@clive@saturation.social cover
@clive@saturation.social avatar

clive

@[email protected]

Writer, musician/songwriter, hobbyist coder. Contributing writer to New York Times Magazine and Wired. Author of "Coders". Blogging at clivethompson.medium.com, archive of writing at www.authory.com/clivethompson -- email: [email protected]; Signal: @clivethompson.98 -- #science #technology #coding #software #writing #literature #poetry [email protected]

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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

People of mastodon!

Super weird question, but ...

... is anyone out there conversant in Assembly for a 1960s-era IBM 7090, or machines of that lineage?

I'm working on an article that includes some Assembly of that vintage ...

... and want to make sure I'm describing what it does correctly

(I'm a programmer but have no experience with Assembly)

if this describes you or someone you know ...

... hit me up, I'd love to tap your expertise!

[email protected] is the fastest

@kenSwinson@indieweb.social avatar kenSwinson , to random

I'm having a hard time putting words to my feelings right now, but thought I'd share this painting from some time ago.

a painting of a dove flying in a night sky over a group of houses.
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clive ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@kenSwinson

Beautiful!

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

people, PEOPLE

some hot hot new gossip just dropped about Cantor's infinity proof

turns out he stole it

https://boingboing.net/2026/02/25/newly-found-letters-show-georg-cantor-stole-his-famous-infinity-proof.html

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Super piece by Adam Serwer, who reported on the everyday Minnesotans who are observing and protesting ICE's actions, while delivering food to their neighbors who are afraid to leave their houses

His key, bang-on point, is this: All assumptions the White House makes -- about how society works, how culture works, the nature of bravery and identity --- are completely wrong

it's why Trump's attack on Minnesota is foundering

The piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/01/the-neighbors-defending-minnesota-from-ice/685769/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/TRsdI

Screenshot reading: A second MAGA assumption is that the left is insincere in its values, and that principles of inclusion and unity are superficial forms of virtue signaling. White liberals might put a sign in their front yard saying IMMIGRANTS WELCOME, but they will abandon those immigrants at the first sensation of sustained pressure. And in Trump’s defense, this has turned out to be true of many liberals in positions of power—university administrators, attorneys at white-shoe law firms, political leaders. But it is not true of millions of ordinary Americans, who have poured into the streets in protest, spoken out against the administration, and, in Minnesota, resisted armed men in masks at the cost of their own life.
Screenshot reading: The MAGA faith in liberal weakness has been paired with the conviction that real men—Trump’s men—are conversely strong. Consider Miller’s bizarre meltdown while addressing Memphis police in October. “The gangbangers that you deal with—they think that they’re ruthless? They have no idea how ruthless we are. They think they’re tough? They have no idea how tough we are,” Miller said. “They think they’re hard-core? We are so much more hard-core than they are.” Around this time, Miller moved his family onto a military base—for safety reasons. The federal agents sent to Minnesota wear body armor and masks, and bear long guns and sidearms. But their skittishness and brutality are qualities associated with fear, not resolve. It takes far more courage to stare down the barrel of a gun while you’re armed with only a whistle and a phone than it does to point a gun at an unarmed protester.
Screenshot reading: Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.

Screenshot reading: Every social theory undergirding Trumpism has been broken on the steel of Minnesotan resolve. The multiracial community in Minneapolis was supposed to shatter. It did not. It held until Bovino was forced out of the Twin Cities with his long coat between his legs. The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone. In Minnesota, all of the ideological cornerstones of MAGA have been proved false at once. Minnesotans, not the armed thugs of ICE and the Border Patrol, are brave. Minnesotans have shown that their community is socially cohesive—because of its diversity and not in spite of it. Minnesotans have found and loved one another in a world atomized by social media, where empty men have tried to fill their lonely soul with lies about their own inherent superiority. Minnesotans have preserved everything worthwhile about “Western civilization,” while armed brutes try to tear it down by force.
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

What's it like applying for a job for ICE?

Over at Slate, a writer -- who's both a US veteran and has a long record of being very vocally anti-ICE online -- went to an ICE recruitment expo

Link if you subscribe to Slate: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/ice-recruitment-minneapolis-shooting.html

Free link, if you don't: https://archive.is/791rH

the tl;dr is ...

