Tootfinder

I have some sketches of an essay that I need to write, but I think it's worth brain-dumping a bit more in the mean time.
#LLMs are an attempt to make tech grow forever. But like, how many "your mom/a friend, but done by a precarious worker instead" apps do we really need? Everything right now is in the AI grift hole, but there's almost nothing of interest (even if you ignore the ethical concerns). Like, no, I don't fucking want a robot to lie to me about my groceries. That doesn't sound like a useful feature. There's a lot of useless shit being pumped out to prop up the bottom line, and a lot of people just want to be able to use their old phone for more than a couple of years.
No one is happy with this. No one wants this. Except the billionaires who are forcing us all to drink the capitalism koolaid, because they'd rather exterminate life on earth than live in a world where they experience consequences.
Nothing grows forever. That's not how literally anything in reality works, or has ever worked, at all in history. Some people think that the universe itself may work like that, but that's only an educated guess. Finite things don't grow forever. Every organism, every society, every technology, every dynamic and adaptive system we have ever known goes through a growth phase and then goes in to a stabilization phase. Or, following a Malthusian pattern, grows until it reaches a catastrophic point and collapses. Like lemmings. Or reindeer. Or cancer.

I have basically mildly positive feelings about Gemini Nano being available in Chrome. I don't use Chrome, but lots of stuff should be done on-device, not off. That's a win.
If "software shouldn't have features i don't like" is the argument you're actually making, that's not really a good argument. Even when the feature is an LLM model.
"Chrome is getting big and bloated and we can do better” is absolutely a good argument you can make.
And then the real kicker: Google pushing the web platform around through dominance is just the real ick here. It's the same sort of thing monopoly power enables. Companies that own verticals in the economy or a product market can dictate rather than negotiate. This is, in general, bad. Google does this, not because the ideas its employees put forward are good, but because they work out to be in Google's interests. And those interests can run counter to the rest of the world.
That's what we have to push back on.

Life Runners 🪖
生活战士 🪖
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️ Ilford HP5 Plus 400, expired 1993
If you like my work, buy me a coffee from PayPal #filmphotography

"I took the German or Autistic diagnostic. Results: probably autistic. Wittgenstein would have gotten the same result."
Also I'm fucking angry that the test said it would take 2 minutes, when it took me 12!
https://german.millermanschool.com/

Silicon Valley Bets $200 Million On AI Data Centers Floating In the Ocean and „hopes to eventually deploy thousands of the nodes.“ Wonder where they hope to get the GPUs from.
The #AI bubble can‘t burst soon enough.

Watched a couple of episodes of #DeArktiskeReddere on DR (public broadcaster on Denmark) yesterday (series about #Greenland's search and rescue team - though they do a lot of emergency air ambulance type work too).
It's a really gripping and well filmed piece of work, sensitive on the difficult topics too and shows really well how different authorities work together.
I imagine it would be uncomfortable watching for USians who seem to imagine some kind of stone age society seeing healthcare emergencies dealt with so professionally with such excellent equipment (and for free at point of delivery).
I also find it hard to explain that the categories and separation between "Danes" and "Greenlanders" isn't always so clear cut and I think the programme got that over well.
It's filmed mostly in Danish but with Swedish, Norwegian and quite a bit of English, so may not travel easily but it's a really well done piece of TV and if you are at all interested in Greenland, it's worth seeking out.
De arktiske reddere https://www.dr.dk/drtv/serie/de-arktiske-reddere_450849

“The barrier to creating software has genuinely dropped. That is not hype. What it means for professional engineers is not that their skills are less valuable, but that the skills that matter have shifted up the stack, as they have in every previous transition.
The developers who thrived after the move from assembly to C were not the ones who could write the most clever assembly. They were the ones who understood what the machine needed to do and could express that intent clearly in a higher-level language. The developers who thrived after the move to managed languages and frameworks were not the ones most resistant to garbage collection. They were the ones who saw the freed-up cognitive capacity as an opportunity to solve harder problems.
The developers who will thrive in the agentic era are the ones who understand this as another step in the same arc and invest accordingly. Not in resisting the tools. Not in deferring to them uncritically. In developing the judgment, clarity, and systems thinking that make the tools maximally effective.
That means writing better specs. Investing in test infrastructure. Developing genuine architectural understanding rather than surface familiarity. Building the taste to evaluate output rigorously. Practicing problem decomposition until it becomes second nature.
The era of programming as primarily a keystroke activity is over. The era of programming as primarily a thinking and judgment activity has been accelerating for decades and just shifted into a higher gear.”
#AITransition
#
https://addyosmani.com/blog/factory-model/

Once again, the Supreme Court’s conservatives put their thumbs on the scale for Republicans.
And once again, they’re very mad that people noticed.
Not content to undo civil rights and destroy the Court’s credibility,
they’re racing to ensure that Republicans can redraw House districts even as voting is already underway.
And if anyone points out their flagrant partisanship and clanging hypocrisy, they scream bloody murder,
even — especially! — if the person p…

How dare you point out that Sam Alito is a partisan hack!
A hit dog will holler.

Do we absorb information better on paper, rather than screens? It depends on the screen https://theconversation.com/do-we-absorb-information-better-on-paper-rather-than-screens-it-depends-on-the-screen-281849

Do we absorb information better on paper, rather than screens? It depends on the screen
Reading is arguably the most difficult task one must learn. To understand why it is difficult, one must understand the physiology of reading.