Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

The way people in tech are wired, if the pistol were invented today the only way they’d conclude it was dangerous is if they personally shot three people and a dog and even then they’d insist that the data wasn’t that conclusive.

“Scan your eyeballs, think of the children: how Britain sells surveillance as safety”

https://www.thenerve.news/p/under-16-social-media-ban-keir-starmer-surveillance-parents-online-safety-bill-heather-burns

So this used to be the power station for a wool mill back before there was even a town here in Hveragerði. #photos #iceland

RE: https://mas.to/@zzt/116748965255528053

GIMP‘s hostility to users actually being able to productively use it is legendary as is its disdain for people showing concern about its name. It’s genuinely poisoned the well for the adoption of OSS creativity software.

(I need to try out Krita, though, which looks much more solid.)

“our workplace LLM mass delusion – ava's blog”

https://blog.avas.space/llm-circus/

> How are we all collectively supposed to forget and move past experiencing the respectable elders in an institution having completely and totally embarrassed themselves in the name of "progress"?

I can't tell you how frustrating it is to warn about a risk when the fuck-around-to-finding-out time gap is on the order of 3-6 years.

Just year after year of watching people kick explosives around going all "I don't know what you were talking around, this thing doesn't explode".

Apparently, this isn't because of "AI" or privacy regulations but because German courts decided that third party liability shields don't apply to "AI" summaries published by Google itself

This should not come as a surprise, I and others warned about this

I wrote this (see image) in The Intelligence Illusion back in 2023 (https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/)

"Landmark German ruling declares Google's AI Overviews are Google's own words and makes it liable for false answers"

https://the-decoder.com/landmark-german-ruling-declares-googles-ai-overviews-are-googles-own-words-and-makes-it-liable-for-false-answers/

So, what are the odds that the reactions to Apple’s early Christmas present to the controlling and abusive everywhere are mostly defined by whether you had an abusive—or at least untrustworthy and controlling—authority figure in your life growing up?

If so, then I’m not surprised that Mastodon has a sizeable population of people with deep-seated authority issues 😝

One of the lessons that many in software strangely never learn is that breaking something while being an asshole gets a very different response from people than breaking something while not being an asshole

And, given how “AI” continues to pour shit on the rest of society, using LLMs is widely going to be perceived as an asshole move

For better or for worse, using LLMs in OSS is going to be seen as an adversarial move that undermines community building

Just once I’d like to see journalists and politicians show at least a grain of scepticism about the claims being made by “AI” vendors. Just once.

Just because anthropic styles their reports to look like scientific or academic papers doesn’t make them sound or credible.

So, it’s becoming clear that some devs treat their peers as authorities irrespective of the nonsense they’re spouting. What matters is, effectively, “time served”

Been a noticeable part of the tech or OSS communities for years? Then your hallucinatory ravings get treated as a double-blind peer-reviewed study

Been less noticeable? Nothing you say will ever shift their opinion.

Sure, they’ll feel bad that you feel harmed, but they’ll always back their friends

(Yes. This is an rsync post)

Knowing that a majority of the voices online in web dev now no longer care about implementation is honestly quite demotivating. Why try new approaches in web dev when you know most are going to just have their “agents” generate legacy approaches anyway? Why talk about it to a small and dwindling audience?

Why work in a field that has accepted stagnation as a standard practice?

So, y’know, feeling a bit demotivated

The way many of the luminaires of tech—CEOs, VCs and OSS leaders used to constant praise—are currently behaving is honestly indistinguishable from a mental health episode. Like, they keep saying stuff that’s either just outright irrational or both manifestly false and trivial to check wrapped up either in insipid GPT-speak or a hodgepodge unabomber-style ramble

They don’t seem well.

RE: https://toot.cafe/@baldur/116674283040110293

Paraphrasing again:

We’re in a power struggle between those using “AI” to centralise and consolidate their hold over the economy, education, media, and politics and are willing to sacrifice much of the environment and society to that end (i.e. "rule the ashes") and those who think that would be bad

Standing in the middle and going “actually, I think we could find productive uses for LLMs” is not a winning move and it won't protect you from the winning side of the power struggle.

> In our analysis, we find that both the scale of this data gathering for training purposes and the representational issues in the training data span multiple international human rights laws and standards, from privacy violations and non-consensual data collection, to discrimination, harassment, and threats to the rights to freedom of expression and freedom of thought.

From the Amnesty PDF report:

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

“Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI - Amnesty International”

https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/pol40/0996/2026/en/

> Amnesty International finds that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with IHRL

My mom was looking for browser alternatives the other day and I suggested @Vivaldi. Now she's a fan.

But she keeps calling it "Valdi" because that's what it sounds like in Icelandic and in Icelandic that's short for the name "Valdimar"

So occasionally when commenting on the browser's set up process and the like, she will switch to "mom voice" and call the browser "Valdimar"

And I instinctively think to myself "Oooh, Valdimar is in TROUBLE!" 😆

Why is Apple’s iCloud still so useless? After all these years, every ”improvement” regresses away in the space of a few months. The iCloud Photos sync lag seems to have returned, albeit not as extreme as it used to be.

I wonder how many of the people in tech who claim to be progressive but spout nonsense like “softness, comfort, and entertainment is a weakness and is why empires fall” realise that it’s literal fascist rhetoric that’s completely detached from actual history?

"The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/the-old-world-of-tech-is-dying/

This ones leans a bit more into theory and politics than I usually do when writing about the industry, but this moment in time warrants it, I think.