... they offered her a job, in a process that seemed so haphazard and sloppy that she concludes they're not doing serious background checks

as she puts it ...

A screenshot reading: "But if they missed the fact that I was an anti-ICE journalist who didn’t fill out her paperwork, what else might they be missing? How many convicted domestic abusers are being given guns and sent into other people’s homes? How many people with ties to white supremacist organizations are indiscriminately targeting minorities on principle, regardless of immigration status? How many rapists and pedophiles are working in ICE detention centers with direct and unsupervised access to a population that will be neither believed nor missed? How are we to trust ICE’s allegedly thorough investigations of the people they detain and deport when they can’t even keep their HR paperwork straight?"
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

behold the gorgeous "aerial embroidery" of Victoria Rose Richards

it's the landscape as seen from a plane, except as stitchwork

Item #1 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read/subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-42-phytomining-adversarial-poetry-and/

A hand holds a circular embroidery hoop showing a detailed, textured aerial landscape with fields, roads, clusters of green trees, and a bright blue canal running vertically through the center. A small embroidered boat floats on the canal, adding a pop of color against the green terrain. The stitching varies in texture and density to mimic foliage, paths, and water, giving the scene a rich, tactile depth
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

I have a collection of ee cummings’ collected poems

you can flip it open at random and it’s nearly always at minimum interesting, often fantastic

here’s a random page

Text reading: let's live suddenly without thinking under honest trees, a stream does.the brain of cleverly-crinkling -water pursues the angry dream of the shore. By midnight, a moon scratches the skin of the organised hills an edged nothing begins to prune let's live like the light that kills and let's as silence, because Whirl's after all: (after me)love, and after you. I occasionally feel vague how vague i don't know tenuous Now- spears and The Then-arrows making do our mouths something red,something tall
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

so apparently sea slugs eat a lot of algae ...

... and some have figured out how to incorporate the algae's plastids into their own bodies ...

... so the sea slugs photosynthesize

they can live for months off the sun -- an animal acting like a plant

weird and awesome

item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-40-the-chthulucene-doom-on-a-satellite/

close-up image of a bright green sea slug with ruffled, leaf-like edges, resembling a piece of underwater lettuce. Its surface is speckled with golden dots, and delicate frills ripple along its sides as it floats near strands of green algae. The creature’s translucent texture and vivid color give it an almost plant-like appearance.
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Interestingly, younger Americans are significantly more likely to dislike data centers than older ones

and dislike is bipartisan

This from a Heatmap story (paywalled): https://heatmap.news/energy/data-centers-left-right-opposition

Screenshot reading: We here at Heatmap have gone to great lengths to better understand why this opposition is so widespread. In August, our data intelligence platform Heatmap Pro conducted polling to figure out how Americans feel about the billions of dollars being poured into data centers for cloud computing and AT development. We found that the dislike is incredibly strong — less than half of Americans are willing to support a data center near them. The frustrations with these facilities are also poised to increase over generations, as data centers are most underwater with the younger cohorts, aged 18 to 49, who may be more familiar with AL

Screenshot reading: We here at Heatmap have gone to great lengths to better understand why this opposition is so widespread. In August, our data intelligence platform Heatmap Pro conducted polling to figure out how Americans feel about the billions of dollars being poured into data centers for cloud computing and AT development. We found that the dislike is incredibly strong — less than half of Americans are willing to support a data center near them. The frustrations with these facilities are also poised to increase over generations, as data centers are most underwater with the younger cohorts, aged 18 to 49, who may be more familiar with AL
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@jerry@infosec.exchange avatar jerry , to random

The republican fundraising spam texts have taken a decidedly dark turn.

clive ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@jerry

I'm weirdly taken by the final injunction

stop=end

the way they did that without spaces between the symbol and words, kind of want that on a t-shirt now

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

I'm working on a magazine piece about how -- and if -- AI coding tools are altering the work of software development

if you're a dev, love to get your 2 cents on it -- whether you use 'em; absolutely avoid them and hate them; anything in between

Also: Very interested to hear from new CS grads -- whether you feel the advent of AI coding tools is affecting the job market for you

hit me up at [email protected]!

