Baldur Bjarnason

Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff.

Blog: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/
AI Book: https://illusion.baldurbjarnason.com/
Pronouns: he/him
Book: https://softwarecrisis.baldurbjarnason.com/

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baldur_at_toot.cafe@momostr.pink

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relay.damus.io

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Last Notes

2025-10-21 13:36:42 UTC

“Mosquitoes found in Iceland for first time as climate crisis warms country | Insects | The Guardian”
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/oct/21/mosquitoes-found-iceland-first-time-climate-crisis-warms-country
Guardian covers the Icelandic mosquito news.

2025-08-31 11:29:14 UTC

At the risk of exposing just how much of a non-listener of audiobooks I am, but how do audiobooks handle references and footnotes in non-fiction?
Or is the format so dominated by narrative prose that it doesn’t really come up?

2025-07-16 09:54:49 UTC

“Michael Tsai - Blog - Gatekeeper Change in macOS 15.4”
https://mjtsai.com/blog/2025/07/15/gatekeeper-change-in-macos-15-4/
Since I'm not a free software zealot, I occasionally consider switching back to the Mac but shit like this makes me sceptical
Desktop Linux is fine for dev, garbage for media work, and has generally poor usability. The usability gap between it and Windows is closing, but that's helped by Windows being an ongoing slow-motion train wreck where the cargo is manure and monopoly-inspired overconfidence

2025-05-03 10:11:05 UTC

“The AI jobs crisis is here, now - by Brian Merchant”
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-ai-jobs-crisis-is-here-now
> The unemployment rate for recent college graduates is unusually high—and historically high in relation to the general unemployment rate
"AI" is killing entry-level jobs, which means that a few years down the line companies won't have senior labour to hire.
This also shows that talk about “AI literacy” and “AI skills” is a joke. You’re not gonna need any skills if employers aren’t employing in the first place

2025-05-02 10:10:00 UTC

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Convertkit rebranding as Kit because they’re worried people will think they’re only for managing mailing lists and they have higher aspirations is like Microsoft rebranding to “Soft” because they’re worried people don’t know what a “microcomputer” is anymore. It was always a nonsense argument

2025-05-02 09:55:53 UTC

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The rich text editor is specifically baffling because it was clunky and buggy from the outset, with issues both in the front end (extremely awkward UX) and in the back end (occasionally lossy conversion of feed HTML into email HTML). It’s a core feature. You’d think it’d be their first priority
What’s worse, I suspect they don’t even realise that their core editor is a bit shit, which is a worrying sign of the taste and judgement of the people managing the place.

2025-05-02 09:48:14 UTC

Is there a term to describe what happened to companies like ConvertKit? Uselessly generic rebrand to "Kit" because of vague aspirations of becoming a "platform", spend tons of dev effort reskinning the entire app, then focus on complicating their code with more and more extensibility, meanwhile their core features are clearly showing signs of abandon. Like the rich text editor for their emails is a clunky mess filled with UX bugs. Because "enshittified" doesn't feel specific enough

2025-05-02 09:26:14 UTC

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“Not everybody in software dev is like that! Some coders genuinely care and put in the work needed to make good software”
True, but I feel confident in saying that next to none of those are leaning hard into “AI coding”
The target market for “AI” is SPECIFICALLY people who don’t care

2025-05-02 09:12:50 UTC

Laughing at "AI" boosters worrying "vibe coding" is becoming synonymous with "AI coding". Tech is vibes througout. Vibe management. Vibe strategy. Vibe design. Coding has been a garbage fire for decades and, yeah it's a vibe-based pop culture from top to bottom and has only been getting worse

2025-04-30 09:29:13 UTC

“Microsoft CEO says up to 30% of the company's code was written by AI | TechCrunch”
https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/microsoft-ceo-says-up-to-30-of-the-companys-code-was-written-by-ai/
Company famous for making a repeated mess of software security "brags" that 30% of its code is written using a tool famous for making a repeated mess of software security.

