ManMachine
@max@manmachine.me
But of course this only has any value if solving problems is your goal to begin with.
I feel a lot of devs aren't in the "solving problems" business, but rather in the "selling something as a solution" business, which plays by completely different rules entirely.
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
A slopfondler walks into a bar.
They: Hey. I found a good use of AI!
Me: No you didn't.
They: Wait let me tell you about it.
Me: Please don't. I'm begging you. Stop talking.
They: No, you'll like this.
Me: I assure you, I will not...
https://jwz.org/b/yk4i
@jwz well, it gave me critical information about my health and DNA that none of the dozens of "healthcare professionals" I was working with for 4+ years ever did. (as you can probably understand, I have an entire team working on my stupid ass)
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@codinghorror Behold the field in which I grow my fucks and note that it is barren.
@jwz I also don't care whether I live or die, but other people seem to for some fucked up reason
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@codinghorror I am going to in no way engage with your entirely bad faith framing of this. Please, I am begging you, stop talking.
@jwz it's correct framing! I could provide extensive documention but your honor
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@codinghorror Jeff. Shut, and I cannot emphasize this enough, the fuck up.
@codinghorror @jwz Everyone knows the solution to structural healthcare problems caused by late capitalism is one trillion GPUs and a chatbot Ponzi scheme.
@feld @codinghorror @jwz And I don't think tanking the global economy at the whims of sociopaths who don't care how much CO2 we pump into the atmosphere is worth it because "some guy online said ChatGPT diagnosed him", sorry.
@feld @codinghorror @jwz "Doctors don't know everything" is a pretty piss-poor defense of LLMs. Try again, please.
jwz » 💀 🔓
@jwz@mastodon.social
@theorangetheme @feld@friedcheese.us @codinghorror Please, I am begging you, all of you, do not try again.
@jwz @codinghorror Okay yeah I was being snarky. He's getting acquainted with everyone else on my slop apologist block list.
@jwz Dang are you buddies with the guy who gamified Q&A and then also gamified forums? Is he planning on gamifying AI?
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
"It's like having a reference librarian!"
My Brother in Taxonomy, it is the farthest thing from that.
A reference librarian is a person with feelings, motivations and ethics, who has a goal of helping you find the answer to your question.
The chatbot is a clockwork mechanism that extrudes text optimized to make you *think* your question has been answered.
It is also a machine built by fascists with the goal of creating a dependent, de-skilled, submissive populace and ending Democracy. HTH.
Hi #fediverse. We need to talk about something.
While talking to a colleague about how I recently learned most people have never sat on a cow it came up that she has never sat on a horse. Like, not even once during childhood.
Another colleague admitted they also have never sat on a horse.
My hypothesis is that most people have at one point in their life sat on a horse.
🏇 🐎 🐴
Have you sat on a horse?
Please boost for scientific accuracy.
| Yes: | 934 |
| No: | 258 |
@n3tcat And I just need to figure out my highest gender frequency to know how often I should be sampling it!
Another curious basement discovery this morning and I cannot recall how I came to own this: a hugely thick green three ring binder with the Altos Computer Systems Unix Time-Sharing System Programmer's Manual - January 1979 (Second Edition, Volume 1).
@halfpress oooo that's hot. 80s altos hackers would have done terrible, terrible things to get their hands on that manual. suelette dreyfus' "Underground" does such a great job of describing getting into an altos system as every hacker's wet dream
@vga256 @halfpress Slight digression, but as a designer, the first thing I noticed was the use of Motter Tektura in the logo. That's the same typeface that most of us associate with the Apple II (and Reebok, to a lesser extent).
I'd thought Motter was an Apple thing, but now I wonder if that was the 70s go-to for "tech" branding.
yt comment:
> Remember: The dumbest person you know is being told 'you are absolutely right' by a LLM right now.
I keep seeing articles like this, about how people choosing to drink less is hurting bars and restaurants, and it's almost always framed as people, especially younger generations, don't like to drink.
