Mastodon Feed: Posts

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

tip for WordPress theme devs if a plugin has terrible CSS specificity (which is all of them)

https://dbushell.com/notes/2026-04-01T13:51Z/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
bodil@treehouse.systems ("Bodil") wrote:

People keep assuring me that LLMs writing code is a revolution, that as long as we maintain sound engineering practices and tight code review they're actually extruding code fit for purpose in a fraction of the time it would take a human.

And every damned time, every damned time any of that code surfaces, like Anthropic's flagship offering just did, somehow it's exactly the pile of steaming technical debt and fifteen year old Stack Overflow snippets we were assured your careful oversight made sure it isn't.

Can someone please explain this to me? Is everyone but you simply prompting it wrong?

It's a good thing programmers aren't susceptible to hubris in any way, or this would have been so much worse.

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

Today is the day I have an appointment with my division chair to announce my retirement.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/01/i-dont-think-the-division-chair-would-react-the-same-way/

pzmyers@freethought.online ("pzmyers 🕷") wrote:

"Nac Mac Feegle! The Wee Free Men! Nae king! Nae quin! Nae laird! Nae master! We willna’ be fooled again!”

Guess what I've been reading.

https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2026/04/01/a-good-slogan/

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

i have to appear human for half an hour at checks notes 1am tonight

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

i was brutally mauled by a category theory.

don't become a victim, support a ban on category theory today.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

delimited discontinuations

Boosted by dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase"):
ironicbadger@techhub.social ("Alex Kretzschmar") wrote:

Brutal.

When Microsoft acquired GitHub.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

wow, LLM enthusiasts occasionally remind me they are a whole other class of person.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
uglyreykjavik.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Ugly Reykjavik") wrote:

Maybe I should have called this account Rusty Reykjavik instead.#Iceland #Reykjavik #photography #streetphotography #nature #landscape #naturephotography #landscapephotography #abandoned #decay #grass #rust

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
beep@follow.ethanmarcotte.com ("Ethan Marcotte") wrote:

I enjoyed @sboots’s essay on becoming a “generative AI vegetarian”, and for a few reasons: it’s a great read, first and foremost, but also my GOODNESS is this well-sourced. Sean pulls together many, many threads here; always grateful for a map like this.

https://sboots.ca/2026/03/11/generative-ai-vegetarianism/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jcoglan wrote:

github has been an art project to demonstrate the need for asynchronous distributed replication. thank for your attention to this matter

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
olivia@scholar.social ("Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ") wrote:

Long story short on relevant parts: tobacco industry jumped on "stress" to divert from cigs cause cancer, much like AI companies will inevitably do the same for psychosis or wtv to divert from the fact that they cause harm. No user is causing this.

As @Iris and I say: "Industry agendas – whether the industry is tobacco, petroleum, pharmaceuticals, or tech – rarely align with human welfare or disinterested research, especially when left unchecked and unregulated."

https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ai-will-not-save-higher-education-but-may-destroy-it-by-olivia-guest-and-iris-van-rooij-2025-10

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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
olivia@scholar.social ("Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ") wrote:

I flinch if anybody thinks I work in "AI Ethics"...

although I suspect they just don't know and mean no harm, but it's not a place of honour

More here: https://doi.org/10.1145/3531146.3533194

And here: https://doi.org/10.1007/s44163-022-00043-3

A short word to describe useful idiots is comprador, because they are agents not of academia anymore but whoever has bought them out and they make a lot of money with their startups and consulting in the process of hollowing out public universities

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprador

12/

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
olivia@scholar.social ("Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ") wrote:

Ending this thread for now by saying what I say in the post below:

> Zooming out, there is much you can do and think about — even just refusing to accept industry frames and rejecting their products is non-negligible.

