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

You remember when everyone (including AI firms) claimed that "Hallucinations" would soon be solved and I got so much shit for arguing that they are a structural property of LLMs?

Now OpenAI releases a paper stating the same and just gets to move on (with all its sycophants).

Really fucking annoys me.

"Voice commands" have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves.

But from a practical standpoint it's a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers, it would be like working next to people having loud phone calls all day.

And who exactly wants every thing they do with their computer broadcasted around them?

Replacing something as central to modern digital life as a browser with something built by an unprofitable "AI" startup in the middle of a deflating bubble might be the least digitally literate thing one can do in 2025.

Btw. about 6 months ago the Anthropic CEO said that by now 50% of all code would be written by LLMs.

How does that prediction relate to the reality we all live in and what does that say about his ability to make predictions about the future?

(https://www.businessinsider.com/anthropic-ceo-ai-90-percent-code-3-to-6-months-2025-3)

On my usual runs I pass this piece which is my favorite work of street art in Berlin.

Now there's construction on the parking lot next to it and this artwork might soon disappear :(

There's a popular "digital rights" perspective that turns "not having kids on social media before 14 or 16" into a binary. That allows to make this a thing about overreach and censorship and all that. In combination with the complexities of ensuring access/restrictions it builds a great straw man.

But I do totally think that just throwing kids into general social media (think Instagram, TikTok but also Bluesky or Mastodon) is harmful to them and is just us older people being lazy and not wanting to give them time to grow into this digital life.

But it's not a binary. There is value in creating spaces for kids to express themselves and find community and their own voice. Question is how to build that in ways to protect them - not just from creeps but also the negative side effects of many commercial social media platforms.

It's not "but Kids need to learn to live with social media so let's throw them on TikTok". It's about figuring out ways for kids (or TBH some older people as well) to make those experiences in the digital "non-swimmer's pool". (Not sure if digital swimmers exist.)

This would actually be a very interesting research project to build a "under 14 Fediverse" with more moderation and restrictions with servers run by organizations who do other kinds of work with youth as well.

As much as I try to be an optimist, I don't see the "AI" bubble popping soon. Too many people's wealth/stock valuation rests on its continuation.

Exposure to "AI Assistance" lowers doctors' ability to diagnose cancer just after a few weeks.

"AI"s main effect on people is skill decay.

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/langas/article/PIIS2468-1253(25)00133-5/abstract

I think the Vibecoding reddit has accidentally stumbled on the best description of vibecoding:

It's "roleplay for guys [it is always guys] who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part".

(Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1mu6t8z/whats_the_point_of_vibe_coding_if_i_still_have_to/ )

#ai #vibecoding

There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.

And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.

One thing that the current exorbitant investments in "AI" show is that the investor class and big tech corporations do not pay enough taxes: If you have billions to set on fire for spicy autocomplete we should take some or all of those to do something useful with.

If you use #genAI you can no longer claim to "care about quality". That is just a contradiction. You actions are saying loudly that you do in fact not give a shit about anything of the sort.

@Ruth_Mottram you have not missed anything. LLMs are niche tools that could be used productively in a few specific cases but not in the way currently proposed: These systems are not economically viable.

I was talking to someone yesterday (let's call them A) and they had another "AI" experience, I thought might happen but hadn't heard of before.

They were interacting with an organization and upon asking a specific thing got a very specific answer. Weeks later that organization claimed it had never said what they said and when A showed the email as proof the defense was: Oh yeah, we're an international organization and it's busy right now so the person who sent the original mail probably had an LLM write it that made shit up. It literally ended with: "Let's just blame the robot ;)".

(Edit: I did read the email and it did not read like something an LLM wrote. I think we see "LLM did it" emerging as a way to cover up mistakes.)

LLMs as diffusors for responsibility in corporate environments was quite obviously gonna be a key sales pitch, but it was new to me that people would be using those lines in direct communication.

I never understood the "you need to push out a newsletter every week or people unsubscribe" thing. Like: If you don't send anything you are totally out of my attention and I don't think enough about you to hunt down your page and unsubscribe. What gets me to unsubscribe is some filler post that has a convenient "click here to unsubscribe" post at the bottom.

I built this cupboard with space to put in towels. I was so naive. As if it were up to me.

"AI is a tool (sorry!) that people who are bad at their jobs will use badly and that people who are good at their jobs will maybe, possibly find some uses for. People who are terrible at their jobs (many executives), will tell their employees that they “need” to use AI, that their jobs depend on it, that they must become more productive, and that becoming an AI-first company is the strategy that will save them from the old failed strategy, which itself was the new strategy after other failed business models."

(Original title: The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work)

https://www.404media.co/the-medias-pivot-to-ai-is-not-real-and-not-going-to-work/

The solution is not to open source "AI" but to resist it.

Systemd is one of the best things in moving Linux forward in a long time.

(Original title: systemd has been a complete, utter, unmitigated success)

https://blog.tjll.net/the-systemd-revolution-has-been-a-success/