Calum

a perfect CVSS 10 😍

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

8 panel comic P1: it's-a-him, Mario. He's standing on a patch of grass, stating up at a question block, suspended in the air. P2: Mario jumps and bobs the block, which causes a mushroom with a face to pop out P3: we close in on the mushroom, as it is about to land on the ground P4: an extreme closeup of the mushroom --with a disturbingly pouty face-- as it lands on the grass P5: we suddenly cut to a planet hanging marble-like in a sea of stars P6: we are now even further back, staring at a galaxy, hanging in the void. A small box highlighting a segment of the galaxy lets us know where the planet we had been looking at is located P7: from that spot comes a huge flash of light P8: growing to truly monstrous proportions, the planet begins to rip the galaxy apart

Three panel comic. P1: Two cloud shaped humanoids lie side by side on top of a hill, both looking upward at a red sky. P2: The cloud person on the left has a look of shock, as the one on the right points up at the sky. P3: A large panel where to POV switched to behind the two cloud people, which reveals what they are looking at. Floating high in the sky are multiple identical deathly white naked men, all with a disturbing blank grin on their faces.

shapes in the sky

Tumblr post from every-lemon Sep 8 so my spouse is part of a weirdly intense but mostly benign men's workout group that meets at like, 5:30am outside every day, even in winter. they do a lot of burpees and lugging cinder blocks up hills and stuff. they take turns leading the workouts and tomorrow is his turn. I asked what he was planning. he handed me a sheet of William Carlos William poems from a large stack he'd printed. I said "what" and he explained, helpfully, "it's a William Carlos William themed workout." I asked what inspired it and he said "l've been planning this for months."

Follow up tumblr post every-lemon Sep 9 it was a smash hit. a dozen guys showed up (more than usual). spouse brought a red wheelbarrow and they took turns bringing cinder blocks up the hill with it. then they broke up in teams and did a relay with an "icebox" (cooler filled with 40lbs of ice). at the end he opened the cooler to reveal it was full of beach plum lacroix and all the guys cheered. they drank sparkling water as he read 'approach of winter' out loud. he was home by 6:30am.

dudes rock

Things were better when computer was in room. Now everywhere is computer. This is bad. Computer should never have escaped room.

9 panel comic P1: Dayyime. We open on an exterior shot of a large modern looking conference centre. In the foreground, on a wall, the sign for the centre: "Tri-Corp Conference Centre" In front of that, a rectangular plinth with a sign showing that a talk titled "HOW TO BE A MAN by Chad Grendel" is on P2: a high shot of the interior of the building, in which we look down on a large conference hall, packed with people sitting in chairs. They are all sat before a stage, on which there is a lone dais, and a huge screen that displays ""HOW TO BE A MAN" in red letters against a yellow background P3: we close in on the stage, on which a spotlight has started shining down on its centre P4: same shot, only now someone off-panel slides a baby into the spotlight. P5: the baby comes to a stop in the middle of the spotlight... P6: ...and suddenly starts crying with a loud "BAWWW" P7: A closeup look of a selection of the audience. Imagine all the stereotypes of rightwing white males, and you're probably not far off. They stare with implacable faces as the baby continues "BAWing" P8: a closeup of the baby's face, contorted into an ugly scrunch as we reveal he has a mic attached to his right ear P9: back to the audience, as they begin to clap politely. The crying continues as loud as ever.

how to be a man

“c gets you close to the machine” is the kind of sentence that lands very differently after working in a factory

you’re not supposed to be close to the machine! that’s where the finger munchers are!

So fun to watch programmers as they find out for the first time what happens when you employ programmers

Chapter view of a podcast app showing chapters named “pgp for encrypted email”, “fcking metadata”, “m-m-m-metadata”, “SMTP m-m-m-metadata”, and “dkim, spam”

I have just today discovered that podcasts can be chapterised, and that apparently @scwpod.bsky.social is painstakingly broken into chapters with often-joke names

I don't know why this lad is building a subterranean city for cats, but I'm all for it.

"I'm gonna dump all my pent up angst and infodump material into a blog post about Itch/payment processing" I say to myself. It ends up like a million words, oops.

but well, I got it out of my brain: voidfox.com/blog/payment...

Instead of regurgitating the bromide that LLMs are just "autocomplete on steroids" (even by people who know better), maybe we can actually engage in some public education. The problem with genAI is better expressed through a classic computer science concept, known as SYMBOL GROUNDING. 🧵

What even are numbers, really?

it does not matter how good you make your game’s block/parry system; I will not use it. My defense is “punch more.” I cannot be taught

Godspeed, I think we’re all due some plug and play at our age 😉

Do you still have to SET BLASTER to tell it what IRQ and so on to look for?

new Date("wtf") How well do you know JavaScript's Date class?

