Sigh had to unfollow yet another Internet-person I’ve looked up to because they got completely weird about AI and it’s suddenly the only thing they can talk about.
Good thing we're destroying the Internet for entirely performative "for the children" bullshit while there's child rapists in the highest ranks of government and business.
The Austrian German term for managers who push bullshit like this is "dem hams ins Hirn gschissn", which translates as "someone shat into their brain".
(This about the thinly veiled workplace surveillance stuff [they call it "bonus system" or some shit] Meta is pushing on their employees.)
"For instance, the company's AI-powered performance tracker, Checkpoint, looks at how many lines of code are generated by software engineers..."
Woman crying and screaming at child in backseat of car: "Why can't you just make a browser?"
Child called "Mozilla" screaming in backseat of car: "AI" with like 20 "I"'s
Heads-up, pretty serious food and drug recall in Indiana, Minnesota and North Dakota for a bunch of products including Cheerios, Kellogg’s stuff, Pringles, Coca-Cola, Gatorade, Heinz ketchup, Crisco, pet foods, beauty products etc because of literal rat shit at a distributor
Before that there was INS, also steeped in bad things (e.g. internment camps for Japanese, German and Italian people during Word War II). However they didn’t amount to a militarized occupation force murdering people in the streets.
So I think about one of the central thesis of Joseph Weizenbaum a lot.
It’s essentially an extension of “there’s no technical solutions to social problems”; it posits that computers are widely used to immortalize and amplify social problems while preventing reforms.
And it has gotten much worse since he wrote about this in the 1970s.
Two of the examples he gives are nation/world-wide stock exchanges and automated trading (lead to wealth concentration and gambling), as well as highly complex but wasteful, punishing and unfair welfare systems (instead of e.g. UBI).
Boromir from the movie The Fellow ship of the rings thinking out loud about the one ring, with the caption "Perhaps we could give the ring better training."
It’s amazing how these people talk about AGI as if it was actually possible (it’s not).
What’s being sold as “AI” currently is slightly random statistical token chain generation; it has zero to do with thinking, intelligence or creativity.
Modem (Supra 56k)
How do luse PC Cards?
Do This
To eject a card, pou can do any of the
rollowing:
• Drag the PC Card icon to the Trash.
• Push the button on the computer next to or
above the PC Card slot. After the cand is
ejected, pull it out of the slot. Cou cannot use
this option if your computer is in sleep, lf you
have a storage card inserted, your PowerBook
must be shut down to use the eject buttons.)
• Click the card's icon to zelect it, Then open
the File menu and choose Put Awar, After the
card is ejected, pull it out of the slot.
• Click the card's ioon to select it. Then open
the Special menu and choose Eject PC Card.
After the card is ejected, pull it out of the slot.
If you are unable to eject your PO Card click
Huh.
Do this step, then dick the right arrow.
Huh?
5
Hi, I'm Thomas. Back in 2005 or so I've practically invented in-browser animations with HTML elements.
PLEASE DO NOT ANIMATE USER INTERFACE ELEMENTS FOR NO REASON.
Do not animate icons, change positions of buttons, do "fun liquid glass animations"; definitely under no circumstances move in or fade in whole blocks of text (unless your design goal is that you want people looking at your website to become nauseous).
Only use animation when it's helpful to the user—for example, when they need to pay extra attention to something because there's a risk of data loss or to pass the time while showing that something is going on when there's a process which takes a bit longer.
You know how to get people to leave platforms run by evil people?
Yes, that's right, by offering better alternatives and being super friendly and welcoming and actively working on recruiting people and evangelizing for the better platforms and most importantly by not being chastizing and gatekeeping misers.
Minidisc or cassette might be cooler, but honestly CDs are probably the easiest “retro” format to get into.
Used players are still relatively easy to come by and you can get a drive for your computer to burn audio CDs very easily; and there’s plenty of dirt cheap used CDs. (This CD Walkman is from Goodwill!)
Audio quality is top-notch, too.
Modern Bose headphones next to an early 2000s Sony CD Walkman.
if you need it, please take care of your mental health, which may be in the form of adding more mute words and blocking news accounts or all the way to a social media sabbatical
you don't owe it to anyone to follow the news and it's not your fault what bad people do
“The system time on the Xbox 360 console can only be advanced until 23:59 on 31 December 2025. The system will continue to advance into 2026 and beyond; however, users cannot set the system date past this point.”
What do you even call it when you have nostalgia for technology that was released in the same year as you were released
Sony Short Wave radio receiver CRF-330K with integrated cassette deck from around 1978. It's dials and switches and wheels and buttons and lights and toggles everywhere.
What’s really amazing about vibe-coding is how people are replacing programming languages which are strictly deterministic with human speech which is highly ambiguous and expect programming to be faster and better.
“Well only use it when you’re already an expert!”
None of the people starting their careers using this technology are experts yet, nor will the ever be.
And within some finite amount of time nether will you, the expert, be an expert anymore.
