Notices by JA Westenberg (daojoan@mastodon.social)

My kid asked what I do for work and I said "I write on the internet" and he said "so nothing" and this is the most accurate job description I've ever received

I genuinely think the worst thing the internet did to reading was convince people that finishing books is a competitive sport. You don't need to read 52 books a year. You just need to read. Books you like. At your own pace. And think about them for longer than a TikTok video.

Not one single "free thinker" who told me to "question everything" in 2020 has questioned a single thing since 2024. Turns out questioning everything meant questioning the specific things that made you feel smart at parties.

"The free market will sort it out" the free market sorted out child labour by saying yes please and we had to pass a law. That's how the free market sorts things out.

Stop saying "the economy is doing well" when what you mean is "stocks are up and everyone I know personally in my friday night poker game / sex crime club is fine." Those are different sentences.

You don't have a "different opinion." You have a factual inaccuracy that you've emotionally bonded with and now you think correcting it is a hate crime.

If you ever want to understand America just know that they have a channel called The History Channel and it shows Pawn Stars

weird that "family values" never seems to include feeding families

Becoming increasingly convinced that LinkedIn is just Willy Wonka's factory except the chocolate river is bullshit and every Oompa Loompa has a podcast

why does every crypto dude in 2026 look like they were generated by an AI prompted to create "a man who definitely has opinions about age of consent laws"

Every AI company knows they're building the wrong thing.

And they can't stop.

Because the competitive structure specifically punishes anyone who slows down long enough to build the right thing.

The race is real. The destination is fake.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everyone-in-ai-is-building-the-wrong-thing-for-the-same-reason/

"Why is everything so political now" mate, your grandparents died in a war about politics. It was always political. You were just comfortable.

The real cancel culture is Netflix who can’t let a single good show get past season one without canceling it

The worst thing about online learning is that everything has become a video. Every code tutorial. Every design tutorial. Nobody actually writes out a guide anymore. It's just "hey guys welcome to my tutorial" and watching 10 minutes of content that isn't remotely relevant...

Unlike you Tesla owning rabble, I drive a volkswagen, a family values car with an unblemished and unproblematic history

Open source culture developed an allergy to gatekeeping that made sense when the risk was excluding talented people. It makes less sense when the risk is thousands of LLM-generated PRs that change variable names to slightly worse variable names.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-gatekeeping-or-why-medieval-guilds-had-it-figured-out/

Open source has an open slop problem.

And I think the solution is one that would've been perfectly obvious to a thirteenth-century Florentine weaver...

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-gatekeeping-or-why-medieval-guilds-had-it-figured-out/

We haven't seen the first great AI collapse. We haven't seen a foundation model company make the BlackBerry mistake or the Nokia mistake, or the Roman mistake, or the Ottoman mistake or reach their Bunker-in-Berlin mistake. But we will, and we'll see it multiple times, because these mistakes = features of power concentration.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

When someone tells you that AGI is inevitable and the permanent economic displacement of most humans is a foregone conclusion, what they're really telling you is that they believe the current leaders of the AI industry will execute flawlessly, indefinitely, against challenges they can't yet foresee, in an environment that's changing faster than perhaps any in history.

This seems unlikely.

https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-empire-always-falls/

every single morning routine post on linkedin is written by a guy who clearly hasnt had a genuine emotion since 2019. “i wake up at 4am and journal about gratitude” motherfucker you are running from something and it is catching up