Anthony

I'm Anthony and I'm a computer scientist.

website: https://bucci.onl/about.html

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nprofile1qqsf2kely2e8u78sdznxwf54wqt2ylfsmfxyr9e3usazv3zxzmaf5hcpz3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerpd46hxtnfduqs6amnwvaz7tmwdaejumr0dswl60p4

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nos.lol

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Last Notes

2026-05-21 20:51:33 UTC

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> Zealotry has no real place here.
Look, I tried to be polite. But fuck right off with this transparently bad faith ungrounded accusatory horse shit. You're blocked now.
@npub1c24…0kcs @npub1e5z…p90v

2026-05-21 18:35:51 UTC

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> Again - it’s entirely possible to use Kagi without a single piece of AI. Which was the point of the original post.
Again---this is a misrepresentation. I take your posts to be purposely obfuscating at this point. Bye.

2026-05-21 12:28:50 UTC

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> There is no training of AI or tracking from their search engine. Their search engine only uses AI when you want it to.
Unless they have blatantly changed their operation, this is a misrepresentation. Their URL literally used to be "kagi.ai", which you can browse on the Internet Archive if you were serious about understanding this company. Their blog at kagi.com still has posts with text like this, which I'm picking from just one of several posts on the subject:<li>"Not a lot of people know that Kagi started as Kagi.ai in 2018 and has a long heritage of utilizing AI"</li><li>"Our early efforts, however, enabled us to use machine learning to deliver answers to questions directly within the search experience, making us the only search engine besides Google and Bing able to do so when we launched the public beta in 2022"</li><li>"Our approach allows us to take advantage of the entirety of available human knowledge...Kagi acts as a gateway to the giant repository of human knowledge, patiently waiting to serve our needs"</li><li>"With the recent advancements in AI, our interest in exploring how it can improve search has reignited. Last year we published technology demonstrations for AI in search and AI in browser and today we are unveiling integrations based on this demos directly in Kagi search."</li>
Their future business model as stated in 2019:<li>"Imagine a world where the market grades AI assistants by their ability and offers them at different price points. Depending on your budget and tolerance, you can buy beginner, intermediate, or expert AIs"</li><li>"Instead of everyone sharing the same Siri, you’ll have your completely individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis - the AI. The more you tell your assistant, the better it can help you, so when you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it’ll provide options based on what you like to eat and how far you want to drive"</li>
Etc. You'd have us believe they stopped these efforts---which require training on user data to be fully realized---and turn all this off unless users opt in? Not plausible. This is plenty of reason to believe they are collecting every interaction every user has with their search engine to train their AI assistants and realize this vision. You can't have your "individual Mike or Julia or Jarvis" unless Kagi is collecting data from you and training Mike, Julia, or Jarvis with it.
If one were inclined to, one could read Kagi's [AI Philosophy](https://help.kagi.com/kagi/why-kagi/ai-philosophy.html ) and take note that what they are listing as the main limitations of using AI in search are not in fact the main limitations of using AI in search according to experts on this subject. To me this suggests they are not inclined to provide a good search and information retrieval experience based on the best understanding of how to do that. Instead they wish to provide the AI-based "question answering" experience that their blog has been detailing for many years.
> they return blended search results
Yes. Blended into a slurry by AI.
> But it’s clear you don’t like them
I stated facts as I know them, with the purpose of sharing information that other people might find useful when making a decision about whether to use Kagi. You can verify what I said on the two posts I linked previously as well as Kagi's own blog, if you cared to. What you're saying here reads as a typical dissembling tactic deployed to discredit unpleasant facts by labeling them as "only aesthetic" or "emotional", on the assumption that somehow aesthetics or emotions are less valid, which of course is a false assumption. That you are misrepresenting the practices of a company with a founder who's regularly expressed chauvinistic views (to put it kindly) reads to me as projection, or worse. Regardless of the motivation, this isn't about what I "like". It's about what Kagi has repeatedly stated it actually does.

2026-05-20 23:41:36 UTC

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Take a peek through Kagi's early blog. Besides its founder holding some odious views he is regularly called out on, Kagi was meant to be an AI company from the beginning. The plan was for the search to exist to provide training data for the AI, which would then be sold back to users. They serve Google search results in the end if memory serves. Not a durable, trustworthy alternative to Google, in my estimation. I certainly wouldn't pay them.
See https://chaos.social/@scy/111704636274463611 and also https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

2026-05-14 13:18:31 UTC

Last night we saw a fairly large bird on the fence that we couldn't identify, and only caught a blurry photo of it. After asking around, it seems it may have been an osprey! Now I'm impatient for it to come back so we can get a better look/photo.
#maine #birds #birding #osprey

2026-05-03 11:00:36 UTC

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I listened to an interview with Robert Dorschel, the author of this book, and found it illuminating: https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-social-codes-of-tech-workers-a-contradictory-middle-class-in-the-making-robert-dorschel/b207a34d1660255b
*The Social Codes of Tech Workers*
> The book identifies tech workers as a contradictory class formation, oscillating between a spirit of emancipation and yet another spirit of capitalism.
The oscillation is a degree of freedom allowing tech workers to take up or avoid solidarity-oriented perspectives as convenient. There's lots of space for bad actors.

2026-04-29 17:26:41 UTC

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The KDE Connect I'm using is the small app that helps different devices communicate. I mostly use it to send URLs and files between computer and phone. As far as I know it cannot handle email.
I've played around with KMail/the KOrganizer suite as a potential Thunderbird replacement. I found it to be OK but not great, in the sense that if I had to I could live with it but there are several things about it I wish were different. At one point I switched from Thunderbird to Betterbird in the hopes that it'd provide some buffer against AI Mozilla is/will be putting into Thunderbird. Switching from Thunderbird to Betterbird was trivial.

2026-04-29 16:47:57 UTC

"KDE Connect has unexpectedly crashed". Oh no, KDE, I expected it to crash. It crashes every single time I turn off my bluetooth headphones, and always has. In fact I've come to think of the headphones' off button as a KDE Connect off button, that's how much I expect it to crash.
#KDE #Linux #KDEConnect #computers #software

2026-04-29 14:16:03 UTC

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Maybe I'm out of my mind, but looking at this graph, there appears to be a treatment and a subsequent effect: https://damrnelson.github.io/github-historical-uptime/
...which may or may not have to do with an internal culture that does things like this: https://isolveproblems.substack.com/p/how-microsoft-vaporized-a-trillion
and also this: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-digital-escorts-pentagon-defense-department-china-hackers

2026-04-27 13:24:32 UTC

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I have been considering this question too, since I've relied on Ubuntu for awhile. I hate to say it, but I've come to think that Gentoo or Guix may be the only reasonable options right now. I say "I hate to say it" because both are supposedly quite difficult to set up and administer compared to a distribution like Ubuntu. I have not used either so cannot speak from experience, only from what I've read.
I considered Debian for awhile, in part because it's familiar and relatively easy. However, as an outsider to that project I'm concerned about some of their internal discussions concerning AI. It wouldn't surprise me if they eventually decided to accept AI-generated code submissions in certain cases, or allow AI to "review" things. Once that crack opens a flood follows, if experience is any guide.
I'm of a mind that as annoying as it can be, compiling your basic tools from source code that you can peg to a specific version (pre-AI-slop-contributions) is the only way to really avoid AI at the OS level. This situation cries out for a community "No AI" distribution, frankly, but I haven't seen anything along those lines yet (such things might exist but I don't track all this that closely)

2026-04-26 13:29:41 UTC

I profoundly dislike Discord and I wish people would stop pushing me there. The UX is poor for such a widely-used service.

