What kind of apologist bullshit is this?

Dialectical materialism?

We really gonna assign blame to the end products of the system instead of interrogating the material conditions that led to them? Who is the Marxist here?

I think you mean…

(OpenAI dev team)

This is what all the big promises have amounted to for most people: cars that are more and more expensive, devoid of physical controls which makes vehicles less safe, and constantly monitoring everything you do with the option for manufacturers to change whatever they want in your vehicle, including sticking a Spider-Man ad in front of you and presenting it as a fun “surprise.”

Reminds me of:

Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out to your insurer so they can raise your premiums by $10 that month to punish you for inattentive driving. Same gadget, different social arrangement.

Literate Programming

Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time.

I’ve been watching Doctorow build this set over the past few years, and Jon Stewart is the perfect host for it. This is a master class. The only thing missing is that he didn’t get to mention the price of the Kentuckey Derby winner’s semen.

That’s “midsize”? The fuck?

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/04/digital-subjugation/#greenlands-next

If Trump wants to steal Greenland, he doesn’t need tanks or missiles. He can just tell Microsoft and Oracle to brick the entire Danish state and all of its key firms, blocking their access to their email archives, files, databases, and other key administrative tools. If Denmark still holds out, Trump can brick all their tractors, smart speakers, and phones. If Denmark still won’t give up Greenland, Trump could blackhole all Danish IP addresses for the world’s majority of transoceanic fiber. At the click of a mouse, Trump could shut down the world’s supply of Lego, Ozempic, and delicious, lethally strong black licorice.

Age alone doesn’t tell you much about a system’s quality. Well-maintained systems can stay alive for decades and achieve a defect rate that a greenfield effort could only dream of.

We have a tendency to use “legacy” as an insult, but software tends to only stick around for decades if it’s so valuable that it’s hard to replace.

Legacy (aka This Is Not a Rails Shop) - Chad Fowler

Really? In front of my Elinor Ostrom poster?

Eh, I don’t think it’s hypocritical to contribute to a commons and then get mad when someone comes along and tries to use the commons to undermine the commons.

Like yes, the commons is there to be used… but not to kill the commons.

https://www.citationneeded.news/free-and-open-access-in-the-age-of-generative-ai/

Not even. Your job isn’t to protect prod, it’s to take the blame when prod goes down.

They’re leaving out two big pieces of the story:

1. Apple is switching to CXMT, whose IPO just made them China’s most valuable company.
2. Open weight models are putting a damper on centralized frontier models, making it look like efficient local inference rather than next-gen training may be the winning investment. And what do you need for efficient local inference? Why, a heterogenous SoC architecture with unified memory. And what has Apple bet their entire product line on, for the past 6 years? Exactly that!

I can say a little bit on tooling: We’ve experimented with Chromatic. We’re on a mobile app though, so the idea with Chromatic is to render via react-native-web, which has its own issues, so the ROI is such that we haven’t taken it beyond POC. Seems nice though, and probably more in line with your domain.

But for org strategy, I take it you’re on a much bigger team than I ever have been. (10 people max for me) So I can’t speak to personal experience there, but what I will say is that being able to control your entire env top to bottom is crucial for pretty much anything where you want high fidelity testing.

Like, being able to set up an env that allows you to play with stuff like externally-sourced ads and CDN caches in a space that’s private and temporary. No small feat, but that’s pretty much what you have to do if you want to catch those Rube Goldberg style failures before prod.

It depends how much it’s worth it to you, to have a test env that’s 99.999% realistic. As with anything, the first two 9s are the cheapest.

Meanwhile at work we just had a training course that specifically said doing “opt out” instead of “opt in” violates the principle of informed consent.

I did it to invite collaboration and connect with other developers with similar interests. FOSS is more about building communities than building software, after all.

I did not anticipate that it could be (legally) used to dismantle the kinds of communities I wanted to build. (I did anticipate that it could be illegally used to that end, but historically that has tended to cause a Streisand Effect, so that risk seemed worth it.)

Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.

And pretty soon we’re gonna own the fuckin’ air that you breathe

Immortal Technique - Rich Man’s World (1%)

AI basically is lossy compression.

Jokes on you, I just did a load of laundry this morning.

After forgetting it in the washer last night and having to re-run it.

And I actually brought it down to the laundry room the day before that.

And I put it all in a hamper the day before that.

Okay what I’m saying is, I have a system and it apparently works eventually so nyah.