Notices by mhoye (mhoye@cosocial.ca)

If a company with a "Generate this with AI" button also gives you a "Report AI Slop" button, you should know that your protest vote is being used to tune the models until the slop is invisible.

RE: https://hachyderm.io/@ltriant/117002472059958347

These two posts in immediate succession in my feed, destroyed books and propaganda floodplains.

https://fed.brid.gy/r/https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:twjze4qqf6fgxz33ct52wlnl/post/3mrq4ojrmhk2q

Whenever I hear "but for me AI is useful", all I hear is the end of the Parable Of The Nazi Bar. "you have to ignore all their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

Except the AI enthusiasts are legitimizing, empowering and funding the terrible, awful people, for that meager benefit.

Imagine the Parable Of The Nazi Bar ending with "... but they pay their tabs and sometimes wipe the counters and that's useful for me so it's fine to let this happen."

Imagine watching a world burn and acting as though the externalities and consequences of your actions aren't real as long as you, personally, enjoy a convenience.

@condret Yes. In North America, we would presently be shuttering coal and diesel plants if it was not for the excess demands on the grid brought about by the tech sector.

RE: https://flipboard.com/@blogto/blogto-8o12e3orz/-/a-VnNts89-SH6hg1e12nI0kg%3Aa%3A3332572087-%2F0

We talk about what AI does to people, sure, but my god does money turn some people's brains into paste.

https://cosocial.ca/@blogTO@flipboard.com/116994215226853489

“Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

I’m so sorry, team. I did my best.

Hand to god this feels like going to an ex-girlfriends' funeral and listening to their husband talk about how much she taught him about b2b sales.

“We reserve the right to update these terms of service in future”.

https://hachyderm.io/@jalefkowit/116975636773704295

I'm reminded of @mcc 's correct observation that the reason to use open source software is that over any time horizon that matters proprietary software doesn't exist.

https://variety.com/2026/film/news/why-no-more-imax-70mm-screens-the-odyssey-christopher-nolan-1236813019/

@skinnylatte I've only visited once, but the underground spaces in Singapore are amazing, particularly seeing them still alive at oh my god o'clock at night as I stumbled across a bunch of kids practicing dance competition stuff during a random midnight walking tour. We have no equivalent for that in Toronto, after a certain hour our urban spaces are just dead air, homeless people and mall cops. I hope to visit again someday.

@dalias The thing we were extremely not good at was external communications, with our communities and the world. An org full of the smartest, kindest, most principled people I have ever worked with, the best people that I _will ever_ get to work with, and the org's face was absolutely visionless, rudderless thrashing from marcom leadership that never hit a single target they set for themselves in my time there. Just empty-net own-goals galore; it still hurts to talk about this stuff.

@dalias Yeah, it came up a lot internally. One of the big differences between Firefox and Chrome was that institutionally, Firefox prioritizes users and developers over site owners while Chrome does the opposite.

@owen Even "who _can_ you say no to".

The people who got us here did it with open eyes, making mouth-noises about openness and freedom over the decades they collaborated building the systems that now enclose us, by and large totally capitulating to the whims of whatever trends and market forces wafted by along the way. But how do you find your way to a human-centered, human-prioritizing computational worldview if you're starting from licenses and moral frameworks that can't admit the existence of society, or even the word 'no'?

@dotstdy @glyph They remain the source of value, though.

Eggs cannot lay eggs, comrade.

The thing that saddens me about so many developments in Linux, at every level - from SystemD and the Wayland permission model up to snaps and flatpak and now apparently the kernel - is that these priorities are, obviously to me at least, not spelled out explicitly because saying so out loud would be too obviously repulsive. Because today the primary constituencies of Linux are cloud and corporate fleet rentiers first, their developers second and human computer owners a distant third at best.

One of the most important things I learned at Mozilla was the idea of an explicit “priority of constituencies”; that is, if you have responsibilities to different groups for different reasons, being clear and honest up front about who is at the front of the line and why. As with The Tyranny Of Structurelessness, there’s always a hierarchy, and letting those hierarchies stay hidden means letting power escape scrutiny.

I do not like these arguments at all, but they’re pretty compelling arguments.

https://realworldpatterns.substack.com/p/the-tragedy-of-the-flat-rate-digital

@dalias There's an awful lot of barren middle ground between those two positions.