2026-04-25 13:23:58 UTC

The typical webapp login process for me is anywhere from 5 to 7 steps, and I'd say I give up about 5-10% of the time after the 2nd CAPTCHA. I can't imagine this is good for anybody, and it almost surely does not reduce abuse either. Just a swirling dark pattern feeding on itself. Everyone likes to ape post-9/11 airport "security" for some reason.
#tech #dev #SecurityTheater #DarkPatterns #UI #UX #security

2026-04-24 23:09:07 UTC

Looks like governor Janet Mills vetoed the Maine data center moratorium that recently passed the Maine legislature. Extremely disappointing, and out of step with what's increasingly looking like a winning electoral strategy. Very few people want data centers. They destroy neighborhoods, don't create good jobs, and don't bring wealth into a community. They raise electricity rates 50-100%, possibly more in the long term.
https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/04/24/politics/janet-mills-vetoes-maine-data-center-ban/
#Maine #DataCenters #NoAI

2026-04-23 15:39:03 UTC

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> What a big huge dumb pile of bollocks this is
...
> Yeah well, it’s a questionable categorization
Why?
I believe most credible evidence points at the likelihood that use of current generative AI leads to deskilling and prevails against upskilling. I also believe that you cannot make up with automated testing what competent human software developers avoid doing in the first place.
To me this paints a picture. Projects that allow AI use are choosing to trade off short-term gains for long-term losses. I want nothing to do with software produced with that mindset, and I question the judgement of people who welcome it. Any list that helps me identify projects heading in this direction is a great help, exactly how uBlock Origin is a great help against adware.
At a "philosophical" level, I don't think a software project that involves closed, proprietary tools (AI or otherwise) as a key part of the development process has any business calling itself "free and open source". People who only care about getting the end result faster might disagree, but to me FOSS has always been a political project, and that project is compromised by deeply incorporating proprietary technology, in my opinion. The *means* matter more than the *ends* in this view.
With all that said, I struggle to see how this is "bollocks" or "a questionable categorization". I think it's as vital as the FOSS/not FOSS distinction, or the adware/not adware distinction.

2026-04-22 13:54:17 UTC

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> Musk and his colleagues have the good fortune of living in a moment when there is no structural actor capable of challenging their dominance. The working class has virtually ceased to exist as an organized force. Absent pressure from below, political parties themselves offer no meaningful opposition to Muskism. The effect is paradoxical. On the one hand, the lives of capitalists are made easier when they can intensify the exploitation of their workers and purchase influence in politics with little resistance. But it also means they have no incentive to restrain their most antisocial impulses or consider the long-term consequences of their actions.
> Muskism typifies this tendency: if Fordism and post-Fordism were both, in different ways, organized to secure social peace, Muskism is oriented toward social war. The relative thinness of the Muskist mode of regulation is symptomatic: the working-class antagonist is so weak, the social war so asymmetric, that there is no need for a negotiated peace. At the moment, the strategy seems to be working.
#USPol #WorldPol #geopolitics #Musk #Muskism #Fordism

2026-04-22 13:52:21 UTC

> In broad strokes, these are some of the main elements of the Muskist regime of accumulation. Fuse with the state by becoming a monopoly provider for essential functions. Concentrate production while prioritizing resilience, independence, and control. Sell technology for national and individual self-reliance in a hostile world filled with racialized others. Accelerate digitization to make everything programmable, including and especially the human brain.
> ...
> This is the other side of the Muskist mode of regulation: a vision not of shared prosperity but of violence. The fan contract for those inside the walls of a fortified West, and expulsion for those marked as illegitimate. After both the models of Fordist industrialism and post-Fordist outsourcing and globalization have receded, Muskism holds out the prospect of a purified community of survivors.
> ...
> In many ways, the ICE incursion was Muskism in action: heavily armed agents equipped with data analytics dashboards and facial-recognition software, using high technology to purge those migrants deemed out of place and punish their “woke” enablers.
From [Muskism As Fordism](https://lpeproject.org/blog/muskism-as-fordism/ )
#USPol #WorldPol #geopolitics #Musk #Muskism #Fordism

2026-04-21 19:34:32 UTC

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A typical reply to this on #LinkedIn : "I can't parse your layer cake of sarcasm but I use AI to _________"

2026-04-21 15:04:06 UTC

I just spent a solid 5 minutes confused about why my noise-cancelling headphones were not cancelling noise before realizing they were turned off.

2026-04-21 14:42:01 UTC

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I often wonder how much of this absurdity reflects a failure of computer science education to convey to students what exactly computer science is about. In my (admittedly biased) view, someone who understood what computer science is would immediately recognize "JSON prompting" as "impoverished computer programming of an unreliable machine". If you understand your theory, a bunch of unavoidable consequences follow from that simple observation. You save yourself a lot of time, trouble, and uncertainty, and can even forecast the future!
#ComputerScience #ComputerScienceEducation

2026-04-21 14:14:49 UTC

It's hilarious (*) that "JSON prompting" is a thing and AI people say "prompt engineering is dead; you should be JSON prompting".
You mean to say it's more effective to use a structured syntax to instruct the computer to do what you want? That's amazing! But I feel like I've heard that somewhere before? 🤔
💡 I wonder whether having a process that rewrites the JSON you enter into other JSON according to some rules---also expressed in JSON of course---would be helpful sometimes?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLM #Claude #PromptEngineering #JSONPrompting
(*) Hilarious in the facepalm sort of way.

2026-04-21 13:30:30 UTC

One of the things I'm finding stunning about the Vecel breach is how many people are saying "I had $VERY_LARGE_NUMBER of OAuth apps authorized to my $VERY_IMPORTANT_ACCOUNT and had to go through them all". I have like 2 OAuth apps authorized on any account that matters to me, and I review them fairly regularly and remove ones I don't use or don't remember. I also never accept "allow all" for any app. Apparently I'm weird in this way? I just feel like not doing this is akin to using "password" for all your passwords.
#tech #dev #security #cybersecurity #InfoSec #Vercel #breach #OAuth #AI

2026-04-19 13:30:06 UTC

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It seems to me that it's a bit worse than this, because the variability is probably long-tailed and there are buffering/queuing effects. When things go well, they go OK; when things go badly, they can go really, really badly. Anything downstream of something going well can also go well; anything downstream of something going really, really badly is unlikely to be able to compensate, and they risk "buffer overflow" if they try. I think in knowledge work and similar long-tailed tasks, increased volatility tends to mean things fail when they didn't need to.
This overall imbalance means that there are negative outcomes that are unlikely to be counterbalanced by corresponding positive outcomes at the system level, leading to net negative value. I think this partly explains why insurance companies are less and less likely to sell coverage to companies that heavily use AI in commercial policies: the actuaries have worked this out, and not willing to take on the extra risk.