I scored 14/28 on jsdate.wtf and all I got was this lousy text to share on social media.

Don’t know whether to be proud or ashamed to get halfway

We ran a randomized controlled trial to see how much AI coding tools speed up experienced open-source developers.

The results surprised us: Developers thought they were 20% faster with AI tools, but they were actually 19% slower when they had access to AI than when they didn't.

This morning I read the phrase "the nazification of grok" and I wished for an extended moment to be a medieval peasant with no knowledge of any of this. Just give me a wheelbarrow and a 40 year life expectancy

8 panel comic p1: Imagine the most non-descript middle aged white fella you can. Even that isn't as vanilla as this guy. Your eyes look at him, and then immediately slide off, like he isn't even there. A title above him --all lower case-- reads "the wednesday man" P2: Same POV (we see him from the chest up), as he raises his right hand in greeting and says "hi there, folks. I'm the Wednesday Man." P3: He continues "As the name suggests, I'm a middling kinda guy..." P4: He folds his arms as he says "none of the oppresive lows of Mondays... none of the dizzying highs of Fridays" P5: An extreme --and way too detailed-- closeup of his open mouth. "Just sorta... there." P6: Another closeup of WM, looking very intense indeed. "The fulcrum point between those highs & lows" P7: We cut to a a side-on view of a desert scene, as a tumbleweed bounces through from left to right P8: Back to the chest up view of WM, as he holds a comic with a smile on his face. He leaves us with "anyways, have a nice Wednesday, all, and go buy some comics."

Comic featuring two anthropo- anthropomorph-- Uh... comic featuring two sentient fireworks, one clearly older than the other In the first panel --as the older firework's fuse is lit by a human hand holding a match-- the younger one asks: "DADDY, WHAT'S THE MEANING OF LIFE?" In the second panel, the fuse continues to burn, as the father looks down realising what is about to happen. In the third panel, tears in his eyes, the father answers... "AMERICA SON--" And then, in a whisper... "americ-" Fourth panel. The father violently blasts off. In the penultimate panel, we see the son looking horrified as he watches his father spiral to nothing into the wild blue yonder. The final panel. BOOM! The father explodes off-panel, as we see a closeup of the son, the explosion reflected in his tear-filled eyes.

happy america day

I did hear someone refer to this as an amazing jazz fusion record with a free karting game included

Roy Scheider in Jaws saying his famous line “I hate that fucking shark! I'm going to kill it.”

Happy 50th anniversary to the movie Jaws. This is probably the greatest line in cinema history:

lol it was a null pointer

She’s being a really good sport about it but I fear this is going to end up being the white balance on her phone

it turned out to be a bad year to work in international freight insurance, so i am on the hunt for a new staff engineering role

tef.computer

i work in the uk, but usually remote and in american timezones. postgres and dist-sys but i can sling json into any replicated log if needed

6 panel comic P1: Me from the torso up, holding a toothbrush in my right hand, and stood at a sink in a dark bathroom. I am extremely tired. So bloody tired. Bleary-eyed, a zombie-like "buhhhhhhhh" is the only sound I am capable of. Above, a caption box reads "as I get older, I notice I never feel QUITE right in the morning..." P2: A terrified look on my face, my head spirals upward as my neck Junji Ito's impossibly, with a "krk" and "pop" The caption box reads "pains in my neck..." P3: A closeup of my bare left leg. In the knee, there is a keyhole, which I am furiously trying to unlock with a key, with a futile sounding "rattle rattle" "My left knee locking up..." P4: Now, I am a ghostly screaming form, barely human as I spiral toward who knows what fate in a featureless void. "Being sent to the NULL PLACE against my will" P5: A closeup on my (allegedly) human face, with upper teeth biting into my lower lip in obvious discomfort, as a large dark tendril-like thing extends outward from my right eye's pupil. "The Eye Floater..." P6: "But otherwise?" Another closeup of my face, this time ostensibly looking happy, with a large manga bead of sweat on my brow. I lift a seven fingered hand, giving a thumbs up. "Yeahhhh, I'm good."

the ravages of age

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patreon.com/nhoj

I am disappointed in the AI discourse steveklabnik.com/writing/i-am...

Ah we got HR from the drop, partly to answer questions but also (I assume) to make sure the announcers didn’t say anything that couldn’t later be defended