Notices by tante (tante@tldr.nettime.org), page 11

New study on the effects of LLM use (in this case on essay writing):

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

Quote:

"LLM users also struggled to accurately quote their own work. While LLMs offer immediate convenience, our findings highlight potential cognitive costs. Over four months, LLM users consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. These results raise concerns about the long-term educational implications of LLM reliance and underscore the need for deeper inquiry into AI's role in learning."

The interesting thing is: People who used search engines (to find sources etc) did not show similar issues. This is an important antidote against the belief that LLM-based tools are just like search engines. Which they are not. They are massively degrading their users' mental abilities and development. Which is why these systems have absolutely no place even _near_ any school or university.

https://hails.org/@hailey/114691651497761523

If you are also annoyed by Firefox for some reason now trimming the protocol in the address bar you can fix that behavior by setting "browser.urlbar.trimURLs" in about:config to get URLs you can properly copy and use back.

This essay by @baldur on why individual experiments on the usefulness of "AI" (or similar stuff) don't teach us anything useful and might actually harm us is brilliant.

Go read it. Too many insights to pull a quote TBH: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2025/trusting-your-own-judgement-on-ai/

"The process of coding with an “agentic” LLM appears to be the process of carefully distilling all the worst parts of code review, and removing and discarding all of its benefits."

Very insightful post on #GenAI by Glyph

(Original title: I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now)

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

"So let’s get one thing out of the way: I think “AI literacy” is a dangerous device of neoliberal education and it deserves to be dismissed out of hand."

"Using AI is not about communicating. It’s about avoiding communicating. It’s about not reading, not writing, not drawing, not seeing. It’s about ceding our powers of expression and comprehension to digital apps that will cushion us from fully participating in our own lives."

https://themindfile.substack.com/p/against-ai-literacy-have-we-actually

Since migrating away from big tech platforms (including Google Drive) I have been using Libreoffice for my writing and presentations.

I often get asked why I do not use OnlyOffice since it looks so much better (especially the web client). Two answers:
- The presentation tools of OnlyOffice are too barebones
But more importantly:
OnlyOffice is a company that seems to be controlled by a Russian guy who invests a lot of time to hide the fact that OnlyOffice is Russian (see https://www.collaboraonline.com/comparing-collabora-with-onlyoffice/#Ownership and https://forum.cryptpad.org/d/232-onlyoffice-concerns-vendor-makes-shady-moves ).

As things are currently I do not rely on Russian service or software providers. So that's why.

Liberals (in basically any western country) think that the political victory of the right is due to messaging: "We just need to get the messaging right".

No. Your politics are shit because you are adopting the narratives of the right (austerity, racism) and provide no meaningful alternatives.

AI systems are not tools, they are keys.

Not to open something up but something to jingle in front of middle and upper management's nose to saturate their attention while you as platform provider embed yourself deep in their processes and decrease their internal capabilities to make their own decisions.

"But underneath its sleek exterior lies something far more insidious: a machinery for elite redemption, designed not to dismantle injustice, but to disguise it in moral language."

On Rutger Bregman's new project.

https://www.counterpunch.org/2025/05/18/how-elites-rebrand-power-as-virtue/

Loving this: "The Copilot Delusion"

Quotes:
"Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, "Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it's good code. Let’s deploy it." Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down."

"The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays."

"At that point, you’re not working with a copilot. You’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded dependency graph."

"But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity."

https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

Stop using Postman already and use Bruno https://www.usebruno.com/

(Original title: Postman is logging all your secrets and environment variables)

https://anonymousdata.medium.com/postman-is-logging-all-your-secrets-and-environment-variables-9c316e92d424

I think the most tragic aspect of deploying "AI" in teaching and learning situations is how much it pushes people into a situation of learned helplessness. This constant feeling of not knowing how to do a thing of being incapable of actually doing work on one's tasks is mentally so harmful. How do people under those conditions gain confidence in their abilities? Like ever?

So if you are a EU citizen would you do me a favor and sign this petition to ban "conversion therapy" throughout Europe? Thanks

https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home

Another "AI" coding assistant review from the actual field "But for anything more nontrivial, I found it took me more time to validate the code and fix the numerous big and subtle errors than it saved me."

(Original title: Martin Pitt: Testing sourcery.ai and GitHub Copilot for cockpit PR reviews)

https://piware.de/post/2025-08-09-sourcery/

This is exactly what most critics argued: It does not matter how good AI results are, their whole use is as a credible threat to lower labor power.
https://mas.to/@carnage4life/114466698654568229

Also ich wäre nicht böse, wenn sich Can'tzler als Kurzname von Merz durchsetzen würde. #cantzler

"Die AfD hat sich selbst entschieden, rechtsextrem zu werden. Die Hochstufung ist folgerichtig. Herzlichen Glückwunsch, der Preis dafür muss lauten: Verbotsverfahren!"

(Original title: AfD gesichert rechtsextrem: Drei Wörter: AfD, Verbot, jetzt)

http://www.taz.de/AfD-gesichert-rechtsextrem/!6085522/

Microsoft says 30% of their code ist now AI generated.

As someone who has to use (and maintain) an Office 365 tenant (and all the Microsoft client software) I believe them 100%. This is not a recommendation.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-30-of-the-companys-code-was-written-by-ai/

The whole "AI" thing should have reignited conversations on what "creations" and "creativity" and "authorship rights" mean.
Like it seems to have settled on "we take it all, stochastic parrot goes brrrr" and "copyright über alles". Feels like a missed opportunity.

A team from the University of Zurich manipulated people on a subreddit for months with their AI bots to see "if they could change people's minds". Their bots pretended to be victims of sexual assault, pretended to be black people against the Black lives matter movement etc. massively maipulative shit. And they did not inform anyone. Nobody on that subreddit consented to being experimented on.

Their excuse "psychological manipulation of OPs on this sub is justified because the lack of existing field experiments constitutes an unacceptable gap in the body of knowledge".

When I say that I don't believe that academia is a huge help in us curbing the negative effects #AI will have, this is what I mean. The thing went through ethics boards and shit. Disgusting.

https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/1k8b2hj/meta_unauthorized_experiment_on_cmv_involving/