(and please boost this if it's relevant to your followers)

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

behold the "HTML bomb"

it's a defensive counterattack on AI web-scrapers that persistently scrape and rescrape your web site, even when you tell them not to

the bomb file looks like a tiny HTML page, but when scraped -- or even requested by a regular browser ...

... it unpacks into a huge-ass 10-gig HTML page ...

... which quickly crashes any browser or scraper

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe to here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-37-wind-theft-an-html-bomb-and-the-rice/

A Chrome browser error page displays the familiar “Aw, Snap!” message, indicating that something went wrong while loading a webpage. A pixelated frowning file icon with Xs for eyes appears at the top left. Below, the error code reads “Out of Memory,” suggesting the browser ran out of system resources. The page includes a “Reload” button in blue on the bottom right
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Speaking of Wired's excellent coverage:

They just reported on a Department of Homeland Security memo that went out to local police forces ...

... urging them to consider even the most innocuous and bog-standard protest activity as dangerous ...

... like skateboarding, or walkigng around "on foot"

no joke

The story: https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-tells-police-that-common-protest-activities-are-violent-tactics/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/4Dgw5

An excerpt:

At the same time, the guidance urges officers to consider a range of nonviolent behavior and common protest gear—like masks, flashlights, and cameras—as potential precursors to violence, telling officers to prepare “from the point of view of an adversary.” Protesters on bicycles, skateboards, or even “on foot” are framed as potential “scouts” conducting reconnaissance or searching for “items to be used as weapons.” Livestreaming is listed alongside “doxxing” as a “tactic” for “threatening” police. Online posters are cast as ideological recruiters—or as participants in “surveillance sharing.” One list of “violent tactics” shared by the Los Angeles–based Joint Regional Intelligence Center—part of a post-9/11 fusion network—includes both protesters’ attempts to avoid identification and efforts to identify police. The memo also alleges that face recognition, normally a tool of law enforcement, was used against officers. Vera Eidelman, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union, says the government has no business treating constitutionally protected activities—like observing or documenting police—as threats. DHS did not respond to a request for comment. “Exercising those rights shouldn't be justification for adverse action or suspicion by the government,” Eidelman says. Labeling something as harmless as skateboarding at a protest as a violent threat is “disturbing and dangerous,” she adds, and could “easily lead to excessive force against people who are
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clive OP ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@junesim63

Ugh ugh

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

There is nothing I love more than research finding that coffee is good for your health

in this case, a four-decade-long study of 50,000 women

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2025/06/16/coffee-healthy-aging-women/84225332007/

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

I always find this chart by Hannah Ritchie -- of Our World In Data -- deeply informative of how disjointed is our sense of personal risk

https://x.com/_HannahRitchie/status/1133703638432526337

A stacked bar chart titled "Causes of death in the US: What Americans die from, what they search on Google, and what the media reports on". It compares what people actually die from versus what people search for on Google, and what the NYT and Guardian report on. It neatly illustrates that while people are most likely to die from cancer and heart disease, they search very little for heart disease, and focus too much on diabetes, suicide, and terrorism. Meanwhile, the media sources focus a wildly disproportionate amount on terrorism, homicide and suicide, while virtually ignoring heart disease. Some number: In reality, people die mostly from heart disease (30.2%) and cancer 29.5%. There are much smaller shares for road incidents (7.6%), lower respiratory disease (7.4%), Alzheimer’s (5.6%), stroke (4.9%), diabetes (3.8%),. Suicide is only 1.8%, homicide only 0.7%, and terrorism is barely 0.01%. The media are even more out of whack with reality: The NYT and Guardian devote 35.6% of their death-related coverage to terrorism and 22.8% to homicide, while devoting only 13.5% to cancer and barely 2.3% to heart disease. The media sources devote roughly 13% of their death-related coverage to cancer, about half as much as it occurs in reality. Basically, the chart shows that while people and media perceive the role of cancer somewhat accurately in causing, people overstate the role of terrorism, homicide and suicide -- and media wildly overstate terrorism and homicide.
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

That hideous rally that Trump held at Fort Bragg? Where soldiers cheered while Trump attacked his political opponents?

