Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe)

Anybody who is writing analysis, predictions, or planning on LLMs and doesn’t take into account the overwhelming dishonesty of the organisations involved is either deluding themselves or you

“Five things privacy experts know about AI - Ted is writing things”

https://desfontain.es/blog/privacy-in-ai.html

All of this has been known for a while, but this one especially:

> Bonus thing: AI companies are overwhelmingly dishonest

The only rational thing to do for a manager in a massive bubble like this is to hold back because there is generally never a first mover advantage in tech. Those who wade in during the bubble almost always lose to those who enter the market after they’ve figure out what actually works for the tech

Anybody arguing that being a first mover in “AI” matters because of something unique to “AI” is literally pulling out the “this time it’s different” card that bubble boosters pullout in every bubble.

One point I made in my book on why generative models are bad for business was that it’s impossible to make safe decisions in a bubble market. Even if the underlying tech has merit, bubble risk—every major company becomes irrational—means accessing that “merit” is effectively impossible

Quick and only partially coherent review of 2024: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/2024-in-review/

In certain circles people tend to cite the cognitive impact of repeated COVID infections as an explanation for the rise in popularity of right wing and nationalist extremism

But, neurological issues with progressive cognitive decline are—terrifyingly—not too uncommon in my family tree and I can tell you this:

Unkindness is not a symptom unless the person was fundamentally unkind in the first place

You can’t blame people’s cruelty on a virus

“The abuser economy | deadSimpleTech”

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/abuser_economy

> The degree to which you have (or are made to think that you have) to become complicit in coercive behaviour in order to run a business is genuinely distressing.

Undecided on how annoying I find the mini-trend of tech people doing a “crash course in humanities” or “year long immersion in the humanities” by, basically, just plowing through a half-assed reading list

It’s definitely annoying, but does it rise to the level of fucking annoying is my question?

If you don’t know why it’s annoying, the “humanities” is a collection of related fields connected by similarities in practices and approaches. It’s not a single field.

Also the practices themselves are a huge part of what makes the fields what they are. Learning the humanities just from reading the books makes about as much sense as learning programming by just reading programming books and not doing any coding.

“Emily F. Gorcenski”

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/on-truth/

> We are no longer in a culture war, we are fighting instead an epistemological war, where authoritarians seek to replace process with diktat

Using a nondeterministic “aspire to mediocrity” engine to check your spelling and grammar sounds like the worst idea ever. I just want a halfway decent spell checker. Why is that so hard for OS vendors to provide? iOS spellcheck just gets less and less reliable with every new version

One of my realisations I've come to during my newsletter/blogging pause is that the vibes crowd has thoroughly won, both in tech specifically and in general. Facts don't matter. Research doesn't matter. If it has research aesthetics and has the vibes you like, people treat it as truth. Motion and churn with the right vibes count as progress. Revenue is treated as evidence of inevitable future profit, no matter how irrational the underlying economics are.

What's worse is that most of the popular critics of this worldview and state of affairs are running largely on vibes as well. Same methodology. Same cherry-picking of references. Same kind of reasoning through showmanship.

It's quite disheartening on the whole and makes me question the point of writing essays like I have over the years.

There's no convincing or reasoning with people if they think your facts have a bad vibe. Explaining things, with references, has no impact because the references are gauged based on vibes and not how well the studies were structured or how well the paper is argued. There is no difference today between decision-makers in tech and the antivaccination crowd. They both operate on the same epistemology and worldview

More than anything else, it feels like the world got considerably dumber this year

Seeing a bunch of people doing amateur analysis of Icelandic politics (“Iceland will probably join the EU!”) with no understanding of how any of it works here.

TBF, many Icelanders don’t either

EU supporters here generally want to join because historically European institutions have been a check on the local oligarchs who manage the economy for their own benefit at the expense of the public. Adopting the Euro and letting in foreign banks would reduce the power of local oligarchs further

“Passkey technology is elegant, but it’s most definitely not usable security - Ars Technica”

https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/12/passkey-technology-is-elegant-but-its-most-definitely-not-usable-security/

> Using 1Password to sync a password is almost identical to syncing a passkey, so why bother?

Generally speaking I've been advising people around me not to use passkeys because the poor UX pretty much guarantees I'd be roped in to do tech support at some point.

“Another AI cautionary tale | Status-Q”

https://statusq.org/archives/2024/12/30/12327/

> What persuaded him, in the end, that my description was right, and that all four LLMs were wrong?

“Apple Photos phones home on iOS 18 and macOS 15”

https://lapcatsoftware.com/articles/2024/12/3.html

> By enabling the "feature" without asking, Apple disrespects users and their preferences. I never wanted my iPhone to phone home to Apple.

@inthehands Yeah, it only does this for some of the images I've exported from Lightroom into Photos. Always the same images. 🤷♂️