🙂‍↕️

https://olivia.science/before/

11/

jwz wrote:

Today will be the day when techbros instruct their CODING AGENT to rewrite the company website to be FUNNY but maybe IRONIC but also not RACIST or at least DENIABLY NOT THAT RACIST.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

the good news is that RAM prices are starting to recover. now is the time to summon the last of your patience if you need that RAM upgrade.

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

saw a RAM chart just now and misread as "average price in GDP'' and well ain't that the truth recently?

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
mhoye@cosocial.ca wrote:

It’s sort of incredible that the core lesson of this chart is that if you’re considering migrating to Azure, you really, really don’t want the people who own and operate Azure helping.

https://techhub.social/@ironicbadger/116326155409620757

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
xgranade@wandering.shop ("Cassandra is only carbon now") wrote:

Reading analysis of the Claude Code leak (not reading the code itself, of course) is evidence towards what I had kind of suspected, that the whole thing is a giant magic trick not only in the straightforward LLMentalist way, but also in the sleight of hand way off making you think that this pile of regexes and JSON schema validation loops is *actually* the LLM doing LLM things.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
jasongorman@mastodon.cloud ("Jason Gorman") wrote:

CircleCI's analysis of 28 million CI workflows confirms the same picture the DORA data shows. While feature branch activity's up significantly, the median impact on *main* (i.e. release) branch activity's net-negative 7%.

Only the top 5% of teams saw significant gains. The top 10% flatlined at 1%.

For the average team, AI slows them down overall.

Told ya!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-28-million-workflows-reveal-ai-codings-biggest-risk-circleci-j9syc/

Boosted by jwz:
Rycochet@furs.social wrote:

Happy 'Unfunny People with Websites' day to all who celebrate it.

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
warandpeas ("War and Peas 🧿") wrote:

Book Birthday! Our book "Hi, Earth" is turning one today!

If you want to read it, you can get it from any book store and our online shop (signed even!) :)

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
GossiTheDog@cyberplace.social ("Kevin Beaumont") wrote:

Congrats to Anthropic for vibe leaking all their IP online.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Probably for the best

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

cowhomology

dysfun@treehouse.systems ("gaytabase") wrote:

friend asked me about sheaves and cohomology and i'm half wondering if this is an elaborate prank

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

"A massive Easter sale and a preview of my next book (out late 2026)"

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2026/easter-sale-and-the-toy-factory/

So for this Easter I'm making an experiment

Instead of trying to find time in between projects to work on my next book, I'm attempting to fund that work by offering a preview of it as a part of a Easter sale bundle

Those who buy the bundle or the preview also get to join a newsletter where I document the progress of the book over the coming months and, once it's out, a copy of the final version

jwz wrote:

Happy "techbros and incels try to monetize comedy without understanding it" day to all who celebrate

Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
tante@tldr.nettime.org wrote:

Anthropic's Claude Code's full source code leaked. Claude is seen by many to be the best coding LLM on the market with Anthropic proudly stating that Claude Code itself is mostly written by the LLM.

Now this sounds good as long as nobody can see the code which is quite the trash fire. Detecting "code sentiment" via regular expressions, variable and functions names containing prompt parts trying to influence the bot, a completely intransparent mess of a control flow that makes actual maintenance and debugging functionally impossible and the prompts ... of the prompts. All the begging and pleading to the chatbot not to do this or not to do that or please to do this.

It is fascinating but it is as far away from actual engineering as drunkenly pissing your name in the snow. Dunno what you call the people prompting software at Anthropic but "engineer" is not it.

Now it is fun to look at the currently hyped product striped bare and showing its pathetic quality but that is the future of software if we let those companies continue to undermine every good practice software engineering has tried establishing.

The software we have to use will be bad, insecure, unmaintainable, expensive with nobody having the skills or resources to build something better. As I wrote a few months ago: LLM based software production is equivalent to saying that fast fashion should be the only way to produce clothing. A tragic degeneration of the quality of the artefacts we rely on build for maximum profit on the backs of people in countries from the global majority.