Nostr notes by Anthony

Re: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116961677110890384 I've ...

2026-07-22T13:04:37Z

Re: https://discuss.systems/@ricci/116961677110890384

I've taken part in numerous computer science research projects that involved IRB review. I believe the system *can* work, even for cases like the above post. But Google and Stanford are bad actors that are taken at their word, and no system, IRB based or otherwise, is going to function properly if it cannot appropriately metabolize this reality.

I was once in a meeting where a Google X person gushed about a project that used smartphone sensor data to detect earthquakes. The calculus being set up here is that detecting earthquakes is a social good that outweighs any particular individual's right to privacy and even outweighs their right to know that their smartphone is being used in this way, let alone consent to it in any meaningful way. (*) Let me be clear and say I reject this framing, but it does appeal to a lot of people, even well-meaning ones. A mess.

#Google #IRB #ethics #EthicsReview #ComputerScience #research #ResearchEthics #tech #dev

(*) I assume there's some contortion involving EULAs whereby Google X can pretend that anyone using Android consented to having their smartphone's sensor data used for any future purpose Google et al. cooks up.

This is a bit tangential, but I was reminded today of the ...

2026-07-17T10:53:53Z

In reply to nevent1q…2dma
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This is a bit tangential, but I was reminded today of the question "who are the farmers?" one ought to be asking when considering enhancing the resilience of communities. If the farmers aren't doing well the entire community is at risk, yet they are frequently left out of consideration (except by people who think about resilience, I guess). So the question takes on a certainn urgency.

If we take seriously that code is to some extent "perishable", meaning it can bitrot, drift out of date with current conditions so badly that it becomes effectively non-functional, etc., then perhaps an analogy with farming isn't unreasonable. Proposals like "just fork the project" would have you give up a robust vegetable farm that reliably produces every season in exchange for a single vegetable harvest. In principle, if you're clever and well-resourced you could seed the vegetables and buy your own land and equipment and start your own farm. Regardless, that possibility existing does not equate the robust farm with the single harvest and it's disingenuous to suggest otherwise. This is another take on the Omelas analogy but one a little closer to my heart.

I think the question "who are the farmers in open source?" is very interesting. I don't think the answer is the obvious one.

I loathe CloudFlare, and strongly believe they do not provide ...

2026-07-17T10:30:12Z

In reply to nevent1q…2wkp
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I loathe CloudFlare, and strongly believe they do not provide security except possibly in the sense a protection racket does.

Yellow-orange skies from Canadian wildfire smoke, ever-worsening ...

2026-07-15T13:51:41Z

Yellow-orange skies from Canadian wildfire smoke, ever-worsening news about federal agents murdering an innocent person for no discernible reason, and the US continuing along its "war crimes as policy" trajectory. The Dystopia Index is high in Maine today.

#maine #dystopia #USPol #MEPol #ClimateChange #wildfires

The book is open access and you can download it directly from ...

2026-07-12T18:16:02Z

In reply to nevent1q…yc8c
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The book is open access and you can download it directly from https://direct.mit.edu/books/book-pdf/2607186/book_9780262053624.pdf (linked from https://direct.mit.edu/books/oa-edited-volume/6161/Towards-a-Biosemiotic-Theoretical-BiologySign ; scroll down and click "Book PDF")

@npub1fg4…mynu Seems to be right up your alley, if you ...

2026-07-12T13:20:10Z

Yogi Jaeger (npub1fg4…mynu) Seems to be right up your alley, if you haven't come across it already: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262053617/towards-a-biosemiotic-theoretical-biology/

> The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a ...

2026-07-11T14:34:11Z

> The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a phase of scientific enquiry in which we produce more but understand less.
From https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07146-0

There are good points in this article, but the framing of the risk above is broken, to my way of thinking. In adopting an economic metaphor or production, it's taking for granted that there is a scientific *process* that leads to *products*, and that we can quantify how many of these products are produced. "We produce more".

I would argue that if we do not understand whatever is coming out of this process, then they are not products in any reasonable sense of that word. In fact I'd say this of any putative commodity: if a factory spits out a widget nobody knows how to use, then the factory has not produced a commodity, it has made an object. Commodities are commodious, adapted to a use or purpose, and human beings are the entities that have uses and purposes.

So, if we create machines that make knowledge-objects resembling the products of science that fewer and fewer people understand, we are not engaging in "scientific enquiry" or "knowledge production". In this view the phrase quoted above ought to be re-cast as "The proliferation of AI tools in science risks science". What exactly is enquiry for if not understanding more?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #science

> The core argument is that systems trained only on linguistic ...

2026-07-11T14:08:26Z

In reply to nevent1q…hzdq
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> The core argument is that systems trained only on linguistic form cannot learn meaning, because meaning requires a connection to extralinguistic referents.
[The octopus test](https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf )---which really summarizes a vast literature on linguistics and language---supports this point of view. It's not some flippant thing Bender at al. are throwing out there just to be contentious.
> Even if we accept this premise
...
> it still does not apply to the systems anyone is talking about today.
What? Anyone who says LLMs have "capabilities", can "think", or "reason", or "code", or "do math" or "solve physics" or "write papers" or..........is talking about exactly this. What they go on to argue about grounding reads as missing the point to me. Training datasets about the world are not grounding in the world.
> On the contrary, some LLMs trained only on text can, in fact, tell you how to build a catapult
False. They can emit words in the shape of instructions for building a catapult, maybe, but only if something like that is in the training data. But this misses the point of the octopus test, which was that *catapult-like things were not in the available data*. An LLM cannot give you instructions to build something it's never encountered in training data. It might fake it a bit if there had been something similar in the training data, but it would almost surely fail to answer any nuanced question about the instructions. We've seen this time and again and it will always be the case. Arguing otherwise presupposes that human beings exist in an entirely closed-ended world that can be fully encased in a large enough but still finite space of natural language text plus whatever can be interpolated within that space. This assumption is plainly false, besides being nihilistic, bleak, and horrifying.

The "people don't believe stuff because it sounds sneering" is irrational tone policing, and is not serious. If your life were at stake, say, would you tell the emergency responder who's there to help you to leave because they spoke to you in a sneering way? Of course not. One tone polices about matters that don't matter.

I'd offer the following observations: The fact that people ...

2026-07-11T13:46:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…8su4
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I'd offer the following observations:

The fact that people motivated by vast amounts of money and power to criticize the term "stochastic parrots" choose to criticize the term "stochastic parrots" is not evidence that there is a problem with the term or the critique it implies. If someone has a critique, they should put it forward and defend it. Otherwise, pointing to "lots of people critique this" sounds at best like bad faith insinuation. Bender and collaborators have also put forward [the octopus test](https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.463.pdf ), if one is feeling chauvinistic about the relative intelligence of birds.