2025-04-22 14:41:52 UTC

Gmail trying to gaslight me by claiming that the word institution doesn't exist in English. Only to change its mind once I added a period at the end of the sentence.
(We used to have working spell check in our software. What happened? Don't answer, I know what happened.)

2025-04-16 15:29:51 UTC

The feeds I follow used to mostly be free of “AI” topics, but lately it seems like it’s in every other post in my feed reader. Even as the financial side of the AI Bubble is getting shakier, the cultural side of the bubble and the mythologising of “AI” capabilities only seems to go from strength to strength
There are still holdouts. Especially in the creative industries, but it feels like we might be close to a tipping point where we become a minority, at least in tech

2025-04-01 09:46:52 UTC

Perfect timing volcano. Perfect timing. https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2023-12-18-bein-streymi-fra-gosstodvum-399932

2025-03-26 09:42:52 UTC

“Something Bizarre Is Happening to People Who Use ChatGPT a Lot”
https://futurism.com/the-byte/chatgpt-dependence-addiction
> Researchers have found that ChatGPT "power users," or those who use it the most and at the longest durations, are becoming dependent upon — or even addicted to — the chatbot.
Possibly related: what I wrote a couple of years ago on how LLM chatbots function like a mentalist's con
https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/

2025-03-25 18:59:38 UTC

Met this little fella on my walk. He was quite friendly.
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/224/605/591/411/187/original/fbc153e557d2e132.jpg

2025-03-23 11:38:11 UTC

Me, thinking to myself: "I wonder how the LinkedIn post went?"
The post: 3000 impressions and 19 comments.
Including this:
> Is a volcano bad because it’s unpredictable and volatile? What about a hurricane? Is the way a gas distributes through an empty chamber suboptimal because it’s chaotic?
>
> It sounds like you’re frustrated that these robots’ answers are qualitatively different from the robot answers of your grandfathers robots.
>
> Maybe old man cloud yell at a different thing?

2025-03-22 10:56:53 UTC

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Also constantly annoyed by analysis that assumes the tech works as promised or will work as promised. The fact that it is unreliable and nondeterministic needs to be factored into any analysis you do. But people don’t do that because the resulting conclusion is GRIM as hell
LLMs add volatility and unpredictability to every system they touch, which makes those systems impossible to manage. An economy with pervasive LLM automation is an economy in constant chaos

2025-03-22 10:08:30 UTC

Keep hearing reports of guys trusting ChatGPT’s output over experts or even actual documentation. Honestly feels like the AI Bubble’s hold over society has strengthened considerably over the past three months
This also highlights my annoyance with everybody who’s claiming that this tech will be great if every uses it responsibly. Nobody’s using it responsibly. Even the people who think they are already trust the tech much more than it warrants

2025-03-14 12:22:22 UTC

“Sigma BF review: the perfect camera for a minimalist | The Verge”
https://www.theverge.com/camera-review/628519/sigma-bf-camera-review-photography-specs
This here is a great example of how tech media enables and promotes user-hostile design. This "minimalist" camera is harder to hold, more complex to wrangle and use, and deliberate omits features like stabilisation that are there to make cameras easier to use
It's "simple" but not simple to use

2025-03-14 10:28:48 UTC

My mom is on Bluesky so I guess any truly unhinged posting on my part is going to be reserved for Mastodon from now on 😝

2025-03-12 22:09:59 UTC

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Absolutely. And it's no bother. 🙂 You bought via Teachable, which I've stopped using
Anybody who wants an updated version of the ebooks they got from there can just contact me (like you just did)
The original download URL should still work but obviously doesn't contain the new version
I've sent you an email to your original purchase email with details on how to access the updated bundle.
Let me know if there's an issue or if the email doesn't arrive.

