”The people and companies selling ‘AI’ technologies routinely use language that portrays their systems as human-like […]. #Anthropomorphizing language influences how people perceive a system on multiple levels.”
“We argue that we should aim for higher #linguistic accuracy in our descriptions of ‘AI’ systems. In #scientific and #journalistic writing, in public debate, and in everyday use.”

In distributed computing, a conflict-free replicated data type (CRDT) is a data structure that is replicated across multiple computers in a network, with the following features:

The application can update any replica independently, concurrently and without coordinating with other replicas.
An algorithm (itself part of the data type) automatically resolves any inconsistencies that might occur.
Although replicas may have different state at any particular point in time, they are guaranteed to eventually converge.

The CRDT concept was formally defined in 2011 by Marc Shapiro, Nuno Preguiça, Carlos Baquero and Marek Zawirski. Development was initially motivated by collaborative text editing and mobile computing. CRDTs have also been used in online chat systems, online gambling, and in the SoundCloud audio distribution platform. The NoSQL distributed databases Redis, Riak and Cosmos DB have CRDT data types.

Ich kann Ihnen jedenfalls aufrichtig versichern: Wenn ich groß bin, möcht ich gern ein bisserl wie Sie sein.

Da müssen Sie gar nicht so viel dran arbeiten. Da müssen Sie nur einen gewissen Charakter haben, und auch politisch eine klare Stellung beziehen, bei all der Scheiße, die Sie umgibt. Das ist gar nicht leicht, weil es umgibt uns sehr viel Scheiße, inzwischen. Leider. Das hätt ich auch nie gedacht, dass ich das noch einmal erleben muss. Aber der Witz ist der, man muss nur hellwach sein und ein bisschen klar schauen.

HTML has been gobbling up swathes of what used to be JavaScript’s remit. This page lists a bunch of dynamic functionality that we can now achieve with just HTML.

My third post about typography in sci-fi has been gestating for a while now. Indeed, it’s been slowly taking shape – you might say it’s been forming itself inside of me – for really quite some time.

I’m delighted to say that it is now ready to burst forth from my allegorical chest, and to spatter allegorical typographic blood all over your allegorical faces. Welcome to Typeset In The Future: The Alien Edition.

The opening credits for Alien are nothing short of a typographic masterpiece.

Let me start by saying, I vehemently hate AI as it is. It is blight upon our planet. In so many ways.

Because of the "popularity" of AI with managers and CEOs who are, actually looking to replace all of us with a series of if/then statements, AI and LLMS have become the big tech fad these days. This has resulted in a series of repercussions for everyone else:

The AI software/LLMs require massive amounts of extremely powerful hardware, because by design, AI is horribly inefficient. So this has resulted in a "Datacenter Boom" across the planet. Datacenters are essentially just warehouses stuffed with computers. Think of Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Oracle Cloud, your Preferred hosting provider/cloud provider, Private datacenters for large companies, etc.

As you might imagine, the desire to stand up more datacenters has resulted in more hardware being bought up by the big tech conglomerates. Famously, Sam Altman of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT bought out 40% of the world's RAM production about a year ago. There are three major RAM manufacturers on the planet: Samsung, Micron, and SK Hynix. Just kidding there's only really two now because Micron has decided that they are no longer selling to the general market and have exclusively gone to AI datacenter sales only. On top of all that, global RAM production capacity has been bought out through 2028. This of course has predictably caused the price of RAM to fucktuple.

The GNOME Shell Extension - Quake Terminal enhances your desktop by providing a drop-down interface, inspired by classic Quake games, that can instantly launch your preferred terminal emulator over any workspace.

AI needs a do-over. As it exists right now, I don’t give a toss what good it can do, what practical benefits it has once the techbros move on to their next mark. I don’t care about any of it at all because AI companies botched the first impressions so hard by telling me consent is a foreign concept and I need to just roll over and submit, or I’ll be left behind forever.

It was this brazen disregard for any kind of consent from the get go that did most of the work in turning me against anything AI had to offer.

If you want me to care about AI? Start over. From zero. Consent needs to be a core concept of it. If people don’t want to use it, respect that opinion. Do NOT treat every no as a thinly veiled yes. Do not force it on people who don’t want it. And if people don’t want it, don’t scream "you’ll like it!" or "it’s the future, get with it or get left behind!" at them.

Because that language sounds eerily similar to the type of language used in domestic abuse situations and is that really the way you want to come off? (Regrettably, some of the psychopaths who push this garbage would nod yes with a grin across their face because they’re absolutely depraved. These people should not be allowed to be anywhere near the helm of a tech company. But alas, this is 2026.)

