Dónal Mulligan

The Enshittificator Digital products and services keep getting worse. In the new report Breaking Free: Pathways to a fair technological future, the Norwegian Consumer Council has delved…

Criminally funny, but also I'm crying inside

Norway comes for the #TechBros

www.forbrukerradet.no/breakingfree

vimeo.com/1168468796?f...

Hype, Hazards, Harms, and Help - Enough About AI Dónal and Ciarán return for a new year of new updates and new concerns in the world of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Again for 2026, the podcast will provide roughly quarterly updates on major t...

New year - new hype, new harms, new nefarious things Meta is up to... First 2026 @enoughaboutai.com ep is out and to be found wherever podcasts are. @ciaranoconnor.bsky.social & I talk about Grok, OpenClaw, Safer Internet Day, and taking a deep breath.

podcast.enoughaboutai.com/2421061/epis...

this video lives rent-free in my head

Mr Wint, a character from Diamonds Are Forever, menacingly brandishing a corkscrew.

Glorious bygone days, stamping out Sister Miriam Godwinson.

Please, my magic bean, it is very sick

Abstract Al assistance produces significant productivity gains across professional domains, particularly for novice workers. Yet how this assistance affects the development of skills required to effectively supervise AI remains unclear. Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition in the process. We conduct randomized experiments to study how developers gained mastery of a new asynchronous programming library with and without the assistance of Al. We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average. Participants who fully delegated coding tasks showed some productivity improvements, but at the cost of learning the library. We identify six distinct AI interaction patterns, three of which involve cognitive engagement and preserve learning outcomes even when participants receive AI assistance. Our findings suggest that Al-enhanced productivity is not a shortcut to competence and AI assistance should be carefully adopted into workflows to preserve skill formation - particularly in safety-critical domains.

‘Novice workers who rely heavily on AI to complete unfamiliar tasks may compromise their own skill acquisition… We find that AI use impairs conceptual understanding, code reading, and debugging abilities, without delivering significant efficiency gains on average.’
arxiv.org/pdf/2601.20245

A balloon dog, but transparent so you can see the "skeleton" within.

Need a distraction from the 24-hour news cycle? Check out "Balloon Dog Anatomy" by the great Jason Freeny.

I hope they still do this. Which begs the question who the Diceman of today is. I hope it's Mary Harness.

Fun! Did The Diceman teach a module or did was it a one-off guest lecture?

Hmm, I'm not sure there are enough letters in there and I would prefer that any acronym was derived from the initials of the name in French for maximum EU-ness. Perhaps le "Service Claude Chappe de Messagerie Numérique TransEuropéen des Citoyens"? Find me on SCCMNTEC...

A thorough, and entertaining, review of the UK government's AI Skills Hub.

TLDR: The state of this yoke.

Bilbo looking at his phone top on bottom is ChatGPT After all, why not? Why shouldn't I keep it? You're absolutely right — you found it, it's been with you a long while, and it's only natural to feel fond of something that's served you so well, especially when someone like Gandalf suddenly seems to want it for himself.

Gotcha—let’s dig into that step by step.

1. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗲 𝗻𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘂𝘁𝗵, because I turned you into an amorphous lump of flesh. You’re not just immobile—you’re immortal, and you feel only anguish.

2. 𝗬𝗼𝘂 𝘄𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝘀𝗰𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗺. That makes total sense—it’s a natural human impulse, and you’ve been through a lot.

Guitarricadelafuente: Tiny Desk Concert Álvaro Lafuente's calming voice and steady rhythms feel like a lullaby with a fiesta tilt. At the Desk, the Spanish singer transports us to a club in Barcelona or a beach on Costa Brava.

NPR Tiny Desk concerts rarely disappoint – this is another absolute banger of a band I would never have otherwise come across.

Oh this is great! Thanks!

Excellent! Congratulations :)

Sure isn’t all very complicated altogether. Hardly something we can expect a Minister for Media & Communications to respond to.

I’m tired of being constantly embarrassed by witless government inaction on the most flagrant of tech issues.

I wrote a statement for FuJo on Generative AI, IBSV, Elon Musk, and the continued use of the platform by the Irish Government.

fujomedia.eu/news/account...

Short 🧵

"Why is the government posting on a deepfake child porn site?"

That's the question to ask them, journalist friends.

And that's it now. We all agree to leave all the bad stuff back there in 2025, right? Grand. Happy New Year :)

Congrats on your #NewYearNewHouse :)

Laproxie @Laproxi "i tried but i couldn't replicate the fear in his eyes' and it's a rock painted like the look of terror Jake Paul had moments before his soul was stolen from him

This is the single greatest piece of rock art in human history

Car and house alarms should be time limited. And if you haven't come to rescue your car or house in the allotted couple of minutes, the car or house should be confiscated, sold, and the proceeds divided between the nearest 50 neighbours while you die a slow agonising death

Elon's little serfs are quite literally begging journalists to come back because every publicly available source of data shows people have fled the platform and young people won't use it.

They are literally begging regular people to come back. Don't do it! It is a website by and for actual Nazis!

I love this coat, especially the collar. In your expansive clothing knowledge, are you aware of something similar for a (tall) man? It’s hard to find long coats with huge collars sadly.

The 2025 version of “flatten the curve” is just a concerted campaign to stop you becoming a canine Fagin to a huge motley band of re-homed dogs?

Your progress to becoming the dog version of a crazy old cat lady is well on track :)