2025-03-12 00:32:28 UTC

A couple of photos of birds perched on roofs. Frist one is a pigeon. The second is a raven on the local church
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/146/632/806/536/212/original/89633779b7b44d41.jpg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/146/632/816/558/690/original/d5af59492b9708b5.jpg

2025-03-10 10:09:23 UTC

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We’ve had three years of github copilot and two of chatgpt, both promising magical productivity gains for software dev, and the only change noticed by regular users is that everything keeps getting shittier, but now with more useless chatbots

2025-03-10 09:59:50 UTC

The software industry keeps talking about increasing productivity without giving a damn about whether any of it works. Everybody keeps adopting magic solutions and becoming so much more productive even as the software itself just keeps getting shittier.
https://c.im/@matdevdug/114137494259127155

2025-03-09 11:54:38 UTC

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What most people don't get is that critics like me are the optimists in this scenario. A future where the fundamental issues with LLMs will lead them to causing more problems than they solve, resulting in much of it being rolled back after the bubble pops is the least bad future for dev as a career.
Because monitoring automation is a low-wage activity and an industry dominated by that kind of automation requires much much fewer workers than one that's fundamentally built on expertise.

2025-03-09 11:50:57 UTC

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I'm sure you're being bombarded with replies
But, brushing past the issues with the software industry that are enabling problematic use of LLMs: it's understandable that coders to feel conflicted about them, even if you assume the tech works as promised, because you've just changed jobs
You've gone from thoughtful problem-solving to babysitting
Monitoring automation will never be an engaging activity
And, in the long run, a babysitter gets paid much less an expert

2025-03-04 18:56:47 UTC

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Sure. Can't guarantee a response, though. Signing off of social media in a few minutes for the day 🙂

2025-03-04 18:53:43 UTC

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Thanks! Yeah, noticed it on one of my walks and just had to stop and take a picture. 🙂

2025-03-04 18:42:29 UTC

A few recent photos from around Hveragerði
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/105/621/790/732/272/original/7b02eba570a25dd7.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/105/628/611/285/405/original/2ec95bfd5b9fe91b.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/105/628/634/787/830/original/024f1eddfdf4a6fd.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/105/628/634/959/366/original/24faa6b4b6d89058.jpeg

2025-03-04 17:41:39 UTC

In the continuing saga of "most software seems to be getting substantially worse over the past year" I've been having a hard time finding a reliable photo workflow lately.
- OSS photo software on desktop Linux is just outright garbage
- Adobe seems incapable of selling a Lightroom cloud subscription to Iceland
- The new version of Apple Photos is A. much worse and B. still doesn't properly support Fuji raw
- CaptureOne on the iPad regularly crashes

2025-03-03 21:46:47 UTC

So, I wonder if it’s common knowledge or not that you’re supposed to dim the lights when watching film or videos that play at 24/25 frames per second?
As in, 24fps specifically relies on the lingering afterimage in your eyes created from watching something brightly lit in a dim setting to function.

2025-03-03 10:46:12 UTC

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Also, the methodologies and approaches of each field varies enormously. The context you take in, the ways you read, and the way you discuss the Bible varies depending on what your actual field is. History, comparative literature, comparative theology, and philosophy all read it in completely different ways. Doing a generic "humanities" reading of the Bible is a nonsense activity. It's cosplay.

2025-03-03 10:46:12 UTC

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The core issue here is that reading the Bible without context, without notes on the translation, the history of translations, theories of how the text evolved and was constructed, is a religious activity and not something done by any of the fields of the humanities

2025-03-03 10:46:11 UTC

“Humanities Crash Course Week 9: The Bible | Jorge Arango”
https://jarango.com/2025/03/02/humanities-crash-course-week-9/
This is a good demonstration of why techies talking about "humanities" are just cosplaying intellectuals and not actually engaging in any intellectual or academic activity. (Quoting Nietzsche is the hallmark of an asshole but his "bildungsphilister" is the perfect name for this.)

2025-03-03 10:21:30 UTC

“Hollywood’s obsession with AI-enabled ‘perfection’ is making movies less human - Fast Company”
https://www.fastcompany.com/91285846/hollywood-ai-enabled-perfection-the-brutalist
> Throughout 2024, Cage spoke against AI every chance he got.
I'm with Nicholas Cage. Modern media's obsession with making seamless artefacts is a good way of making works that nobody can relate to.

