Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe), page 2

This talk by Meredith Whittaker is excellent. I originally clicked way from it without reading because the title is in German, but turns out the talk itself is absolutely in English.

https://www.helmut-schmidt.de/aktuelles/detail/die-rede-der-zukunftspreistraegerin

> What we call AI today grew out of this toxic model – and must be understood primarily as a way of marketing the derivatives of mass surveillance and concentrated platform and computational power.

In case you don’t know what happened.

1. Kathy was driven off the internet by a nazi and the entirety of tech sided with the literal nazi
2. The computer book market collapsed to a fraction of its former size
3. Software quality collapsed
4. Kathy returned to the internet a decade later, only to be driven off again because tech again prefered to side with literal nazis over women cooties.
5. Dev education turned into an industry of shilling and grift
6. Generative models are nuking what’s left

Putting together the blog post collection has meant trying to find old links in the Wayback Machine

One was this one by the legendary Kathy Sierra in 2004. It’s both inspiring and depressing, because we all know what happened in the intervening two decades

“A Computer Book Author’s Manifesto” https://web.archive.org/web/20120118171954/http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/news/ksmanifesto.html

One of the things that the Stack Overflow brouhaha demonstrates is that it doesn’t matter if a service was founded by people trusted by the community (Atwood and Spolsky) and was broadly community-led. If it’s a VC-funded startup, they will sell out their users at some point.

The flip side to “Europeans are lazy and don’t work hard” is that we’re able to maintain a modern society with a high standard of living while still being able to spend time with our families. And why kill yourself through overwork when most of the rewards go to somebody else, anyway?

Please stop using generated art for thumbnails and illustrations for videos and blog posts that aren’t generated themselves. It gives people the impression that the post is spammy bullshit. Starting to see people dismiss links out of hand just because of the preview thumbnail on social media

99% of tech social media:

“I like this thing, but people say it’s bad so here is a list of self-serving reasons why I should be allowed to like it. They’re my soothing koans to calm the phantom pain of my long-amputated conscience”

“No, none of them actually address the criticism. Why do you ask?”

You can have a tech that is mostly used for fraud, bankrupts the elderly, or even literally kills people, but tech enthusiasts will defend it by saying it saves five minutes on their morning breakfast routine

It’s a worldview where individual benefit, no matter how trivial, trumps societal harm. There’s no arguing with people who respond to “this will destroy lives” with: “but I find it useful”

“‘Means of Control’ – Pixel Envy” https://pxlnv.com/blog/means-of-control/

From yesterday, a question for you all:

“What would you like to learn from me?”

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/what-would-you-like-to-learn-from-me/

“Jon Stewart Confirms Apple Wouldn’t Let Him Do Show on AI With FTC Chair”

‘Tech co doesn’t let contractor talk to FTC’ is always going to be a bad look, no matter the context https://gizmodo.com/jon-stewart-confirms-apple-show-ai-with-ftc-chair-1851380884

'I'm not a cynic, I'm disappointed' – the _Software Crisis_ Easter Sale: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-software-crisis-easter-sale/

Looking through Linkedin and all the bad managers I've had seem to be cast from the same mould:

- Into "AI", but gesture towards doomerim to look reasonable
- Believes "AI" coders will replace programmers
- Pretending they weren't into "blockchain" a few months ago
- Uses trendy PKM du jour (Aboard is replacing Notion among the MBA types)
- Uses passive voice to gloss over the mistakes they've made in the past
- Older ones talk about Web 2.0 as if it wasn't a bullshit marketing term at the time

I’ll let you in on a secret: I love sporadically updated weblogs. I subscribe to over 1200 feeds and most of them are sporadic or even technically “inactive”. Months often pass between updates

It means that every post published was important to the writer

Back in the days of snail mail, letters that began with “It’s been a while since I last wrote to you” were the ones people cherished the most

You don’t need to post every day or even every week to have a blog that matters

JFC, people in tech are really out there saying that language models will be better at therapy, financial advice, and career advice than trained people.

WTF is wrong with you people? Do you really have no clue about what other people’s jobs actually involve?

Language models can’t even do maths how are they supposed to get good at financial advice?

And therapy? Just… 😑

What’s wrong with people in tech?

One of my new year’s resolutions was to stop debating the incoherent AI claims MBA and tech bro types on private Slacks or mailing lists, but they just keep saying so much dumb stuff that it’s hard to just sit on your fingers and ignore them.

Managing to hold back for today despite claims like “society needs economic bubbles to build out infrastructure like rail or broadband” which is just 🤨😑🤦🏻♂️

Here’s a nice related fact from a Microsoft investor conference last year. It’s almost certainly higher now.

“And 40% of the code they're checking in is now AI-generated and unmodified“

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Investor/events/FY-2023/Morgan-Stanley-TMT-Conference#:~:text=and%2040%25%20of%20the%20code%20they're%20checking%20in%20is%20now%20ai%2Dgenerated%20and%20unmodified

Think about how much of your average dev process they much own now to be able to know this and say it with confidence.

“Microsoft Is Spying on Users of Its AI Tools - Schneier on Security”

This is an inevitability with all cloud services, and with code copilots much of the industry’s coding activity that used to be private is now in the cloud and fully analysable by Microsoft. https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/02/microsoft-is-spying-on-users-of-its-ai-tools.html

“Literacy crisis in college students: Essay from a professor on students who don’t read.”

If you’re like me and your livelihood consists of either selling textual objects or using textual objects to sell services to a youth-obsessed sector (tech) then this is seriously bad news https://slate.com/human-interest/2024/02/literacy-crisis-reading-comprehension-college.html