2026-04-06 19:09:23 UTC

Re: https://social.coop/users/scottjenson/statuses/116352800579635299
> Yes, a lot of you don't want AI posts in your feed (or pick any other topic) but the solution isn't to keep "AI People" from joining Mastodon
If this were not a disingenuous strawman---because it's impossible for one thing---I'd ask "why not?" I wouldn't invite the "AI People" I've encountered into my house either, because I've found them to be unpleasant and I get to choose who enters my space. This solution has worked quite well for me over the years.
It seems to me that what this person is saying is that people should give up the power they have---namely, their power to exclude people and topics they don't wish to interact with---because it favors them. That's a typical rhetorical move of AI boosters: demanding you give up your power because you having and exercising that power inconveniences them.
> any more than it is keeping marginalized communities off of Mastodon.
One should ask why this person chose to use the most offensive possible metaphor to make their case for inclusion. It's almost as though they don't believe the argument their words are shaped into resembling.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #AIBoosters

2026-04-02 12:31:33 UTC

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Their code is remarkable for how terrible it is. Learning from it would be a bit like learning how to be a chemist by studying the pollution from a chemical plant. As far as I can see, what there is in there to learn is learnable in a much better way from more conventionally produced software, courses, books, etc.
> the commercial pressure to be great is something that we cannot feel
This feels like an apology for Anthropic, and I do hope you're receiving a nice paycheck for doing their PR for them. Otherwise you're doing their work for free.
I've worked in both corporations and startups. I've felt the pressure "to be great". I did not resort to whatever the heck resulted in a mess like Claude Code. Many of my colleagues can say the same.

2026-04-01 15:12:44 UTC

I posted about the Claude Code leak on LinkedIn and almost immediately someone attacked me about my criticism. They tried the "take a look at COBOL and get back to me" angle.
Buddy. I've *written* COBOL. I spent several years working almost daily with a 3-million-line monstrosity of a COBOL program. I was working on another app that interfaced with it, but in that work I occasionally had to read the code and in a few cases modify it. Granted I haven't spent as much time looking at the leaked Claude Code source code (and won't lol), but nevertheless I confidently declare that Claude Code is *worse*. "Spaghetti code" doesn't come close to describing this thing.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #ClaudeCode #ClaudeCodeLeak #Anthropic #Claude #tech #dev #SoftwareEngineering #SoftwareDevelopment #software #COBOL #LinkedIn

2026-03-31 14:24:29 UTC

For reasons that aren't even clear to me, I'm about 1/3rd into Barry Jay's *Reflective Programs in Tree Calculus* and about 1/10th into Frank Waaldijk's *Natural Topology*, which I've been reading side-by-side. Smashing these two into each other is pretty fascinating, even as I'm not sure what to make of the mixture yet.
Having sat with the notion for about six months now, I think Jay's critique of the Church-Turing thesis has legs. I don't see clearly yet exactly where and how the limits of computation manifest in his own system(s), which of course they must. But I think he's correct that this thesis as it's colloquially presented (and taught to students, including me!) is misleading at best and false in a certain important sense. Apparently he is regularly called a crackpot for forwarding this critique even though it's straightforwardly demonstrated.
Waaldijk's book is more of a constructive mathematics exploration. In this it is closely related to computer science, but it's focused on traditionally mathematical notions like topological space. The latter is usually quite complicated, but Waaldijk shows that the core concept of compact space can be represented with finitely-branching trees, making these spaces amenable to computation. Since we imagine physics taking place in spaces that are topological (among other things) there's potentially an interesting bidirectional flow of ideas between computer science and physics.
Jay calls his central notion "natural trees". Waaldijk calls his central notion "natural spaces". In both cases I think the intended sense is "with minimal artifice".
#ComputerScience #computation #math #mathematics #topology

2026-03-31 12:18:30 UTC

Here's one for the dystopia/AI Hell files: https://jaigp.org
> **Journal for AI Generated Papers**
> Where humans and machines are welcomed.
> The Open Prompting Journal Built Collaboratively by its Community.
One positive I can think of is that folks who wish to "collaborate" with machines can congregate there, giving the rest of us a clear signal about who to block, ignore, critique, ridicule...
cc [@olivia@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/olivia ) [@Iris@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/Iris ) [@dingemansemark@scholar.social](https://scholar.social/users/dingemansemark ) @npub1e2z…n97d @npub15xv…0jms
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AntiScience

2026-03-30 18:56:09 UTC

Microsoft Copilot putting ads in pull requests on Microsoft Github is expected behavior.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #github #tech #dev #SoftwareDevelopment

2026-03-30 13:00:50 UTC

The "correction", when it comes, is going to be ugly. The quantities of misallocated capital involved in this AI mania look to be even more staggering than previously reported.
I worry that few smaller companies or startups will survive, and the country will be pockmocked with half-constructed data centers and obsolete equipment. This is not like the dot-com crash that left useful and unused fiber networking.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/private-credits-exposure-to-ailing-software-industry-is-bigger-than-advertised-d80da378
hashtag#AI hashtag#GenAI hashtag#GenerativeAI hashtag#software hashtag#tech hashtag#dev hashtag#AssetBubble hashtag#PrivateCredit

2026-03-29 18:35:19 UTC

[@davidgerard@circumstances.run](https://circumstances.run/users/davidgerard ) here's one for your bsky files, if you haven't encountered it already: **Bluesky leans into AI with Attie, an app for building custom feeds** https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/bluesky-leans-into-ai-with-attie-an-app-for-building-custom-feeds/
Attie.

2026-03-28 18:14:00 UTC

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If I could have someone kicking the back of the chair while another chair is lowered onto my lap and someone coughs on me, I might just lose myself in the experience!

2026-03-28 18:10:17 UTC

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I'm there with you. I understand how enormous an undertaking it would be to do something like fork the Linux kernel. However, acting like we're trapped because it'd be hard is premature surrender, and I don't think anybody who actually cares should be advocating for that. I question the motives of people who talk this way. I'm old enough to remember all the people who said Linux would never be accepted, there'd never be a viable alternative to Windows or Office, etc.

2026-03-28 17:30:30 UTC

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Please miss me with incoherent fatalism. If you want to roll over that's up to you but untag me first.
@npub17ux…329m

2026-03-27 14:36:23 UTC

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I think there's a decent chance he's a spoiler for Collins, and/or a spoiler for any legitimately left candidate. Given his background, I'd characterize him as right-wing, not progressive. He says progressive-sounding things publicly, but his background and previous actions suggest right-wing leanings. Propping up a candidate like this in Maine serves the center-right Democratic leadership *and* the Republican party.
That's how I've been thinking about it, anyway.

