Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

When people call LLMs “useless” they’re generally being kind as it’d be more accurate to call it harmful, dangerous, toxic, or risky.

It’s like calling white asbestos “useless”. Technically true in most western countries because you literally can’t use it, but it kind of elides the reason why

“ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development”

https://futurism.com/chatgpt-polluted-ruined-ai-development

Also, a recurring security concern (and bandwidth abuse issue) with training data sets is that they generally don't store copies of the data and have few safeguards checking if it's been changed

So, y'know, if a pre-2020 domain expires and is replaced entirely with slop, many datasets will mark the slop as pre-2020 data

I seem to be the only person in the world who doesn’t want multitasking on his iPad. The reason why I like it is it’s my “do only one focused thing at a time” device. All multitasking gives me is a bunch of random features I accidentally trigger all the time until I find a way to disable them.

Avoiding generative models is the rational and responsible thing to do – follow-up to “Trusting your own judgement on ‘AI’”: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/followup-on-trusting-your-own-judgement/

“Disney, Universal sue image creator Midjourney for copyright infringement | Reuters”

https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/disney-universal-sue-image-creator-midjourney-copyright-infringement-2025-06-11/

I mean, we all knew this was going to happen eventually, right? And that they're going to want to make an example of them, right?

The reason why “AI is inevitable” is a leap of faith and not an actual argument is that these systems still cost substantially more to run than they earn, cost a fortune to build and maintain, and have already hit diminishing returns

That last part means that any efficiency gains found will be spent improving the model instead of lowering costs

A not-so-short blog post on cognitive hazards, homeopathy, "AI" and the epidemiology of beliefs.

Trusting your own judgement on 'AI' is a huge risk: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/

Comforting thought of the day: none of the software industry’s popular success metrics would catch a Boeing 737 Max style failure—catastrophic failure a year after delivery. So, you can literally murder scores of people with a software defect and still get that bonus at work for a successful project

That’s a less comforting thought if you’re a software user, admittedly

Flipping through my feed reader and it really feels like the pro-AI blog posts have ramped up considerably in both intensity and volume over just the past week, all filled with massive caricatures of “AI” criticism and a blind faith in what the tools are promising to deliver

What’s worse is I think most of the posts are 100% sincere

All else being equal, pointing out that the argument laid out in a company’s blog post, if sincere, would indicate a relaxation of standards and quality, is always worthwhile when said company is in the infrastructure and hosting business, irrespective of whether it changes anybody’s mind about “AI” or not

Again, most who say we need “better AI critique” are either not paying attention to the actual critics or simply do not like being told something they like is flawed.

They inherently don’t accept any critique as valid, otherwise they’d engage with existing critique to find points they can act on

There is no winning in a debate with somebody who is deliberately not paying attention.

A very useful question to ask yourself when reading anything (fiction, non-fiction, blogs, books, whatever) is “what does the author want to believe is true?”

Because a lot of writing is just as much about the author convincing themselves as it is about them addressing the reader

@silverwizard That everybody just assumes that the inherently messed up finances and massively high ongoing costs will just get fixed somehow through some yet to be invented mechanism is quite frustrating to watch.

Underlining the point here: the fundamental argument of the pro-AI crowd in coding is that it makes you go faster and, after you’ve gone faster, you can go slower a little bit to catch the errors caused by going faster.

This has two problems

Because it’s harder to catch defects in code you didn’t write, the only realistic way of ensuring that you really do “go faster” is to let more defects through, unintentionally or no.

You end up increasing throughput without increasing performance while letting more defects through. Also leaves design (the ones you haven’t fired already) with less time and space to manoeuvre, forcing them to adopt “AI” which has another set of negative consequences for the product

It’s not great

So, effectively “LLMs for coding” are largely a cover story for improving throughput by relaxing quality standards

The other issue is that “go faster” on coding without a corresponding increase in attention to other parts of software development and design seems to be just shifting the performance cost onto other parts of the org, at least in the cases and studies I’ve seen

The problem, though, with responding to blog posts like that, as I did (unfortunately), is that they aren’t made to debate but to reinforce belief. The author is simultaneously putting himself on the record as having hardline opinions and deliberately putting himself in the position of having to defend them

The note to make on this post is the domain. Fly is an hosting company so if “AI lets us go faster” and “AI makes bad code but we’re slowing down to make it usable” (paraphrased) is their self-contradictory policy, that puts a question mark on hosting with them

https://fly.io/blog/youre-all-nuts/

Also, going “many of you will lose your jobs but that’s a sacrifice I’m willing to make” is almost admirable as a douchebag move, but it’s also the norm in tech. There is no class solidarity to speak of in tech.

I genuinely don’t get how tech folks can one moment be wringing their hands about the effects of “AI” on education, the insecurity of “prompting”, and job losses and then the next be writing about the best way to integrate an LLM into your workflow or SaaS without even a hint of cognitive dissonance

Like, what sort of flat-minded disassociation do you need to be suffering from to so completely avoid dissonance or at least a cursory double bind? WTF?