It turns out the soldiers in attendance were pre-screened for their political views ...

... and the ones on stage were screened so none would be allowed who were "fat" ...

... and everyone on stage was male

The story from Military.com: https://www.military.com/daily-news/2025/06/11/bragg-soldiers-who-cheered-trumps-political-attacks-while-uniform-were-checked-allegiance-appearance.html

Screenshot reading: Internal 82nd Airborne Division communications reviewed by Military.com reveal a tightly orchestrated effort to curate the optics of Trump's recent visit, including handpicking soldiers for the audience based on political leanings and physical appearance. The troops ultimately selected to be behind Trump and visible to the cameras were almost exclusively male. One unit-level message bluntly said "no fat soldiers." "If soldiers have political views that are in opposition to the current administration and they don't want to be in the audience then they need to speak with their leadership and get swapped out," another note to troops said.
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Among the many dangerous things the Trump administration is doing ...

... this one's a doozy:

the executive order giving his political appointees the power to determine what are "correct" scientific findings, and "the power to 'discipline' anyone who violates the way the administration views science"

Gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/03/climate/executive-order-gold-standard-science.html?unlocked_article_code=1.MU8.OyDj.Zg9c1rftvl0c&smid=url-share

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Flock -- an automatic license-plate-reading service -- is adding tons of data sources ...

... so police could, upon scanning your license, get linked to tons more info about your life, relationships, etc

where did Flock get these additional sources of info?

they're using standard people-lookup tools and data brokers, but also ...

... info from data breaches

so great

@404mediaco has the story: https://www.404media.co/license-plate-reader-company-flock-is-building-a-massive-people-lookup-tool-leak-shows/

unpaywalled version: https://archive.is/GmuUk

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

New coinage just dropped, folks

"enshittogenic"

as in ...

... when the ecology of the online world loses crucial stabilizers, such that enshittification has not yet happened, but the conditions are ripe for it

@pluralistic on his new podcast series "Who Broke the Internet?"

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/08/who-broke-the-internet/

Screenshot reading: "These four forces – competition, regulation, labor power and interoperability – once acted as constraints, because they punished enshittifying gambits. Make your product worse and users, workers and suppliers would defect to a competitor; or a regulator would fine you or even bring criminal charges; or your irreplaceable workers would down tools and refuse to obey your orders; or another technologist would come up with an alternative client, an ad-blocker, a scraper, or compatible spare parts, plugins or mods that would permanently sever your relationship with whomever you were tormenting. As these constraints fell away, the environment became enshittogenic: rather than punishing enshittification, it rewarded it. Individual enshittifiers within companies triumphed in their factional struggles with corporate rivals, like the Google revenue czar who vanquished the Search czar, deliberately worsening search results so we'd have to repeatedly search to get the answers we seek, creating more opportunities to show us ads"
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

This is an op-ed by a professor at West Point, describing the Trump/Hegseth crackdown on any sort of instruction that questions power ...

gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/08/opinion/west-point-trump-military.html?unlocked_article_code=1.Fk8.nAsH.FJBUeCyms015&smid=url-share

I highlighted this part here -- they just completely disbanded the sociology major

sociology and anthropology are really, really hated by Trump and his fellow travellers

they hate anything that seeks to examine the fabric of society

Screenshot of text reading: "Department heads ordered reviews of syllabuses and then demanded changes. West Point scrapped two history courses (“Topics in Gender History” and “Race, Ethnicity, Nation”) and an English course (“Power and Difference”). The sociology major was dissolved and a Black history project at the history department was disbanded. Department leaders forced professors to remove from their courses works by James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and other women and men of color. One of my supervisors ordered professors to get rid of readings on white supremacy in Western ethical theory and feminist approaches to ethics in “Philosophy and Ethical Reasoning,” a course I direct that is required for all cadets. A West Point student debate team was even told that it couldn’t take certain positions at a forthcoming competition. And these are just some of the episodes I am aware of." The words "the sociology major was dissolved" is highlit in blue
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@stux@mstdn.social avatar stux , to random
clive ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@stux

nature is healing

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

China is sharing its rare moon rocks -- collected from the far side of the moon and returned to earth -- with scientific agencies from six different countries, including the US

the rocks are "a shared treasure for all humanity", as China's space-agency chief said

gotta say, it's always cool to see scientists collaborating around the world and across borders