The substance of Searl'e Chinese Room objection has never really been met by proponents of the belief that sequence-to-sequence maps somehow encase "intelligence" or "agency" or other cognitive markers humans have. Ken Aizawa and collaborators have written several nice articles on "the mark of the cognitive", trying to get at what we mean when we say humans are cognitive, and an immediate consequence of their work is that LLMs are not. By my read they don't go so far as to claim things like LLMs *cannot* be cognitive, but personally I think their work strongly implies that conclusion (they don't want to pick that particular fight is how I read them). A lot of these "debates" turn on the fact that to claim LLMs do something "cognitive", you must define precisely what you meany by that word, yet proponents of this view rarely if ever do.

In other words, and to speak of credibility, the burden of proof lies with the proponents of LLM "capabilities". Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, etc. Worse still, we've known about the ELIZA effect for 50-ish years by now, and since it is a powerful confounder it needs to be ruled out at a bare minimum before any further conclusions can reasonably be drawn.

Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham on SpaceX and AI: "we ...

2026-07-10T19:01:28Z

Billionaire investor Jeremy Grantham on SpaceX and AI: "we should wish that it’s hype, because if it’s not, it’s a lot worse."

From https://global.morningstar.com/en-gb/stocks/jeremy-grantham-spacex-it-will-be-amazing-if-it-doesnt-collapse

#AI #SpaceX #hype #billionaires #economy #finance #investors

update-notifier-crash on Ubuntu 24.04 wrote 1 Tbyte of garbage to ...

2026-07-09T15:42:00Z

update-notifier-crash on Ubuntu 24.04 wrote 1 Tbyte of garbage to syslog before I noticed and stopped it. I noticed because it filled the disk.

Unbelievably annoying behavior. I guess that'll teach me to ignore an update notification rather than figuring out how to disable it forever.

#linux #ubuntu #syslog #SpamLogging #tech #dev

> For there is one weapon that only we possess and which the ...

2026-07-08T13:47:09Z

In reply to nevent1q…aa78
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> For there is one weapon that only we possess and which the billionaires and the warmongers can never take from us. One weapon which so frightens them they will twist their words into knots, they will spend the entirety of their vast fortunes trying and failing to convince us that we don’t possess it at all, they will claim over and over and without evidence that it is vanishing before our eyes even as it remains right there in our hands, clear and plain to hearts yet open to the world: the refusal to work.

> On the one hand, they threaten us with no work at all, with ...

2026-07-08T13:41:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…tp34
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> On the one hand, they threaten us with no work at all, with the misery and penury that comes from a lack of work, and therefore a lack of the means of living. On the other, they demand endless work, a work that wipes out all other avenues for thinking and being, that leaves us programmable and programmed, no space left in our minds for thoughts they haven’t placed there. Are we to merely acquiesce, to accept their scraps and the miserable conditions attached to them? Surely not. For if we accept these conditions, will they not impose even worse upon us? Will they not keep increasing their demands and decreasing our pay until we are working ceaselessly, and for nothing? What would compel them to stop? Already we have seen that their greed for money and for power is so voracious it will tear through buildings and through bodies, it will murder many people, it will poison the air and the soil, it will bring great storms upon us. So there must be an end, and it is only we who can bring that end about.

> Only a mind so subdued by slop and propaganda and ...

2026-07-08T13:27:02Z

> Only a mind so subdued by slop and propaganda and advertising, a mind unpracticed in observation and inquiry and imagination—only such a mind could be complacent as its pockets are picked to fund that most terrible of horrors.
[Into the Gap](https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/into-the-gap )

I found this to be excellent: ...

2026-07-08T13:08:14Z

I found this to be excellent: https://mass-driver.com/article/from-human-hands

**From human hands.**
*We don’t use AI in any of our design or production processes. Here’s why.*

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ImageGeneration #fonts #typefaces #art

> Low levels of code literacy are acceptable in the industry. ...

2026-07-08T12:48:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…hcel
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> Low levels of code literacy are acceptable in the industry.
My experience isn't representative, but that's something I've observed in industry as well. Code that isn't understood tends to be treated a bit like a cyst. The trouble is that over time the codebase becomes more cyst than functional.

I've been in the position to hire software developers multiple times over my career, and I eventually converged on a pretty simple technique. For the technical interview, I'd ask them to bring code they've written and that they understand, and explain it to me. It was intended as a literacy test. The trouble is the interviewer needs to be relatively code literate to understand what they're observing in such an interaction.

I had a technical interview long ago where the interviewer sat me in a room, gave me a printout (!) of code, and asked me to highlight all the issues I could find with it. When I was done we walked through it and I explained my observations. In retrospect that was a literacy test, too. Using a physical printout is a brilliant move.

Microsoft hates Doom, creates doom. #computer #games #gaming #id ...

2026-07-07T17:04:00Z

Microsoft hates Doom, creates doom.

#computer #games #gaming #id #IdSoftware #IdTech #Microsoft #XBOX #Doom #Quake

Putting aside that the existence of "Youtube science ...

2026-07-07T16:10:35Z

In reply to nevent1q…6vu2
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Putting aside that the existence of "Youtube science communicator" as a group is indicative of serious problems, Green is an AI shill spreading critihype, among other things. Broken down here: https://youtu.be/4lKyNdZz3Vw (the bits about SciShow, but also how irresponsible and damaging it is for someone like him to be posting the stuff he does).

He's problematic in other ways but I can't be bothered to dig up the links.

Who'd want to use the meat machine in their skull any more ...

2026-07-06T00:15:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…p77s
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Who'd want to use the meat machine in their skull any more than is necessary to usher in the singularity?

Hmm, yes. It makes sense. I don't think many do, frankly. ...

2026-07-05T23:11:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…jedh
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Hmm, yes. It makes sense. I don't think many do, frankly. I've asked software developers I've known over the years and virtually all admitted some variation of the same sentiment. I think it's a tragedy we don't teach this better. There is so much brilliance recorded in source code.

One of the "coders" interviewed was an odious toadie of ...

2026-07-05T20:12:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…49eu
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One of the "coders" interviewed was an odious toadie of Jeffrey Epstein, one has some awful views including homophobic ones, and several others have become horrifyingly AI-pilled in recent years. I think I'll pass on this one I'm afraid to say.

Nostr event nevent1qqswjd5q2m5fhtpaxjm8h6zqrsa2gsjjfpzmzlt3gj3u0lf2dcndcrqzyz24k0ezkfl83urg5enjd9tsz6386vx6f3qewv0y8gnyg3skl2d97e5mdjh

2026-07-05T12:53:43Z

Re: https://social.wildeboer.net/users/jwildeboer/statuses/116860157329810170

I realize this is beside the point, but personally I view the fact that code review is not considered interesting as a serious failure of computer science education. I'm invested in the latter, so it stands out for me.

On the whole writers tend to love to read. I think they love it in part because their education led them to realize that learning to read well is both a good in itself and helps you become a better writer. Programming languages were designed to be human readable so that humans could read them. Yet we have a couple generations of people writing code most of whom were never explicitly taught how to read it, let alone learn to love reading it.