2026-03-27 12:39:19 UTC

> French first lady Brigitte Macron and other spouses of world leaders. "It will be formed in the shape of humans. Very soon, artificial intelligence will move from our mobile phones to humanoids that deliver utility. Since our environment is designed for people, humanoid systems are uniquely suited to navigate and operate within our world. They fit well."
> "Imagine a humanoid educator named Plato," she continued. "Access to the classical studies is now instantaneous. Literature, science, art, philosophy, mathematics and history. Humanity's entire corpus of information is available in the comfort of your home. Plato will provide a personalized experience, adaptive to the needs of each student. Plato is always patient, and always available. Predictably, our children will develop deep critical thinking and independent reasoning abilities. The AI-powered Plato will boost analytic skills and problem solving and adopt in real time to a student's pace, prior knowledge and even emotional state. The byproduct — a more well-rounded lifestyle for our children, freeing up time for being with friends, playing sports and developing interests beyond school. A more complete person."
From **Melania Trump pitches robots as potential educators for American schoolchildren** https://www.cbsnews.com/news/melania-trump-robots-educators-kids-humanoid-systems/
The horrors and clowns of the bread and circus.
#AI #GenAI #GeneartiveAI #robotics #education #MagicalThinking #dystopia

2026-03-25 14:33:49 UTC

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The economy, politics, and tech is centering around how to keep the deca- and hectobillionaires fully insulated from the problems they directly cause. As far as I can see they are not sawing off their own ladders or anything like that. They are consolidating their position at the tippy top. Their position there does not depend on the masses being educated, literate, or particularly skilled anymore. Instead, it requires the masses to be docile. I will start believing that this situation is changing when the masses are no longer docile, but there's not much evidence of that, at least not in the US as far as I can see.
It's possible the wealthy and powerful have miscalculated and current automation is not enough to allow them to retain an acceptable lifestyle while being fully decoupled from the masses. However, I don't see this as a foregone conclusion, even as I personally believe it is probably true.

2026-03-24 14:51:16 UTC

I feel like there's a population of crypto and crypto-adjacent tech people who legitimately don't understand why a long, hard-to-guess string that is stored and shared in cleartext is very different from a password and cannot be substituted for one. I feel like a bunch of these folks don't understand why.
I'm not going to name and shame but I'm in the midst of a conversation on this, which is why it's top of mind.
#tech #dev #crypto #security #cybersecurity #InfoSec

2026-03-23 12:15:54 UTC

I feel like most of Trump's statements regarding the attack on Iran should be read as market manipulation.
#US #USPol #Iran #economy

2026-03-22 15:06:00 UTC

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I think it means that investors expect Altman will be able to pickpocket $100 from every person on the planet every year forevermore. The company valuation is the capitalization in present value terms of expected future revenues, after all!

2026-03-22 13:18:41 UTC

I think it is meaningful that Marvin Minsky, sometimes called the "father of AI", seemed to hold human beings in low regard.
Here's John Searle in 1983:
> Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
> Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".
I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a *disdain* for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.
It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.
#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #intelligence #GenAI #GenerativeAI

2026-03-22 13:09:08 UTC

Re-reading *The Soul Gained and Lost:
Artificial Intelligence as a Philosophical Project* by Phil Agre as catharsis. [Here](https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/shr.html ).
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

2026-03-20 13:23:33 UTC

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I have had the same experience. I co-founded a startup in 2016 that managed to secure a funding round, and the VCs themselves were giddy about announcing it as widely as possible. I've consulted for startups both before and after that, and as far as I'm aware every one of them that secured funding rapidly announced it. This explanation from Bluesky does not pass a basic smell test.

2026-03-20 13:21:06 UTC

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I second both points!

2026-03-20 13:16:01 UTC

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Bitcoin opened the climate-destroying proof of work floodgate and now we're here.

2026-03-19 13:03:29 UTC

A good review of reasons insurance companies are pulling back from insuring companies that lean on generative AI. Point 4, "The main problem is not just the error, but the incentive not to see it" is especially damning: use of AI not only obscures audit trails, it sets up perverse incentives against accountability, pushing costs and risk to other parts of an organization, its customers, or society. The net result is that whatever "local" advantages AI may provide turn into downstream risk that cannot be easily accounted for. Insurance companies are (rightly) allergic to this state of affairs.
Another example of how (whole)-systems thinking is very helpful for parsing the effects of technology changes like this.
https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/89367
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #AgenticAI #GPT #ChatGPT #Claude #Gemini #ActuarialScience #insurance

2026-03-18 15:36:16 UTC

**Workers who love ‘synergizing paradigms’ might be bad at their jobs**
> Employees who are impressed by vague corporate-speak like “synergistic leadership,” or “growth-hacking paradigms” may struggle with practical decision-making, a new Cornell study reveals.
From https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2026/03/workers-who-love-synergizing-paradigms-might-be-bad-their-jobs
I tried reading this article replacing variations of "corporate" with "LLM" and it works. Right down to the "LLM Bullshit Receptivity Scale (LBSR)".
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #CorporateSpeak #Bullshit

2026-03-17 17:36:59 UTC

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Similar for me. I know people who are down with some preventable illness at least part of a week, if not parts of several weeks every single month during the winter. This is not something that happened this much prior to the COVID pandemic, and I'm honestly at a loss to explain why people tolerate it.

2026-03-17 16:47:13 UTC

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Maybe I'm rude but I ignore it if I can and if I can't I say "I don't get how you tolerate being sick so often."

2026-03-16 23:32:25 UTC

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Seems it's time for an LLM-free Linux distribution, perhaps forking useful projects before they went off the deep end.

2026-03-16 13:26:46 UTC

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I think you've hit on a brilliant new design methodology: SDD (Superstition-Driven Design).

2026-03-08 16:02:11 UTC

Something I've learned from Ruth Ben-Ghiat: aspiring authoritarians purposely engineer situations in which people are invited to give up their values and morals and make decisions that compromise their sense of right and wrong. Moral decay, moral injury, and subsequently moral collapse become so intolerable that afflicted people will blame anything else but their own choices or the leader they threw in with, which of course are the only proximate causes it would be helpful to implicate. The more compromising decisions they make, the more they are drawn into the authoritarian's orbit.
There is no question that it is indefensible to use generative AI systems as they are currently constituted, especially the commercial ones, once one becomes aware of how they are made and operated and the destructive consequences they have already had and will surely continue to have. Among the many reasons using these tools is indefensible is that they represent an authoritarian invitation. You're invited to trade your morals and ethics for a bit of convenience, a reduction in friction, a learning experience, a rhetorical flourish, or maybe (a kind of) status. You thereby align yourself more and more with people who say things like "water is fake" or "fuck earth" as they make the computer systems enabling the horrors we're watching unfold on social media. You start to tell yourself stories, complexifying stories that explain why it's OK you did this thing that you know is not OK. You move in the direction of people who are already telling themselves stories like this. Maybe their stories have superior analgesic qualities to yours.
Nobody needs to go down this path.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ethics #morality #authoritarianism

2026-02-09 18:44:03 UTC

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And who doesn't like a good detective story???

