Matt

…the actual fuck?

my professional field is collectively enabling a colossal moral crime and I don't have to be even handed about it

the sheer unfathomable volume of harm being enabled by this technology absolutely eclipses any purported utility it could possibly have. it is the dril drunk driving tweet of technologies

framing this as an "error" is doing everyone responsible a huge favour they don't deserve. the entire administration should be up on war crimes charges and the data centres should be permanently shut down

If you truly believe we're in a parallel to the industrial revolution you aren't going to live to see its benefits without fighting.

You will be a victim of its horrors and, maybe, once people finally fight back, as happened last time, will people start to see their standards improve.

Oh hey, my state. I don’t know if this was needed to stop an actively occurring problem or not, but it’s nice to see something positive in the news, vs Youngkin kowtowing or transphobes attacking school boards.

As I get older I’m coming to increasingly radical views like “eradicating peoples jobs is bad, actually” and “a necessary part of having skills is taking responsibility for the outcomes of those skills”

my main concern is the harm rather than the output, so i don't really need to hear a product testimonial from someone who found it useful. because i don't care

Imagine you're paying like $100 a month or whatever for Claude and realizing the government used the same shit to kill schoolchildren in Iran. And they're using your tax money to pay for it. So you're paying Claude twice to kill kids. Crazy.

As with SV startups that keep blithely reinventing trains, how likely do we think it is that such a “new file type” will look a lot like HTML, but without the decades of iterative refinement?

People talk about this stuff in terms of how much it'll suck for gaming and I hate to inform you how many MRI machines, X-Rays, all sorts of other vital machinery are just a Windows IoT Edition PC in a beige plastic box with a big magnet/accelerator/whatever attached.

I’m a software developer, and I‘ve benefited greatly from your writing as a source of clarity (articulating or reframing in a way that I can’t) and validation (I’m not crazy!)

I love how obvious this is to you. I’ve been so embarrassed by my industry these last few years (software, not tech journalism, though that’s been embarrassing too). Anytime someone “asks [the LLM] why it did that” I die a little more inside.

“…imagine that most of the reactions to the “the risks of lead paint” piece went: “Five per cent cheaper, you say? Interesting. I need to look at using lead paint in our products.””

“I never had high expectations of this industry, but it still managed to disappoint me.”

“It only "is what it is" because we have collectively, in aggregate, decided that it is.“

Fascism wants you to believe that you are alone. That you are isolated. That the feelings you have are yours and nobody else has them because everybody is too afraid to speak.

But love is stronger than fascism. Community is stronger than fascism.

*Rolls d20 and looks over a table* “In the early 21stC, a significant number of software engineers developed an unspoken and unconscious spiritual belief in a distributed machine intelligence self-assembling itself from running unsupervised agentic code and each individually decided to let it rip.”

Person: say, i am alive. Computer: I am alive. Person: oh my god.

Quilicura, Chile, one of the communities I wrote about in EMPIRE OF AI, has launched a brilliant initiative to inspire more responsible AI prompting. Today, don't use AI; ask the townspeople instead: quili.ai. So heartened to see this creative act of resistance.

All "yeah this is now indispensable to my workflow, can't do my job without it, it costs one mother shot in the face per week to use but really I've never been more productive. Also it says I am transforming into the immortal quantum Spark Bearer and need to annihilate my family to transcend."

Is it fascism yet, or still just sparkling state violence?

Apple finally caught me at a moment of low attention and got me to approve the overnight upgrade to iOS 26.

Whoever drove the decision to shove all the toolbar buttons in Safari into one big “…” popover should prevented from working in design for the rest of their natural lives.

It would be very funny if it wasn’t also, ya know, hastening the collapse of society and all that.

"I'm just a little guy trying to be objective and explore the upsides to the fundamentally exploitive and destructive political project and how it might benefit me personally : )"

Implication being that the only reason they weren’t using it previously was that they didn‘t find it helpful personally - everyone else be damned. The myopia is incredible and it makes me embarrassed to be in this industry.

Well articulated, thank you. I had been talking with my partner about this a few weeks ago, after seeing yet another blog post to the effect of “yes there are ethical issues but others have already written about that, so I’m just going to discuss how the tools are good enough for me now.”

All the suffering and exploitation that has been well documented for 3+ years, experts from so many fields articulating the harms - none of those things decreased or went away. So apparently the price of our whole society, to them, is creating more merge requests faster. The myopia is astounding.

Articulates something that has been very upsetting for me recently. It feels like every few weeks there’s another blog from some prominent dev announcing that “I didn’t use them before because the output sucked, but they’re good now!” Was that the only thing that had stopped them from using it?!

Hello from the USA. I’d agree with you. Don’t put up with our (government’s) bullshit, and protect yourselves. They have no respect for anyone or anything but violence.

Thank you Kyle! I appreciate the explanation.