They never seem to bring up the fact that a cocktail is like $20 now unless you go to a really divey dive bar. It's the same kind of reporting they on how no one goes to the movies anymore. It's always about changing habits, and never that movie tickets just cost a lot now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/16/dining/us-alcohol-restaurants.html
There are limits, and if I can buy two bottles of vodka from the grocery store for the price of a single cocktail, I'm going to opt to not have that cocktail most of the time
There's a burrito place near me that I really like, that I've been eating at for years. I used to go once a week or so, but since the pandemic, the price of a burrito went from $5 to $11, and that's just too much! I eat there once every few months now. It doesn't mean I don't like burritos though.
When you wake up what do you do
| get out of bed in 5-10 mins: | 211 |
| fuck around on my phone for half an hour: | 148 |
| fuck around on my phone for an hour (or more): | 99 |
| something else: | 70 |
Closed
@eniko I typically wake up over 15-20 minutes (with my alarm going off every 5 minutes and me hitting snooze) while cuddling cats. I do not like mornings, but cats help.
@eniko
Whatever the dog wants.
(Maybe less so in the recent years, as we bought her an automated feeder.)
@eniko get up straight away to go and check the sheep. I’d love to snooze in bed for another half hour though
@eniko Far more effective to use the laptop for failing-to-get-my-butt-out-of-bed tasks. Tiny phone screen is mostly reserved for when I'm out of the house.
@eniko I no longer bring my phone to the bedroom.
While I never used it in the morning, I kept wasting quite a lot of time in the evenings. Having it turned off and in another room has improved my sleep schedule a lot.
Currently I also don't have any other options than getting up right away. The cat demands a morning walk at sunrise every day, and will loudly complain if I try to sleep any longer.
@eniko It's either "get the fuck out of the bed asap" or "fall back to sleep", and there is no in-between 💀
@eniko get out of bed in 5-10 minutes, prepare a mug of warm water and fuck around on my phone for half an hour in a bathtube 😉
@eniko
i think of it as "skidding", i often can't completely wake up right away so i'll fall back asleep and redo the end of the dream i was having again.
sometimes 5-10 times until my cat gets impatient enough to meow right in my face.
@eniko I started reading first thing in the morning a few years ago and it made a positive impact for me. Depending on the book, the day of the week, mood, etc. it might be anything from 15' to 1h
@eniko reading this just after waking up while i refuse to get out of bed... nice reminder that i should probably get on with my day!
@eniko have a cat aggressively demand cuddles then fall back to sleep for half an hour with a cat in my arms.
@eniko I get out of bed pretty quickly. And then spend way more than half an hour fucking around on my phone while sat on the loo 😅
@eniko Get up, take the dogs out, feed them and the cat, make a coffee, get stuff out for my wife’s breakfast, take my meds, then go muck around on my laptop while I drink coffee.
@eniko On a day where I have an alarm set, the alarm is on the far side of the room so I have to get out of bed to turn it off, and there is no snooze, and no way for me to sleep though it. At that point I'm out of bed and shambling around.
On days where I have no alarm, I wake up at 10:00 (almost spookily to the minute) and get out of bed pretty much immediately.
@eniko actually trying to figure out what's the best for me. either 5-10 minutes 'cause i'm saying goodbye to my wife and closing the door for her and deciding if i have the energy to start the day or go back to bed and start a stream on low-volume on my tablet-alarm and then limbo in there for an hour or four.
I've always kept my phone in a separate room from where I sleep.
ETA: I should clarify for the Gen Z'ers who have only ever used their phone as an alarm that we have an actual alarm clock radio in our bedroom. 🙂
@eniko if I did start playing with my phone I'd likely wake up my wife, so it's better to just get up.
heard "be the elephant you want to see in the room" earlier and gosh if that hasn't stuck with me
Old school. #grickledoodle #19thcentury #divers #duel #cartoon #art #drawing #funny #humor
The most optimal method of eating a banana is by starting
| to peel it from the stalk, of course: | 91 |
| to peel it from the tip, it's tastier this way: | 76 |
| to bite it on the side, for the maximum fun: | 53 |
Closed
@nina_kali_nina
No grab it with both hands and snap it in half against the curve?
@kirtai that is great for cooking but is it okay for eating?
@nina_kali_nina
Yep, because the skin doesn't break on the far side which makes it easy to peel from the middle.