#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #ComputerProgramming #ComputerScience #ComputerScienceEducation

In other words Ladybird is no longer a free and open source ...

2026-06-05T13:24:35Z

In other words Ladybird is no longer a free and open source software project. It is, in an important sense, closed source now.

"Proprietary" means having owner(s). If the maintainers are the only ones allowed to introduce changes, they are establishing an ownership relationship over the codebase. I.e., it's a proprietary project, and that is the sense in which it's closed.

This is the destiny of most projects that go AI, in my opinion.<li><a href="https://exquisite.social/users/thomholwerda/statuses/116697078838020135"; target="_blank">https://exquisite.social/users/thomholwerda/statuses/116697078838020135</a></li><li><a href="https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/"; target="_blank">https://ladybird.org/posts/changing-how-we-develop-ladybird/</a></li>;

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #web #WebBrowser #browser #tech #Ladybird #FOSS #OSS #OpenSource #ClosedSource #ProprietarySoftware

Elites: We are going to hit you with clubs now Software ...

2026-06-01T14:04:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…yfm9
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Elites: We are going to hit you with clubs now
Software developer: There are ways to be hit by clubs that make my KPIs go up
Elites: Perfect

> Again - it’s entirely possible to use Kagi without a ...

2026-05-21T18:35:51Z

In reply to nevent1q…6ppq
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> Again - it’s entirely possible to use Kagi without a single piece of AI. Which was the point of the original post.
Again---this is a misrepresentation. I take your posts to be purposely obfuscating at this point. Bye.

> There is no training of AI or tracking from their search ...

2026-05-21T12:28:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…0uwg
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> There is no training of AI or tracking from their search engine. Their search engine only uses AI when you want it to.
Unless they have blatantly changed their operation, this is a misrepresentation. Their URL literally used to be "kagi.ai", which you can browse on the Internet Archive if you were serious about understanding this company. Their blog at kagi.com still has posts with text like this, which I'm picking from just one of several posts on the subject:<li>"Not a lot of people know that Kagi started as Kagi.ai in 2018 and has a long heritage of utilizing AI"</li><li>"Our early efforts, however, enabled us to use machine learning to deliver answers to questions directly within the search experience, making us the only search engine besides Google and Bing able to do so when we launched the public beta in 2022"</li><li>"Our approach allows us to take advantage of the entirety of available human knowledge...Kagi acts as a gateway to the giant repository of human knowledge, patiently waiting to serve our needs"</li><li>"With the recent advancements in AI, our interest in exploring how it can improve search has reignited. Last year we published technology demonstrations for AI in search and AI in browser and today we are unveiling integrations based on this demos directly in Kagi search."</li>

Their future business model as stated in 2019:<li>"Imagine a world where the market grades AI assistants by their ability and offers them at different price points. Depending on your budget and tolerance, you can buy beginner, intermediate, or expert AIs"</li><li>"Instead of everyone sharing the same Siri, you’ll have your completely individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive"</li>
Etc. You'd have us believe they stopped these efforts---which require training on user data to be fully realized---and turn all this off unless users opt in? Not plausible. This is plenty of reason to believe they are collecting every interaction every user has with their search engine to train their AI assistants and realize this vision. You can't have your "individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis" unless Kagi is collecting data from you and training Mike, Julia, or Jarvis with it.

If one were inclined to, one could read Kagi's [AI Philosophy](https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html ) and take note that what they are listing as the main limitations of using AI in search are not in fact the main limitations of using AI in search according to experts on this subject. To me this suggests they are not inclined to provide a good search and information retrieval experience based on the best understanding of how to do that. Instead they wish to provide the AI-based "question answering" experience that their blog has been detailing for many years.

> they return blended search results
Yes. Blended into a slurry by AI.

> But it’s clear you don’t like them
I stated facts as I know them, with the purpose of sharing information that other people might find useful when making a decision about whether to use Kagi. You can verify what I said on the two posts I linked previously as well as Kagi's own blog, if you cared to. What you're saying here reads as a typical dissembling tactic deployed to discredit unpleasant facts by labeling them as "only aesthetic" or "emotional", on the assumption that somehow aesthetics or emotions are less valid, which of course is a false assumption. That you are misrepresenting the practices of a company with a founder who's regularly expressed chauvinistic views (to put it kindly) reads to me as projection, or worse. Regardless of the motivation, this isn't about what I "like". It's about what Kagi has repeatedly stated it actually does.

Take a peek through Kagi's early blog. Besides its founder ...

2026-05-20T23:41:36Z

In reply to nevent1q…3gkn
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Take a peek through Kagi's early blog. Besides its founder holding some odious views he is regularly called out on, Kagi was meant to be an AI company from the beginning. The plan was for the search to exist to provide training data for the AI, which would then be sold back to users. They serve Google search results in the end if memory serves. Not a durable, trustworthy alternative to Google, in my estimation. I certainly wouldn't pay them.

See https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611 and also https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

"KDE Connect has unexpectedly crashed". Oh no, KDE, I ...

2026-04-29T16:47:57Z

"KDE Connect has unexpectedly crashed". Oh no, KDE, I expected it to crash. It crashes every single time I turn off my bluetooth headphones, and always has. In fact I've come to think of the headphones' off button as a KDE Connect off button, that's how much I expect it to crash.

#KDE #Linux #KDEConnect #computers #software

Maybe I'm out of my mind, but looking at this graph, there ...

2026-04-29T14:16:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…j6we
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Maybe I'm out of my mind, but looking at this graph, there appears to be a treatment and a subsequent effect: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/

...which may or may not have to do with an internal culture that does things like this: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion

and also this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers

> Musk and his colleagues have the good fortune of living in a ...

2026-04-22T13:54:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…gfj0
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> Musk and his colleagues have the good fortune of living in a moment when there is no structural actor capable of challenging their dominance. The working class has virtually ceased to exist as an organized force. Absent pressure from below, political parties themselves offer no meaningful opposition to Muskism. The effect is paradoxical. On the one hand, the lives of capitalists are made easier when they can intensify the exploitation of their workers and purchase influence in politics with little resistance. But it also means they have no incentive to restrain their most antisocial impulses or consider the long-term consequences of their actions.

> Muskism typifies this tendency: if Fordism and post-Fordism were both, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism is oriented toward social war. The relative thinness of the Muskist mode of regulation is symptomatic: the working-class antagonist is so weak, the social war so asymmetric, that there is no need for a negotiated peace. At the moment, the strategy seems to be working.
#USPol #WorldPol #geopolitics #Musk #Muskism #Fordism

Nostr event nevent1qqs96gsn7fsydsfuwa58x3knl2akmt7l706hlkz5enqmphtz0dy0r4czyz24k0ezkfl83urg5enjd9tsz6386vx6f3qewv0y8gnyg3skl2d97mpjvaf

2026-04-06T19:09:23Z

Re: https://social.coop/users/scottjenson/statuses/116352800579635299
> Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon
If this were not a disingenuous strawman---because it's impossible for one thing---I'd ask "why not?" I wouldn't invite the "AI People" I've encountered into my house either, because I've found them to be unpleasant and I get to choose who enters my space. This solution has worked quite well for me over the years.

