PJ 🌻

The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (permalink) Last night, I gave a speech for the University of Washington's "Neuroscience, AI and Society" lecture series, through the university's Computational Neuroscience Center. It was called "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI," and it's based on the manuscript for my next book, "The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI," which will be out from Farrar, Straus and Giroux next June:

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more."

This piece on AI by Cory Doctorow is spectactular.

pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

MASSIVELY resent struggling to find the meaning in some turgid, repetitive text only to realize it's "A.i." bullshit that no one wrote and that contains no meaning.

Fuck billionaire-owned "A.i." companies forever for WASTING MY TIME, which means STEALING FROM MY ACTUAL LIFE.

This was the turning point for me, what turned me from an annoyed SaaS worker to an active AI hater. Some old fart „investor” on LinkedIn wagging his finger that if we don’t keep up with AI, we’re finished. Idiot was happy he’d made some charts. Then I learned CEOs of the LLM corps said the same.

Grammarly Offering Manuscript Reviews by AI Versions of Recently Deceased Professors The Grammarly "Expert Review" feature uses AI to provide feedback on papers using the name and work of real professors, dead or alive.

Daily reminder that calling ai dead labor and stolen labor is literal.

If you maintain your work and business WITHOUT generative "A.i.," you will be ahead of the game when these companies jack up their prices before crashing and burning.

Also, your work won't be trash.

Schools and universities have invited this tech and these companies with their rapacious greed and compulsive desire for destruction into our midsts.
We tell students to use these technologies.
We give them no guardrails, nor do we ask for guardrails from companies, because techbros are always right

guardrails are a scam...

as I said before: AI & any concept relating to it like so-called guardrails are a scam in the deepest sense like a perpetual motion machine or a ouija board — and not only a scam like a pyramid scheme which is a possible way to make money if you are first in first out

🇺🇸 The court ordered the Trump administration to begin refunding more than $130 billion in global tariffs, WSJ reported, - WSJ

Companies have filed more than 2,000 lawsuits seeking the refunds. The plaintiffs include giants such as Costco Wholesale, FedEx and Pandora Jewelry.

Will ya look at that.

Sorry I'm not more open-minded about LLMs, it's just some fucking maniacs shoveled out a bunch of useless bloatware featuring that technology, did not give me any chance to opt out, reorganized the entire economy around it, zeroed out gains made by green energy, and made it impossible to buy RAM

This was the turning point for me, what turned me from an annoyed SaaS worker to an active AI hater. Some old fart „investor” on LinkedIn wagging his finger that if we don’t keep up with AI, we’re finished. Idiot was happy he’d made some charts. Then I learned CEOs of the LLM corps said the same.

Oh I’m taking notes, screenshots of deranged LinkedIn posts and all. I often want to vomit, but still.

“Huh I keep shouting ‘I HOLD YOU AND YOUR SKILLS IN IMMENSE CONTEMPT’ at my subordinates but for some reason they don’t seem very fond of me, wonder what that’s about”

This is the era to take detailed notes on who the Business Idiots are. Every single person who bought into this at this scale has outed themselves as an untrustworthy individual with questionable taste

www.wheresyoured.at/the-era-of-t...

A Day in the Life of an Ensh*ttificator YouTube video by Forbrukerrådet - Norwegian Consumer Council

youtu.be/T4Upf_B9RLQ?...

Oh ffs

No, shame on you.

Geriatric Millennial! I like that. I’ll be using that. And like you, I’m also sick of tech and looking for a way out. Just now, this dumb autocorrect tried to change “and” to “Andy”, and I don’t even know any fucking Andy’s!!!

Hah, Georgia was mentioned there too. I wonder if Europe even remembers Abkhazia now, where Russia played the same scenario, very successfully.

Bootlicking. That’s what Graham thinks his job is, and he’s pretty good at it too.

1/ “Nothing the Party says is true. Nothing the Party does is good. Even the war itself isn't real. The Party wants you to believe we are at war so as to channel your aggressions away from the rightful target, the Party.