@nina_kali_nina peeling from the tip is the most efficient way to remove all the disgusting strings
(if feel like this poll is subposting me lol)
@hypha no, I was just eating a banana and realised that I don't peel it the way my parents taught me to
@nina_kali_nina you peel it from the tip, and hold the stalk. Just like all the other great apes do.
@nina_kali_nina behold a borderline dissection for optimal preservation and observation of internal structures: cut the stalk and tip skin bits with a knife (see red planes pic1), then do thin cuts on the skin longitudinally at the right edges (blue dashed lines pic1) to remove the peel. The inside of the banana is made of three symmetrical parts (brown outline 2nd pic) that run along a central axis and that can be separated applying some pressure+pulling from the tip and through. It comes out easy if done right.
It's my favourite fruit. Perhaps I might have eaten too many of them.
@nina_kali_nina My English is not as good as I thought it was. What’s a stalk?
I eat my bananas the human way, not the ape way.
@nina_kali_nina open it by breaking it in half like you would snap a small tree branch, and then peel and eat each half
I eat bananas in banana bread and smoothies. For banana bread they are usually falling open stem end due to age. For smoothies I might open either end. Rarely I'll have bananas someone else has opened and prepared as banana chips or banana desserts like pudding or cream pie
@nina_kali_nina carefully make an incision along the length of the banana, remove the meat and place the peel somewhere such that it looks like a whole banana sitting on the counter.
@nina_kali_nina with knife and fork, because you are Civilised https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GzkaUjl2tYw
@nina_kali_nina my child once asked me if he could eat a banana. I said he could only have half because dinner. He surprised me twice: first by in fact only eating half, and second by not eating half the length but half of the breadth! The leftover looked like a crescent of bite marks.
Today I learned that Michaelangelo's first paid commission was a snowman during a rare snowfall in Florence, and I'm not quite sure how to incorporate that into my understanding of the world.
@attoparsec How did you learn this amazing thing?
@attoparsec everybodys gotta start somewhere, and that first opportunity is often disproportionate to the actual amount of effort and skill you’ve put into it.
Michaelangelo’s snowman was literally the equivalent of going viral from a shitpost while the rest of your video catalogue remains at 1k views.
If one Florentine nobleman didn’t stumble across that ninja turtle doing snow doodles the history of art and architecture would be forever changed.
Somebody once asked David Gilmour how he got through the solo for "Comfortably Numb" and whether he always played it live the same way.
And he said he couldn't. He didn't know how. He just played it as he felt it should be played each time. He couldn't recreate the original solo verbatim if he tried.
But he mentioned seeing a Youtube video of a 13-year-old girl playing the solo, and he said, "But she could! So you should ask her. She's pretty good."
New music service, tell me what you think: a guaranteed advert free playlist of around an hour of a particular artist's works, carefully curated and mixed by the artist themself. It gets better: pay one flat fee up-front for unlimited replays, even when offline!
...you've probably spotted that I'm just describing albums, but it increasingly sounds like a really good deal, doesn't it?
A reminder that "For sale: baby shoes, never worn" isn't the shortest horror story ever written, it's actually "Specifies a tri-state Boolean value" written by the esteemed author Microsoft .NET Documentation.
Context: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.office.core.msotristate
Note that there are actually 5 values, not three. Also True is -1, and the value that equals 1 isn't supported.
you're a lawyer.
you run gcc without arguments.
it says:
"gcc: fatal error: no input files"
puzzled, you consult the dictionary.
fatal: causing death. leading to failure or disaster.
error: a mistake. the state or condition of being wrong in conduct or judgement.
is starting gcc without arguments equivalent to making a mistake, a wrong action that leads to deadly failure or disaster? did you just kill someone? did you commit a felony? now you are panicking. you turn off the pc.
RE: https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/116219642373307943
I wish I could recommend this piece more, because it makes a bunch of great points, but the "normal technology" case feels misleading to me. It's not _wrong_, exactly, but radium paint was also a "normal technology" according to this rubric, and I still very much don't want to get any on me and especially not in my mouth
Today's threads (a thread)
Inside: Three more AI psychoses; and more!
