Software Janitor

I am doing my best to respond to this without a string of expletives. But let's be very clear. What just happened in Minnesota was cold blooded murder of a civilian by out of control federal agents, aided and abetted by the entire Trump administration and their fascist enablers.

And learn a new set of hotkeys?! Unthinkable!!!

The way the press is treating chatbots, like they have agency and they “know” things all of a sudden, crossed the line recently from dumb and obsequious to something else entirely. Treating them as alive and making conscious decisions is an almost religious belief. It won’t age well.

Insanely based take. Maybe I’ve judged Go too harshly 🤔

To be fair, the build flag is _also_ unambiguous. It is about as “opt-in” as it gets.

I would not, could not, in my docs
Please get out of Firefox
I would not, could not, on the phone
Please just leave my calls alone
I will not, will not, even free
LLMs, just leave me be!

No Prolog?! /s

This applies to code too. You see all these programming luminaries (that haven’t written a line of production code in a decade) espousing code agents for this exact reason

Being sick and tired of constant surveillance is a big tent 🎪 like it or not, gun owners are in that tent

They have a page about it here: ammo.com/donations

For the unaware, Ammo.com donates a portion of their profits to the EFF.

Armin’s post is a great example of something most normal tech workers already know: tech luminaries are near completely disconnected with reality and normal people (and their struggles).

I discovered Alex (and Gary Marcus) via Ed Zitron getting me interested in this. So sad to see.

Now you’re just making stuff up 😕

I think it would be more accurate to call it “Denver-based mass surveillance company”. I don’t mean to be snarky, it’s more that every tech company calls themselves “AI” and it’s meaningless

I smiled a bit when you “correctly” pronounced Warios name

"You're right to be confused - I'm making assumptions without actually looking at your setup properly." - Claude AI

You know, maybe AI will replace software engineers; this is the most "Software Engineer" thing I've ever seen it do!

Is the zeitgeist turning against Gradle? I notice more and more Java guides using Maven these days. I maintain projects with both, but the majority is gradle. Maybe there’s some maven magic I’m missing? #java #maven #gradle

They have made the world living hell for no reason whatsoever. People will ask why this happened in a decade and there will be tremendous effort to make it more complicated than “they were evil, stupid, and bored”

@prestonstew.bsky.social was that missile hypersonic? I’m a rube but it looked crazy fast

Policy and Research Staff Technologist ...

The greatest job alert! My team at EFF is hiring and you could be on it: www.paycomonline.net/v4/ats/web.p...

I'm sad they also shuttered Fakespot. Fakespot's genAI features were largely useless, but its review analysis was actually helpful for filtering out astro-turfed reviews.

I wish it could defer encoding to an external provider like mediaconvert or bitmovin, really my only gripe with the tech.

Someone with a botnet could really make this dogs day.

Screencap of graph from linked article. Caption: Nearly half say they have no interest in using an AI chatbot to get information from news organizations Data: 9.9% I might use a tool like this even if it sometimes made mistakes when interpreting the language in previously published reporting 39.3% I would only use a tool like this if editors verified information in the answers to ensure it accurately represented the facts 49.1 % I have no interest in using a tool like this to get information 1.7% Don't know or refused Note: Respondents were asked, "Some news organizations have created tools that allow readers to get information by chatting with a virtual assistant or digital chatbot that delivers AI-generated answers from previously published reporting. Which of the following comes closest to your view about such tools?" Chart: Minnesota Journalism Center/Poynter Survey on Attitudes about AI in NewsSource: NORC AmeriSpeak Omnibus, March 6-10, 2025 (N = 1128)Created with Datawrapper

Take the caption for this graph. If you look at the details, 39.3% chose "I would only use a tool like this if editors verified information in the answers to ensure it accurately represented the facts". Which means 88% reject chatbots.

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markets soar as investors realize that mommy didn't actually disappear, she was just hiding behind her hands

Hypothesis: comments on social media that use this emoji 😂 are likely bots.

Why? The dumbest comments I read generally use this emoji as punctuation.

Lovely read. Reminded me: a decade+ ago, Sears built an employee social network called Pebble, sorta like Tiffany Joy. The CEO Eddie Lampert would troll it under a pseudonym and yell at employees that were showing even slight criticism.

Your reporting is a welcome reprieve from the mountains of AI shit advertising I deal with daily as a tech professional.

@jamieloftus.bsky.social dives into this in her Manosphere episodes on 16th Minute of Fame. It was such an enlightening listen for me.