Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe), page 4

“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. 🤷♂️

@inthehands Apple Mail just plain refuses to insert images unpredictably after the latest update (they appear as a question mark box). Gmail outright refuses images over a fairly low quota, with no option to resize that I can see. I'm down to sharing a Dropbox folder at this point.

Am I imagining things or didn't email clients commonly have an option to automatically resize images you added to an email?

Feels like this shit used to be easier.

“Study Finds 77% of Employees Report AI Has Increased Their Workload”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2024/07/23/employees-report-ai-increased-workload/

> Despite 96% of C-suite executives expecting AI to boost productivity, the study reveals that, 77% of employees using AI say it has added to their workload and created challenges in achieving the expected productivity gains.

Literally saw this coming two years ago but still to this day I keep meeting people who don’t believe it

“Does current AI represent a dead end? | BCS”

https://www.bcs.org/articles-opinion-and-research/does-current-ai-represent-a-dead-end/

> From the perspective of software engineering, current AI systems are unmanageable, and as a consequence their use in serious contexts is irresponsible.

Been saying this for a long long while and I highly doubt anybody who is still using these systems is ever going to change their mind, but you gotta try.

Also, I’ll bet the original title of the piece was way more forceful and was watered down into a question

Chromebook hard crashes, as it does because it's a garbage OS.

"Do you want to restore your tabs?" this garbage OS asks after crashing.

You click "restore", after which this utterly garbage OS that should be chucked into the sun obligingly opens up a window with a single empty tab.

ChromeOS is consistently the single worst OS I have ever experienced, and that includes the worst days of Apple's "classic" mac OS. And because they keep changing it, it's always the worst in fresh novel ways.

Anyway, don’t bother debating these types, is all I’m saying. They won’t change their minds and will blatantly use emotional manipulation (like “I’m being reasonable, why are you so aggressive?” at the mildest criticism) to try and get you to drop fact-based lines of argument.