Archived at: https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/12/normal-technology/
1/
The "critic psychosis" thing is tedious and wrong for the same reasons Cory's previous "purity culture" take was tedious and wrong, a transparent and honestly somewhat pathetic attempt at self-justification for his own AI tool use for writing assistance. It pairs very well with this Scientific American article, which points out that pedestrian "writing AI tools" influence their users in subtle but clearly disturbing ways. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-autocomplete-doesnt-just-change-how-you-write-it-changes-how-you-think/
Cory also correctly points out that "AI psychosis" is probably going to be gatekept by medical establishment scicomm types soon because "psychosis" probably isn't the right word and already carries an unwarranted stigma. And indeed, I think the biggest problem with "psychosis" as a metaphor is going to be that the ways in which AI can warp our minds are mostly NOT going to be catastrophic psychosis, and are not going to have great existing analogs in existing medical literature.
If I could use another inaccurate metaphor, AI psychosis is the "instant decapitation" industrial accident with this new technology. And indeed, most people having industrial accidents are not instantly decapitated. But they might get a scrape, or lose a finger, or an eye. And an infected scrape can still kill you, but it won't look like the decapitation. It looks like you didn't take very good care of yourself. Didn't wash the cut. Didn't notice it fast enough. Skill issue.
More to the point though in this metaphor where you're getting a potentially-infected scrape at work, we are living in the pre-germ-theory age of AI. We are aware that it might be dangerous sometimes, but we don't know to whom or why. We are attempting to combat miasma with bloodletting right now, and putting the miasma-generator in every home before we know what it's actually doing.
For me, this is the body horror money quote from that Scientific American article:
"participants who saw the AI autocomplete prompts reported attitudes that were more in line with the AI’s position—including people who didn’t use the AI’s suggested text at all"
So maybe you can't use it "responsibly", or "safely". You can't even ignore it and choose not to use it once you've seen it.
If you can see it, the basilisk has already won.
Now, for rhetorical effect, I'm obviously putting this fairly dramatically. Cory points out that people have been doing this *to each other* mediated by technology, in emergent and scary ways, with no need for AI. He shows that people prone to specific types of delusions (Morgellons, Gang Stalking Disorder) have found each other via the Internet and the simple availability of global distributed communication has harmed them. But obviously that has benefits, too.
I'm open to a future where we do some research and figure out the limits of how AI influence works, and where the safety valves are, and also the extent to which it's *fine* that AI can influence our views because honestly many different kinds of stimuli can influence our views, not least of which is each other. But it sure looks right now like it has a bunch of very dangerous feedback loops built-in, and it's not clear how to know if you're touching one.
But, as Cory puts it:
"""
It is nuts to deny the experiences these people are having. They're not vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They're not generating tech debt at scale.
"""
I had a very visceral emotional reaction to this particular paragraph, and I find it very important to refute. Here are two points to consider:
1. YES THEY ARE.
They are vibe-coding mission-critical AWS modules. They are generating tech debt at scale. They don't THINK that that's what they're doing. Do you think most programmers conceive of their daily (non-LLM) activities as "putting in lots of bugs"? No, that is never what we say we're doing. Yet, we turn around, and there all the bugs are.
With LLMs, we can look at the mission-critical AWS modules and ask after the fact, were they vibe-coded? AWS says yes https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/after-outages-amazon-to-make-senior-engineers-sign-off-on-ai-assisted-changes.1511983/
2. If it is "nuts" to dismiss this experience, then it would be "nuts" to dismiss mine: I have seen many, many high profile people in tech, who I have respect for, take *absolutely unhinged* risks with LLM technology that they have never, in decades-long careers, taken with any other tool or technology. It reads like a kind of cognitive decline. It's scary. And many of these people are *leaders* who use their influence to steamroll objections to these tools because they're "obviously" so good
The very fact that things like OpenClaw and Moltbook even *exist* is an indication, to me, that people are *not* making sober, considered judgements about how and where to use LLMs. The fact that they are popular at *all*, let alone popular enough to be featured in mainstream media shows that whatever this cognitive distortion is, it's widespread.
@glyph @wordshaper people are just having fun. I am not using either, but have you seen the world around us? It is shit everywhere I look.
