’s good for you.”

“If you want to keep working here, this is what it takes.”

“You can’t yell it away.”

“It’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”

Am I comparing AI to rape? I am not. I am, however, comparing the language we use when discussing AI adoption to the language of rape culture. It’s the language of coercion. Language that implies a lack of choice and reminds you of the power those who are using it have over you. A lack of agency. It’s language that does not rely on consent, but instead the idea that we are bereft of choices, so we might as well get with the program.

In this post, we’re going to explore how the company Bright Data facilitates modern AI models scraping training data from the Internet using its residential proxy network.

Bright Data is a data-collection company that sells access to what it markets as the world’s largest residential proxy network of 400M+ home IP addresses that its customers route web-scraping traffic through. The supply behind that network comes from an SDK: a piece of software embedded in consumer apps that, with the user’s consent, turns their phone or smart TV into one of those exit nodes.

We’ll document what you, the average user, should know about what this company’s SDK does on your systems such as your mobile phone and your smart TV. We’re going to explore how their SDK works, which platforms have shipped it, and why your Internet-connected TV is the ultimate proxy for AI models looking to train on data scraped from the Internet.

lessons learned:

• anthropic's LLM assumes the persona of rich liberal who will only listen to you if you're nice
• which is to say, if you're too forceful or strict, the LLM will ignore everything you say and will become adversarial
• anthropic's LLM is literally "the absence of tension is the presence of justice"
• we live in a society

https://codeberg.org/queer-computer-club/doorbot/src/branch/doorbot-pro-max-ultra-deluxe-se/AGENTS.md

I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.

I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.

I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

"NASA is aware of the anomaly that occurred tonight at Launch Complex 36...."

This is the "increased latency in us-east-1" of space

This is the job now. You're standing on a burning ship, holding a map, trying to figure out where the hell we're going and how we're going to get there.

There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren't valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we'll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember.

The European Commission has delayed formal presentation of its tech sovereignty package to 3 June … marking the third such delay on the flagship plan’s big reveal.

The latest postponement comes soon after a blunt warning by the US ambassador to the EU, speaking in an interview with Euractiv earlier this month, that “protectionist” rules could derail the EU-US trade deal.

See also yesterdays "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born":
The US no longer has the power or influence it once did and that changes everything for US tech companies.

LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.

It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.

Bosses betting on AI to slash headcount and boost margins are discovering an uncomfortable truth: the strategy isn't working.

New research from Gartner lays out the problem in stark terms. The analyst firm surveyed 350 global businesses - all with annual revenues above $1 billion, all piloting or deploying intelligent automation - and found that around 80 percent had cut staff as a result.

The returns? Elusive. Companies that reduced their workforces were just as likely to see negative outcomes or marginal gains as they were to generate any meaningful return on investment (ROI).

TIL: display-popup in tmux

Displays a popup running shell-command (or default-command when omitted) on target-client. A popup is a rectangular box drawn over the top of any panes.
https://man.openbsd.org/OpenBSD-current/man1/tmux.1#display-popup

/via https://sean.taylormadetech.dev/2026/04/29/tmux-display-popup.html

John Oliver just did what he did best: demolished a harmful industry piece by piece.

On the latest episode of his HBO show “Last Week Tonight,” Oliver tore into AI chatbots, those oh-so helpful tools that can sure save us “significant time writing emails,” he opened, with the small cost of “everything else on Earth.”

“The more you look at chatbots, the more you realize that they were rushed to market with very little consideration for the consequences,” he warned, on a more serious note.

“The proliferation of AI-generated and AI-assisted text on the internet is feared to contribute to a degradation in semantic and stylistic diversity, factual accuracy, and other negative developments,” the researchers write in the paper. “We find that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted, up from zero before ChatGPT's launch in late 2022.”

„Es wird befürchtet, dass die zunehmende Verbreitung von KI-generierten und KI-unterstützten Texten im Internet zu einer Verringerung der semantischen und stilistischen Vielfalt, der sachlichen Genauigkeit sowie zu weiteren negativen Entwicklungen beitragen könnte“, schreiben die Forscher in ihrer Studie. „Wir haben festgestellt, dass bis Mitte 2025 etwa 35 % der neu veröffentlichten Websites als KI-generiert oder KI-unterstützt eingestuft wurden, während dieser Anteil vor der Einführung von ChatGPT Ende 2022 noch bei null lag.“