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8v691qmg5o?utm_source=semafor

clive OP ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@f800gecko @kangaroo5383

agreed

like, I doubt many Americans realize that China has built and is operating its own space station ...

... while the 30-year-old ISS is crumbling and will soon be decommissioned

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

"Conservatives hate complexity"

a superb post by @pluralistic that distills a core aspect of why right-wing ideas about how to manage things like the economy, immigration and our personal lives collide so rapidly with reality

key passage here, but do read the whole thing

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/24/hermit-kingdom/

Screenshot reading: Conservatives hate complexity. That's why the Trump administration banned all research grants for proposals that contained the word "systemic" (as a person with so-far-local cancer, I sure worry about what happens when and if my lymphoma become systemic). I once described the conservative yearning for "simpler times," as a desire to be a child again. After all, the thing that made your childhood "simpler" wasn't that the world was less complicated – it's that your parents managed that complexity and shielded you from it. There's always been partner abuse, divorce, gender minorities, mental illness, disability, racial discrimination, geopolitical crises, refugees, and class struggle. The only people who don't have to deal with this stuff are (lucky) children. Complexity is an unavoidable attribute of all complicated processes. Evolution is complicated, so it produces complexity. It's convenient to think about a simplified model of genes in which individual genes produce specific traits, but it turns out genes all influence each other, are influenced in turn by epigenetics, and that developmental factors play a critical role in our outcomes. From eye-color to gender, evolution produces spectra, not binaries. It's ineluctably (and rather gloriously) complicated. The conservative project to insist that things can be neatly categorized – animal or plant, man or woman, planet or comet – tries to take graceful bimodal ...
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

US border officials are so twitchy and paranoid that they detained and imprisoned two German teenagers ...

... even though they'd applied for -- and received -- their electronic approval for a five-week visit

Why were they detained? Because they hadn't booked accommodations for their full five weeks

they'd figured they'd travel around a bit and make decisions on the fly ... like tourists do all the time, in most normal and free countries

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/german-tourists-deported-hawaii-cbp-b2736655.html

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

someone hacked crosswalk buttons in three California cities so they play deepfakes of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk

Zuckerberg: "It’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every, every facet of your conscious experience."

Musk: "You know, people keep saying, ‘cancer is bad,’ but have you ever tried being a cancer? It’s fucking awesome."

https://www.theverge.com/news/647830/crosswalk-hack-musk-zuckerberg-voices-california

(Via @mathewi 's newsletter: https://newsletter.mathewingram.com/churchill-urged-the-us-to-hit-moscow-with-an-atomic-bomb/ )

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

so there's a company that makes AI that will call your elderly parent every day to check on them ...

... I was going to add, "if you can't be bothered" ...

... but I guess if I were to steel-man the argument of this AI's creator, the goal of the AI is to fill in on the days when, say, you're at work etc and can't

but honestly it still feels like this is gonna be used by people who can't be bothered

https://www.404media.co/i-tested-the-ai-that-calls-your-elderly-parents-if-you-cant-bothered/

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Behold Pong running in 240 browser tabs

a delightful project by Nolen Royalty

item #3 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter, free to read and subscribe here: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-33-two-hit-wonders-moonglass-and-trees/

Animated GIF showing a rendition of the classic Pong game embedded in multiple browser tab favicons. There are eight browsers on screen, stacked up so that you only see the foremost browser page -- but at the top of it, the seven other lines of browser tabs poke up, one by one, each with 30 browser tabs open, so you can only see the favicons. Each favicon represents a frame of the animation, with paddles moving vertically on either side, and a ball bouncing horizontally between them. The score is displayed beside each paddle, creating a dynamic and inventive demonstration of browser capabilities.