It seems to me that what this person is saying is that people should give up the power they have---namely, their power to exclude people and topics they don't wish to interact with---because it favors them. That's a typical rhetorical move of AI boosters: demanding you give up your power because you having and exercising that power inconveniences them.

> any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
One should ask why this person chose to use the most offensive possible metaphor to make their case for inclusion. It's almost as though they don't believe the argument their words are shaped into resembling.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #AIBoosters

Their code is remarkable for how terrible it is. Learning from it ...

2026-04-02T12:31:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…ymre
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Their code is remarkable for how terrible it is. Learning from it would be a bit like learning how to be a chemist by studying the pollution from a chemical plant. As far as I can see, what there is in there to learn is learnable in a much better way from more conventionally produced software, courses, books, etc.
> the commercial pressure to be great is something that we cannot feel
This feels like an apology for Anthropic, and I do hope you're receiving a nice paycheck for doing their PR for them. Otherwise you're doing their work for free.

I've worked in both corporations and startups. I've felt the pressure "to be great". I did not resort to whatever the heck resulted in a mess like Claude Code. Many of my colleagues can say the same.

I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost ...

2026-04-01T15:12:44Z

I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost immediately someone attacked me about my criticism. They tried the "take a look at COBOL and get back to me" angle.

Buddy. I've *written* COBOL. I spent several years working almost daily with a 3-million-line monstrosity of a COBOL program. I was working on another app that interfaced with it, but in that work I occasionally had to read the code and in a few cases modify it. Granted I haven't spent as much time looking at the leaked Claude Code source code (and won't lol), but nevertheless I confidently declare that Claude Code is *worse*. "Spaghetti code" doesn't come close to describing this thing.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #Anthropic #Claude #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #software #COBOL #LinkedIn

For reasons that aren't even clear to me, I'm about 1/3rd ...

2026-03-31T14:24:29Z

For reasons that aren't even clear to me, I'm about 1/3rd into Barry Jay's *Reflective Programs in Tree Calculus* and about 1/10th into Frank Waaldijk's *Natural Topology*, which I've been reading side-by-side. Smashing these two into each other is pretty fascinating, even as I'm not sure what to make of the mixture yet.

Having sat with the notion for about six months now, I think Jay's critique of the Church-Turing thesis has legs. I don't see clearly yet exactly where and how the limits of computation manifest in his own system(s), which of course they must. But I think he's correct that this thesis as it's colloquially presented (and taught to students, including me!) is misleading at best and false in a certain important sense. Apparently he is regularly called a crackpot for forwarding this critique even though it's straightforwardly demonstrated.

Waaldijk's book is more of a constructive mathematics exploration. In this it is closely related to computer science, but it's focused on traditionally mathematical notions like topological space. The latter is usually quite complicated, but Waaldijk shows that the core concept of compact space can be represented with finitely-branching trees, making these spaces amenable to computation. Since we imagine physics taking place in spaces that are topological (among other things) there's potentially an interesting bidirectional flow of ideas between computer science and physics.

Jay calls his central notion "natural trees". Waaldijk calls his central notion "natural spaces". In both cases I think the intended sense is "with minimal artifice".

#ComputerScience #computation #math #mathematics #topology

Here's one for the dystopia/AI Hell files: https://jaigp.org ...

2026-03-31T12:18:30Z

Here's one for the dystopia/AI Hell files: https://jaigp.org
> **Journal for AI Generated Papers**
> Where humans and machines are welcomed.
> The Open Prompting Journal Built Collaboratively by its Community.
One positive I can think of is that folks who wish to "collaborate" with machines can congregate there, giving the rest of us a clear signal about who to block, ignore, critique, ridicule...

cc [@olivia@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/olivia ) [@Iris@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/Iris ) [@dingemansemark@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/dingemansemark ) Alex Hanna (npub1e2z…n97d) Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her) (npub15xv…0jms)

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AntiScience

Microsoft Copilot putting ads in pull requests on Microsoft ...

2026-03-30T18:56:09Z

Microsoft Copilot putting ads in pull requests on Microsoft Github is expected behavior.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #github #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment

The "correction", when it comes, is going to be ugly. The ...

2026-03-30T13:00:50Z

The "correction", when it comes, is going to be ugly. The quantities of misallocated capital involved in this AI mania look to be even more staggering than previously reported.

I worry that few smaller companies or startups will survive, and the country will be pockmocked with half-constructed data centers and obsolete equipment. This is not like the dot-com crash that left useful and unused fiber networking.

https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/private-credits-exposure-to-ailing-software-industry-is-bigger-than-advertised-d80da378

hashtag#AI hashtag#GenAI hashtag#GenerativeAI hashtag#software hashtag#tech hashtag#dev hashtag#AssetBubble hashtag#PrivateCredit

Nostr event nevent1qqs8vchuwesg2jhf27gsdt3thwczqgyvqtea87ztkhr08sst3ez0ejszyz24k0ezkfl83urg5enjd9tsz6386vx6f3qewv0y8gnyg3skl2d975chtwu

2026-03-29T18:35:19Z

[@davidgerard@circumstances.run](https://circumstances.run/users/davidgerard ) here's one for your bsky files, if you haven't encountered it already: **Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds** https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/bluesky-leans-into-ai-with-attie-an-app-for-building-custom-feeds/

Attie.

If I could have someone kicking the back of the chair while ...

2026-03-28T18:14:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…nm3f
_________________________

If I could have someone kicking the back of the chair while another chair is lowered onto my lap and someone coughs on me, I might just lose myself in the experience!

I'm there with you. I understand how enormous an undertaking ...

2026-03-28T18:10:17Z

In reply to nevent1q…d4qw
_________________________

I'm there with you. I understand how enormous an undertaking it would be to do something like fork the Linux kernel. However, acting like we're trapped because it'd be hard is premature surrender, and I don't think anybody who actually cares should be advocating for that. I question the motives of people who talk this way. I'm old enough to remember all the people who said Linux would never be accepted, there'd never be a viable alternative to Windows or Office, etc.

Please miss me with incoherent fatalism. If you want to roll over ...

2026-03-28T17:30:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…tnxe
_________________________

Please miss me with incoherent fatalism. If you want to roll over that's up to you but untag me first.

Esther Payne :bisexual_flag: (npub17ux…329m)

I think there's a decent chance he's a spoiler for ...

2026-03-27T14:36:23Z

In reply to nevent1q…xpvw
_________________________

I think there's a decent chance he's a spoiler for Collins, and/or a spoiler for any legitimately left candidate. Given his background, I'd characterize him as right-wing, not progressive. He says progressive-sounding things publicly, but his background and previous actions suggest right-wing leanings. Propping up a candidate like this in Maine serves the center-right Democratic leadership *and* the Republican party.

