Notices by jimray (jimray@mastodon.social)

Having spent three years inside a massive tech company rebuilding itself around AI, @anildash is exactly right here. It’s normal technology that the bosses see as an opportunity to expand and exploit, including their own workers.

https://www.anildash.com/2025/10/17/the-majority-ai-view/

The literal first word of the America by Design uh… manifesto? is a failure of the most basic principle of text design.

As in, I would literally fail my undergrad page layout course if I turned this in.

This photo series of China’s solar build out looks like background scenes from a near future series on Apple TV you’ve heard is good but aren’t going to watch

https://www.theatlantic.com/photography/archive/2025/07/photos-china-solar-power-energy/683488/?gift=xw1ABCFnadCHxRLYMsWCk1Vp7-o5ewxKpp4Cl53FnK0

If you haven’t yet read Bill McKibbon on the revolution in solar and wind power, it is easily the most hopeful thing I’ve read in a long long time

https://apple.news/Az7nU1cqeSpibruPw5qmiQg

This piece by @anamariecox about why culture feels flat, corrupted, and inhumane now is so deep, generous, and so *good*. I thought about it all weekend and have read it twice now, feels like one I’ll return to many times.

https://newrepublic.com/article/193563/trump-podcasters-hollywood-right-wing-culture

It’s distressing and a little maddening that in all of the sturm about Facebook this week I haven’t seen anyone arguing a straightforward, if not exactly simple, fact: the only way to avoid this is to take their power away.

As always, @kissane cuts right to the heart of the matter

https://www.wrecka.ge/bad-shape/

My wife pulls out a whiteboard and, without even a hint of irony, asks me “what are the secret ‘quick projects’ that will in reality take all day that you’re going to attempt this weekend” and I’ve never felt so attacked.

Yes, I could hear the air quotes.

@sjvn it’s actually a prequel. Why do you think they unleashed the snakes!

My thoughts on Dick Cheney voting for Kamala Harris are that Dick Cheney should be rotting in a cell at The Hague.

@evan Nationalized in the sense that what-we-call-AI corporations are taken over by the state or nationalized in the sense that there is a public benefit to governments building open source LLMs?

Red state governors: it’s illegal to say the word abortion, expectant parents are required to buy their newborn children an AR-15, and it’s legal to kill bikers and pedestrians as long as your full sized truck is American made.

Blue state governors: this tiny incremental environmental improvement that has taken 25 years to become law is too much of a burden on cars ability to further ruin citities and will be postponed indefinitely.

NASA successfully debugged a 46-year-old computer that has a latency of nearly two full days. That is truly awesome.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

@ianbetteridge @tfb @loke Sharp post and in the comments you get at something that has genuinely made me sad: the correlation between the reactionary shift and the upstart of Dithering. I like John and Ben personally, their rightward drift over the past four years though just bums me out.

@tantramar @ianbetteridge @tfb @loke I’m not a regular Talk Show listener but did listen to an episode with @anildash a while back and I could see glimmers of the old Daring Fireball.

Marc Andreessen: “And another thing! We would’ve solved climate change in the 70s if the pesky environmentalists hadn’t killed nuclear power!”

Also Marc Andreessen: “I’m proud to announce we’re working with one of the most brutal, repressive, corrupt regimes in history to help them launder their oil money on a computer that uses ⅛ of the global electric supply to generate ransom notes.”

I am in no way clever enough to make up that bit about petrostates funding AI, it’s an actual thing on this, the worst timeline

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/19/business/saudi-arabia-investment-artificial-intelligence.html

Me, an idiot: “So, kids, by setting the thermostat a little lower and eating less meat, we’re doing our part to make the world more sustainable”

VCs, very smart: “We just raised $100 billion dollars from the sovereign wealth funds of three petrostates to build the world’s largest AI supercomputer. It uses as much power and water as Guatemala and the primary use case is for management consultants to autogenerate powerpoints for justifying mass layoffs.”

Lots of nodding along to this great piece by @anildash

One thing left unsaid is the value of the Apple podcast directory, which seems to power a ton of discoverability.

https://www.anildash.com//2024/02/06/wherever-you-get-podcasts/

One of the lessons of the past two decades of tech is open protocols can work as long as there is some element of infrastructure that isn’t dependent on market forces. Social media platforms ended up the way they did because they were hellbent on wringing out every possible cent of profitability.