In kommunalen Diskussionen sind die Chancen von Sprachmodell-KI und ihren Agenten seltsam risikobefreit. Dass die Chancen zu höherer Produktivität, mehr Effizienz oder schnellerer Bearbeitung führen, scheint gewiss. Man müsse es nur richtig machen.

Aber wie es generell „richtig“ geht, kann niemand wissen. Use-Cases und Best Practices geben Anregungen, sind aber interkommunal nicht so übertragbar, wie man sich das vorstellt. Die Beharrlichkeit und soziale Intelligenz historisch gewachsener, lokaler Organisationsstrukturen werden unterschätzt.

The concern driving all this is the US CLOUD Act. It lets American authorities request data held by US firms, even in overseas data centres. Last year a Microsoft executive told a French court, under oath, that the company could not guarantee data sovereignty.

Everyone is an artist.
Lots of people consider themselves to be "hackers" or "makers", but wouldn’t call themselves "artists". One of our goals should be to show people that they are. We can do this by creating a level playing field between more established artists and people just bringing a little thing that they’ve made. We want people to be proud of their work and see how valued it is.

Being encouraging:

• lots of people are just starting out making things and need encouragement

Even if you’ve done EMF multiple times before and are an experienced installation artist, making something new is always hard. It’s easy to get sucked into negative thoughts about your work and sometimes someone just saying "yes! that sounds amazing!" is what you need to find the motivation to complete it.

Equally, sometimes a project just doesn’t work out how you’d hoped, no matter how hard you work on it. Having someone say, "hey! that’s cool, don’t worry about it" can restore your confidence.

inside-voice is a terminal app that helps you keep your speaking volume down while you are on Zoom, Google Meet, or other calls. It watches your microphone level and plays a short local chime when your voice crosses above an adjustable dB threshold, or after it stays above the threshold for a configurable duration.

I believe that vibe coding — irrespective of whether it’s useful for enterprises, which I doubt — is being marketed towards consumers in a deeply unethical way. One that’s worryingly reminiscent of multi-level marketing schemes like Herbalife and Amway, or the crypto grifts of the 2010s.

I believe that Replit’s decision to target younger people at a time when they’re struggling to find work, or are convinced that the future workplace has no use for them, is deeply predatory.

Any creator that promotes Replit without being transparent about the likelihood of building a million-dollar app, or about the costs of building software with AI, is either willingly complicit in a cynical, harmful scam, or otherwise promoting a technology that they themselves do not understand.

One of the issues in during this research—one that has perplexed me—has been that many people are convinced that language models, or specifically chat-based language models, are intelligent.

…

LLMs are not brains and do not meaningfully share any of the mechanisms that animals or people use to reason or think.

LLMs are a mathematical model of language tokens. You give a LLM text, and it will give you a mathematically plausible response to that text.

There is no reason to believe that it thinks or reasons—indeed, every AI researcher and vendor to date has repeatedly emphasised that these models don’t think.

…

Many of the proposed use cases now look like borderline fraudulent pseudoscience to me.

The intelligence illusion seems to be based on the same mechanism as that of a psychic’s con, often called cold reading. It looks like an accidental automation of the same basic tactic.

By using validation statements, such as sentences that use the Forer effect, the chatbot and the psychic both give the impression of being able to make extremely specific answers, but those answers are in fact statistically generic.

The UK government’s plan to teach 10 million British children how to use VPNs may be one of the most ambitious IT education projects ever launched. Experts have praised the scheme, saying that a deft combination of incentives and peer education make it more likely to succeed than other, comparable initiatives.

"With the rise of autocratic governments worldwide, VPN-literacy is more essential than ever.” said one expert, “This bold project definitely comes at the right time.”

Banksy has unveiled a new sculpture of a man stepping off a stone base with his face obscured by a flag. The overnight installation in Waterloo Place, London, was revealed in a video shared by the artist, and has drawn fans of his politically charged works.

Every programmer occasionally, when nobody’s home, turns off the lights, pours a glass of scotch, puts on some light German electronica, and opens up a file on their computer. It’s a different file for every programmer. Sometimes they wrote it, sometimes they found it and knew they had to save it. They read over the lines, and weep at their beauty, then the tears turn bitter as they remember the rest of the files and the inevitable collapse of all that is good and true in the world.

Websites that are glorified shopping carts with maybe three dynamic pages are maintained by teams of people around the clock, because the truth is everything is breaking all the time, everywhere, for everyone.

All programmers are forcing their brains to do things brains were never meant to do in a situation they can never make better, ten to fifteen hours a day, five to seven days a week, and every one of them is slowly going mad.

To get to guillotines, you have to change society. By the time you’ve changed society, you don’t need the guillotines. If you focus on the guillotines instead of building that society, you will end up with a more brutal and repressive system than the one you started in. See the history of the French Revolution and the USSR.