That's how I've been thinking about it, anyway.

> French first lady Brigitte Macron and other spouses of world ...

2026-03-27T12:39:19Z

> French first lady Brigitte Macron and other spouses of world leaders. "It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility. Since our environment is designed for people, humanoid systems are uniquely suited to navigate and operate within our world. They fit well."

> "Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato," she continued. "Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous. Literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history. Humanity's entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient, and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytic skills and problem solving and adopt in real time to a student's pace, prior knowledge and even emotional state. The byproduct — a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person."
From **Melania Trump pitches robots as potential educators for American schoolchildren** https://www.cbsnews.com/news/melania-trump-robots-educators-kids-humanoid-systems/

The horrors and clowns of the bread and circus.

#AI #GenAI #GeneartiveAI #robotics #education #MagicalThinking #dystopia

The economy, politics, and tech is centering around how to keep ...

2026-03-25T14:33:49Z

In reply to nevent1q…x47m
_________________________

The economy, politics, and tech is centering around how to keep the deca- and hectobillionaires fully insulated from the problems they directly cause. As far as I can see they are not sawing off their own ladders or anything like that. They are consolidating their position at the tippy top. Their position there does not depend on the masses being educated, literate, or particularly skilled anymore. Instead, it requires the masses to be docile. I will start believing that this situation is changing when the masses are no longer docile, but there's not much evidence of that, at least not in the US as far as I can see.

It's possible the wealthy and powerful have miscalculated and current automation is not enough to allow them to retain an acceptable lifestyle while being fully decoupled from the masses. However, I don't see this as a foregone conclusion, even as I personally believe it is probably true.

I feel like there's a population of crypto and ...

2026-03-24T14:51:16Z

I feel like there's a population of crypto and crypto-adjacent tech people who legitimately don't understand why a long, hard-to-guess string that is stored and shared in cleartext is very different from a password and cannot be substituted for one. I feel like a bunch of these folks don't understand why.

I'm not going to name and shame but I'm in the midst of a conversation on this, which is why it's top of mind.

#tech #dev #crypto #security #cybersecurity #InfoSec

I feel like most of Trump's statements regarding the attack ...

2026-03-23T12:15:54Z

I feel like most of Trump's statements regarding the attack on Iran should be read as market manipulation.

#US #USPol #Iran #economy

I think it means that investors expect Altman will be able to ...

2026-03-22T15:06:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…yrkf
_________________________

I think it means that investors expect Altman will be able to pickpocket $100 from every person on the planet every year forevermore. The company valuation is the capitalization in present value terms of expected future revenues, after all!

I think it is meaningful that Marvin Minsky, sometimes called the ...

2026-03-22T13:18:41Z

I think it is meaningful that Marvin Minsky, sometimes called the "father of AI", seemed to hold human beings in low regard.

Here's John Searle in 1983:
> Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
> Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".

I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a *disdain* for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.

It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #intelligence #GenAI #GenerativeAI

Re-reading *The Soul Gained and Lost: Artificial Intelligence as ...

2026-03-22T13:09:08Z

Re-reading *The Soul Gained and Lost:
Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project* by Phil Agre as catharsis. [Here](https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/shr.html ).

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

I have had the same experience. I co-founded a startup in 2016 ...

2026-03-20T13:23:33Z

In reply to nevent1q…tkze
_________________________

I have had the same experience. I co-founded a startup in 2016 that managed to secure a funding round, and the VCs themselves were giddy about announcing it as widely as possible. I've consulted for startups both before and after that, and as far as I'm aware every one of them that secured funding rapidly announced it. This explanation from Bluesky does not pass a basic smell test.

I second both points!

2026-03-20T13:21:06Z

In reply to nevent1q…urxh
_________________________

I second both points!

Bitcoin opened the climate-destroying proof of work floodgate and ...

2026-03-20T13:16:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…87yp
_________________________

Bitcoin opened the climate-destroying proof of work floodgate and now we're here.

A good review of reasons insurance companies are pulling back ...

2026-03-19T13:03:29Z

A good review of reasons insurance companies are pulling back from insuring companies that lean on generative AI. Point 4, "The main problem is not just the error, but the incentive not to see it" is especially damning: use of AI not only obscures audit trails, it sets up perverse incentives against accountability, pushing costs and risk to other parts of an organization, its customers, or society. The net result is that whatever "local" advantages AI may provide turn into downstream risk that cannot be easily accounted for. Insurance companies are (rightly) allergic to this state of affairs.

Another example of how (whole)-systems thinking is very helpful for parsing the effects of technology changes like this.

https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/89367

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AgenticAI #GPT #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #ActuarialScience #insurance

**Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at ...

2026-03-18T15:36:16Z

**Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs**
> Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.
From https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/workers-who-love-synergizing-paradigms-might-be-bad-their-jobs

I tried reading this article replacing variations of "corporate" with "LLM" and it works. Right down to the "LLM Bullshit Receptivity Scale (LBSR)".

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #CorporateSpeak #Bullshit

Similar for me. I know people who are down with some preventable ...

2026-03-17T17:36:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…ycte
_________________________

Similar for me. I know people who are down with some preventable illness at least part of a week, if not parts of several weeks every single month during the winter. This is not something that happened this much prior to the COVID pandemic, and I'm honestly at a loss to explain why people tolerate it.

Maybe I'm rude but I ignore it if I can and if I can't I ...

2026-03-17T16:47:13Z

In reply to nevent1q…yjnz
_________________________

Maybe I'm rude but I ignore it if I can and if I can't I say "I don't get how you tolerate being sick so often."

Seems it's time for an LLM-free Linux distribution, perhaps ...

2026-03-16T23:32:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…qv6s
_________________________

Seems it's time for an LLM-free Linux distribution, perhaps forking useful projects before they went off the deep end.

I think you've hit on a brilliant new design methodology: SDD ...

2026-03-16T13:26:46Z

In reply to nevent1q…grfv
_________________________

I think you've hit on a brilliant new design methodology: SDD (Superstition-Driven Design).

Something I've learned from Ruth Ben-Ghiat: aspiring ...

2026-03-08T16:02:11Z

Something I've learned from Ruth Ben-Ghiat: aspiring authoritarians purposely engineer situations in which people are invited to give up their values and morals and make decisions that compromise their sense of right and wrong. Moral decay, moral injury, and subsequently moral collapse become so intolerable that afflicted people will blame anything else but their own choices or the leader they threw in with, which of course are the only proximate causes it would be helpful to implicate. The more compromising decisions they make, the more they are drawn into the authoritarian's orbit.