2025-02-28 11:49:49 UTC

Torn between linking to a piece of hot nonsense and explaining in detail why, even though it's hot nonsense, it's an indication of a five-alarm fire for the node.js job market, or just keeping it simple like so:
That managers are writing nonsense posts that are variations of "node.js is perfect for AI" means the node.js job market is about to get substantially worse
Huh? Guess I didn't need to link to the nonsense post.

2025-02-25 09:43:46 UTC

So Ed Zitron has been digging into the numbers behind the AI Bubble and coming away pessimistic and, unusually, I actually think he’s downplaying the risks a bit because much of them are hard to quantify as hard numbers
https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
- The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?

2025-02-23 10:10:23 UTC

“The Guy Who Invented Those Annoying Password Rules Now Regrets Wasting Your Time”
https://gizmodo.com/the-guy-who-invented-those-annoying-password-rules-now-1797643987

2025-02-22 16:59:39 UTC

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Apple's Mail app is slower and more cluttered
TV now occasionally tries to shut itself off for "power management" halfway through a broadcast, as if it's not been playing anything for the past hour.
And that's without getting into the constant push of "AI" features and chatbots where none are needed.
It's all so incredibly annoying.

2025-02-22 16:59:26 UTC

A running themes over my past year is software getting substantially worse with each update.
And I'm not just talking about the usual, "fuckers moved everything and introduced a bunch of bugs so now my productivity will need a few weeks to recover". Outright declines in reliability and quality.
The Android-based devices now all have less reliable wifi.
Autocomplete and overall touch keyboard reliability and responsiveness is much worse for both the iPhone and iPad.

2025-02-20 09:48:22 UTC

The cognitive dissonance of Icelandic radio can be wild sometimes. Half the time it’s radio edits, like that of Doechii’s latest, and then the next DJ will turn around and play “Fuck the Pain Away” by Peaches.

2025-02-19 17:44:01 UTC

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The meeting actually went well. Everybody agreed that there was enough shit going on in the world without us making additional problems in the building
😮‍💨

2025-02-19 13:29:35 UTC

That feeling when you have a stress headache, not because of the ongoing collapse of the world into authoritarianism and fascism, and not because of the decline in the tech job/freelancing market, but because of the homeowners association meeting scheduled for later this day.

2025-02-18 13:24:53 UTC

I’ve written about this before but in 2018 I was living in Montréal, trying to go through the immigration process, and feeling quite alienated. One of my coping mechanisms was going to Parc Jarry and take photos. Last year I finally narrowed the thousands of pictures I took down to a proper four photos, one for each season. Summer. Autumn. Winter. Spring.
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/025/103/025/531/329/original/c15e73e9798df15a.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/025/103/524/885/051/original/273b4dcc1d6963ab.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/025/104/174/204/074/original/5212d9576ebb62e4.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/114/025/104/895/484/689/original/b970853627133980.jpeg

2025-02-17 12:29:51 UTC

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TBF, I'm not really worried about the new generation of coders. I'm worried about the industry being run by people who think this is desirable and being uninterested in hiring people who can actually code.

2025-02-17 12:23:07 UTC

“New Junior Developers Can’t Actually Code | N’s Blog”
https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning
JFC. Reading this just as I'm feeling especially discouraged about staying in coding was probably not a good idea.

2025-02-14 11:40:58 UTC

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Responding when they were not mentioned makes them an asshole

2025-02-11 10:59:03 UTC

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A third scenario, which is less likely, is that pushback results in the US returning to more democratic principles that result in a more peaceful decline
I personally don't think that's likely as my impression of the US public is that they are not temperamentally likely to take the idea of not being the world's biggest power peacefully, but I truly appreciate those in the states who are trying to make it happen. You gotta try

2025-02-11 10:59:03 UTC

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You can't really prepare for any of these scenarios as an individual as they are likely to happen on timelines that are unpredictable, so I'm mostly trying to figure out how to stop thinking about it 😐