2026-02-09 17:46:50 UTC

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It's true that it's an unfortunate name.

2026-02-09 16:50:07 UTC

I think abduction is a deeply underappreciated aspect of human reasoning.
#logic #abduction

2026-02-09 16:46:06 UTC

**As AI enters the operating room, reports arise of botched surgeries and misidentified body parts**
From https://www.reuters.com/investigations/ai-enters-operating-room-reports-arise-botched-surgeries-misidentified-body-2026-02-09/
I read this and the first thing that came to mind was Kool Keith/Dr. Octagon saying "f@?k it he's dead / oh sh!t there's a horse in the hospital!" on *General Hospital*.
#AI #healthcare #DrOctagon #music

2026-02-09 13:52:59 UTC

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I personally know more than one person who's spent years writing about some method, let's say TDD, going to conferences presenting their ideas etc, fully independently of their employer. Said folks are now slinging AI slop and writing about how great LLMs are. Blaming the employer doesn't pass a smell test.

2026-02-08 20:22:30 UTC

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That's what I had in mind. The key bit is that if our understandable human languages aren't moving up the complexity scale along with whatever it is we think we're representing about math, then "whatever it is we think we're representing about math" is as incomprehensible to us as "all of math". We don't have the language to express it, so it looks algorithmically random (i.e. incompressible)--even as we claim to have made an "automated mathematician" to produce math for us!

2026-02-08 18:40:14 UTC

I'm tinkering with an argument based on algorithmic complexity that if it were possible to make something like an "automated mathematician" or "automated scientist", then these would be expected to eventually produce outputs that we humans would be unable to distinguish from random noise.
Getting the whole argument just right is fiddly, but the basic idea is this. You feed some kind of theory into the AM/AS, which is a black box. It churns on this and spits out a result, which is added to the theory (I'm neglecting the case that the result is inconsistent with the theory). It can now churn on theory + result 1. After doing this long enough, it's churning on theory + result 1 + result 2 + ... + result N. Whatever it spits out will be dependent in particular on results 1 - N. Unless you know these results, you will not be able to understand what it outputs. I.e. it will look like noise to you. If the AM/AS is appreciably faster at producing results than people are at understanding them, there will be an N beyond which no one can understand the output. It'll look like random noise.
If you're into software development, this would be analogous to a software system that generates syntactically-correct code and then adds it to a software library it can then call. If you were to run this long enough, virtually all the programs it generated that were short enough for human beings to read and understand would consist almost entirely of library calls to code generated by the system. You'd have no idea what any of this code did unless you studied the library calls, which you wouldn't be able to do if the system were expanding the library faster than you could read and understand it.
I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader whether this is a desirable thing to do and whether it's happened yet. I would offer, though, a question to ponder: what reason is there to believe that a random number generator hooked up to an inscrutable interpreter produces human flourishing, for any given meaning of "human flourishing" you care to use?
#tech #dev #mathematics #AutomatedMathematician #AutomatedScientist #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ThoughtExperiment

2026-02-08 15:32:07 UTC

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This really makes me wonder whether the decades of constant blog posts about method, such as software craftsmanship, *-driven design, agile, extreme programming, etc etc etc (event sourcing, the hexagonal architecture, etc etc etc etc etc dear lord there are so many), were all, ultimately, not serious. If a single technological advance coupled with hype and corporate pressure is enough to convince people to throw all of that out, how serious could it have been, really?

2026-02-08 00:19:56 UTC

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https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1769891986.847341

2026-02-06 14:47:27 UTC

Happy [Bandcamp Friday](https://daily.bandcamp.com/features/bandcamp-fridays ) to those who celebrate.
#Bandcamp #BandcampFriday #music

2026-02-06 14:22:25 UTC

What they don't tell you, what you have to figure out for yourself, is that the "things" in the slogan "move fast and break things" is us. It's people.
#tech #dev #SiliconValley #SocialMedia #AI #GenAI #etc

2026-02-05 16:15:10 UTC

Economy looking wobbly eh?
#US #economy

2026-02-04 18:49:56 UTC

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I think you're dead on about the focus on automating tasks.
Here's John Searle in 1983:
> Marvin Minsky of MIT says that the next generation of computers will be so intelligent that we will ‘be lucky if they are willing to keep us around the house as household pets.'
Here's Joseph Weizenbaum in 2007:
> Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’
He goes on to note that meat is dead and might be eaten or thrown out. Flesh is what's alive. He also draws attention to the word "merely", as in "nothing more than".
I share with Weizenbaum the belief that Minsky has clearly expressed a *disdain* for human intelligence. We're on the order of household pets. Our brains are no more than food or trash. Obviously Minsky doesn't speak for all AI researchers then or since, but his "meat machine" language is all over the place, and this disdain or even contempt for human intelligence and achievement is also common.
It definitely doesn't speak to a curiosity about intelligence, which I think requires at least a little bit of love and esteem.

2026-02-04 17:52:48 UTC

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He has a history of denying genocides that includes dismissing firsthand accounts of refugees escaping them, going back to the Khmer Rouge at least. Further revelations that he doesn't respect people with less power than he enjoys are unsurprising to me as well.

2026-02-04 16:14:07 UTC

I wonder whether the digital age has led to a decline in the use of atlases, which in turn might be expected to imbue a false sense of increasing objectivity as scientific practitioners of become less acquainted with analog methods.
#science #PhilosophyOfScience #objectivity #digital

2026-02-04 15:42:40 UTC

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Cool! I'm curious how you address the cyborg myth. Given things like artificial hearts and prosthetic limbs there's a believable setup for a sorites paradox: when, exactly, does the person stop being "themselves" as you replace, one by one, their organic parts with mechanical analogs? I think that paradox does a lot of work for people who want to assert organism=mechanism. Do you think there will be a Zoom option or recording of this? I can't see myself making it to Vienna...

2026-02-04 15:34:20 UTC

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If you stuck a human infant into the same "learning environment" as an LLM being trained, they would not learn English. This simple-minded thought experiment demonstrates to me that LLM-based AI, or really anything in machine learning that has this form of training, is not and cannot be a model of human intelligence. Pretending a computer is a human baby doesn't help either but that's another conversation!
I too have been struck by the apparent lack of curiosity of our colleagues. One tentative conclusion I've come to is that there is a subspecies of STEM folks driven largely by impressive demos. I feel like this tendency reflects the perversities of short-termist economic thinking, but in any case the view is a splashy demo that makes it into *Nature* and the NYT but has shoddy science backing it is superior to excellent science that has no splashy demo. The field "progresses" from one impressive demo to the next. Pollack used to say things along these lines, but that's no surprise given that he founded the DEMO lab: it's right there in the name! I think that mindset is not uncommon, though. Even those who agree the science is important run up against the constraint that there's significantly more funding for flashy demos than for basic research.