There is no question that it is indefensible to use generative AI systems as they are currently constituted, especially the commercial ones, once one becomes aware of how they are made and operated and the destructive consequences they have already had and will surely continue to have. Among the many reasons using these tools is indefensible is that they represent an authoritarian invitation. You're invited to trade your morals and ethics for a bit of convenience, a reduction in friction, a learning experience, a rhetorical flourish, or maybe (a kind of) status. You thereby align yourself more and more with people who say things like "water is fake" or "fuck earth" as they make the computer systems enabling the horrors we're watching unfold on social media. You start to tell yourself stories, complexifying stories that explain why it's OK you did this thing that you know is not OK. You move in the direction of people who are already telling themselves stories like this. Maybe their stories have superior analgesic qualities to yours.

Nobody needs to go down this path.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ethics #morality #authoritarianism

And who doesn't like a good detective story???

2026-02-09T18:44:03Z

In reply to nevent1q…qyg7
_________________________

And who doesn't like a good detective story???

It's true that it's an unfortunate name.

2026-02-09T17:46:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…da43
_________________________

It's true that it's an unfortunate name.

I think abduction is a deeply underappreciated aspect of human ...

2026-02-09T16:50:07Z

I think abduction is a deeply underappreciated aspect of human reasoning.

#logic #abduction

**As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched ...

2026-02-09T16:46:06Z

**As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts**

From https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-2026-02-09/

I read this and the first thing that came to mind was Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon saying "f@?k it he's dead / oh sh!t there's a horse in the hospital!" on *General Hospital*.

#AI #healthcare #DrOctagon #music

I personally know more than one person who's spent years ...

2026-02-09T13:52:59Z

In reply to nevent1q…n5mk
_________________________

I personally know more than one person who's spent years writing about some method, let's say TDD, going to conferences presenting their ideas etc, fully independently of their employer. Said folks are now slinging AI slop and writing about how great LLMs are. Blaming the employer doesn't pass a smell test.

That's what I had in mind. The key bit is that if our ...

2026-02-08T20:22:30Z

In reply to nevent1q…vw35
_________________________

That's what I had in mind. The key bit is that if our understandable human languages aren't moving up the complexity scale along with whatever it is we think we're representing about math, then "whatever it is we think we're representing about math" is as incomprehensible to us as "all of math". We don't have the language to express it, so it looks algorithmically random (i.e. incompressible)--even as we claim to have made an "automated mathematician" to produce math for us!

I'm tinkering with an argument based on algorithmic ...

2026-02-08T18:40:14Z

I'm tinkering with an argument based on algorithmic complexity that if it were possible to make something like an "automated mathematician" or "automated scientist", then these would be expected to eventually produce outputs that we humans would be unable to distinguish from random noise.

Getting the whole argument just right is fiddly, but the basic idea is this. You feed some kind of theory into the AM/AS, which is a black box. It churns on this and spits out a result, which is added to the theory (I'm neglecting the case that the result is inconsistent with the theory). It can now churn on theory + result 1. After doing this long enough, it's churning on theory + result 1 + result 2 + ... + result N. Whatever it spits out will be dependent in particular on results 1 - N. Unless you know these results, you will not be able to understand what it outputs. I.e. it will look like noise to you. If the AM/AS is appreciably faster at producing results than people are at understanding them, there will be an N beyond which no one can understand the output. It'll look like random noise.

If you're into software development, this would be analogous to a software system that generates syntactically-correct code and then adds it to a software library it can then call. If you were to run this long enough, virtually all the programs it generated that were short enough for human beings to read and understand would consist almost entirely of library calls to code generated by the system. You'd have no idea what any of this code did unless you studied the library calls, which you wouldn't be able to do if the system were expanding the library faster than you could read and understand it.

I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether this is a desirable thing to do and whether it's happened yet. I would offer, though, a question to ponder: what reason is there to believe that a random number generator hooked up to an inscrutable interpreter produces human flourishing, for any given meaning of "human flourishing" you care to use?

#tech #dev #mathematics #AutomatedMathematician #AutomatedScientist #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ThoughtExperiment

This really makes me wonder whether the decades of constant blog ...

2026-02-08T15:32:07Z

In reply to nevent1q…nst4
_________________________

This really makes me wonder whether the decades of constant blog posts about method, such as software craftsmanship, *-driven design, agile, extreme programming, etc etc etc (event sourcing, the hexagonal architecture, etc etc etc etc etc dear lord there are so many), were all, ultimately, not serious. If a single technological advance coupled with hype and corporate pressure is enough to convince people to throw all of that out, how serious could it have been, really?

https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1769891986.847341

2026-02-08T00:19:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…pwdn
_________________________

https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1769891986.847341

Happy [Bandcamp ...

2026-02-06T14:47:27Z

Happy [Bandcamp Friday](https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays ) to those who celebrate.

#Bandcamp #BandcampFriday #music

What they don't tell you, what you have to figure out for ...

2026-02-06T14:22:25Z

What they don't tell you, what you have to figure out for yourself, is that the "things" in the slogan "move fast and break things" is us. It's people.

#tech #dev #SiliconValley #SocialMedia #AI #GenAI #etc

Economy looking wobbly eh? #US #economy

2026-02-05T16:15:10Z

Economy looking wobbly eh?

#US #economy

I think you're dead on about the focus on automating tasks. ...

2026-02-04T18:49:56Z

In reply to nevent1q…0hwj
_________________________

I think you're dead on about the focus on automating tasks.

Here's John Searle in 1983:
> Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
> Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".

I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a *disdain* for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.

It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.

He has a history of denying genocides that includes dismissing ...

2026-02-04T17:52:48Z

In reply to nevent1q…sjlg
_________________________

He has a history of denying genocides that includes dismissing firsthand accounts of refugees escaping them, going back to the Khmer Rouge at least. Further revelations that he doesn't respect people with less power than he enjoys are unsurprising to me as well.

I wonder whether the digital age has led to a decline in the use ...

2026-02-04T16:14:07Z

I wonder whether the digital age has led to a decline in the use of atlases, which in turn might be expected to imbue a false sense of increasing objectivity as scientific practitioners of become less acquainted with analog methods.

#science #PhilosophyOfScience #objectivity #digital

Cool! I'm curious how you address the cyborg myth. Given ...

2026-02-04T15:42:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…ugqf
_________________________

Cool! I'm curious how you address the cyborg myth. Given things like artificial hearts and prosthetic limbs there's a believable setup for a sorites paradox: when, exactly, does the person stop being "themselves" as you replace, one by one, their organic parts with mechanical analogs? I think that paradox does a lot of work for people who want to assert organism=mechanism. Do you think there will be a Zoom option or recording of this? I can't see myself making it to Vienna...

If you stuck a human infant into the same "learning ...

2026-02-04T15:34:20Z

In reply to nevent1q…shvh
_________________________

If you stuck a human infant into the same "learning environment" as an LLM being trained, they would not learn English. This simple-minded thought experiment demonstrates to me that LLM-based AI, or really anything in machine learning that has this form of training, is not and cannot be a model of human intelligence. Pretending a computer is a human baby doesn't help either but that's another conversation!

