Notices by Jim Salter (jimsalter@fosstodon.org)

I don't know why I'm noticing this more lately, but all the memes about "white man energy" confidence/perceived-importance really are on point.

I keep finding myself in situations where women are in charge, I really could not *possibly* be authoritative, and yet--without me saying a word, and despite nobody present knowing who I am--my mere white, male, and grey-bearded presence pulls focus from the women it should rightfully be on.

Pay more attention to women, y'all. Please.

#AI

AI is *not* your hyper intelligent, completely trustworthy friend. It is what it is, and nothing more. If you must have an anthropomorphic metaphor, it's like somebody took the dumbest spammer that ever rang your phone in the middle of dinner, taught them flawless English, and gave them a MUCH better skill at sycophancy.

If you trust that too far, it can *literally* kill you. Just like it killed this kid who thought ChatGPT would give him good advice on party drugs.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/05/will-i-be-ok-teen-died-after-chatgpt-pushed-deadly-mix-of-drugs-lawsuit-says/

If you aren't horrified enough yet: "ChatGPT Health" is an actual product, intended to "advise" both end users AND supposed medical PROFESSIONALS--and it's available for employee use in many medical facilities where I live (Columbia, SC) including but not limited to major hospitals.

A friend who is a local medical professional told me about it last week--and about a competing "medical LLM" intended for the same purpose, which my friend described as WORSE than ChatGPT.

https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-health/

But don't get me wrong, it advised him to up the dosages of the party drugs to "maximize his trippy head space" ALSO.

And Sam queried it constantly about what was "safe" and asked it "will I be okay" if taking its recommendations. He was not unaware that the drugs were dangerous... And he probably would have been safer with NO "help" whatsoever, for exactly that reason.

ChatGPT enabled him to ignore his own fears. Because it's dumb as hell, and designed to be an engagement-maxxing sycophant.

This is a logged conversational snippet between Sam and the model that killed him a year later. Other snippets entered into court evidence show Sam's ChatGPT model logging that he suffers from major drug abuse issues, and updating its set context on THAT basis.

Despite which, it kept advising him to make multi-drug "cocktails"--worse yet, telling him to take the extra drugs not merely as a "fun mix" but so that the later party drugs would in theory mitigate the unpleasant effects of the first.

HMMMMM

RE: https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/116465689693004632

This is very true. The problem is that the pockets of the assholes pushing AI are a *lot* deeper than the pockets of the IT workers that companies are determinedly attempting to replace with AI.

Several years of this shit will do no more than disappoint the oligarchs, but it will *ruin* careers and even lives of millions of workers who can't just wait out a major loss of income "for a few years" while this plays out.

I'm not sure why, as a tech obsessed teenager distrustful of authority, it never occurred to me that when AI actually became a thing, it would be an unvarnished tool of oligarchy.

But boy howdy. Add that one to the same "Jim's Dumb Teenage Takes" file right next to "all this hacking in Neuromancer is so stupid, just put a password on it and you're golden."

1980s-era William Gibson had a MUCH better handle on how the world works than 1980s-era Jim Salter did, that's for sure.

This was the state of text generative models only six years ago. Hard to believe, as all pervasive as models like chatgpt are these days.

I don't think I've ever in my life wished a technological genie back into a bottle... until now. It can't be done, of course. But we are not--as a culture, and frankly as a species--ready for this technology in SO many different ways.

Bring back the hilariously inept candy hearts; take back the deceptively eloquent artificial idiots. Please...?

Got ballsy and took Scooty Puff Jr out for a short local errand today. Saw a long slick patch of thin ice at the top of a hill I needed to make a left through, and decided to give it a shot... ALMOST made it, lol.

Picked the bike back up, remounted, and went on my merry way while giving the friend who watched it happen a thumbs up. I was annoyed when it happened, but on the way home I couldn't wipe the grin off my face.

Nobody understood why I liked getting my ass kicked in the dojo, either...

Here's the thing: facing a scary challenge and handling it is rewarding as hell, **even if you technically failed.**

In some cases, failing is more rewarding than succeeding--it teaches you that failure is survivable. Failure is okay. Failure is worth *risking*, and you're tough enough to take it.

Getting your ass kicked every once in a while is good for you. I'm glad I'm still getting mine kicked after half a century on this ball of dirt. It reminds me that I'm not just here, but ALIVE.

But you know what's worse than the drug ads? The Dell ad for the "AI PC" where it literally, deadpan, there's no joke here, tells you that Copilot is going to save you HOURS A DAY, EVERY DAY of drudge work.

Why do we tolerate this shit?

Amazon Prime offered me a "Livestream" of classic SNL episodes. With ads. No fast forward, no pause, no rewind. How is this "streaming" again? But fuck it. Classic SNL. Sounds good, let's go.

About fifty ads for a psoriasis drug that includes suicidal ideations as a side effect go by. Then fifty more for a different drug that treats Crohn's disease and its side effects are EVERYTHING. Like literally everything, to the point that the announcer actually says "these aren't all the side effects."

Healthy life coach type shit right here

@badnetmask @linuxnerd not gonna lie, I had fun with it. Technically it's a much better presentation with the actual deck available, but hey, how often do you get the chance to see somebody take a live hard drive failure laugh it off and keep rolling? 🤣

Well that was fun--my laptop's M.2 drive coughed up a hairball something like thirty minutes into my (storage!) talk at #ato2025 .

The laptop immediately hard rebooted, and I delivered the last fifteen minutes of my talk blind, with "journal recovery aborted" ext4 errors infinitely scrolling across the big screen beside me.

I saw several folks in the crowd snap pics... Can anybody send me one? That felt like for the scrapbook! 😅

https://2025.allthingsopen.org/sessions/storage-fundamentals

Growing up, my heroes were steely eyed, laconic, hyper-competent people who Got The Needful Done.

Whether it's a power company lineman out fixing a blown transformer in a storm, or a grizzled master sergeant figuring out how to solve a company-scale problem with a platoon, we're talking about people who say little, and don't think a problem ends with "I don't know" but BEGINS with "I don't know YET."

It feels like society has moved on from that. But I haven't. Those are STILL my heroes.

The #FSF wanted to know why I'd cancelled recurring billing immediately after my membership auto-renewed. So I told them.

I picked my middle kid up from smart kid summer camp today. Behold his robotics project, which he named "Unfortunate Son" 🤣