Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe), page 2

Any scenario where "AI" works well enough to be in wide use long term means mass unemployment, wholesale political capture of media and cultural industries, dysfunctional products, and other continuing large-scale harms

The thankfully bullshit "AGI" scenario would just be an unending clusterfuck

Which is why "this is shit and you're a fool for using it" is the optimistic take

The best case scenario for the rest of us is that we have to clean up after a bunch of fools in the tech industry

One thing "AI" has in common with cryptocoin that pretty much every posited scenario is disastrous to some degree, just a question of flavour and distribution of said disaster.

If doomers are right: disaster

If naysayers—"it's dysfunctional"—are right: disaster ("Congrats! all software is broken")

If "moderate" boosters are right: disaster (mass unemployment)

If optimists are right: disaster (also mass unemployment)

If the AGI folks are right: disaster ( "Congrats! Digital chattel slavery")

In some of the scenarios billionaires do really well and in others they are largely insulated from the worst outcomes. Win-win for them

For the rest of us they're all bad. The scenarios where the tech is largely dysfunctional are the optimistic ones

If you posit that "AI" won't work well enough to make up for the costs long term and we realise this early to mitigate for the harms that are already happening then we might get out of this with a functional economy after the hubbub has died down.

RE: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/116116686458550609

I’ve had basically tan identical encounter to the one described in this thread a few times as well, both offline and online

“Rely On AI And Get Left Behind – Codemanship's Blog”

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/02/21/is-comprehension-debt-in-your-risk-register/

> These are effects we’re seeing today. Most dev teams are shipping less reliable software, and shipping it later thanks to “AI”. Good work, everyone!

I guess some of people are only now realising that when cyberlibertarian types object against a destructive centralised tech that's being used to attack our economic and social systems, the bit they're objecting against is the "centralised" part

Been there. It's always a disappointment

This conversation took a weird turn. Note that, as far as I can tell, the author of the NYTimes article wasn't at-mentioned anywhere in the thread elsewhere.

https://bsky.app/profile/ftrain.bsky.social/post/3mfba4xijos24

Edit: looks like the author has limited the visibility of their posts, but since they decided to inject themselves into my discussion, I think it's fair game to archive what they said here.

The parent thread: https://bsky.app/profile/baldurbjarnason.com/post/3mf7xfpbb6aez

My reply https://bsky.app/profile/baldurbjarnason.com/post/3mfc255cv5c2b

We used to have working spelling and grammar checkers. Why does everybody in tech pretend you need a whole-ass LLM to check for typos?

> When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this

What? This is apparently from the Paul Ford NYTimes article I haven’t read (paywalled, also not a fan) but is this really the going price for a personal website these days?

This week has been "interesting" as somebody who suffers from anxiety. My bank rolled out a new version of its online bank. Errors have since been recurring, which is not the kind of shit you want happening with a bank

A bill I needed to pay to disappeared causing a bunch of nonsense I've been trying to unwind for the past four days

This online bank used to be pretty solid.

So, I'm pretty unfocused today and not in the mood to entertain claims that the software industry isn't shitting the bed

RE: https://mastodon.social/@SteveFaulkner/116091145441116888

I used to have a decent sideline as a Subject Matter Expert (SME) for technical writing. All that work disappeared because LLMs took over and I refuse to use fabrication tools, esp. not for work where accuracy matters

So, now, when I see the people running tech writing teams complain that all their SMEs use LLMs to plagiarise and fabricate, I’m not particularly sympathetic.

This is specifically a mess you were warned about but decided to make and sit in anyway. FAFO.

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/116065569757449515

Ars Technica seems to have deleted all the threads talking about the quote fabrication issue?

Edit: I think it was just a loading issue on their forum as it’s back now. Guess they’re getting a lot of traffic.

The duality of every vibe-coded project you see and every LLM-generated pull request you review being dangerous insecure messes and then turning around and hearing every respected figure in the web dev community saying these tools are now better than human developers

If I hadn’t live through several brain-cooking bubbles (Iceland has had a few more than the rest) I’d be shocked at the dissonance

“The job losses are real — but the AI excuse is fake – Pivot to AI”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/01/29/the-job-losses-are-real-but-the-ai-excuse-is-fake/

> That darker reality is that the economy is already screwed.

“Coding Is When We’re Least Productive – Codemanship's Blog”

https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2026/01/30/coding-is-when-were-least-productive/

> But if I hadn’t made that trip and seen for myself, and had a chance to talk to a department manager in that store, those three lines would have been applying special offers wrong

“Design As Repair - Ron Bronson”

https://blog.ronbronson.com/design-as-repair?utm_campaign=vibe-prototyping-isn-t-solving-any-problems-but-it-s-creating-many-new-ones&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=productpicnic.beehiiv.com

> The loop is clear. Automation without understanding leads to more friction, not less.

"Books as signifiers, the paradox of tolerance, and Nazi bars"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/paradox-of-tolerance/

On how books work as social signals.

And a cursed book.

I'm still getting comments along the lines of "why are you being so mean to somebody just because they're rhetorically defending Mein Kampf?" (Paraphrased, obviously.)

Being cast as the bad guy online just because I think Mein Kampf is beyond the pale and that people defending it know full-well what they're doing was not on my my bingo card for 2026, but I guess it fits right in with how everything else is going at the moment.

Going all “but it works great for me” even as the industry burns around you and the “it” is a right-wing political project built on disregarding consent, being applied to dismantle public infrastructure and institutions, is fundamentally a dick move.

And debating dicks is pointless.

/fin

Thinking most of software industry management and influencers are suffering from some form of chatbot psychosis. Instead of "inventing" a new maths, they think they've invented a new form of coding, and because dev is so full of bullshit already people aren't noticing that it's outright unhinged.

For example

> “It will be like kubernetes, but for agents,” I said.

Possibly the most cursed sentence I've read all day, and I've been reading up on the Greenland crisis

From https://steve-yegge.medium.com/welcome-to-gas-town-4f25ee16dd04