«Ça me prend presque autant de temps d'aller relire ce que l'IA a fait que de l'avoir fait moi-même et lŠ, je trouverais normal que mon employeur me dise: ‹mais attends, est-ce que tu es vraiment en train de gagner du temps ou est-ce que tu es juste en train de t'amuser avec un gadget?›»
Est-ce peut-être pourquoi Microsoft a labellisé Copilot «for entertainment purposes only»? Ça ne me semble pas vraiment un «secret de productivité».
Cowboys Headlines: Schedule fallout; what if Pickens is long-term plan at WR over Lamb? https://cowboyswire.usatoday.com/story/sports/nfl/cowboys/2026/05/16/news-headlines-may-15…
Some thoughts from Claude about military use of AI in targeting.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DYIHIM6ihVJ/?igsh=cmM1ZmdjaDl3bzJ5
Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee
have sent a letter addressed to FBI Director Kash Patel
demanding answers regarding a recent article in The Atlantic
that alleges he regularly engages in excessive partying, drinking, and travel
at the expense of taxpayers.
ht…
Fermi CEO Toby Neugebauer is leaving the company, as the data center developer faces issues in securing an anchor tenant and construction delays (Amy Harder/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/2026/04/19/ai-data-center-project-troubles-texas
Unexpected oof.
"People can do terrible things when they feel safe and powerful. Your father had probably gotten his way for so long that he thought he was untouchable, and that is a dangerous way for a person to feel."
-Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet
The whole #LLM ROI thing reveals something interesting. It's basically impossible to figure out the ROI of an LLM. That makes it impossible for bean counters to make a comparison between human work and LLM work, or human work without an LLM and LLM-assisted work, to determine if the incredibly high price is worth it. But it's also impossible because you can't measure the ROI of a human, especially for skilled labor.
You can't measure the ROI of a human, because managers have no idea what people do. There's an eternally expanding amount of work designed to address this problem. But no matter how closely people are surveilled, interrogated, analyzed, there's never any real answer.
I've talked in the past about in relation to medical care. One of the dirty secrets of hospitals is that they have no way to figure out how much individual treatment costs. It's easy to understand at scale. You can know exactly how much something costs society. You can even identify patterns, using public health models, and decrease costs for society by trying to get people to avoid risky behavior (stop smoking, use protection during sex, etc). But it is absolutely not possible, at all, in any way, to figure out how much a single visit costs. This is similar to the problem of predicting climate change vs predicting the weather tomorrow in Amsterdam at 15:00. One is possible, the other is simply not.
But what is becoming painfully clear now is that this is true *everywhere*. It's trivial to know how much an industry costs. It's possible to figure out it's ROI for society. It is not possible to figure out how much value any individual worker provides. LLM ROI and cost comparison is an instance of this larger problem.
This is a problem for capitalism because it shows that the fundamental assumptions behind capitalism, that product value and labor value are quantifiable, that people can actually make comparisons between competing products, etc, are completely bullshit. The capitalist apologetics that makes up so much of economics, the lies that are told that hold this system together, are crumbling before our eyes.
If you make a lot of money, it's because you've been lucky. You have the right social networks, you have become good at convincing people to give you money. There is absolutely no way to connect that to actually providing value to society. If you make a lot of money, internalize that. Understand that you are not special, and things can change. If you don't make a lot of money, it's not because you don't provide value. Don't forget that. The system is a lie built to destroy you. Don't let it.
The ideology is sick, something something time of monsters and all that, we are together in this dying machine. We need to understand the lies. Your value can never be quantified. The way we have always figured out how to do the right thing for each other is through each other. Social connection has always guided us. But now the most socially disconnected people on the planet have hijacked the system. They direct the resources of the world, and game the system to avoid personal responsibility.
We have to build a system where everyone is accountable. We can't use abstract numbers and lies to figure things out for us. We have to build systems around people and accountability. There is no other solution.
#Mattermost threads are terrible. Messages vanish in that weird sidebar and nobody sees them anymore. You can't answer to a message ( :signal: #Signal-style) and not have it vanish in the threads sidebar. 😩
The answers to this question are, for D4, relative to expectations, refreshingly reasonable. I'm glad even the candidates with a track record of being quite car-brained (lookin' at you Albert Chow) at least feel the need to talk about balance and aren't all, "Yes, there is a war on cars, bicycles are ruining everything and only white people ride them" or something.
Has Technology Ever Reduced Labor?
Has technology ever reduced labor? The question sounds rhetorical. We carry small computers that answer any factual query in seconds, our laundry tumbles itself clean while we sleep, our cars drive themselves on highways our great-grandparents traveled by mule. Of course technology has reduced labor. The question barely needs asking.