Tootfinder

If you wish to defame me at least spell my name right

In which I offer my 30th “Long Links” outing, a curation of beautiful writing and music. Well, and some AI stuff too, but I put that at the end so it’s easy to skip.
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2026/03/24/Long-Links

“Big Tech’s AI hype is distracting users from the rapid and dangerous expansion of giant, energy and water-intensive data centres […].
There is simply no evidence that AI will help the climate more than it will harm it.
Rather than relying on credible and substantiated data, Big Tech companies are writing themselves a blank cheque to pollute on the empty promise of future salvation. We cannot bet the climate on these baseless claims.”

I wish we had more people writing more sophisticated concerns about the harms of AI.
"Slop" criticism is important because I think many of us feel we are being gaslit into believing that generative AI is currently creating quality creative output, while Al (henceforth Alfred) is overwhelmingly creating mediocre quality creative work.
Every past winter, Alfred survives in a more focused and refined form. Eliza was a toy chatbot of the 1960s, but what emerged from that is…

Following federal cuts to history-focused organizations, the president of the Canadian Historical Association, Colin Coates, sent this letter to Marc Miller, the Minister of Canadian Identity and Culture.
One thing might not be obvious: Coates's reference to Carney's recent Quebec City speech suggests Canadians' need for historical context right now. He doesn't agree with Carney's claims. In fact, most Canadian historians would dispute them.

When Elon Musk’s social media platform X launched a contest to promote its “Articles” feature,
the guidelines were explicit: Submissions “must not contain political, or religious statements.”
But when the company announced the winners on Tuesday, the results appeared to contradict those rules.
While the stated criteria emphasized high-quality writing and nonpolitical content,
more than $2 million in prize money largely flowed to users ranging from popular right-wing …

X awards $1 million prize to creator with history of racist posts
X said it would give $1 million to a user who had previously shared racist posts, including one supporting Hitler.

Former dev at my current employer somehow convinced everyone he was a genius while writing some very smelly code. One project still on his codebase I have to fix something in every so often.
This is his enum of product status values - what occurs if something is a Top Seller and discounted 10%? 🤡