Tootfinder

@… Please let me know if it works for you!

Icelandic peeps: if you know anyone with a nice apartment in 101/105/107 ish areas who is willing to rent it out furnished for August-September (or part of that), let me know. Finally trying to plan my trip!

Why AI can't possibly make you more productive; long
#AI and "productivity", some thoughts:
Productivity is a concept that isn't entirely meaningless outside the context of capitalism, but it's a concept that is heavily inflected in a capitalist context. In many uses today it effectively means "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations." This is not really what it should mean: even in an anarchist utopia, people would care about things like how many shirts they can produce in a week, although in an "I'd like to voluntarily help more people" way rather than an "I need to meet this quota to earn my survival" way. But let's roll with this definition for a second, because it's almost certainly what your boss means when they say "productivity", and understanding that word in a different (even if truer) sense is therefore inherently dangerous.
Accepting "productivity" to mean "satisfying your boss' expectations," I will now claim: the use of generative AI cannot increase your productivity.
Before I dive in, it's imperative to note that the big generative models which most people think of as constituting "AI" today are evil. They are 1: pouring fuel on our burning planet, 2: psychologically strip-mining a class of data laborers who are exploited for their precarity, 3: enclosing, exploiting, and polluting the digital commons, and 4: stealing labor from broad classes of people many of whom are otherwise glad to give that labor away for free provided they get a simple acknowledgement in return. Any of these four "ethical issues" should be enough *alone* to cause everyone to simply not use the technology. These ethical issues are the reason that I do not use generative AI right now, except for in extremely extenuating circumstances. These issues are also convincing for a wide range of people I talk to, from experts to those with no computer science background. So before I launch into a critique of the effectiveness of generative AI, I want to emphasize that such a critique should be entirely unnecessary.
But back to my thesis: generative AI cannot increase your productivity, where "productivity" has been defined as "how much you can satisfy and/or exceed your boss' expectations."
Why? In fact, what the fuck? Every AI booster I've met has claimed the opposite. They've given me personal examples of time saved by using generative AI. Some of them even truly believe this. Sometimes I even believe they saved time without horribly compromising on quality (and often, your boss doesn't care about quality anyways if the lack of quality is hard to measure of doesn't seem likely to impact short-term sales/feedback/revenue). So if generative AI genuinely lets you write more emails in a shorter period of time, or close more tickets, or something else along these lines, how can I say it isn't increasing your ability to meet your boss' expectations?
The problem is simple: your boss' expectations are not a fixed target. Never have been. In virtue of being someone who oversees and pays wages to others under capitalism, your boss' game has always been: pay you less than the worth of your labor, so that they can accumulate profit and this more capital to remain in charge instead of being forced into working for a wage themselves. Sure, there are layers of manservant caught in between who aren't fully in this mode, but they are irrelevant to this analysis. It matters not how much you please your manager if your CEO thinks your work is not worth the wages you are being paid. And using AI actively lowers the value of your work relative to your wages.
Why do I say that? It's actually true in several ways. The most obvious: using generative AI lowers the quality of your work, because the work it produces is shot through with errors, and when your job is reduced to proofreading slop, you are bound to tire a bit, relax your diligence, and let some mistakes through. More than you would have if you are actually doing and taking pride in the work. Examples are innumerable and frequent, from journalists to lawyers to programmers, and we laugh at them "haha how stupid to not check whether the books the AI reviewed for you actually existed!" but on a deeper level if we're honest we know we'd eventually make the same mistake ourselves (bonus game: spot the swipe-typing typos I missed in this post; I'm sure there will be some).