@Migueldeicaza @wordshaper this is as bad a rationalization for harming others and oneself with reckless OpenClaw deployments (which is to say: OpenClaw deployments) as it would be for taking heroin. I am sympathetic to people getting swept away by this hype but that doesn't mean it's OK. Within a week of its release we already had it doing open source maintainer harassment, deleting execs' emails, stealing API keys, all of which was predictable.
The most amazing thing about the tech industry is that the state of software development across the board is so unbelievably bad that you can't even tell that the computers we are on are 15x faster than the ones we were on a decade ago because they feel the same.
Happy #MARCHintosh ? 😩☣️ 🖨️
@mac84tv Ooof, gonna guess, bad wiper blade(s) in the toner cart.
Machine translations are often brought up as a gotcha whenever I criticize LLMs. It's worth pointing out two things: Machine translations existed decades before LLMs, and yes, machine translations are useful. However: I would never in my life read a machine translated book. Understanding what a social media post is talking about in rough terms? Sure. Literature? Absolutely not. Hell, have you ever seen machine translated subtitles? It's absolute garbage.
I have the impression that primarily anglophone people don't read as much translated literature, because so much good literature already exists in their language, so this issue may not be as familiar within that demographic. As someone who did not grow up anglophone, I can tell you there is a world of difference between a good and a bad translation even when done by humans. Machine translations are not even on the scale.
From what I've observed, people who claim that LLMs can replace artists don't understand art, people who claim that they can replace musicians don't understand music, people who claim that they can replace writers don't understand literature, and people who claim they can replace translators don't rely on translations. If I had a button that would erase LLMs from the world but it would take machine translations away (which is a false dichotomy anyway), I would absolutely still press it.
Technology is not inevitable. We've decided not to have asbestos in our walls, lead in our pipes, or carginogenic chemicals in our food. (If you're going to argue that it's not everywhere, where would you rather live?) We could just not do LLMs. It's allowed.
some time ago i (half) joked that the only job #llm can replace outright is the CEO.
today i attended an earnings call where a synthetised voice of our CEO read multi-page long table of numbers from an official financial document, according to a script prepared by claude, over a single slide titled "company earnings 2025" - to a room full of employees who commuted to the office to watch it in person. there was no management present or even shown on the screen.
it was the most disturbed dystopian fucking thing i've experienced in my career of working for soul-crushing corporations.
Seem in response to Kaja’s latest murderous post:
@Migueldeicaza I recognize Ursula van der Leyen and Christine Lagarde - who is the third person in the bottom picture ?
Which reserved IPv4 net block do you use for your internal network?
| 192.168.0.0/16 (16 bits - 32768 hosts): | 34 |
| 172.16.0.0/12 (20 bits - a million hosts): | 5 |
| 10.0.0.0/8 (just in case you need 2^24 hosts): | 24 |
jwz » 💀 🌐
@jwz@mastodon.social
@jef Like a proper mullet, I use 172.28 for business 10.0 for pleasure. But maybe I have that backwards. Wouldn't be the first time.
We've all upped our "mask game" in the last half decade or so, but I'm curious, what was the best mask or respirator you wore with any regularity in the very early days of the pandemic, say, before fall 2020?
| Nothing: | 1 |
| Cloth masks: | 7 |
| Dust mask: | 0 |
| Surgical mask: | 3 |
| Kn95 mask: | 4 |
| ffp2/p2/n95 mask: | 4 |
| Half face elastomeric respirator: | 1 |
| Full face elastomeric respirator: | 0 |
| PAPR: | 0 |
| Other: | 0 |
there's this article about knuth and literate programming and word count with early unix shell tools which is echoing very much my sentiment or the article about "hello here's my awk script and it's 135 times faster than your hadoop cluster" and instead of really taking a deep look "what do you REALLY need" people are always "that never works in a PROFESSIONAL environment" and then you look at established companies and it's all dusty perl (or equivalent) in a dark corner running the business
Nobody on LinkedIn has ever had a bad day. Every setback is a "growth opportunity." Every firing is a "new chapter." Every complete professional disaster is framed as "excited to announce." These people would describe the Titanic as "a bold pivot to submarine operations."