2026-02-04 11:58:30 UTC

"Cloud" is an appropriate for that kind of computing. From a distance it can appear solid. Up close, it's a fog, with nothing clear and with none of the apparent solidity visible.
#tech #dev #cloud #CloudComputing

2026-02-02 22:08:01 UTC

I am astonished to have bookmarked a message from the Pope in my pile of AI-related links.
[MESSAGE OF HIS HOLINESS POPE LEO XIV FOR THE 60TH WORLD DAY OF SOCIAL COMMUNICATIONS](https://www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiv/en/messages/communications/documents/20260124-messaggio-comunicazioni-sociali.html )
His emphasis on face and voice is good.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #PopeLeo

2026-02-01 17:09:50 UTC

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I am not a lawyer; nor am I deeply studied in the legalities, so you should double and triple check anything I say, and if it ever comes to it, speak to a lawyer.
That said, my understanding is that if you are not under arrest, ICE has no right to access your phone unless they have a judicial warrant. You can file a criminal complaint of theft in the local jurisdiction where it happened (local politicians sometimes recommend this: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2025/06/06/metro/ice-immigration-rights-bystander/ ). The [Alasaad v. McAleenan ruling](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/federal-court-rules-suspicionless-searches-travelers-phones-and-laptops ) found such searches unconstitutional. I don't know what followup rulings might have occurred or whether the consensus has shifted since then. You definitely do not need to consent to a search either of your person or of your phone.
Even if arrested, you are not required to speak to anyone other than to say "I wish to remain silent", "I do not consent to a search", and "I wish to speak to an attorney". You are entitled to contact an attorney. They will confiscate your belongings, but you do not need to tell them the password to unlock your phone.
Practically speaking, this is an agency that is willing to shoot people dead knowing that even the president will openly spread lies about what happened. They will almost surely threaten someone to unlock their phone and will take a copy of its contents regardless of whether they are legally entitled to do that. How much one resists is a question of how much danger one anticipates and what they are comfortable with risking. I'm definitely in no position to make recommendations about something like that.

2026-02-01 16:04:43 UTC

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> The Trump-Vance lie that the city had been “destroyed,” the notion of “carnage,” the dehumanization of immigrants— all of this creates the impression that their promised ethnic cleansing action would be a > *response*> to something, rather than a simple > *choice*> to exercise state violence against an invented racial enemy. These reversals are very important. It is important to consider this carefully.
> First, Vance reported that the Nazi propaganda campaign that he had himself inspired amounted to factual evidence. Mental chaos has been created where there was none before. And then that mental chaos becomes the justification for physical chaos: Trump’s “large deportations,” ICE raids that will, in fact, wreck an improving local economy. And once that physical chaos has been created, it will be blamed on the immigrants who are no longer there. Most of this has already played out. A key threshold, which it appears that we are about to cross, is the application of the state violence. At that point, so to speak, the lie is supposed to become “true.”
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

2026-02-01 15:58:37 UTC

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> In the schools and churches of Springfield, Ohio, people are making hasty preparations for a “large deportation” promised by the president. To all appearances, and according to local sources, the city is two or three days away from a federal ethnic cleansing, grounded in a hate campaign organized by the vice-president and American Nazis. The destined victims are ten thousand or more Haitians.
From [Timothy Snyder's substack](https://snyder.substack.com/p/ethnic-cleansing-in-ohio ). Note the use of the phrases "ethnic cleansing" and "hate campaign", which are accurate. Snyder later states, regarding his use of the word "Nazi", "I use the word advisedly". It's well worth reading what he says about that. J.D. Vance's words led to a self-professed US Nazi group terrorizing Springfield Ohio. Snyder spells out how the hyperreality--the non-existent parallel and false world Vance set in motion and then Trump amplified--is turning into real-world consequences for real people.
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

2026-02-01 15:33:43 UTC

I like the historian Timothy Snyder's observations about what has been happening in the US with respect to ICE recently, and why it is different from previous actions of this agency. I'll paraphrase him, so errors and omissions are mine.
Here's one point: masked thugs in mismatched camo are breaking laws that include abducting, assaulting, and executing people, and the regime is attempting to force us all to refer to this as "law enforcement". For all the many criticisms one might aim at US law enforcement, members typically wear blue, show their faces, and doctrinally aspire to behave transparently and professionally (please don't @ me with your critiques of law enforcement or hashtag ACAB comments; this is not meant as a defense, only a contrast. I've been beaten and teargassed by cops and witnessed far worse so I am acquainted with this aspect of US "law enforcement").
In other words the regime is attempting to change consensus reality so that Americans accept that the phrase "law enforcement" includes random, unprovoked breaking and entering by heavily armed masked men into homes or vehicles, assaults, and summary executions on the street, targeting *all citizens*. They want this to be a normal and accepted occurrence anywhere and at any time. Much as one might criticize previous administration's immigration policies---and one might really really criticize those---this attempt to shift consensus on "law enforcement" to include summary executions of anyone and all the rest is new (It is not new for certain groups; what I think Snyder is saying is that it'd be new for *everyone* to be targeted in this way, and for most people to accept that's just how it is now).
Snyder also points out that the border plays an important role here because it is where the country, and therefore the law, ends. In other words, it's not coincidental that the regime chose to elevate ICE. Historically, authoritarian regimes have a marked tendency to expand the lawlessness and indefiniteness of border zones to include the entire territory of the country, and the current regime is no different. Immigrants and immigration aren't the only targets here. The larger aim is to indefinitely suspend the rule of law nationwide by making the entire nation into a border zone (Recall the Texas governor kidnapping immigrants and shipping them to "blue states", a classic attempt to spread resentment of immigrants throughout the country). Again, this is a narrative move, an attempt to shift consensus reality.
So, one way to resist is to simply not accept either of these attempts to change reality. Continue to refer to what's happening as unacceptable, not who we are, etc. Continue to point out that out of control border "enforcement" has led to street executions. Continue to name these actions as the criminal acts of thugs. Continue to pressure people with power, such as lawmakers, to do the same. Not out of some misguided or naive nationalism or patriotism, but in order to keep a stake firmly planted in the ground against the forces attempting to move it.
Incidentally, all eyes on Haitian and Haitian-American people in Ohio over the coming weeks. The Haiti Temporary Protected Status designation ends this coming Tuesday, February 3, 2026. Haitians in Springfield were specifically abused during the Trump campaign. The US has a long history of abusing and dehumanizing Haitians dating back at least to Thomas Jefferson, so the Trump campaign rhetoric was no outlier or anomaly. Haiti is also one of the countries specifically named in the US State Dept's announcement about indefinitely halting immigrant visa processing. It would not be surprising if the next ICE "surge" targeted Haitian immigrants in Ohio given how the groundwork's been laid.
#USPol #ICE #history #authoritarianism #tyranny #resistance #resist #narrative #immigration #Haiti