I too have been struck by the apparent lack of curiosity of our colleagues. One tentative conclusion I've come to is that there is a subspecies of STEM folks driven largely by impressive demos. I feel like this tendency reflects the perversities of short-termist economic thinking, but in any case the view is a splashy demo that makes it into *Nature* and the NYT but has shoddy science backing it is superior to excellent science that has no splashy demo. The field "progresses" from one impressive demo to the next. Pollack used to say things along these lines, but that's no surprise given that he founded the DEMO lab: it's right there in the name! I think that mindset is not uncommon, though. Even those who agree the science is important run up against the constraint that there's significantly more funding for flashy demos than for basic research.

"Cloud" is an appropriate for that kind of computing. ...

2026-02-04T11:58:30Z

"Cloud" is an appropriate for that kind of computing. From a distance it can appear solid. Up close, it's a fog, with nothing clear and with none of the apparent solidity visible.

#tech #dev #cloud #CloudComputing

I am astonished to have bookmarked a message from the Pope in my ...

2026-02-02T22:08:01Z

I am astonished to have bookmarked a message from the Pope in my pile of AI-related links.

[MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV FOR THE 60TH WORLD DAY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html )

His emphasis on face and voice is good.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #PopeLeo

I am not a lawyer; nor am I deeply studied in the legalities, so ...

2026-02-01T17:09:50Z

In reply to nevent1q…a24u
_________________________

I am not a lawyer; nor am I deeply studied in the legalities, so you should double and triple check anything I say, and if it ever comes to it, speak to a lawyer.

That said, my understanding is that if you are not under arrest, ICE has no right to access your phone unless they have a judicial warrant. You can file a criminal complaint of theft in the local jurisdiction where it happened (local politicians sometimes recommend this: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/06/metro/ice-immigration-rights-bystander/ ). The [Alasaad v. McAleenan ruling](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-rules-suspicionless-searches-travelers-phones-and-laptops ) found such searches unconstitutional. I don't know what followup rulings might have occurred or whether the consensus has shifted since then. You definitely do not need to consent to a search either of your person or of your phone.

Even if arrested, you are not required to speak to anyone other than to say "I wish to remain silent", "I do not consent to a search", and "I wish to speak to an attorney". You are entitled to contact an attorney. They will confiscate your belongings, but you do not need to tell them the password to unlock your phone.

Practically speaking, this is an agency that is willing to shoot people dead knowing that even the president will openly spread lies about what happened. They will almost surely threaten someone to unlock their phone and will take a copy of its contents regardless of whether they are legally entitled to do that. How much one resists is a question of how much danger one anticipates and what they are comfortable with risking. I'm definitely in no position to make recommendations about something like that.

> The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” ...

2026-02-01T16:04:43Z

In reply to nevent1q…r73r
_________________________

> The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” the notion of “carnage,” the dehumanization of immigrants— all of this creates the impression that their promised ethnic cleansing action would be a > *response*> to something, rather than a simple > *choice*> to exercise state violence against an invented racial enemy. These reversals are very important. It is important to consider this carefully.

> First, Vance reported that the Nazi propaganda campaign that he had himself inspired amounted to factual evidence. Mental chaos has been created where there was none before. And then that mental chaos becomes the justification for physical chaos: Trump’s “large deportations,” ICE raids that will, in fact, wreck an improving local economy. And once that physical chaos has been created, it will be blamed on the immigrants who are no longer there. Most of this has already played out. A key threshold, which it appears that we are about to cross, is the application of the state violence. At that point, so to speak, the lie is supposed to become “true.”
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

> In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are ...

2026-02-01T15:58:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…fdhl
_________________________

> In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians.
From [Timothy Snyder's substack](https://snyder.substack.com/p/ethnic-cleansing-in-ohio ). Note the use of the phrases "ethnic cleansing" and "hate campaign", which are accurate. Snyder later states, regarding his use of the word "Nazi", "I use the word advisedly". It's well worth reading what he says about that. J.D. Vance's words led to a self-professed US Nazi group terrorizing Springfield Ohio. Snyder spells out how the hyperreality--the non-existent parallel and false world Vance set in motion and then Trump amplified--is turning into real-world consequences for real people.

#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

I like the historian Timothy Snyder's observations about what ...

2026-02-01T15:33:43Z

I like the historian Timothy Snyder's observations about what has been happening in the US with respect to ICE recently, and why it is different from previous actions of this agency. I'll paraphrase him, so errors and omissions are mine.

Here's one point: masked thugs in mismatched camo are breaking laws that include abducting, assaulting, and executing people, and the regime is attempting to force us all to refer to this as "law enforcement". For all the many criticisms one might aim at US law enforcement, members typically wear blue, show their faces, and doctrinally aspire to behave transparently and professionally (please don't @ me with your critiques of law enforcement or hashtag ACAB comments; this is not meant as a defense, only a contrast. I've been beaten and teargassed by cops and witnessed far worse so I am acquainted with this aspect of US "law enforcement").

In other words the regime is attempting to change consensus reality so that Americans accept that the phrase "law enforcement" includes random, unprovoked breaking and entering by heavily armed masked men into homes or vehicles, assaults, and summary executions on the street, targeting *all citizens*. They want this to be a normal and accepted occurrence anywhere and at any time. Much as one might criticize previous administration's immigration policies---and one might really really criticize those---this attempt to shift consensus on "law enforcement" to include summary executions of anyone and all the rest is new (It is not new for certain groups; what I think Snyder is saying is that it'd be new for *everyone* to be targeted in this way, and for most people to accept that's just how it is now).

Snyder also points out that the border plays an important role here because it is where the country, and therefore the law, ends. In other words, it's not coincidental that the regime chose to elevate ICE. Historically, authoritarian regimes have a marked tendency to expand the lawlessness and indefiniteness of border zones to include the entire territory of the country, and the current regime is no different. Immigrants and immigration aren't the only targets here. The larger aim is to indefinitely suspend the rule of law nationwide by making the entire nation into a border zone (Recall the Texas governor kidnapping immigrants and shipping them to "blue states", a classic attempt to spread resentment of immigrants throughout the country). Again, this is a narrative move, an attempt to shift consensus reality.

So, one way to resist is to simply not accept either of these attempts to change reality. Continue to refer to what's happening as unacceptable, not who we are, etc. Continue to point out that out of control border "enforcement" has led to street executions. Continue to name these actions as the criminal acts of thugs. Continue to pressure people with power, such as lawmakers, to do the same. Not out of some misguided or naive nationalism or patriotism, but in order to keep a stake firmly planted in the ground against the forces attempting to move it.

Incidentally, all eyes on Haitian and Haitian-American people in Ohio over the coming weeks. The Haiti Temporary Protected Status designation ends this coming Tuesday, February 3, 2026. Haitians in Springfield were specifically abused during the Trump campaign. The US has a long history of abusing and dehumanizing Haitians dating back at least to Thomas Jefferson, so the Trump campaign rhetoric was no outlier or anomaly. Haiti is also one of the countries specifically named in the US State Dept's announcement about indefinitely halting immigrant visa processing. It would not be surprising if the next ICE "surge" targeted Haitian immigrants in Ohio given how the groundwork's been laid.

