Ben Zero

It really does feel like a lot of formerly reasonable people have been infected by some sort of terrifying brain parasite when it comes to unthinking and total acceptance of using AI tools

if you're my age, you remember two decades when people viewed careers in Silicon Valley as mostly Creative, with relatively little Management. That's long over now: as always, Management is actually just capital, Creative is actually just labor, and capital wants less labor. That's it!

"PhD-level experts in your back pocket" is a completely nonsensical description of AI but a pretty good description of social media if you follow the right people

Carl Sagan: We’re all stardust

Evil Carl Sagan: We’ll all be stardust

Look, these tools are amazing in lots of ways. But if you’re gonna pitch and sell or foist them on the world by saying “This is your PhD level genius expert buddy you can ask things in natural language”, don’t get all pissy when it comically bombs tasks people reasonably think of as trivial.

the only sentence I keep coming back to when thinking about the current state of the Democratic Party elite

Truly a perfect illustration of what a MAGA libertarian paradise actually looks like: rotting corpses on your property from a horrible disaster and nobody gives a shit.

Hey @npr.org - I think an independent public media is essential, but I’ve been disappointed by your light coverage of the daily outrages committed by the Trump admin.

So, here’s the deal. For each day you don’t sanewash Trump, I’ll donate to you. By “sanewash,” I mean the following:

I love the Wire for different reasons, but the final episode of The Shield is an astounding wrap up.

“Productivity!”

I’m just finishing a rewatch, and yeah, that’s been floating around in my head.

Now that the Internet officially has more bot activity than human activity, we should abandon it like they do in the Cyberpunk universe. Just start again on a new Internet

Do people not remember the exact same motherfuckers saying the exact same things about NFTs?

And yeah, I think that the DOGE folks at agencies kind of had unilateral decision making authority in a way that's kind of scary because they both had the we should come into government and do common sense things mindset without realizing that the most common sense things are actually the hardest to accomplish for very specific reasons.

Coding interviews from people who left government earlier this year, and this is a fantastic quote in response to a question about what DOGE tech folk don't understand.

Everything about the fascistic white supremacist virulence that's overrunning the US is a return to tradition, not a departure from it. White supremacist despotism is quintessentially US. That's why this country inspired Hitler. A new society won't be gained by clinging to nostalgic lies and myths.

Steve Jobs tried to make the reason for Apple’s success as explicitly clear as he could and the second he died Andreesen was like “fuck books”

Every AI evangelist makes it sound like I’m basically gonna be a witch in a decade because I can still tell time, make change, write cursive, read/write/speak multiple languages, read maps, hold focus for longer than two seconds, do math in my head, engage with culture

Anyoke else notice that society is just slowly turning into a casino?

Eat Pant Bart

This is better than any art AI has ever made

The Cowardice of Senate Democrats Made Emil Bove’s Confirmation Possible Senate Democrats could have confirmed Biden nominee Adeel Mangi to the Third Circuit last year. They caved to a disgraceful right-wing smear campaign instead.

Emil Bove's confirmation was only possible because Democrats caved to a vile right-wing smear campaign of Adeel Mangi, who would have been the first Muslim appeals court judge, when Biden nominated him for the same seat last year. Absolutely disgraceful. Bove's confirmation is on them, too.

Lorax! She was great. Saw that lineup at the Central Tavern in Seattle back in the day.

I do not yield my expertise to anything that I cannot trust to properly do the task at LEAST as well as I can, consistently and correctly.
The LLM and generative AI bullshit systems cannot do that, for ANY task I have tried with them yet.

And Honestly the WORST thing about the AI bullshit fad has been that things I used to be able to MOSTLY trust a computer to do correctly and accurately I now no longer can.
Google Docs broke their spelling system so bad I had to abandon the fucking platform.

I'm so tired of hearing that we need to "teach our students how to use AI" when the thing they most need to use it is a critical-thinking skill set that can only be acquired by NOT using it. I'm tired of hearing that it's inevitable. I'm tired.

So much this. The point of an assignment isn’t the assignment, it’s the process to generate the output.

Confusing product with process only hurts students.

not sure how the "here is some bullshit you hate and refuse to use, now pay us for it" business model will work out for the AI boosters

“The president cut your health care so he could build himself a golden ballroom” is a pretty easy message to sell