2026-01-31 20:39:46 UTC

> The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.
*Truth and Politics*, Hannah Arendt

2026-01-31 19:24:20 UTC

i just tried to type cd .. while viewing a PDF 🤦

2026-01-31 14:19:21 UTC

Finally had a pipe freeze. We have an unfinished basement that usually stays above 40℉, plus I monitor it, so I wasn't concerned. However, it looks like there are localized areas of the basement that get colder than the spot I'm monitoring, and last night it got down to -10℉ outside. Apparently that was enough. The problem looks like it was localized to one spot right at the pressure tank, and hitting it with a space heater for 10 minutes was enough to clear it. It looks like nothing's damaged. Got lucky.
It looks like I'll be doing some insulating. This is the longest, coldest cold snap I've experienced here and the bright side of it is that it's alerted me to a trouble spot as well as the limits of our current systems!
#maine #weather #cold #FrozenPipes #plumbing #insulating

2026-01-30 19:25:29 UTC

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Ars is a font of crithype these days. @npub15wh…e9hw

2026-01-30 16:40:38 UTC

Another read of this is that four organizations claim the right of ownership over "nearly all the world's commercial sound recordings". A cultural archive they claim is worth around half of US GDP, an immense sum.
Frankly it reads to me like an admission of their own guilt.
**Spotify and the three main major record labels sue Anna’s Archive for $13trillion for “brazen theft of millions of files containing nearly all of the world’s commercial sound recordings”**
From https://www.nme.com/news/music/spotify-major-record-labels-sue-annas-archive-13trillion-allege-brazen-theft-millions-files-3925977
#culture #music #AnnasArchive #spotify #UMG #WarnerBros #Sony #lawsuit

2026-01-30 13:34:08 UTC

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A teacher I know, when giving his spiel about his AI, asks "would you bring a forklift to the gym to lift the weights for you?" I like to point out that using AI converts a generation problem (create the work) into a recognition problem (recognize that the work is adequate). The two are cognitively different--you can learn to understand a natural language without ever being able to speak it--and you are giving up an opportunity to learn how to create works better when you lean on AI instead.
Still, it's the framing I object to. This technology has been forced down the throats of everyone, students included, and if surveys are to be believed it's been against a large majority's will. I don't think we should requiring the victims of this, especially not overburdened teachers and their students, to take extra steps to cope with the consequences. That's an injustice we should not accept. But the inclination to try to think of technology solutions to this grander social problem is doing exactly that, in my view. By now technologists have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that they do not have our collective best interests at heart, and we should therefore not be accepting their tools as solutions to the problems they themselves are heavily contributing to causing.

2026-01-29 21:12:25 UTC

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No one should be required to submit to a machine to prove they are a human being who did human work. It is literally dehumanzing to demand this of people, and it leads nowhere good. It's a technosolutionist way of thinking and deepens injustice. Plus, it can't work *on its own terms*. @npub1py4…7td9

2026-01-29 19:51:30 UTC

The phrase describing this behavior is "state terror". It is not "enforcement" or "operations". This is inexcusable.
**ICE agents shatter window, leave 1-month-old baby, mother in car after Portland arrest**
> Video shows federal immigration agents leaving behind an infant and broken glass after detaining a Guinean immigrant with no known criminal history.
#maine #ICE #ICEOut #Trump #USPol #StateTerror

2026-01-29 19:23:05 UTC

Would the perception that an LLM chatbot is speaking to you be dissolved if they were deterministic instead of stochastic?
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #ChatGPT #Claude

2026-01-29 18:03:08 UTC

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It's possible this has come full circle because I'm always chasing my own tail.

2026-01-29 17:53:00 UTC

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I wonder what prompt they used to induce Claude to output this text.

2026-01-29 15:50:52 UTC

Failed another captcha because I couldn't be bothered to read let alone follow the directions.

2026-01-28 15:51:37 UTC

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They propose adding AI slop features to SearXNG. I suspect they're OK with slop-coded features too. You should carefully read these issues if you are going to depend on and recommend this engine.

2026-01-28 15:49:37 UTC

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It's an important development for many reasons, but one is that there are many people now arguing something like this: because of double descent, we don't need to worry about the bias-variance tradeoff anymore. With enough compute we can continuously lower the bias, and with enough data we can continuously lower the variance. It takes a bit more subtlety to tease out why this is a reasoning error. It unfortunately meshes well with prevailing prejudices in thought, especially among technologists (the theory-free ideal, Han's notion of dataism, etc.), so it's a tricky argument to land. I like Brighton's notion of "the bias bias" for this: preferring ever-increasing model complexity really is a bias, unjustified by either evidence or theory.

2026-01-28 15:34:54 UTC

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Beware of SearXNG. They are developing AI psychosis. https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1768916331.977611

2026-01-28 15:30:40 UTC

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The type of docility demanded of us arguably makes us less than human, and in this respect it really is anti-human. This assemblage is certainly anti-imagination, for instance. The "AI subject" is an entity that doesn't think or create, and self maintains this status.

2026-01-27 20:42:16 UTC

I've added 3 domain blocks in the last few weeks, the first time I've had to do this in quite some time. I'm now blocking a nicely symmetrical 111 domains.

2026-01-27 20:29:01 UTC

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I don't have the foggiest idea what you are saying nor why you chose to say it.

2026-01-27 20:10:22 UTC

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> What do these people actually mean when they shout that man is a machine? It is, as I’ve suggested, that human beings are ‘‘computable’’ (> *berechenbar*> ), that they are not distinct from other objects in the world, in any way deserving of special respect or even attention. This then leads, at first gradually and then with exponentially increasing speed, to a view of human beings as mere objects who—no! Not who, > *that*> —can be exploited, inducted in killing machines, imprisoned, tortured, killed (providing they are ‘‘enemy combatants’’). It leads to the American military sponsoring programs to produce robot soldiers. What is then left of Norbert Wiener’s vision of the human use of human beings? And does not our world show us with utmost clarity how far we have already come?
> I want here to emphasize, especially to this audience, that all this is not the fault of the computer. Guilt cannot be attributed to computers. But computers > *enable*> fantasies, many of them wonderful, but also those of people whose compulsion to play God overwhelms their ability to fathom the consequences of their attempt to turn their nightmares into reality.
#AI #ComputerScience #human #life #TormentNexus #machinic