But using generative AI also lowers the value of your work in another much more frightening way: in this era of hype, it demonstrates to your boss that you could be replaced by AI. The more you use it, and no matter how much you can see that your human skills are really necessary to correct its mistakes, the more it appears to your boss that they should hire the AI instead of you. Or perhaps retain 10% of the people in roles like yours to manage the AI doing the other 90% of the work. Paradoxically, the *more* you get done in terms of raw output using generative AI, the more it looks to your boss as if there's an opportunity to get enough work done with even fewer expensive humans. Of course, the decision to fire you and lean more heavily into AI isn't really a good one for long-term profits and success, but the modern boss did not get where they are by considering long-term profits. By using AI, you are merely demonstrating your redundancy, and the more you get done with it, the more redundant you seem.
In fact, there's even a third dimension to this: by using generative AI, you're also providing its purveyors with invaluable training data that allows them to make it better at replacing you. It's generally quite shitty right now, but the more use it gets by competent & clever people, the better it can become at the tasks those specific people use it for. Using the currently-popular algorithm family, there are limits to this; I'm not saying it will eventually transcend the mediocrity it's entwined with. But it can absolutely go from underwhelmingly mediocre to almost-reasonably mediocre with the right training data, and data from prompting sessions is both rarer and more useful than the base datasets it's built on.
For all of these reasons, using generative AI in your job is a mistake that will likely lead to your future unemployment. To reiterate, you should already not be using it because it is evil and causes specific and inexcusable harms, but in case like so many you just don't care about those harms, I've just explained to you why for entirely selfish reasons you should not use it.
If you're in a position where your boss is forcing you to use it, my condolences. I suggest leaning into its failures instead of trying to get the most out of it, and as much as possible, showing your boss very clearly how it wastes your time and makes things slower. Also, point out the dangers of legal liability for its mistakes, and make sure your boss is aware of the degree to which any of your AI-eager coworkers are producing low-quality work that harms organizational goals.
Also, if you've read this far and aren't yet of an anarchist mindset, I encourage you to think about the implications of firing 75% of (at least the white-collar) workforce in order to make more profit while fueling the climate crisis and in most cases also propping up dictatorial figureheads in government. When *either* the AI bubble bursts *or* if the techbros get to live out the beginnings of their worker-replacement fantasies, there are going to be an unimaginable number of economically desperate people living in increasingly expensive times. I'm the kind of optimist who thinks that the resulting social crucible, though perhaps through terrible violence, will lead to deep social changes that effectively unseat from power the ultra-rich that continue to drag us all down this destructive path, and I think its worth some thinking now about what you might want the succeeding stable social configuration to look like so you can advocate towards that during points of malleability.
As others have said more eloquently, generative AI *should* be a technology that makes human lives on average easier, and it would be were it developed & controlled by humanists. The only reason that it's not, is that it's developed and controlled by terrible greedy people who use their unfairly hoarded wealth to immiserate the rest of us in order to maintain their dominance. In the long run, for our very survival, we need to depose them, and I look forward to what the term "generative AI" will mean after that finally happens.

