Tag: ai
-
Is Anthropic going to prove me wrong?
Anthropic's latest numbers seem to suggest that they're the first GenAI company to actually make money! But we ought to take that with an enormous pinch of salt.
-
Man Who Identifies as a โHumanistโ Gets Religious Exemption From Using AI at Work
If your religious beliefs are incompatible with your use of a particular tool that isn't essential for a particular kind of work, then you should absolutely be able to be exempted from using those tools. At least, that's the legal verdict in this case!
-
The Mythical Man-Month in the age of AI
Jan van den Berg suggests that the corollary to the Mythical Man-Month in the age of AI might be: "Adding agents to a project with unclear requirements gets you the wrong answer faster."
-
Webpage Copy-Protection is Impossible (and that's great!)
A friend of mine was inconvenienced by an over-eager bit of Web copy-protection JavaScript this week, and it reminded me that more-than-ever, these scripts are both harmful (to legitimate users) and pointless (ineffective at preventing downloading).
-
![Scan of book pages with highlighted section reading "Children [who] treat very roughly young birds, butterlies, and other poor animals... with a seeming kind of pleasure... will by degrees harden their minds even towards men and... will not be apt to be very compassionate or benign to those of their own kind.](https://bcdn.danq.me/_q26u/2026/10/locke-john-some-thoughts-concerning-education-1693-1889-edition-pp100-101-978x480.jpg#30378)
Do not build the LLM torture factory
Sean Goedecke puts forward a few arguments why people shouldn't play at 'torturing' LLMs. I disagree with many of his arguments, but I agree with his conclusion because of a different argument: one made by animal rights activists for hundreds of years now: that people who 'practice' abuse are more-likely to go on to commit (further) abuse.
-
Iโm leaving Reddit because of RSS
For Jeff Johnson, Reddit's ecosystem becoming yet-more closed-down and enshittified, with them dropping RSS support, is the last straw. For me, it would have been too (if I hadn't already abandoned ship nine years prior!).
-
Opusfived
Miloลก Novoviฤ's experimental interactive fiction is a silly (but with a grain of truth!) simulation of what it feels like to attempt to use vibe-coding to make small, simple, isolated changes to an established codebase. Go play it!
-
Hot take: AI peaked with Taco Bot 3000
AI peaked in 2014 with the invention of the Taco Bot 3000. With artificial (taco) intelligence and the latest cheese dispensing technology, it truly represented the summit of human technological achievement the likes of which we might not see again.
-
The modern app
The other month, David Bushell made a tongue-in-cheek interactive simulation of the state of modern desktop applications. It's pretty fun, and I see what he means.
-
AI Software Development โ What Does The Data Say?
Jason Gorman's summarised the state of the art in research into the efficacy of LLM-assisted software engineering, and I was reassured to see that it closely mirrors my own personal experience of these technologies, with which I've now experimented for several years.
-
I Regret To Say That GMail is Now a Spam Farm, or, Why You Should Really Get That Dedicated Email Address Now
John Scalzi observes that GMail is now the source of much of the world's spam, especially AI-generated spam, and GMail-originated messages are increasingly at-risk of going to spam folders. Maybe it's time to ditch that primary GMail address, if you haven't already.
-
Why aren't AI companies competing directly with their customers?
Why sell picks and shovels if you've already struck gold? Cory Doctorow provides a metaphor that shows how the behaviour of the big AI companies is exactly what you'd expect if they didn't actually have great confidence in their own product or its ability to eventually reach profitability.
-
Exploiting Thoughtcrime in LLMs
New malware variants seem to include source code comments about how to build WMDs, presumably in an effort to hamper analysis by AI-based tools. I find myself wondering if the same technique can be used by authors to "protect" their work, too...
-
Garbage for humans
unstory observed that Cloudflare's 'Markdown for machines' feature means that the simplified output given by some websites to LLMs will be superior to the experience afforded to humans. How did we get here? Still... I think I see a opportunity to exploit this...
-
Maybe "is AI a bubble?" is the wrong question
Emile Silvis asks 'is AI a bubble?' and delivers a concise and balanced view of the key factors - clocks, in this case - that impact the related question, 'do the cash flows arrive before the financing patience runs out?'. There are no answers here, but I've been watching those clocks and they smell like tulips to me... ๐ท