2025-02-11 10:59:03 UTC

My "uplifting” thoughts at the moment:
- The US is in a terminal decline and has been for a while (took the wrong turn in 2008, that being the last point of potential turnaround)
- A slowish decline is the least likely to destabilise the world. A fast decline would be an existential threat to the rest of us
- But a slowly declining US, still the world’s biggest power, ruled by an out-of-control autocrat, is also an existential threat to countries like Canada, Mexico, Greenland, &… well, Iceland

2025-02-07 11:05:03 UTC

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So, I just don’t see how we’re going to avoid a wholesale deterioration of the effectiveness of organisations, institutions, and companies in Europe and the US. The few that avoid using the tools because the bubble makes the tools too risky to adopt still have to use the services and products made by the rest

2025-02-07 11:04:38 UTC

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If we’re lucky, managers and execs might realise months after the fact that they’ve sabotaged their organisations by adopting these tools, but that’s unlikely because there’s plenty of economic “cover” going on. They won't realise the organisation is doing badly because of their mismanagement (their persistent overconfidence doesn't help), but because of tariffs or whatever

2025-02-07 11:03:41 UTC

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Copywriting, illustrating, editing, or coding, the work that the model is doing simply isn’t the work the human was doing
David Gerard links to a good example of this happening in press releases https://toot.cafe/@davidgerard@circumstances.run/113958441383464091
The "AI" replacement simply isn't doing the job it supposedly replaces

2025-02-07 11:02:28 UTC

I’ve often made the point that generative AI is an amazing tech much like asbestos is an amazing material: they have qualities that feel like genuine miracles but at a human cost so high that broad adoption is only possible if human life is devalued beyond what has been acceptable up until now
But much of the adoption of generative models doesn’t come from the few it does well, but is driven by those who do not understand the job they’re replacing.

2025-02-07 10:40:34 UTC

“The Coup”
https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/the-coup/
> We're all below the AI line except for a very very very small group of wealthy white men. And they truly fucking hate us.

2025-02-06 11:55:16 UTC

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A lot to agree with here. For example, I've been trying to get my sister to join social media to share her illustration and art work (she's managed to avoid being active on social media since Livejournal fell apart) and, honestly, there's no way I'd tell her to join Mastodon
But Bluesky, with it's moderation features, and bridged over to Mastodon? Sure. That'd work.

2025-02-06 11:55:08 UTC

"Bridges & scruples"
https://www.wrecka.ge/bridges-scruples/
> I wanted to write a little short post about a very practical set of network decisions by the makers and users and refusers of Bridgy Fed

2025-02-05 14:17:43 UTC

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Aaaand the storm has been upgraded to a red alert
https://en.vedur.is/alerts

2025-02-05 13:36:22 UTC

Todo notes as a storm approaches
https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/todo-notes-as-a-storm-approaches/

2025-02-05 09:33:58 UTC

“Licking the AI Boot | deadSimpleTech”
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/licking_ai_boot
> In short, everyone involved in the current AI bullshit is deeply, deeply tainted by involvement in a goddamned fucking coup of the US government, and should be treated as such

2025-01-31 12:30:10 UTC

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In some cases, sure. But a number of them used to write in ways that were genuinely well-thought out and they consistently avoided herd mentality during previous tech fads like cryptocoins. The number of previously critical tech people I’ve been following who are now all-in on “AI” is seriously alarming.

2025-01-31 12:17:34 UTC

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Honestly, the number of people who have gone from “this person regularly makes interesting observations and writes thoughtfully” to “OMG! What’s wrong with you? That’s not how anything works! That’s not even a line of reasoning. You’re just jumping from bullshit to bullshit in a smelly series of half-baked non-sequiturs!”

2025-01-31 12:12:29 UTC

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I mean—sure—a bunch of you are still sensible folks working on the same kinds of problems you always have. But so so many aren't just head-first into generative models but seem to also have giving up on thinking clearly about anything.
Makes me sometimes wish I could reach out over the net and smack people in the head with a rolled up newspaper. It wouldn't help at all but it would definitely make me feel better.