2026-01-27 20:02:52 UTC

> Perhaps the most (in)famous and illustrious American computer scientist and acknowledged principal pioneer of the discipline now known as artificial intelligence (AI), Professor Marvin Minsky of MIT, once pronounced—a belief he still holds—that ‘‘the brain is merely a meat machine.’’ It is significant that the English language distinguishes between ‘‘flesh’’ on the one hand, and ‘‘meat’’ on the other. The latter is dead and may be eaten, thrown in the garbage, fed to pigs, and so on. Flesh, on the other hand, is living matter and, as such, deserves the respect and dignity for life of which, among others, Albert Schweitzer spoke eloquently. The word ‘‘merely’’ in Minsky’s sentence means essentially ‘‘nothing but,’’ that is, also not deserving unusual respect. His statement is a clear reflection of a profound contempt for life that, as I see it, is shared explicitly by important sectors of the AI community, the artificial intelligentsia, as well as many scientists, engineers, and ordinary people. Daniel C. Dennett, an important American philosopher, once said that we must give up our awe of life if we are to make further progress in AI.
From Weizenbaum, Joseph (2007). *Social and Political Impact of the Long-term History of Computing*
#AI #ComputerScience #life #brain #mind

2026-01-27 19:16:42 UTC

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https://buc.ci/abucci/s/post-b4c1b92cf6a5fc5abe1ac917914c12ef.png

2026-01-27 14:54:22 UTC

A few inchoate thoughts on Gas Town, since I think this example has more to it than “it’s just a meth binge/crypto scam/one-shot AI poisoning”. Part of the reason I think this is that some of the rhetoric it deploys dovetails perfectly with broader trends and phenomena, and I think it's worth pulling those out.
1. Economists from the physiocrats (18th century) onward promised society freedom from material deprivation and hard physical labor in exchange for submitting to an economic arrangement of society
2. In a country like the US, material deprivation and hard physical labor have been significantly reduced since then:
1. Though too many clearly still suffer too much, a large proportion of people live free from fear of starvation or lack of shelter
2. The US has deindustralized, meaning hard physical labor is not the reality for a lot of people. For a lot of people labor is emotional or symbolic (“knowledge work”)
3. In other words, for lots of people the economic promise has been fulfilled
3. Having to think hard is one of the service economy’s analogs for hard physical labor. If the promise of economics is to be continually pursued--meaning it maintains the promise that if we collectively submit to it, in exchange we will enjoy a freedom--a natural target of the promise is providing freedom from the need to think hard
1. It is not coincidental that “Gas Town”’s announcement post mentioned Towers of Hanoi, an undergraduate CS student homework problem that for most students requires thinking hard. It’s designed to encourage a kind of “eureka” moment where recursion as a computer programming technique becomes more clear. GT claims to fulfill the promise of not having to think hard like this anymore: the LLMs will do that thinking for you
2. It is not coincidental that Gas Town is described as being very expensive. Economic power in the form of asset accumulation is what earns you freedom in this way of conceiving things. If you want the freedom from having to think hard, you’d better accumulate assets
1. Since the promise is greater collective freedom, endeavoring to accumulate assets is, in this view, a collective good
2. This differs from effective altruism and other “do good by doing well” conceptions. Rather, the very mechanism of economics produces collective wealth, so the story goes, which means the more active one is as an economic agent, the more collective good one produces (“wealth” and “good” being conflated)
3. Accumulation of assets is the scorecard, so to speak, of such enhanced economic activity, and the individual reward can then be freedom from having to think hard
4. Expending significant resources is viewed as a good in itself from a (naive) evolutionary perspective
1. Lotka’s maximum power principle (supposedly) dictates that those entities that transform the most power into useful organization are most fit from an evolutionary standpoint
2. Ernst Juenger’s notion of “total mobilization” brings this principle to politics/political economy/geopolitics: those nations that “totally” mobilize their national resources are the ones that will dominate geopolitically
1. See, for instance, the RAND Corporation’s [Commission on the National Defense Strategy](https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html ): “The Commission finds that the U.S. military **lacks** both the **capabilities** and the **capacity** required to be confident it can deter and **prevail** in combat. It needs to do a better job of **incorporating new technology at scale**; field **more and higher-capability platforms, software, and munitions**; and **deploy innovative operational concepts to employ them together better**.” (emphasis mine). In summary: the US is about to be outcompeted (lacks fitness); in response, it should go big (“at scale”, “more”) in an organized way (“deploy innovative operational concepts”, “employ them together better”)
3. The rhetoric around LLM-based AI includes similar language, exemplified in the GT post: burn through as much infrastructural resources as possible to produced organized outputs “at scale”, dovetailing perfectly with the “total mobilization” concept
4. LLM-based AI plays a prominent role in US federal government strategy, particularly military strategy, with language about dominance serving to justify its use
3. It is not coincidental that Gas Town uses many orders of magnitude more resources to solve the Towers of Hanoi problem (“Burn All The Gas” Town). This dovetails perfectly with the previous remarks
#ComputerScience #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #GasTown #economics #eugenics #MaximumPowerPrinciple #evolution #EvolutionaryTheory #Darwinism #USPol #US

2026-01-27 13:38:52 UTC

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Personally I feel like no left-leaning politics in the US is ever going to fly until leftists grapple directly with their eugenics problem. Granted I am not in a position to say with any certainty, but from where I sit I see almost no evidence that this is happening at all. Nowadays a lot of lefties I know are flirting with "nothing important can happen unless we're sitting in a room together breathing on each other", but will not wear masks, use proper ventilation, or monitor CO2, let alone actively care for one another. Ignoring COVID like this is doing the fascists' work for them.
So yeah, I share your skepticism.

2026-01-27 02:05:59 UTC

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I don't know for sure, but the large number of parameters and large training sets of the popular LLMs strongly suggests they train them past the interpolation threshold, which would mean they cannot be overfit.
If you trained an LLM with only demonstrably true statements, they would still output false statements. They have no representation of truth at the level of the sequences they emit.
"Hallucination" is therefore a human judgment about the human user's reaction to LLM output and is not reflective of any semantic content of that output. All LLM outputs, whether they appear to have semantic content or not and regardless of whether that aligns with the user's expectations, are thus hallucinations in a sense.

2026-01-26 17:15:58 UTC

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It took the three of us a bit under 2 hours to dig out from the roughly 18" of snow (slightly more maybe?). One of us is a four year old who loves being a snowplow. His favorite book right now is The Little Snowplow. There were a bunch of woodpeckers at the feeders, undeterred by the weather. We can get the car out and both the postal truck and the propane truck have clear spaces to do their things. I need new boots.
No grand ideas about the universe came to me, but I did realize something about Bénabou cosmoses I didn't know before so that's something.
#maine #weather #snow #thoughts

2026-01-25 19:01:36 UTC

Looks like the snow has started here. If we do end up with the 12-18 inches the advisories have been warning about, it'll be a mess.
On the bright side, lately I've been doing a lot of informal thinking while shoveling snow. I'm turning over an informal argument grounded on Chaitin incompleteness that if our physical universe has continuous space-time, then we must make non-computable leaps in our theories in order to increase the fidelity of our understanding. "Artificial scientists" running on computers will always have inescapable limits that don't apply to human beings. It's exactly the sort of wacky thing that makes for good shovel thinking.
#maine #winter #weather #advisory #SnowStorm