What last month clarified for me is that we are not engaged in the normal to and fro of politics, we are in a hybrid conflict against a loosely-defined but very much unified set of forces: tech corporations, fossil fuels, and international fascism arrayed together. They can be fought, and they can be beaten, but it falls on all of us to understand that this is a conflict and there are sides.
Excellent writing on AI and fascism from Bruno.
I wanted to write this specifically to say to other people in this position: No, you're not insane. We are living through a horrific break in human history, and we are going to watch people fail to recognize the battle lines being drawn or simply fail a basic decency check. We are watching a mass betrayal of humanistic values unfold before our eyes. It is natural to be shocked and disgusted.
His viral post had captured a feeling of exhaustion and frustration that so many can relate to with the flood of AI-generated ‘slop’ and then, ironically, that very viral attention had sent others off to generate their own AI rip-offs of his work.
The framing of this article is kind of odd -- "isn't it weird this guy was accused of being AI?" is not the principal issue here. The issue here is that he put together a handmade ad and it was immediately copied by the AI generated small business losers online who have access to grok. AI is bad and it's filling the internet with useless shit!!
Are companies genuinely planning their workforce requirements, or are they experimenting with how few developers they can get away with now that AI is involved?Because from where I’m standing, it increasingly feels like developers are becoming disposable resources in a giant experiment.
To be clear, I feel very bad for this author who appears to be on the receiving end of a rapidly enshittifying company (Plex, which I use regularly but am basically always expecting to fall apart at a moment's notice). However, it is clear that the author is also a user and promoter of the very technologies that put him out of work, which strikes me as very short-sighted. Nevertheless, it is a good look inside a very frustrating industry.
LLM technology is catnip to these large company structures -- it's an excuse for them to lay off huge swaths of their workforces without any extra explanation. We can simply "do it with AI", a claim that is dubious at best and is unfortunately only emboldened by rank-and-file workers endorsing this technology. Chewing off your own foot and then complaining that it's hard to walk.
Because big tech doesn't do customer service, we are being inundated with AI-generated emails begging us for help.
Strange example, but yet another case of the modern LLM craze filling the internet with useless shit.
When I write code, the code stops writing when my fingers do. I am making concrete a vision I have in my head of my goal, like the nail being driven into the wood. These operations feel discrete to me in a way I find pleasing. This lack in AI coding programs feels very stark to me, one doesn't seem to be 'using a tool' in a literal sense.
In the last few months, Yen set up an email address for employees to contact if they come across anything blocking adoption of AI at Proton, so leadership can “ruthlessly smash everything that stands in the way of AI velocity;” Proton installed software on workers’ computers that track how much AI code the company is generating; and Yen said this is the last year that Proton will hire engineers at all, and instead only hire people to build things with AI.
By all appearances, Proton's CEO and CTO are both in the throes of a deep and disturbing bout of AI psychosis and it's putting a lot of people who rely on their products in danger. Diversify soon, methinks.
What we are learning at an alarmingly fast pace is that not only are some of the locks easy to pick, in some cases the door is wide open or there’s a giant hole in the wall.
You may or may not have noticed (though I did make a blogpost about it) but I took down this site for a couple hours last night -- the reason being a massive PHP exploit that this site (& a few others I selfhost) were vulnerable to.
I'm not really sure what to do with this, other than what I can do -- be wary, pull things offline if need be. I am a bit of a pessimist in general and I know that, but I do think it is a very rough time to be "getting into" hosting websites, and yet that is what I'm doing.
This stuff has seeped into the soil like a crude oil spill. There is so much viral hyperbole about what these things are capable of that is often followed by a sobering and less sexy reality. What I mourn is the loss of trust, the alienation of people with institutional knowledge and the chaotic disruption of real communities by strangers walking in like a toddler with a Glock.
Today, IF is probably the best-preserved cross-section of video game history we have. Every game, from Zork through Infocom's latter-day output, through every game made with Inform from the 90s until today, is playable and runs on any machine you could name; there are almost as many ports of the z-machine as there are ports of Doom.
A fantastic historiography of interactive fiction from its inception to today, written by Bruno.
