It should not be a controversial statement to demand horror be horrifying, but because we live in a capitalist society that prioritizes comfort and sanitization over all else, that refuses to engage with material reality if it isn’t assuaging our delicate egos and imperialist sensibilities, we find discomfort immoral. It made me feel bad and therefore it is bad. The thing that made me feel bad should not do that but I want to be a part of it. I want the prestige, the money, to sit at the cool kid’s table and enjoy the infrastructure they built while I was mocking them.
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.
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.
Most of the critiques I've seen of "algospeak" miss the mark, for me. If you see someone getting in a fight about it online, they're probably going to accuse the algospeaking poster of being a child. That's the wrong tack to take, I think. You should instead be accusing these people of not understanding the website where they're posting, and not caring enough to read any of the other posts!
lurk moar!!