Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

“Keeping up appearances | deadSimpleTech”

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/keeping_up_appearances

> Material or technical arguments aren't going to work here, at least not in the way we'd like: as we've established, the people who hold the purse strings are willing to absorb considerable amounts of material harm in order to keep playing their status games.

The ideas here are spot on

“My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane : r/ExperiencedDevs”

https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/

I'm finding this darkly hilarious. Darkly, because I'm still dependent on Windows for a couple of apps (nothing work-related, thankfully) and this doesn't bode well for software quality at Microsoft

The difference between thinking about how any given tech impacts you individually—harm versus utility—and thinking about how it impacts society if adopted at scale is effectively the difference between concluding that:

“Cars are fine, actually, the bigger the better. So helpful.”

Versus…

“We’re destroying ourselves and our planet because public transport is less profitable than the car industry.”

I can't emphasise strongly enough how this ISN'T happening with LLMs. They are throwing all their money into building ON the broken tech and next to nothing in developing a replacement that has an actual chance at fulfilling the promise LLMs hint at, because there genuinely aren't any plausible pathways to get there from here

"LLMs are here to stay," is like saying that the modem-based internet of the 90s was forever. It was a largely unusable piece-of-shit tech that was manifestly incapable of delivering beyond a fraction of what the dot-com bubble promised, but it prompted investment in fixing the one thing that prevented that promise: bandwidth.

Modem speeds are very much not enough and if broadband had proven to be infeasible for some unexpected technical reason, then the web would definitely have faded away into a hobbyist-oriented subculture in the style of ham radio.

The modern AI Bubble is 100% a "modem speeds were good enough and the dot-com companies only failed because they didn't have enough funding to get them over the hump created by the government's regulatory fight with Microsoft" delusion.

Addendum: even if we were on the path towards developing an “actually works” replacement to current era LLMs—which all suffer from the same problems—that hypothetical future tech is not what’s being baked into everything. Even if they did manage to magically come up with an LLM that “works” nobody’d be using it because broken shit will be what’s built into everything.

And if you think LLMs are "good enough" as they are, then the only thing I can say is I hope you're right because at the moment it looks like the tech industry is trying to bake a broken toy into every aspect of our society in the belief that the only thing that actually "breaks" tech is regulatory interference

Responding to “modem speeds are unworkable and if we don’t fix that the internet is a dead end fad” with “the internet is still extremely useful” isn’t a counterargument, it’s self-identifying as a member of the subculture that will remain after the fad peters out

I honestly don’t get people who understand generative models and are still either in favour or on the fence. Even if you believe the tech has merit, a good idea, implemented badly, with no regard for safety, bias, or soundness, and run by extremists and fascists, is inevitably a bad idea

“Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill | The Internet Review”

https://theinternet.review/2025/05/13/you-do-not-get-to-die-on-the-vibe-coding-hill-simon/

Yeah.

They’re FINE with tech destroying the fabric of society as long as there isn’t an outright scam component to it or the scam element can be regulated separately without affecting the main event: the dismantling of the economy for the benefit of the wealthy.

Destruction is fine. Minor scams are not

The massive adoption of “AI” by the tech “moderate” tells me that most of them only objected to the scam portion of cryptocoins not the fact that the tech itself was built on a dysfunctional libertarian worldview and designed from the ground to bypass or destroy our existing financial infrastructure

How these SaaSes sell crap to each other using VC money until they get acquired reminds me of that scam where the con artists move money around to make it look like they’re bigger players than they are so outsiders get fooled and fleeced

What was it called again?

Right… “tech startup”

Accidentally glimpsed the Y Combinator/React/“Prompt” side of web dev and these dudes are seriously indistinguishable from parody at this point. Just clowns play-acting at business without even a clear idea of what that looks like in practice. Yikes.

“Study: Your coworkers hate you for using AI at work – Pivot to AI”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/05/10/your-coworkers-hate-you-for-using-ai-at-work/

“Naomi Klein Interview: Trump, Musk, Pandemic Rage, and Climate Denial”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/naomi-klein-trump-musk-thiel-oligarchs-climate-science-1235330780/

> I don’t know if you’ve been following this, but Peter Thiel is now running Bible study groups in Silicon Valley. He said in a few interviews recently that he believes that the Antichrist is Greta Thunberg. It’s extraordinary.

This entire interview is great and is a must-read, but this quote in particular is all kinds of yikes

Time to revisit the “you are what you do” lineage of media theory

The point made by Dewey and McLuhan is that meaning comes from what you do, the actions you take, not from what you say, think, or believe. Ideas have no meaning, only the actions you take to execute them and the actions the audience take to receive. The prevailing “AI” orthodoxy is almost the diametric opposite, that meaning comes from your ideas and that all actions can be automated.