Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

“The AI bubble is 17 times the size of the dot-com frenzy — and four times the subprime bubble, analyst says - MarketWatch”

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-ai-bubble-is-17-times-the-size-of-the-dot-com-frenzy-this-analyst-argues-046e7c5c

I keep seeing people flat out state that this bubble popping won't have meaningful consequences outside of tech.

Meanwhile it’s the biggest bubble of the century in a severely weakened economy , poor regulatory environment, and a global community in near collapse

“Comprehension Debt: The Ticking Time Bomb of LLM-Generated Code – Codemanship's Blog”

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/comprehension-debt-the-ticking-time-bomb-of-llm-generated-code/

Been warning about this for a couple of years now so I'm well into "he keeps crying 'wolf'" territory meaning nobody pays any attention, but it's still going to be a problem.

“Bullsh*t Writing - by John Warner”

https://biblioracle.substack.com/p/bullsht-writing

Solid and practical piece on what writing is for

“OpenAI admits AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering flaws – Computerworld”

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4059383/openai-admits-ai-hallucinations-are-mathematically-inevitable-not-just-engineering-flaws.html

> OpenAI’s own advanced reasoning models actually hallucinated more frequently than simpler systems.

An observation I made in my book, even in the first edition two years ago, was that research gave us reason to believe that hallucinations got worse with increasing model size

So, y'know... I literally told you so

Apparently this affected a bunch of their trailers

This is "fun". Eureka's trailer for the restorations of the Fantomas movies (yay!) had its French dialogue automatically "AI" dubbed (boo!) when uploaded because of YouTube's new defaults and "all AI, all the time" policy

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jzxHGWih8QI&lc=UgxrlaFKlU7-AosxqNR4AaABAg.AMeR4IYnz6iAMegqnPEYLc

“Google quietly vanishes its net zero carbon pledge – Pivot to AI”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/09/05/google-quietly-vanishes-its-net-zero-carbon-commitment/

One of the biggest reasons for opposing generative models and the "AI" Bubble is that it turned tech from being potential allies to environmentalism to outright political adversaries

(I don’t think they were ever actual allies against the climate crisis but this, the lobbying and funding they’re doing today, is much worse than whatever they were before.)

I'd seen the whole "em dashes are an AI tell" discourse, but today's the first time I'd seen somebody float the notion that photography with depth of field and bokeh were mimicking an AI-generated aesthetic 😑

Maybe some people are just so used to phone photography that they think blurry backgrounds are always an algorithmic effect?

Don't know. People in general haven't made sense to me in years.

"The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2024/the-slow-evaporation-of-the-foss-surplus/

> Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline.

Wrote that a year ago and it feels like it's panning out roughly as expected.

“inessential: Writing Mac and iOS Apps Shouldn’t Be So Difficult”

https://inessential.com/2025/08/28/easy-app-writing.html

This is something I've had a hard time convincing young devs of: substantial portions of the field of software in the past used to be better in multiple ways. It wasn't all good but we've clearly regressed in multiple ways

“Stack Overflow data reveals the hidden productivity tax of 'almost right' AI code | VentureBeat”

https://venturebeat.com/ai/stack-overflow-data-reveals-the-hidden-productivity-tax-of-almost-right-ai-code/

> AI tools don’t just produce obviously broken code. They generate plausible solutions that require significant developer intervention to become production-ready. This creates a particularly insidious productivity problem.

::sighs::

"YouTube Is Using AI to Alter Content (and not telling us)"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=86nhP8tvbLY

These companies know they're effectively a monopoly so from their perspective there is no downside to sabotaging their own products to keep a bubble inflated.

“AI slop and the destruction of knowledge – Iris van Rooij”

https://irisvanrooijcogsci.com/2025/08/12/ai-slop-and-the-destruction-of-knowledge/

😬

People keep describing “AI” as “low effort” but that’s not accurate. It’s high effort on the back end (training, etc) and variable effort on the front.

Sometimes it saves work. Sometimes it’s more work.

This doesn’t really have any direct parallels in industrial or tech history

Also given that political history is repeating itself (fascism and authoritarianism) in a collapsing environment, expecting technological history to repeat itself is itself an incredibly unsafe assumption.

“Maintainers of ESLint Prettier Plugin Attacked via npm Supply Chain Malware | Snyk”

https://snyk.io/blog/maintainers-of-eslint-prettier-plugin-attacked-via-npm-supply-chain-malware/

Feels like there's something fundamentally broken about npm. That we've put all of the web dev and node eggs in a single basket is definitely a bad idea as well

Never a quiet day, looks like https://www.ruv.is/english/2025-07-16-ninth-eruption-on-the-reykjanes-peninsula-beware-of-hazardous-gases-448677

Unless you own a data centre for training an LLM from scratch, all models are centralised. Pretending that local models are any less influenced by their corporate owners means you’re fundamentally misunderstanding the issue

Only just now realising that the objection many of the "reasonable" in tech had against cryptocoins was technical infeasibility and not, y'know, environmental disaster, criminality, fraud, and the wholesale destruction of society's ability to regulate and govern finance and money.

That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery ("nuts", "shove your concern up your ass") and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects

Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it's giving them a moderate advantage