Josh's harp

My doomer-worry about AI is not that the LLMs become omnipotent and take over the world but that the wealthy and powerful use it as a means to consolidate power and marginalize or lay off skilled workers and also everything about our technological and political and social life gets worse

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

I believe they call it *shudder* "meat sauce"

Australia spends more on tax breaks for landlords than social housing, homelessness and rent assistance combined Exclusive: Acoss report shows property investors received $12.3bn in tax concessions in 2025, while the share of social housing dropped to a record low

Australia is run by landlords for landlords

The national anthem speaks of shared commonwealth, but that wealth was stolen from sovereign First Peoples & locked away from workers & carers

If we shared it we could all thrive. But no

The rage and disgust I feel at this can't easily be put into words

But all roads lead to the same conclusion. It is the greatest single policy move that could be made to make the world better. Morally, economically, technologically. Let people move freely.

Fedi.Tips – An Unofficial Guide to Mastodon and the Fediverse An unofficial guide to using Mastodon and the Fediverse

If you don't want to share a social media platform with verified fascist cops, remember that there is a genuinely decentralised network waiting for you in the fediverse. A good place to get started is fedi.tips

Hey slightly serious post, please share if you can: if you are a #software developer in the #Australia area and are looking for a #tech job, please reach out to me. I'm looking for mid or senior engineers who excel at constraint based optimizations, typescript, and k8s. Sound like you? Get in touch.

I wrote a little roundup of all the media I enjoyed in 2025. Film and TV, books, games, and music. joshsharp.com.au/blog/good-me...

Also consider checking out the Fediverse (joinmastodon.org) in addition - Bluesky and Mastodon are similar, but popular with folks in different fields, with a lot of tech, science, and especially OSS happening over there.

It's very little work to keep an account in both places (as I do).

4/ Ventilation saves lives. Clean indoor air, through ventilation or filtration, dramatically cuts the spread of respiratory infections. It’s time to treat air quality like food hygiene: a basic public health requirement.

Stealworkers

Here’s my Spotify Wrapped 🎵✨

We need more honest language:

Theft Tech (AI)

Grift Tech (crypto)

Death Tech (automated weapons and military surveillance)

Fucking hell that's rude.

People here just really hate adding alt text huh

Slop-Free Club Rejecting AI and slop crammed into every single app and site.

Doesn't it piss you off that companies keep cramming "AI" features into every damn app? I'm so tired of it. I wanted a way to show that we don't and won't do that with Hello Code stuff, and I thought other folks might like to be a part of it.

Introducing... Slop-Free Club.
slopfree.club

Largest study of its kind shows AI assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time – regardless of language or territory An intensive international study was coordinated by the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and led by the BBC

Yet again, we can't afford to let LLMs become a source of epistemic grounding for society.

people playing music/videos on their phone speakers in public is more than just mildly annoying and is instead a leading indicator of the decline of community and empath

But the problem is (as the thread also points out) most users treat this as "Twitter, but no Nazis", and expect central moderation to enforce that.

Honestly if you want Twitter, but with communities that have norms and moderation, your best bet is to find a good Mastodon instance.

Well put and I wholeheartedly agree. Happy birthday!

United Nations Declaration of Universal No Yanks On The Thread

The thing about living in a human society is you either decide that everyone (except those for whom it would be medically dangerous) has to take VACCINES into their bodies or everyone (with no exceptions at all) has to take VIRULENT PATHOGENS in from those around them and, look, the first is better.

A screenshot of a graph from an article in the Age. The graph headline is 'What we think CEOs earn vs what they really get'. It shows Australia's believe CEOs get 7.1 times the pay of an average worker, that the 'preferred difference' is 3.3 times the pay, and that the actual difference is 103 times the pay.

Inequality is much worse in Australia than most people think it is. "The average chief executive officer of companies listed on the ASX earns more than 100 times as much as the average full-time worker - but people think they earn just seven times as much".

Our 2025 redesign

What have I been up to? Thank you for asking. Just making a whole new android app for tracking stuff about your life. I know, it took a lot of effort, thank you, you're too kind
exist.io/blog/exist-2...

I really and truly need people to understand that a chatbot does not and cannot know anything. Like, I need them to understand that in their bones. It is very good at looking like it knows something, but it does not and cannot know anything.

We live in an increasingly individualised, atomised, lonely society — technologies are offered as solutions to societal problems caused by neoliberalism. Loneliness is commoditised by these corporations. Let’s not get too busy making fun of each other to see it’s our tech overlords profiting off us

"AI-munted" is a beautiful turn of phrase

I really wish you'd stop using chatgpt to make the illustrations for your newsletter, it bums me out