I think the Vibecoding reddit has accidentally stumbled on the best description of vibecoding: It's "roleplay for guys [it is always guys] who want to feel like hackers without doing the hard part". (Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1mu6t8z/whats_the_point_of_vibe_coding_if_i_still_have_to/ ) #ai #vibecoding

"So if ChatGPT destroys literacy and law, then ChatGPT is going to kill God. By this I don’t mean that the bearded guy in the sky is going to be found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, but that monotheistic religion as we have traditionally understood it will not be able to function in a post-literacy regime." (Original title: ChatGPT is going to kill God)

An und für sich

ChatGPT is going to kill God

I hate generative AI. I hate how it’s destroying writing pedagogy and giving students even more excuses not to read (because they can just re...

Read another "Diversity and Inclusion" thing by some organization that argues that "Diverse teams produce better results because ..." whatever. We demand diversity and inclusion because it is _right_.

"There are hells on earth and Dubai is one: an infernal creation born of the worst of human tendencies."

Sidecar

Caitlín Doherty, Everything Else — Sidecar

In Dubai.

"Whatever" is a brilliant essay on "AI" by @npub1wlqd...6ayh: "But I think the core of what pisses me off is that selling this magic machine requires selling the idea that doing things is worthless. Because if doing something has some value, then it must be somehow better than pushing a button and receiving Whatever for essentially no cost."

The rise of Whatever / fuzzy notepad

Google's emissions are up over 50%, Amazon builds huge data centers powered by 75% natural gas. Remember all those posts telling us that "AIs climate impact isn't that bad" supported by some really funky math/perspective and/or numbers Sam Altman invented? Here's the actual impact. "AI" is a fossil fuel technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/24/technology/amazon-ai-data-centers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.SU8.2JRa.e3Ju6r_pL1Im

the Guardian

Google’s emissions up 51% as AI electricity demand derails efforts to go green

Increase influenced by datacentre growth, with estimated power required by 2026 equalling that of Japan’s

"You can tell what happened — Google promised iNaturalist free money if they would just do something, anything, that had some generative AI in it. iNaturalist forgot why people contribute at all, and took the cash." (Original title: Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage)

Pivot to AI

Google bribes iNaturalist to use generative AI — volunteers quit in outrage

iNaturalist is a website that crowdsources pictures of plants and animals to help identify species. Its tagline is “A Community for Naturalists.�...

I have this idea of building a "Luddite Library". A set of information, tools and processes to harness luddite thinking when analyzing technological developments and "innovation". Something that interested parties could use to understand that there might be a different way to think about what tech is/should be/can be/mustn't be for us. Thin for example sets of questions to use to analyze a new thing being pushed on you and similar tools. I'm thinking about applying for grants to fund this. If anyone has an idea where to propose this, I'd be grateful for a message to: tante+ludditelibrary@tante.cc

It's 2025. How can that ever, like _ever_ happen?

23

Thomas Fricke (he/his) (@thomasfricke@23.social)

Attached: 1 image An all male panel talking about #AI discrimination. Priceless. #wiconf2025

Here's an idea: People in tech want better AI criticism? It's all just too $something? I'm willing to take off a month from work to write a whole bunch of detailed structural criticism if the people demanding better, more specific criticism pay my salary for that month.

Loving this: "The Copilot Delusion" Quotes: "Copilot isn’t that. It’s just the ghost of a thousand blog posts and cocky stack-overflow posts whispering, "Hey, I saw this once. With my eyes. Which means it's good code. Let’s deploy it." Then vanishing when the app hits production and the landing gear won’t come down." "The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop. Eventually, you’re living in a cathedral of technical debt, and every user pays." "At that point, you’re not working with a copilot. You’re playing Russian roulette with a loaded dependency graph." "But even if you're just slapping together another CRUD app for some bloated enterprise, you still owe your users respect. You owe them dignity." https://deplet.ing/the-copilot-delusion/

These 9 rules for evaluating technology sound very luddite to me. (which is good!) (Original title: Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology)

kottke.org

Nine Rules for Evaluating New Technology

In 1987, Wendell Berry wrote an essay called Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer. In it, he outlined his standards for adopting new technology in ...

If you also use Fastmail and are annoyed by the lack of custom background coloring for pinned emails I wrote a small userscript to fix this.

app.fastmail.com by tante

Color the pinned emails in your Fastmail inbox with a special background color

"Discriminative AI turns the complex and contradictory, the wild and weird world of physics and chemistry and people into simple data. It is the tool to build tools. The mold that you can use to shape the world into computer-processable bits of information of higher abstractions." (Original title: Forcing the world into machines)

Smashing Frames

Forcing the world into machines

When people talk about “AI” these days – which depending on how healthy and well-adjusted your social environment is can be very ...

Using AI image generators to create Ghibli style images just shows that you neither respect those pieces of art and their creators as well as not understanding their message of the importance of humanity.

BBC tested AI assistants for summarization and concluded: "91% of AI responses had at least some issues. 51% had “significant” issues." (Original title: AI chatbots are still hopelessly terrible at summarizing news)

Pivot to AI

AI chatbots are still hopelessly terrible at summarizing news

BBC News has run as much content-free AI puffery as any other media outlet. But they had their noses rubbed hard in what trash LLMs were when Apple...

You don't compromise on people's fucking humanity. (Original title: If Not Now, Then Never)

Lefty Cartoons

If Not Now, Then Never

Check out the timelapse video of this cartoon being drawn! TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON This cartoon has four panels. They mostly focus on two members of ...

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism "In other words, the AI industry now finds that it needs all the allies it can get. And it can’t afford to be picky. If the only places that people are seeing AI imagery is (at)BasedEphebophile1488’s verified X account – well, at least it’s being used at all."

New Socialist

AI: The New Aesthetics of Fascism

It's embarrassing, destructive, and looks like shit: AI-generated art is the perfect aesthetic form for the far right.

I increasingly think that accepting the "digital souvereignity" narrative was a pyrrhic victory for European and non-European NGOs. It might have lead to a bit of money here and there but it also plays super into the cards of right-wing thinking.

It's super revealing that Zuckerberg basically equates "lack of masculine energy" and "female energy" which then he calls "neutered". Not great to kinda imply women are neutered men. His world view is basically at pickup-artist/incel levels.