Oh this clown. I muted him bc sometimes his stupid tweets still popped up on my feeds.

Do not let pro-Putin voices exploit current events to launder their own agenda.

You can be against American intervention without dismissing years of documented war crimes committed by the Russian state. (1)

Ah, haven’t seen the term “NATO’s eastward expansion” since mid-2022, brings back memories. So many on the “podcast left” were masturbating to this sequence of word back then…

A war, because the DoD rebrand to DoW has to be justified somehow.

I hate this timeline, and how much I’ve said that recently.

How much longer until the outages and lower quality everything is tolerated and Amazon starts losing customers? “Very strong productivity gains” my ass.

For years, the anti-imperialist/alt-left crowd has been screeching about a WWIII that has never come to fruition.

This rhetoric has become a convenient way for them to justify Russia’s aggression while simultaneously silencing victims into submission. (1)

So, despite all of this being very obvious, it’s clear that the markets and an alarming number of people in the media simply do not know what they are talking about or are intentionally avoiding thinking about it. The “AI replaces software” story is literally “Anthropic has released a product and now the resulting industry is selling off,” such as when it launched a cybersecurity tool that could check for vulnerabilities (a product that has existed in some form for nearly a decade) causing a sell-off in cybersecurity stocks like Crowdstrike — you know, the one that had a faulty bit of code cause a global cybersecurity incident that lost the Fortune 500 billions, and resulted in Delta Airlines having to cancel over 1,200 flights over a period of several days. There is no rational basis for anything about this sell-off other than that our financial media and markets do not appear to understand the very basic things about the stuff they invest in. Software may seem complex, but (especially in these cases) it’s really quite simple: investors are conflating “an AI model can spit out code” with “an AI model can create the entire experience of what we know as ‘software,’ or is close enough that we have to start freaking out.” This is thanks to the intentionally-deceptive marketing pedalled by Anthropic and validated by the media. In a piece from September 2025, Bloomberg reported that Claude Sonnet 4.5 could “code on its own for up to 30 hours straight,” a statement directly from Anthropic repeated by other outlets that added that it did so “on complex, multi-step tasks,” none of which were explained. The Verge, however, added that apparently Anthropic “coded a chat app akin to Slack or Teams,” and no, you can’t see it, or know anything about how much it costs or its functionality. Does it run? Is it useful? Does it work in any way? What does it look like? We have absolutely no proof this happened other than Anthropic saying it, but because the media repeated it it’s n…

As I said earlier, the “wow, Claude Code!” articles are mostly from captured boosters and people that do not actually build software being amazed that it can burp up its training data and make an impression of software engineering. And even if we believe the idea that Spotify’s best engineers are not writing any code, I have to ask: to what end? Is Spotify shipping more software? Is the software better? Are there more features? Are there less bugs? What are the engineers doing with the time they’re saving? A study from last year from METR said that despite thinking they were 24% faster, LLM coding tools made engineers 19% slower. I also think we need to really think deeply about how, for the second time in a month, the markets and the media have had a miniature shitfit based on blogs that tell lies using fan fiction. As I covered in my annotations of Matt Shumer’s “Something Big Is Happening,” the people that are meant to tell the general public what’s happening in the world appear to be falling for ghost stories that confirm their biases or investment strategies, even if said stories are full of half-truths and outright lies. I am despairing a little. When I see Matt Shumer on CNN or hear from the head of a PE firm about Citrini Research, I begin to wonder whether everybody got where they were not through any actual work but by making the right noises. This is the grifter economy, and the people that should be stopping them are asleep at the wheel.

The AI economy has become a grifter economy, with dodginess and chicanery at every level, where CEOs lie, and their lies are solidified into plausible-looking analyslop.

And the institutions that should be challenging them are nowhere to be seen.

www.wheresyoured.at/on-nvidia-an...

A lot of AI safety is a grift and the moment they have to do anything that requires Anthropic to actually handle a safety issue that exists in the here and now they relent. They don’t care. They never have.
www.wheresyoured.at/ai-mythbuste...