2025-01-31 12:12:28 UTC

My feed reader used to be my safe haven from social media. Half of the feeds were writers and artists writing about what they do. The other half were generally software people writing about problems they were solving.
But now most of the creative side are in despair—being squeezed between rising authoritarianism and tech-inspired mismanagement of their industries—and the software side is just so much fucking nonsense.

2025-01-29 17:20:49 UTC

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"But they're using the output to 'distil' OpenAI's models somehow! They're stealing their intellectual property!"
Reverse engineering your garbage based on observing the shit it does generally isn't illegal either, so we're back to just a plain old fucking Terms of Service violation

2025-01-29 13:29:48 UTC

I seem to be the only one who remembers that LLM output is generally not covered by copyright protection so whatever it is that DeepSeek has been accused of doing absolutely isn't a form of copyright or intellectual property infringement. Terms of Service violation at the most. 🤷‍♂️

2025-01-29 09:36:08 UTC

So, the idea seems to be that works by humans—such as pretty much everything in the training data set OpenAI and the rest used without permission—should not have copyright protection? But the autogenerated output of a programs should?
Not that I’m expecting my colleagues in tech to notice how absurd that is, but that is an absurd argument
https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/28/david-sacks-claims-theres-substantial-evidence-that-deepseek-used-openais-models-to-train-its-own/

2025-01-28 16:50:52 UTC

Anybody got an opinion on https://taskfile.dev/ as a task runner for small- to medium-sized projects?

2025-01-27 15:45:18 UTC

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Big tech companies are planning to buy a lot lot lot more and build a bunch of new data centres to house them in. I don’t actually expect them to change course in any way. It’s likelier that they’ll just continue to lose more and more money as everybody else changes course (and as demand drops as not nearly as many customer genuinely want this as they had hoped)

2025-01-27 15:31:18 UTC

“That they used Nvidia chips, just 10x fewer and mostly older gen is still good news for Nvidia, right? It’s not a disaster to have potentially overestimated demand by tenfold, right?”
Let’s all have a tiny bit of schadenfreude, as a treat, at least until the reality distortion kicks in again

2025-01-27 11:42:07 UTC

"Announcing ES Module Shims 2.0"
https://guybedford.com/es-module-shims-2.0
Shouldn't this at least mention that enabling the typescript type stripping adds a 3MB module to your JS payload? Interesting experiment but feels unwise for production

2025-01-27 11:11:30 UTC

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Or, even shorter version: I fucking told you so.
There is almost never a first-mover advantage in tech. More often first-movers are the assholes who clear the minefield for the rest by blowing up their companies with foolishness
Avoiding bubble tech until the bubble pops isn’t just socially responsible, it’s good strategy.

2025-01-27 11:11:29 UTC

Managed to stifle the urge to write a blog post on current events in tech, because ephemeral shit is ephemeral shit, right?
Instead, here’s the super short version: a core point in my book on AI was that there is no upside to being an early adopter of a fast-moving tech during a bubble
Anything you gain in the short term will be more than lost in the medium term as the risks of undetected fraud/shenanigans are too high, whatever you integrate will become obsolete and extremely expensive

2025-01-27 10:15:36 UTC

Nobody’s ever explained how the TikTok sale is supposed to work
- Can they just sell the US portion of TikTok?
- How would that work for international branding?
- Or are they forcing the purchase of global TikTok which has 1b users instead of the US’s 170m
- What happens when US TikTokkers travel?
- Would US TikTok be a separate network?
- Bytedance doesn’t want to sell the algorithm and without it TikTok isn’t TikTok
- Could they sell US TikTok with the caveat that it needs to be renamed?

2025-01-25 15:18:10 UTC

Every time I discover that a relative has gone masks-off Trumpist it’s always both a surprise—“somebody here in Iceland has fallen for the most American of extremisms?”—and completely unsurprising—“well, he has been regularly making offensive jokes over the years and has ’boundary issues’ to put it kindly”.