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io avatar molly0xfff , to random

Trump has directed the Department of Justice to stop pursuing crypto fraud, dismantling the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team and ordering the Market Integrity and Major Frauds Unit to cease cryptocurrency enforcement.

clive ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@molly0xfff

woof, that is quite a brief

it's rabbit season

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Keyboard.io makes high-end angled and "split" keyboards

they wrote a letter to customers explaining how Trump's new tariffs will affect them

it's bad news for them -- prices have already shot up, and new tariffs Trump is threatening would double prices

their description of "why building something as complex as a keyboard is an inherently cross-border enterprise" is really interesting

they have to ship wood to China! that sort of wood isn't readily available there

https://shop.keyboard.io/blogs/news/an-open-letter-to-u-s-customers

A "split" keyboard sitting on a desk. The base of the keyboard is an attractive dark-brown wood, and the keys are black, with deep curved divots on top. The keyboard is split into two pieces -- the left-hand part of the QWERTY key layout on the left, and the right-hand part on the right. There is also a trackball mouse, cup of coffee, and set of headphones next to it. Overall it looks like a pretty sweet, de luxe and ergonomic workstation!
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

So it turns out that Michael "Reply All" Waltz, Trump's national-security advisor -- the guy who accidentally invited the editor of The Atlantic into a Signal chat to reveal top-secret military plans in realtime ...

... also had left his Venmo "friends" list comppletely public

Wired discovered this and reported it, whereupon the account went instantly private: https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

(in other news, Wired continues to kill it)

https://www.wired.com/story/michael-waltz-left-his-venmo-public/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/G68KW

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Wired surveyed 730 software developers about whether they use AI to help do their work, and what they think about it

very cool results

check out the whole spread: https://www.wired.com/story/how-software-engineers-coders-actually-use-ai/

A screenshot of a graphic from Wired, that says: "1. How much do you use AI? 3 in 4 Three in four coders have tried AI. Of them, the vast majority use it at least once a week. 17% -- percentage of coders who use AI "like, at all times"
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

The Author's Guild is offering a "human authored" certification for books that used no generative AI in their creation:

https://www.theverge.com/news/602918/human-authored-book-certification-ai-authors-guild

i hereby offer up the badges I designed a year and a half ago (gift link): https://clivethompson.medium.com/warning-labels-for-ai-generated-text-fa6235481631?sk=caa26634f1c13d76f19c8750660fa935

A large square black warning sign. The background is a distressed, crumbling black-and-white color. White text on top of it reads: "WARNING, CONTAINS AN UNPREDICTABLE AMOUNT OF AI BULLSHIT"
A badge in the shape of a green oval, with two words superimposed in black: "cyborg writer". Between the two words there is a black jagged icon that looks like a voltage pulse

A badge in the shape of a green oval, with two words superimposed in black: "cyborg writer". Between the two words there is a black jagged icon that looks like a voltage pulse
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

In addition to formal government institutions, Musk is also trying to tear apart Wikipedia

That is almost certainly, as this analysis notes, because Wikipedia is "a last bastion of shared reality" ...

... and Musk, in contrast, only wants online sources that repeat his sort of conspiratorial blather

The piece: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2025/02/elon-musk-wikipedia/681577/

Unpaywalled: https://archive.is/1mjMq

A screenshot reading: "Wikipedia is certainly not immune to bad information, disagreement, or political warfare, but its openness and transparency rules have made it a remarkably reliable platform in a decidedly unreliable age. Evidence that it’s an outright propaganda arm of the left, or of any political party, is thin. In fact, one of the most notable things about the site is how it has steered relatively clear of the profit-driven algorithmic mayhem that has flooded search engines and social-media platforms with bad or politically fraught information. If anything, the site, which is operated by a nonprofit and maintained by volunteers, has become more of a refuge in a fractured online landscape than an ideological prison—a “last bastion of shared reality,” as the writer Alexis Madrigal once called it. And that seems to be precisely why it’s under attack." The final two sentence are highlit
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

