Notices by Tom Morris (tommorris@mastodon.social)

Imagine if every AI data centre was a library. Full of readers of every age and demographic, reading everything and anything - romantic bestsellers, pop science, reference books, magazines and newspapers, the poetry and philosophy of every culture imaginable. People exercising their actual intelligence, thinking for themselves rather than generating endless slop.

Then consider who would be most scared by this.

If you'd bought a $300,000 Bored Ape NFT in 2022, it'd now be worth about $20,000.

By contrast, if you'd put that money into a really boring All-World ETF, you'd have about about $425,000 now.

Turns out cryptographically verified receipts for legally unrecognised rights in ugly monkey art might not be a good investment.

The future of software development is Gemini adding and removing the "status/needs-triage" tag from an issue on GitHub 5,000 times.

Gemini is made by Google, a company once famous for incredibly high quality software engineering.

https://github.com/google-gemini/gemini-cli/issues/16723

It’d be incredibly useful to have a list of every MP who publicly supported the #OnlineSafetyAct, alongside their current views regarding the Grok/Xitter situation, and whether they continue to post on the Nazi deepfake CSAM website.

Match up past statements, current statements and actual behaviour.

Had a look at "multi-agent coding" today.

Apparently, the first step is signing up for the premium plans from OpenAI, Anthropic AND Google. So that's £50 to £500 a month. Then installing a massive pile of NodeJS to coordinate it all.

A few years ago, we were all celebrating how computing had gotten cheap: RasPi Zeros for a tenner, old HP workstations or ThinkPads on eBay for £100.

Having to pay three different landlords to build software seems like an incredibly shit vision of the future.

Spoke to a former colleague recently. Their employer monitors employee AI use and wants to see number go up.

Since the obligatory AI nannying, multiple product teams have fallen apart and they’ve stopped delivering new features of value while users are leaving.

A whole layer of middle management are destroying good products to make a Potemkin village of fake automation to justify their bosses buying crap enterprise software. It’s as if the entire industry had their heads kicked in by a donkey.

Microservices adds lots of benefits to the development process like:

- network call overhead for every operation
- more cloud infrastructure to manage—IAM policy writing, costs accounting, etc.—on all those services
- submitting PRs on 50 Git repos in order to make cross-cutting changes
- reimplementing a type system in a YAML file
- buying developer laptops with 64GB of RAM to spin up 50 containers to replicate the functionality previously provided by a damn bash script

Oh, look, the entirely predictable consequences of age verification that everyone said would happen. Bravo for all involved with the #OnlineSafetyAct.

https://www.theverge.com/news/797051/discord-government-ids-leaked-data-breach

"LLMs allow dead (or non-verbal) people to speak" - spiritualism/channelling

"what happens when the AI turns us all into paperclips?" - end times prophecy

"AI will be able to magically predict everything" - astrology/tarot cards

"...what if you're wrong? The AI will punish you for lacking faith in Bayesian stats" - Pascal's wager

"It'll fix climate change!" - stewardship theology

Turns out studying religion comes in handy for understanding supposedly 'rationalist' ideas about AI.

Given the attitude to consent of tech executives when it comes to forcing everyone to use their shiny but shitty toys, it is completely reasonable to draw inferences about their wider attitude to consent.

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250822-youtube-is-using-ai-to-edit-videos-without-permission

A very slow handclap for Nick Clegg taking god-knows-how-many years to work out that Silicon Valley is filled with a bunch of vain sociopaths.

You’d think the apprenticeship of British politics would have attuned his sensors, but apparently not.

https://mas.to/@carnage4life/115081221350850904

"What if, instead of being good at something, I was really fast at being bad at it?"

"That's amazing! Truly, the future of everything", said people who are impressed by bad things being done really, really fast.

The perils of using large language models in litigation, Australia edition.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-08-15/victoria-lawyer-apologises-after-ai-generated-submissions/105661208

Any time someone in tech says that their software or AI is “democratising creativity”, they desperately need to be reminded:

A notepad costs about 50p.
A biro costs 26p.
A set of twelve colouring pencils costs about £15.
A second hand acoustic guitar can be had for under £50.

None of these things require electricity, an internet connection, or any bloody monthly subscriptions.

They don’t want to “democratise”, they want to privatise. They want to be the landlord and you to be the tenant.

"GitHub CEO delivers stark message to developers: Embrace AI or get out."

So, I guess, if one wants to get out, @Codeberg is the place to go.

https://www.businessinsider.com/github-ceo-developers-embrace-ai-or-get-out-2025-8

digital transformation - the replacement of a government process that doesn't work with a web application that also doesn't work.

A website getting hacked and losing 13,000 “verification photos and images of government IDs” in the same week the age verification nonsense comes into force for the #OnlineSafetyAct is fitting. Because that’s what we will see a whole lot more of… to protect the children.

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/social-media/tea-app-hacked-13000-photos-leaked-4chan-call-action-rcna221139

This morning, I requested a number of popular LLMs answer a simple legal question of the form "it is illegal in England and Wales to do [X] - please set out the legislation that makes it such".

The response discussed a piece of legislation that was repealed in 2005.

And another piece of legislation that applies in Scotland. The fact "(Scotland)" is in the short title might be some kind of clue.

It completely failed to state the current law.

Still, let's pump it into the nation's veins.

If you asked a programmer whether it is possible to write a really short program that’s stable, fast, deals with all edge cases (foreseeable and not) and is understandable by human beings, they’d say “no, engineering requires trade offs”.

But when it comes to open source licenses, brevity of license text is seen as the main concern. Hence why people like stuff like the “do WTF you like”license.

Please, grasp that explicit error handling is as valuable in legal drafting as it is in coding.

Wikipedians on the front line of keeping AI nonsense from getting into articles have prepared a list of common catchphrases and signs.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_AI_Cleanup/AI_catchphrases