Notices by Glyph (glyph@mastodon.social)

New Blog: Programming Isn't Special

Artists understand that AI is bad for art. Why don’t programmers understand that we are artists?

https://blog.glyph.im/2026/10/programming-isnt-special.html

@cwebber @jlink @mttaggart this is going to be the least satisfying “I told you so” of my entire life

man I _really_ do not like the way that Mastodon presents being blocked. I do not begrudge anyone the right to block me, but the fact that mid-conversation all their posts just gradually start disappearing as if the server is having an outage, and replies start intermittently failing, even attempting to reply to _other_ people in the same conversation even though their replies come through to me, is an incredibly obnoxious UX

I logged in to LinkedIn to see a page full of people praising DHH, got mad, and wrote this. Less than 12 hours later I got an email telling me "Your post doesn’t comply with our Professional Community Policies on bullying and harassment. It’s been removed from LinkedIn and only you can access it."

Big tech is more and more mask-off every day.

@misty @dalias one of my favorite things about going to the Apple Store these days is they have a "how do you use AI" survey and "how much do you trust Apple's AI" and I get to vote 1/5 1/5 on both every time

RE: https://mastodon.social/@arstechnica/117389906323212713

as with any such tool your mileage may vary, deleting system components like this can cause annoying peripheral damage in ways that are hard to predict, but _at least_ let's give them some github stars to show our colletive displeasure

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/117386899276807175

boosters one month ago: the vulnerabilities are REAL. they're REAL and they're SCARY. it can INDEPENDENTLY hack stuff. you CANNOT DISMISS that it can ONE-SHOT vulnerabilities PERFECTLY EVERY TIME. prepare for DOMINATION by the CYBER-OVERMIND

boosters today:

Really tired of having this conversation over and over again.

A: "LLMs provide the illusion of productivity, by making you *feel* productive while wasting enough time that they're net negative."

B: "Come on. That's not a serious position any more. Maybe 3 years ago. Not today. Obviously they work."

A: "How do you know?"

B: "It's obvious."

A: "… because *you* use them, and they make *you* feel productive?"

B: "Are you calling me DELUSIONAL? Everybody who disagrees with you is just CRAZY?"

Anyway it's a real bummer that she appears to me to be the most popular journalist on the fediverse

You can also see her telegraphing this a little bit in her defensiveness about Substack and her constant complaining about how hard it is to get paid as a journalist and how she deserves so much more money. Which, again, not wrong, and people should not have been critical of her for pointing it out, but also, if your worldview is that you _personally_ deserve more money rather than deserving more money for your role as a quality journalist, then "pivot to grifting" is just the next logical step.

It is very frustrating that the vast majority of criticism of her has been dumb bullshit about how she's stupid to wear a mask, just because she's immunocompromised, or the usual sort of deranged misogyny one attracts for being an outspoken woman on the Internet. But luckily those people are probably going to be quiet as they accept her into the fold, so there won't be a lot of "I told you so" here.

A lot of her reporting in the last couple of years has been declining in quality and less and less interested in the truth, but her recent output has been full-on defensiveness about AI, so, it's all of a piece. When I've been critical in the past I've tried to focus on the work itself and not ad-hominems but when people keep telling you who they are eventually you've got to believe them.

@dalias In isolation, on the merits, I could have defended the LoTT interview! It actually made Chaya Raichik look pretty stupid! And arguably LoTT's platform was far larger than hers at the time anyway. But, in retrospect, yeah, that's when things went off the rails.

Taylor Lorenz is preparing for her "why I left the left" right-wing grifter pivot. Do not trust her. https://www.thefp.com/p/two-drinks-with-taylor-lorenz-savodnik

(If you do not know "the free press", it is Bari Weiss's right-wing false-balance propaganda outlet, so talking to them *at all* is already suspicious. Talking to them about how you "wouldn’t say [you're] particularly woke" is a dog whistle so loud my ears are bleeding.)

why did mastodon change the mapping of the 'enter' key on the alt-text edit box to mean "delete all my alt text"? I would expect it to either mean "insert a newline" or "save my alt text"

@mcc wait…what? a project heard user feedback and actually reacted to it? with like a pure 180 degree reversal… what is happening. am I dead

fair use has a 4-factor test https://fairuse.stanford.edu/overview/fair-use/four-factors/

1. purpose and character, i.e. "transformativity"
2. nature of the work
3. substantiality
4. effect on market

whether or not your copy is a bit-for-bit copy is only a single factor, the 3rd factor, out of these 4

okay so since people keep saying that AI training is fair use and that you need to be able to spot plagiarism based on the contents of a repository: no. please read https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

RE: https://mastodon.social/@mcc/117338022446987611

the way I am coping with my own version of this, of creeping corruption all the way up and down the stack, rather than starting at the bottom of the stack with like-minded folks and building all of modern computing up from first principles, is to build whatever little islands of resilience that I can within the ocean of slop.

I don't know if this is for any principled reason though, it is probably just that I can't withstand the total ego-death of "abandon everything you've ever worked for"

I'd like to ask CPython, today, to stop incorporating slop. This discussion would likely go nowhere. I cannot imagine a way to have it productively.

But there's a future (this *specific* one isn't likely) where, for example, NYT wins a devastating blow against Anthropic, something comes out in discovery about proprietary code as well as pirated books in the training set, somebody sues the PSF and then someone needs to review and potentially reauthor every commit from Python 3.14 to 3.19.