US media has traditionally been far more clear-eyed about antidemocratic purges abroad

so here's an exercise in how a US correspondent might describe the events of the last week in Washington, were it occurring overseas

https://www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/musk-s-junta-establishes-him-as-head-of-government

A screenshot reading: Musk Junta Seizes Key Governmental Offices February 1, 2025 By William Boot WASHINGTON, D.C. — What started Thursday as a political purge of the internal security services accelerated Friday into a full-blown coup, as elite technical units aligned with media oligarch Elon Musk moved to seize key systems at the national treasury, block outside access to federal personnel records, and take offline governmental communication networks. With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk's junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk'’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority. The G-7 country’'s newly installed president, a mid-level oligarch named Donald Trump, appeared amid Musk’s moves to be increasingly merely a figurehead head of state. Trump is a convicted felon with a long record of family corruption and returned in power in late January after a four-year interlude promising retribution and retaliation against foreign opponents and a domestic “Deep State" ...
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Software folks

Wired is running a short survey asking about whether you ever use AI in your coding

if you're interested, give 'em your feedback: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScxqxzbjQvfD9xIcrub3d2n1yDWreJJL5PxGYpfjaw9fgnDuA/viewform

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Via the Algorithmic Sabotage Research Group ( @asrg ) ...

... here's a list of code designed to poison the well for AI web-scrapers

https://tldr.nettime.org/@asrg/113867412641585520

(thanks to @peterfr for pointing this one out!)

A screenshot reading: - WV iocaine The deadliest Al poison — iocaine generates garbage rather than slowing crawlers. https://git.madhouse-project.org/algernon/iocaine - Nepthenes A tarpit designed to catch web crawlers, especially those scraping for LLMs. It devours anything that gets too close. @aaron https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/ - Quixotic Feeds fake content to bots and robots.txt-ignoring #LLM scrapers. @marcusb https://marcusb.org/hacks/quixotic.html - Poison the WeLLMs A reverse-proxy that serves diassociated-press style reimaginings of your upstream pages, poisoning any LLMs that scrape your content. @mike https://codeberg.org/MikeCoats/poison-the-wellms - Django-lim-poison A django app that poisons content when served to #Al bots. @Fingel https://github.com/Fingel/django-llm-poison - KonterfAI A model poisoner that generates nonsense content to degenerate LLMs. https://codeberg.org/konterfai/konterfai
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

A hacker developed an "infinite maze" to trap web-crawlers/scrapers from AI companies

basically, if the server code detects that a web crawler from an AI firm is trying to scrape the site ...

... the code begins spinning up an infinite, nesting warren of new sham pages, filled with random text

so the crawler gets stuck crawling and scraping endless and meaningless pages

fun @jasonkoebler piece at @404mediaco

https://www.404media.co/email/7a39d947-4a4a-42bc-bbcf-3379f112c999/?ref=daily-stories-newsletter

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Behold the AI slop that google served up when these folks asked it "does corn get digested"

I just checked that query, and it now serves up this story itself, bien sur

but overall I agree with the deck to the headline

"slopaggedon cometh"

https://futurism.com/google-image-corn-ai-slop

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Back last spring I visited Denver ...

... where the city was two years into a fascinating experiment:

Subsidizing residents who wanted to buy an e-bike

Turns out the program was exceptionally successful

People rode 'em 26 miles a week on average, rode them year-round ...

... removing 6 million miles of car-driving each year. Cleaner air, healthier residents getting exercise

And: way cheaper than subsidizing electric cars

My piece on it for Mother Jones: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/01/e-bike-subsidy-programs-denver-states-walkable-cities-urban-infrastructure/

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

You know about disposable vapes?

many brands are powered by the same lithium-ion cells that are used to make huge battery packs for electric cars or ebikes

but with vapes, they're just ... thrown out

Chris Doel got 130 dead vapes, took the batteries out, and used them to create a new rechargeable battery pack for his ebike

It worked great

His question: "Why they hell are they being thrown away after one use?"