2025-01-22 16:54:59 UTC

Still working on this for later this week. Over 3500 words. Definitely something wrong with me.
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/873/045/912/132/110/original/51873aa07d88709b.png

2025-01-22 13:28:57 UTC

Finally got around to exporting the archive and then closing my Twitter account. I haven't used it in for over a couple of years now but I figure there's plenty of reason to close it completely.
(Also, 4GB? WTF is in that archive?)

2025-01-21 09:41:48 UTC

A useful aspect to a completely unambiguous fascist gesture, even though it’s ultimately performative, is that you can use it to gauge which news media you can trust to call a Nazi a Nazi, which will obfuscate things with layers of “both-sidesing”, and which will outright be regurgitating propaganda

2025-01-20 15:38:59 UTC

Fun Icelandic fact: we have two different words for ravens. “Hrafn” is the formal Icelandic word for raven and used in most writing. “Krummi” is the less formal and more friendly nickname
This applies also to people whose name is “Hrafn”, who are often called “Krummi” by friends and family

2025-01-18 11:21:37 UTC

Moving what I own of Gaiman’s work over to the “asshole” section of my graphic novel collection, next to Warren Ellis and John Byrne.

2025-01-18 10:59:35 UTC

“Here's a notification for _you_, Apple: There is no husband”
https://techthings.cmail20.com/t/d-e-sjrttn-dykjyuhruh-r/
> Summaries of messages from my wife often include the word “husband”—usually when she’s talking about one of our sons.
This is a great example of how biases work in LLMs. Instead of the hard bigotry of getting punched in the gut for being too camp or shouted at in the street, they represent the soft bigotry of pretending you both don't and _can't_ exist no matter how much you try to correct them

2025-01-16 15:23:39 UTC

“They’re planning on shutting the app down, even though it’s not required by the law. It’s a PR stunt.”
Ugh.
Do try to understand the logistics of servicing 170m users when every infrastructure and tech co in that country is legally barred from selling you most of the services you need and it’s become untenable for you to maintain operations in the country. I’m not sure they could keep it going for long in the US even if they tried

2025-01-16 13:21:23 UTC

The web is a creative industry and is facing the same decline and shattered economics as film, TV, or publishing: https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/the-web-is-a-creative-industry/

2024-12-02 11:54:40 UTC

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The newsletter isn't as dire, even though it's largely the same stuff. Very slight growth despite having a number of genuinely popular posts during this period. That traffic hasn't been translating into subscriptions
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/583/093/845/413/232/original/d541221760fc3c00.png

2024-12-02 11:54:12 UTC

If I want my blog to have any feed subscribers in 2025, then it certainly looks like I stop whatever it is I'm currently doing. The graph below is of my feed subscribers. When it drops, that means somebody actively unsubscribed and isn't just inactive.
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/583/090/480/732/453/original/c4ae10faa001b098.png

2024-12-01 19:19:30 UTC

Whenever I manage to cheer myself up, something happens to remind me that things are... not optimal in the world and there's plenty of reason to believe it's going to get worse and I get depressed again. (Though "depressed" doesn't feel like the right word when you're down for entirely rational reasons.)
I seriously need to figure out a way to shore up my mental and emotional reserves because we're all gonna need them over the next few years

2024-12-01 16:49:44 UTC

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Yup. And most EU workers don’t bother to try.

2024-12-01 16:24:35 UTC

You can reliably start an argument around election time here in Iceland, by saying something along the lines of "around 20% of the population of Iceland are immigrants with permanent residency of some sort but have no right to vote and that's inherently undemocratic". Rarely fails.

2024-12-01 11:58:39 UTC

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We could still get a centre-right government with support from the populist People’s Party. If that ends up being the case then we’re probably in for a similarly bad ride as the UK is on currently. 😬

2024-12-01 11:44:40 UTC

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Iceland has three overtly nationalist parties in parliament now, the Independence Party—the oldest—is “tightly integrated with domestic industry” (read: does what the oligarchs want), the Centre Party is overtly Trumpist, mysogynistic and racist, and the People’s Party are the populist who have sucked up votes on the left by promising to rebuild the healthcare, retirement, and welfare systems, but mixed in with a bunch of anti-immigrant, reactionary and xenophobic ideas.

