Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org)

"I suggest the social action: shame. Shame these people. Their actions are shameful. AI bros hate being shamed and they try to make rules against shaming — because shame works.

None of these people doing shameful things deserve a place in polite company. They should be shamed for their shameful choices.

The AI industry is also running a PR push to redefine common word usage. The word “slop” is also super effective — so the bros really hate “slop” and try to define it to mean slop they don’t like.

But all AI output is slop. It’s social spam. That’s what it’s for. It’s slop! Say “slop” every time."

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/14/linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits/

There's a form of grief about the state of the climate, the species we killed with out actions, the damage we've done to the ecosystem. Grief about not what we "lost" but what we destroyed (often through negligence).

I do feel a very similar kind of grief when I think about "AI" and what its usage does to our cultural expression and our collaborative infrastructures.

Seeing the damage that "AI" is doing to the Kernel (not just in Slop code being integrated that will bite us later but in making becoming a new kernel developer even harder than it is at a time where we should really be thinking about how to fill that pipeline) is super painful.

I think that - like Wikipedia - Linux as an alternative platform for computing was one of the new wonders of the world, something that showed that a better world is possible. And we're just pissing it away because Linus doesn't want to talk to people who he needs to mentor.

Claims of increased productivity rest on the affected people and organizations actually being able to measure productivity which - aside from traditional manufacturing processes - is often very hard to do if not borderline impossible.

RE: https://tacobelllabs.net/@astraluma/117363654848931561

Digital Ocean killed its "we give Open Source projects a bit of free hosting" policy basically at the same time they dropped 3 million USD on Omarchy, DHH's (who is a fascist and racist) set of config files he calls a distribution.

This is exactly the kind of "Power Grab" I wrote about a few weeks ago: https://tante.cc/2026/09/11/power-grab/

DHH is working towards accumulating open source funding to be able to direct it towards projects that align with his technical and ideological views.

It's hard to overstate how dangerous that is for all of us.

There was this consensus of not going to X after Elon Musk turned it into a right-wing hellhole but I see more and more especially journalists going back "because the AI people are there".

Yes, because the "AI" folks mostly agree with right wing talking points because that's what the whole idea of "AI" is build upon. That's a bad argument for relegitimizing X.

That they are winding down the "Forkiverse" is fine. Nothing has to last forever. But with the hosts all admitting that they mostly just rented a Mastodon instance they then didn't moderate and use I wonder how it could be labelled an "experiment". What was the hypothesis?

And when I heard Kevin Roose just saying "yeah there's thousands of accounts but since nobody built a business there we can just pull the plug without a second thought" it became clear that - at least for Mr Sloplord - it never was about creating a social space but about creating a mall.

Researchers analyzed the epistemic diversity of LLMs (meaning: how many different positions/kinds of information do they produce for a given input). Result:

"every system is less diverse than a search baseline. This gap is not uniform: RAG can improve diversity, while large models are counterintuitively less diverse than smaller ones. Moreover, LLM parametric knowledge systematically reflects English over local-language knowledge for country specific topics."

https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04226

"Which is to say: not choosing or trying to choose a middle ground is basically full support of generated code, but slower. It is effectively choosing position 1 (pro-AI) without being explicit about it. It is either naive or hypocritical."
https://ploum.net/2026-10-01-pascal_wager.html
(by @ploum )

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/117358990093685067

100%. The whole "terrorists can use an LLM to build a bomb" is a dumb movie plot threat. If you want to hurt people, lack of knowledge is not your problem. And nobody needs to develop a new chemical to do terrorism. All you need is readily available.

This is just "AI" labs creating imaginary issues to distract us from the real harm they cause.

"There is no worthwhile career in AI-anything.

The AI industry is designed to dehumanise and commoditise labour. Everyone who has dedicated their life to token servitude has become a dull fungible meat proxy."

(Article title: Leaving them behind)

https://dbushell.com/2026/09/28/leaving-them-behind/

RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/117348316997310623

"There is no worthwhile career in AI-anything.

Simple as that. The AI industry is designed to dehumanise and commoditise labour. Everyone who has dedicated their life to token servitude has become a dull fungible meat proxy."

I had a few thoughts on why techbros always say these embarrassing, weird things
https://tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/

"These are – for actual human beings – very embarrassing things to admit. Why would techbros do that? Constantly."

(Article title: The Test)

https://tante.cc/2026/09/24/the-test/

If you thought the Omarchy Fascist power grab (https://tante.cc/2026/09/11/power-grab/) was over, Alibaba committed another 3 millions to DHH's foundation.

@davidgerard @dysfun It's baffling to me how community projects, that by definition require collaboration and building on each other's work, can accept these sorts of isolating, fragmenting, deskilling technologies. Like even if their output was good (which it's not really) all you get is a whole bunch of slop libraries that will never be consolidated into something meaningful

Open Source hot take: A software project is allowed to be *done*. Not everything needs to add features or rewrite things. You can just be happy with functionality and focus on just maintainance. "Maintenance mode" is not always bad but can just show a mature product.

"Executives working on AI at Microsoft and OpenAI admitted what its critics have been saying all along: Large language models are predatory pieces of technology that have been built on what a Microsoft executive called “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” and the “largest theft of labor in human history.” An internal Microsoft document said generative AI products have created a “doom loop” that is killing “the entire web.”"

(Article title: ‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft)

https://www.404media.co/doom-loop-openai-and-microsoft-admits-llms-are-destroying-the-web-and-built-on-theft/

RE: https://infosec.exchange/@mttaggart/117288549065128153

"Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the idea of ‘fair use.’”"

Let him cook!

"When authoritarian governments attack non-commercial, independent digital communication infrastructure like in this case, we can’t underestimate the impact. This time it was Italy, but next time might be closer to you. It is still much too quiet. "

by @anneroth

https://internet.exchangepoint.tech/what-it-means-to-lose-autistici-inventati/