@… Hey Chris! How are you? I'm trying to upload something via research equals but it looks like I may have been locked out of my account - it is associated with my TU Delft account and now I can't reset the password... Would it be possible to manually reset it to e.plomp8@gmail.com?
Let me know!

Let's just say this answer surprised me. Happy reading! #writing #writers
I Refuse to Support My Friend’s Crappy Self-Published Novel: Am I the Asshole? ‹ Literary Hub

I Refuse to Support My Friend’s Crappy Self-Published Novel: Am I the Asshole?
That’s right, you know what time it is! We’re back for another wild installment of everyone’s favorite drunken advice column, Am I the Literary Asshole?, the place where your questions and my answe…

Wondering why the number of downloaded vanilla #Linux mainline #kernel packages[1] for aarch64 and ppc64le on Fedora 42 already overtook 40 and 41.
🤷
BTW, if anyone wants me to build kernels for s390x as well, please let me know. It's likely not more work for me than enabling a c…

I'm looking for a few additional reviewers for Algorithmic Pattern talks/papers . Please let me know if you're up for that!
https://2025.algorithmicpattern.org/call/

I get the desire for live coding interviews, you can't just take people's word that they know how to do it.
But what's the point in throwing Advent of Code style problems at me and interrupting a naive or incorrect approach before I even start implementing it? Let me write unoptimized code for you and then make it better! I'm not going to write the perfect implementation first try for every problem, but I can show you my process and prove I can write _some_ code.
…

Which class is your favorite to play on Linux? Let me know in chat as I stream Star Wars: The Old Republic tonight! Come hang out! #SWTORCommunity

What Is Centrism? -- "Let me start by saying I don't know the answer to that question." (Hamilton Nolan/How Things Work)
https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/what-is-centrism
http://www.memeorandum.com/250605/p52#a250605p52

When @… goes on a dunk-fest like this,
somebody should provide Talmudic annotated marginalia explaining each joke (I only understand about half of them.)
This commentary would provide a complete reference guide to the socio=techno-political history of the Fediverse

If someone does a deep-dive on the jeans seen in the Apple WWDC25 video, please let me know.

Question: To you, what is the relationship between society and stories?
My aim is to discover more perspectives than what I'm familiar with.
Bonus: Include a description of a visualisation.
Example: recycle symbol between society & stories, mirror, time travel machine, etc.
Thank you! And let me know if you need more info!

The more time goes on, the more conflicted I get about #AI. (or, more specifically, generative AI. I like causal AI a fair bit)
On one hand, I hate so much about it:
the needless environmental and electronic parts waste, the impact on labor, the monopolistic nature of main organizations driving it, the endless conversations about AGI and other absurdly utopian (or dystopian) futures, the widespread theft of IP and human work, the devaluation of labor and craft… so much of it is not okay at all.
On the other hand, I kinda get it?
I like to test software for myself, so I've been dipping my toes into some popular AI tools over the past couple of years. I have a paid subscription to ChatGPT (which I don’t feel great about, I know), and I have found genuine utility in it.
More so, I feel so conflicted when I talk to people I respect and who I think are very smart and creative and they tell me how in love they are with all of these AI tools, about the complex workflows they build, about their experiments with agentic AI and integrations... These people seem so excited, so alive, so joyous about the things that this technology allows them to do. They often wouldn't have had the skills / knowledge / financial capital to do some of those things with human efforts alone. And now I see them coding their own tools, doing complex data analysis, trying creative experiments with graphics / text / video...
And I feel like a total jerk going "BUT ACTUALLY THIS IS UNETHICAL AND INEFFICIENT AND YOU SHOULD STOP IT BECAUSE AI SUCKS".
The technology behind all these gen AI models does have real utility, and it has kicked off a lot of creativity from people who wouldn't have dabbled in those kinds of projects otherwise.
So I don't know how to feel. Because I can't let go of the guilt and the real problems and the awareness of how much empty hype there is.
#technology #artificialintelligence #genAI #ChatGPT

Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
DAYNA: Set.
TARRANT: Good luck.
[Dayna teleports to the surface of Bucol Two. Looks around]
DAYNA: [Into bracelet] Scorpio. Down safe.
TARRANT: [Voice over] Right, standing by. Let me know when you make contact.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/405/3

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Attn VN folks; got our instance updated to the latest stable and managed to include the 5k post limit, (they made it easier, but still confused as to where `state.getIn(['server', 'server', 'configuration', 'statuses', 'max_characters']` is referring to)
File uploads are back to default for the moment, I may try to get around to patching the 24-file limit back in too, but I don't know how many folks used that anyway, so I may not. Let me kno…