2024-12-01 11:44:40 UTC

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I have no idea where it goes from here. Not good, but could have been worse. We were about 2% away from probably having an outright nationalistic right-wing coalition in power, which would have been disastrous. So I have my fingers crossed hoping for the least bad outcome for the coalition talks

2024-12-01 11:44:40 UTC

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Framsókn (Progressive Party) was one of the biggest losers of the election. They have a long, long history of gross nationalism. (One of their pre-war policy planks was to get rid of “degenerate art”.) But they’ve been trying to shed that image in later years which lead members to split into a new party: the overtly Trumpist Centre Party. So, trying to shed nationalism is effectively the root cause of their collapse

2024-12-01 11:44:39 UTC

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There aren’t that many paths to a coalition government. The likeliest one is a coalition of centre-left, centre-right, and the least worst of the populist bunch, the People’s Party (still bad IMO). How that would play out is anybody’s guess because, well, it’s never been done and many of the new MPs are unknown quantities. It’s likely, though, that we’ll see harsher policies for both asylum seekers and non-EU immigrants.

2024-12-01 11:44:39 UTC

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Also, some of you may remember that the leader of the Independence Party is the one who called this election and I speculated that it might have been because he was about to face a leadership challenge. No matter how the election went he could spin it as a “defensive victory”. That party has just had its worst election outcome in its history but the media is already talking about, you guessed it, a “defensive victory”. Looks like a perfect play on his part

2024-12-01 11:44:39 UTC

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Policy-wise, the social-democrats are further to the left than, say, UK’s labour and two of the social democrats’ likely candidates for ministries are the people responsible for steering Iceland’s successful response to the Covid pandemic. Also, unlike UK’s Labour, we don’t have to deal with an economy in terminal decline
A right-wing coalition is also possible but a bit less likely because of the personalities involved.

2024-12-01 11:44:38 UTC

Mixed feelings about these election results. (See https://www.ruv.is/english/2024-11-30-iceland-elects-full-coverage-429449) Media talk about “polarisation” was complete nonsense. The left united, for the most part, behind the centre-left social democrats, and all of the actual left-wing parties were wiped out. The business-oriented right-wing shifted to the centre-right (Viðreisn). But the rest all went for nationalist or populist parties

2024-12-01 11:44:38 UTC

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The Pirate Party made several missteps and fell apart in dissarray. Left-Greens are seen as traitors after helping keep a right-wing gov alive for seven years. The Socialists suffer from having been founded by a “reformed” right-wing libertarian who many on the left don’t trust (for good reason). So, it’s not surprising that these left-wing parties have all been wiped out. It would be nice if they got replaced in the next election with a united left-wing party, but I’m not holding my breath.

2024-12-01 11:02:20 UTC

“Strategy is Not War; It’s Gardening – Eleganthack”
https://eleganthack.com/strategy-is-not-war-its-gardening/

2024-11-30 17:48:30 UTC

Went out and followed the local ravens around for a bit. A few more juveniles have joined the ones that arrived the other day. I’m guessing there are at least ten currently in town
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/573/140/000/889/497/original/1c0e21897e9ceb5c.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/573/140/289/789/969/original/0f4c7c3d24440cc7.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/573/140/654/229/491/original/d7e3b23a4fe13b3f.jpeg
https://assets.toot.cafe/media_attachments/files/113/573/141/639/996/118/original/8246bd77274db1df.jpeg

2024-11-30 11:35:27 UTC

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Alien: Romulus. Possibly the most competently executed Alien movie since Aliens. Also everything about it is completely unnecessary. Being a prequel, it's already committed not doing anything that fucking matters.
Furiosa: Probably the second-best Mad Max movie after Fury Road, but still completely unnecessary and adds nothing. Heavy prequelitis.