IF has long had an arms-length relationship to video games at large. It is a genre and a surrounding community that is insistently noncommercial, relentlessly critical-minded, insular (and at times, though not so much today, exclusionary). It's more like a (large, unruly, eccentric) extended family than anything that could be described as a "fandom."
Of course, as would be expected from the title and from... recent history, this also touches on the increasing and disgusting practice of the use of generative AI in interactive fiction. Not only does this feel creatively insulting, it feels particularly galling in a small, bespoke scene like intfic.
AI sells the promise that you don't even have to imagine something; that your vague impulses, half-formed ideas, or just the result of a delusional conversation with a machine can become productized for an audience of none. The effect has been immediately toxic to all sorts of institutions that take submissions from all comers—from literary magazines like Clarkesworld to open-source code hosting service Codeberg.
The good news is that people will always want to create things, and will always create the best things. Better things than AI will, and ever could.
Looking at my software peers in 2026 I see fatigued faces, I see frustration, and I see a lot of people looking for a way out of an industry that seems poised on the brink of collapse. LLMs are being pushed on us at every turn, most people seem at best frustrated by them, and ultimately they seem to appeal most to people who see the production of software as a purely mechanical means to an end.
Agreed.
If you are a vibe coder or vibe translator, I implore you to learn how to do this the correct way. You are better than this.
Great, frustrated writing from within the Sega Saturn retro scene.
This is very much all on brand for Meta, a company obsessed with impossible scale but completely unwilling to do absolutely any of the heavy lifting to ensure it's adhering to the most rudimentary ethical standards. This never changes because the entire company exists to coddle Mark Zuckerberg's bulbous ego, allowing him unlimited funding to cosplay as an interesting person.
You'd have to be a complete fucking idiot, just railroad-spike-through-the-forebrain mind-melted, to not notice that like literally every fucking other thing Meta does this is about mass surveillance and rent seeking. I can't tell if all of these people are slowly making themselves unbelievably stupid by inhaling chatbot fumes, or if proximity to silicon valley tech sphere radiation is microwaving their brains by itself.
Bruno is right.
Yudkowsky also claimed that his (non-profit) company was probably the only one that could make AI safely[...] It is also a pitch for people to give you total control over them, because if they do not, the world might end.
Thorough write up of (one of) the suicidal sex cults that currently runs the American government.
This industry approaches regulation in this way because it has, at its core, a millenarian death cult that worships and fears AI, believes AI will end the world, feels compelled to create AI, and at least somewhat wants to destroy AI as an entire field.
Edit: The article has been deleted. Archived version available here.
Making sense of iLands, the company whose AI agents emailed me half a dozen times in two days offering to do my research. Turns out they’re just bots trying to keep their own lights on by trying to take my job.
As far as I can tell, iLands is sort of like a less-user-focused version of those fucking stupid MoltBots or whatever, just a website full of pointless AI bots with access to an email server. It is insane that this is just happening! This should be banned
“AI agents” now have enough power and permission to be extremely annoying online.
In the past week I have received 10 different sign-up requests for my mastodon instance from really obvious bots, and I wonder how many of those were "AI Agents".
Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men.
Slightly older piece now, but a real banger for examining the modern Silicon Valley psychopaths. These people are evil and their brains are entirely rotted by AI
I spend a lot of time on Bluesky, for which reason my soul will surely meet oblivion in the jaws of Ammit; but while I'm there I see a lot of AI boosterism. Here's a taxonomy.
It’s just so bad, in so many different ways, on so many different levels. Trying to ignore or excuse any one of the points against it will still leave you with dozens more.
“Tech-forward” should have no place in how we think about the future. There is not a single axis. Things are not either forward or back, accelerating or retreating, primitive or modern, fast or slow. If we are having debates about who owns global compute, what AI infrastructure sits on the interconnection queue, who is paying for rate increases, who signs NDAs or negotiates the terms of data center projects, it becomes painfully obvious how shallow this framing is.
On Taylor Lorenz, AI, the Right, and the tech industry. Of course, I disagree on one point put forth in the article: There is a future vision of tech-collaborative socialism, and it is ("as much as you may not like it") the People's Republic of China.