Item #6 in my latest "Linkfest" newsletter: https://buttondown.com/clivethompson/archive/linkfest-28-neolithic-octopuses-weeping-trees-and/

A photo of a workbench on which sits perhaps 120 small batteries — in size and shape very much like AA batteries — all collected together and standing upright inside a DIY plastic gray casing. There are several wires sticking out from the apparatus. Directly to the right of the apparatus is a multimeter, and in the background there appears to be a soldering iron, and a red canister of unknown function.
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Ed Zitron went to Amazon and bought its best-selling laptop — a $238 machine running Microsoft S, a hobbled version designed to limit what a user can do

The laptop is janky, slow, awful — and the internet it opens onto is a shitshow of upselling, slop, and con schemes, where the walled gardens are preferable mostly because they offer an illusion of order

His point: for most people, computing is psychologically abusive

He’s right

Read the whole thing!

https://www.wheresyoured.at/never-forgive-them/

A screenshot reading: The picture I am trying to paint is one of terror and abuse. The average person's experience of using a computer starts with aggressive interference delivered in a shoddy, sludge-like frame, and as the wider internet opens up to said user, already battered by a horrible user experience, they're immediately thrown into heavily-algorithmic feeds each built to con them, feeding whatever holds their attention and chucking ads in as best they can. As they browse the web, websites like NBCnews.com feature stories from companies like "WorldTrending.com" with advertisements for bizarre toys written in the style of a blog, so intentional in their deceit that the page in question has a huge disclaimer at the bottom saying it's an ad.
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@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

Since there’s been a resurgence lately of the “mastodon is mostly just for folks who use Linux” thing …

… i’m now curious about my community here

(i’m offering intentionally crude and ungranular options in this poll)

“I use Linux …”

(Please boost!)

clive OP ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@nixCraft

Yep

In our household we have a Roku, that thing is 100% linux

@nixCraft@mastodon.social avatar nixCraft , to random

credit https://www.nasserjunior.com/comics

A four-panel comic talks about the emotional rollercoaster of debugging. Panel 1: A frustrated developer with a cracked laptop screen thinks, "I hate this job." Panel 2: The developer's frustration intensifies: "and I hate my life." Panel 3: Reaching peak despair, they cry out, "WHY IS THIS HAPPENING TO MEEEE" Panel 4: Suddenly calm takes over them, the developer realizes, "nevermind, misspelled a variable." TL;DR: the comic shows the intense emotions and sudden relief that often comes with the debugging process for all devs out there.
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clive ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@nixCraft

man, I've never done any professional programming, just a hobbyist

(which is a good thing for me and for the world 😅 )

but this is the thing that has always struck me about software

showstopping errors can be so hilariously banal

@owlislost@nerdculture.de avatar owlislost , to bookstodon group

Hiya ! What are you ? I am listening to Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll and I just started reading The Free People’s Village by Sim Kern, which is engaging so far. How ‘bout you? bookstodon@a.gup.pe icon bookstodon group

clive ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@owlislost bookstodon@a.gup.pe icon bookstodon group

Stephanie McCarter’s new translation of Ovid’s “The Metamorphoses”

absolutely phenomenal, and takes as first principle the fact – long ignored, or at least severely underplayed, by generations of academics — that it’s a massive epic poem about sexual assault

@clive@saturation.social avatar clive , to random

I built this tool a year ago but I feel like Mastodon folks would like it

The "Weird Old Book Finder"

Type in a search query, and it'll find one randomly-chosen public-domain book that matches the query -- and present it for immediate reading: https://www.weirdoldbookfinder.net/

Why only one book? To prevent the paradox of choice! Just start readin'

Can't promise every book will be weird, but most are

A longer essay on how/why I developed it: https://debugger.medium.com/a-search-engine-that-finds-you-weird-old-books-3a74fbb5f3d4

This was a search for "mastodon"

A screenshot of the Weird Old Book Finder, showing the book returned for the search "mastodon" -- the book is "Mastodon, Mammoth, and Man"
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clive OP ,
@clive@saturation.social avatar

@aral

that usually happens if someone is running a VPN, I’ve found

The project uses it to Google books API, and I think that API sometimes gets tripped up by VPNs so I temporarily turn mine off when I’m using it