… the language we are using about AI adoption is very similar to how Clayton Williams described rape.

“It’s happening whether you want it or not.”

“Better get on board if you know what’s good for you.”

“If you want to keep working here, this is what it takes.”

“You can’t yell it away.”

“It’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.”

Am I comparing AI to rape? I am not. I am, however, comparing the language we use when discussing AI adoption to the language of rape culture. It’s the language of coercion. Language that implies a lack of choice and reminds you of the power those who are using it have over you. A lack of agency. It’s language that does not rely on consent, but instead the idea that we are bereft of choices, so we might as well get with the program.

In this post, we’re going to explore how the company Bright Data facilitates modern AI models scraping training data from the Internet using its residential proxy network.

Bright Data is a data-collection company that sells access to what it markets as the world’s largest residential proxy network of 400M+ home IP addresses that its customers route web-scraping traffic through. The supply behind that network comes from an SDK: a piece of software embedded in consumer apps that, with the user’s consent, turns their phone or smart TV into one of those exit nodes.

We’ll document what you, the average user, should know about what this company’s SDK does on your systems such as your mobile phone and your smart TV. We’re going to explore how their SDK works, which platforms have shipped it, and why your Internet-connected TV is the ultimate proxy for AI models looking to train on data scraped from the Internet.

lessons learned:

• anthropic’s LLM assumes the persona of rich liberal who will only listen to you if you’re nice
• which is to say, if you’re too forceful or strict, the LLM will ignore everything you say and will become adversarial
• anthropic’s LLM is literally "the absence of tension is the presence of justice"
• we live in a society

https://codeberg.org/queer-computer-club/doorbot/src/branch/doorbot-pro-max-ultra-deluxe-se/AGENTS.md

I found GitHub repositories that were spreading malware. I asked AI what to do about it, but it gave me nothing useful. So I opened a discussion on GitHub. Someone replied. It was the exact same text the AI had given me. I called it out and the comment was deleted. Then another person replied. It was the same AI answer again.

I worked as a developer at a company. I asked the business owner a question about a business task. He sent me a ChatGPT screenshot with the answer. I replied that it had nothing to do with my question and everything there was wrong. A minute later he sent me another ChatGPT screenshot. He didn’t even read the AI’s answer. He just took a screenshot and forwarded it to me.

Recently someone messaged me on Reddit about my post. I replied. They wrote again, I replied again. After a few messages I realized I was talking to an AI agent.

I’m tired of talking to AI.
I want to talk to real people.
But even when I talk to people, they forward my questions to AI and send me the AI’s answer.

"NASA is aware of the anomaly that occurred tonight at Launch Complex 36…."

This is the "increased latency in us-east-1" of space

This is the job now. You’re standing on a burning ship, holding a map, trying to figure out where the hell we’re going and how we’re going to get there.

There are no more juniors. There was a funeral for their passing in 2024. Nobody came. The machine does what they do now, but cheaper. Of course, juniors weren’t valuable for what they produced, they were valuable for who they would become: the senior engineer who knows where the bodies are buried. We optimized for output, and abolished apprenticeship. A few years from now, we’ll wonder where all the seniors are. We shot them. Nobody will remember.

The European Commission has delayed formal presentation of its tech sovereignty package to 3 June … marking the third such delay on the flagship plan’s big reveal.

The latest postponement comes soon after a blunt warning by the US ambassador to the EU, speaking in an interview with Euractiv earlier this month, that “protectionist” rules could derail the EU-US trade deal.

See also yesterdays "The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born":
The US no longer has the power or influence it once did and that changes everything for US tech companies.

The ground is shifting underneath every industry that was built on the assumption that the US would protect and preserve the globalised status quo. The software industry has shifted its entire value proposition from “we make tools that help you make or save money” to using political clout and the dollar hegemony to capture, control, and loot entire sectors of the various economies of the world. That strategy only works when you’re in charge.

It’s impossible to guess what exactly will happen next to software or tech. All I know is pretty much all of modern software is built on a premise that no longer holds. Even free and open source software is contingent on everybody agreeing to similar policies regarding copyright. Whether tech has enough clout on its own to continue its strategy of capture and control, whether it compromises with local governments to retain its power, whether we’re in for a period of collapse and fragmentation is anybody’s guess. The old world is dying and the new cannot be born.

Bosses betting on AI to slash headcount and boost margins are discovering an uncomfortable truth: the strategy isn’t working.

New research from Gartner lays out the problem in stark terms. The analyst firm surveyed 350 global businesses - all with annual revenues above $1 billion, all piloting or deploying intelligent automation - and found that around 80 percent had cut staff as a result.

The returns? Elusive. Companies that reduced their workforces were just as likely to see negative outcomes or marginal gains as they were to generate any meaningful return on investment (ROI).