#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

> The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies ...

2026-01-31T20:39:46Z

> The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
*Truth and Politics*, Hannah Arendt

Nostr event nevent1qqs06q8hdlfa0j5z0l20h64wkaxnqyjf7nqez2h4sx6wgj6f0tr2kuczyz24k0ezkfl83urg5enjd9tsz6386vx6f3qewv0y8gnyg3skl2d978j2zmx

2026-01-31T19:24:20Z

i just tried to type cd .. while viewing a PDF 🤦

Finally had a pipe freeze. We have an unfinished basement that ...

2026-01-31T14:19:21Z

Finally had a pipe freeze. We have an unfinished basement that usually stays above 40℉, plus I monitor it, so I wasn't concerned. However, it looks like there are localized areas of the basement that get colder than the spot I'm monitoring, and last night it got down to -10℉ outside. Apparently that was enough. The problem looks like it was localized to one spot right at the pressure tank, and hitting it with a space heater for 10 minutes was enough to clear it. It looks like nothing's damaged. Got lucky.

It looks like I'll be doing some insulating. This is the longest, coldest cold snap I've experienced here and the bright side of it is that it's alerted me to a trouble spot as well as the limits of our current systems!

#maine #weather #cold #FrozenPipes #plumbing #insulating

Ars is a font of crithype these days. @npub15wh…e9hw

2026-01-30T19:25:29Z

In reply to nevent1q…synp
_________________________

Ars is a font of crithype these days. Ars Technica (npub15wh…e9hw)

Another read of this is that four organizations claim the right ...

2026-01-30T16:40:38Z

Another read of this is that four organizations claim the right of ownership over "nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings". A cultural archive they claim is worth around half of US GDP, an immense sum.

Frankly it reads to me like an admission of their own guilt.

**Spotify and the three main major record labels sue Anna’s Archive for $13trillion for “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings”**

From https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-major-record-labels-sue-annas-archive-13trillion-allege-brazen-theft-millions-files-3925977

#culture #music #AnnasArchive #spotify #UMG #WarnerBros #Sony #lawsuit

A teacher I know, when giving his spiel about his AI, asks ...

2026-01-30T13:34:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…z0fm
_________________________

A teacher I know, when giving his spiel about his AI, asks "would you bring a forklift to the gym to lift the weights for you?" I like to point out that using AI converts a generation problem (create the work) into a recognition problem (recognize that the work is adequate). The two are cognitively different--you can learn to understand a natural language without ever being able to speak it--and you are giving up an opportunity to learn how to create works better when you lean on AI instead.

Still, it's the framing I object to. This technology has been forced down the throats of everyone, students included, and if surveys are to be believed it's been against a large majority's will. I don't think we should requiring the victims of this, especially not overburdened teachers and their students, to take extra steps to cope with the consequences. That's an injustice we should not accept. But the inclination to try to think of technology solutions to this grander social problem is doing exactly that, in my view. By now technologists have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that they do not have our collective best interests at heart, and we should therefore not be accepting their tools as solutions to the problems they themselves are heavily contributing to causing.

No one should be required to submit to a machine to prove they ...

2026-01-29T21:12:25Z

In reply to nevent1q…pg8t
_________________________

No one should be required to submit to a machine to prove they are a human being who did human work. It is literally dehumanzing to demand this of people, and it leads nowhere good. It's a technosolutionist way of thinking and deepens injustice. Plus, it can't work *on its own terms*. petersuber (npub1py4…7td9)

The phrase describing this behavior is "state terror". It ...

2026-01-29T19:51:30Z

The phrase describing this behavior is "state terror". It is not "enforcement" or "operations". This is inexcusable.

**ICE agents shatter window, leave 1-month-old baby, mother in car after Portland arrest**
> Video shows federal immigration agents leaving behind an infant and broken glass after detaining a Guinean immigrant with no known criminal history.
#maine #ICE #ICEOut #Trump #USPol #StateTerror

Would the perception that an LLM chatbot is speaking to you be ...

2026-01-29T19:23:05Z

Would the perception that an LLM chatbot is speaking to you be dissolved if they were deterministic instead of stochastic?

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #Claude

It's possible this has come full circle because I'm ...

2026-01-29T18:03:08Z

In reply to nevent1q…j9ln
_________________________

It's possible this has come full circle because I'm always chasing my own tail.

I wonder what prompt they used to induce Claude to output this ...

2026-01-29T17:53:00Z

In reply to nevent1q…jzsq
_________________________

I wonder what prompt they used to induce Claude to output this text.

Failed another captcha because I couldn't be bothered to read ...

2026-01-29T15:50:52Z

Failed another captcha because I couldn't be bothered to read let alone follow the directions.

They propose adding AI slop features to SearXNG. I suspect ...

2026-01-28T15:51:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…5wmp
_________________________

They propose adding AI slop features to SearXNG. I suspect they're OK with slop-coded features too. You should carefully read these issues if you are going to depend on and recommend this engine.

It's an important development for many reasons, but one is ...

2026-01-28T15:49:37Z

In reply to nevent1q…d7f3
_________________________

It's an important development for many reasons, but one is that there are many people now arguing something like this: because of double descent, we don't need to worry about the bias-variance tradeoff anymore. With enough compute we can continuously lower the bias, and with enough data we can continuously lower the variance. It takes a bit more subtlety to tease out why this is a reasoning error. It unfortunately meshes well with prevailing prejudices in thought, especially among technologists (the theory-free ideal, Han's notion of dataism, etc.), so it's a tricky argument to land. I like Brighton's notion of "the bias bias" for this: preferring ever-increasing model complexity really is a bias, unjustified by either evidence or theory.

Beware of SearXNG. They are developing AI psychosis. ...

2026-01-28T15:34:54Z

In reply to nevent1q…zx8h
_________________________

Beware of SearXNG. They are developing AI psychosis. https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1768916331.977611

The type of docility demanded of us arguably makes us less than ...

2026-01-28T15:30:40Z

In reply to nevent1q…d6tl
_________________________

The type of docility demanded of us arguably makes us less than human, and in this respect it really is anti-human. This assemblage is certainly anti-imagination, for instance. The "AI subject" is an entity that doesn't think or create, and self maintains this status.

I've added 3 domain blocks in the last few weeks, the first ...

2026-01-27T20:42:16Z

I've added 3 domain blocks in the last few weeks, the first time I've had to do this in quite some time. I'm now blocking a nicely symmetrical 111 domains.

I don't have the foggiest idea what you are saying nor why ...

2026-01-27T20:29:01Z

In reply to nevent1q…kkq4
_________________________

I don't have the foggiest idea what you are saying nor why you chose to say it.