Let's say you find a really cool forum online that has lots of good advice on it. It's even got a very active community that's happy to answer questions very quickly, and the community seems to have a wealth of knowledge about all sorts of subjects.
You end up visiting this community often, and trusting the advice you get to answer all sorts of everyday questions you might have, which before you might have found answers to using a web search (of course web search is now full of SEI spam and other crap so it's become nearly useless).
Then one day, you ask an innocuous question about medicine, and from this community you get the full homeopathy treatment as your answer. Like, somewhat believable on the face of it, includes lots of citations to reasonable-seeming articles, except that if you know even a tiny bit about chemistry and biology (which thankfully you do), you know that the homoeopathy answers are completely bogus and horribly dangerous (since they offer non-treatments for real diseases). Your opinion of this entire forum suddenly changes. "Oh my God, if they've been homeopathy believers all this time, what other myths have they fed me as facts?"
You stop using the forum for anything, and go back to slogging through SEI crap to answer your everyday questions, because one you realize that this forum is a community that's fundamentally untrustworthy, you realize that the value of getting advice from it on any subject is negative: you knew enough to spot the dangerous homeopathy answer, but you know there might be other such myths that you don't know enough to avoid, and any community willing to go all-in on one myth has shown itself to be capable of going all in on any number of other myths.
...
This has been a parable about large language models.
#AI #LLM

Anyone have good suggestions on CompTiA network plus classes on YouTube? (or cheap online like Udemy or something). Since we have gone to Cisco phones, the phone people need to know way more about networking than they do presently. I was thinking a Network would get them the basics, and let the network folks off the hook for dealing with things that annoy them. (Like telecom people) The usual budget cuts are preventing me sending anyone to a class, and these folks are not 'read the manu…

Series D, Episode 05 - Animals
DAYNA: Set.
TARRANT: Good luck.
[Dayna teleports to the surface of Bucol Two. Looks around]
DAYNA: [Into bracelet] Scorpio. Down safe.
TARRANT: [Voice over] Right, standing by. Let me know when you make contact.
https://blake.torpidity.net/m/405/3

Blakes7Bot | Search
Companion site to the Blakes7Bot Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky accounts. Automated lines of Blakes 7 dialog. Includes a script search facility.

Pleading with React devs to let me open things in a new tab by middle click or holding ctrl, it's annoying how common this is and I don't know what you're all scared of.

(And now @… are less than €19,000 away from their stretch target of € 75,000 to provide @… services to all. Amazing work folks and fedizens 🤩)
#Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @peertube  is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/

You know what would be really cool? A #quantifiedself person influence monitor. Say I have a #Fitbit and Joe has a Fitbit, we could have them detect when we are in proximity (if both people agreed) and then it would let us know over time how being around the other person influenced us - e.g. did heart rate variability increase or decrease (do they relax us or cause stress), did we burn more calories (maybe we usually go on hikes together), did we sleep better that night, and so on.
There are definitely people in my life who I'm pretty sure have significant effects on me in both directions, it'd be awesome to quantify them.
It would also be cool if one could do this without data sharing - e.g. maybe one presses a button on ones device to indicate one has entered x's presence and again when one has exited...
Honestly, I'd totally forget to do this...so something passive would be better - e.g. when you want to start tracking the next time you are around someone you press a button and it scans for electronic signatures and identifies Bluetooth etc. uniquely so that when you are around then it auto knows and can record...
The latter raises issues of #consent and #privacy...I'm not sure how/if one could do this in an ethical manner...but I'd like to have it 😂

The #Fediverse is amazing, less than 24 hours after I posted this and @… is only €223 from the penultimate target with 30 hours to go.
Not taking any credit for that, but happy to see a chord has been struck for all genuine surveillance-capital-free social media. Even more important in the time of #NoKings.
Looks like I'm going to be busy making #Science videos on #ClimateChange in the #Polar Regions too for the next few weeks.
Here's one I made earlier on #SurfaceMass Budget. Let me know if there's something #Climate and/or #ice related you'd like to see a short clip about and I'll see what we can do
#fedizens who may not have seen this already? If they make the €55,000 target I promise to write a peertube channel into my next grant proposal, AND I'll post some better quality videos of our Greenland and #Antarctic research over the coming weeks...
Go!
#bigTech derisory) amount of EUR 75,000 to develop the opensource #fediverse competitor app to Youtube. Maybe chuck 'em a few euros if you think it useful?
https://support.joinpeertube.org/en/