genai

Gradient ascent is superior to generate-and-test in any domain in which you have even a heuristic gradient that is sometimes wrong.

Why people working on software where something serious is at stake would throw out known gradient to use a code generator + testing is beyond my capacity to understand.

https://1password.social/@1password/116580082041363054

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #VibeCoding #Software #SoftwareDevelopment #tech #dev #security #InfoSec #PasswordManagers

Me: Maybe #PublishDrive is an alternative to #Draft2Digital?

PublishDrive: Use AI to generate optimized descriptions, keywords, and covers based on market trends!

Me: 🫠

#writingcommunity #writerslife #genAI

You have to robotically "prove" you're a human to a robot to read about the human rights costs of robots, apparently.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #HumanRights #Amnesty #AmnestyInternational #CloudFlare #web #tech

In which @mitsuhiko, who’s on a tear recently, defends and promotes the use of the word “clanker” to replace “agent” (in the LLM sense): https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/5/26/clankers/

#genai #clanker

New front in the data center resistance: underwater.

"DeepGreen Western Passage SPV LLC" sounds like some kind of shell company created by one of the bigger players.

Suellen Hendrix, an Eastport resident, told councilors she believes “billionaire investors” have little interest in the city’s welfare, calling underwater data centers an “understudied industry” and urging the City Council to enact a moratorium.

“This man (Wolfson) is a one‑percenter,” Hendrix said. “He doesn’t care about us. There’s a reason he isn’t building it in Cape Cod, where he lives, and he’s choosing Eastport.”

Right on.

From Eastport residents push City Council to oppose DeepGreen’s underwater AI data center, https://themainemonitor.org/residents-push-eastport-oppose-data-center/

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #DataCenters #DataCenterBuildout #AIBubble #NoAI #maine

ICYMI: some dork used #Claude #LLM to 'fix' an issue in #rsync and broke it (v3.4.3).

#GenAI is shit and shld not be used for code that needs to work, even if you have the morals of a billionaire skunk.

Lots of critical tasks, such as backup 🤦‍♂️ will be broken as people update their #Debian #Linux thanks to this stupid obsession and psychosis.

How much will that cost? On top of all the costs inflicted on people who never touch the stuff and don't want to run anything built with it, like me.

Flathub moves to ban nearly all apps and submissions made with generative AI https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/05/flathub-moves-to-ban-nearly-all-apps-and-submissions-made-with-generative-ai/

#Linux #OpenSource #Flathub #AI #GenAI

O joy and delight, Dependabot has always made me nervous and here's its latest little gift, a patch to some CI/CD dependency I totally don't understand, includes “with Copilot"…

Q1: Am I the only person frightened by Dependabot?
Q2: Are there any people out there who (a) like GenAI and (b) still find this particular callout unnerving? [no point asking what the contras think]

#software #cicd #genai

I ain’t no connoisseur of #GenAI-practitioner wisdom, but Rishi is a smart guy and is using code derived from mine as his teaching platform, so this might help you if you’re down in the mines: https://rishi.baldawa.com/posts/writing-as-diagnostic-mirrors-for-agents/

There is a lot to like about this talk by Antón Barba-Kay, "The Politics of AI and the Fate of Liberal Democracy", but here's a quote that struck me:

The conviction that technology is neutral is not itself neutral. It paradoxically functions as the conviction that this neutrality is a good thing so as to positively sanction the technological development of more "neutral" tools.

(this is my own transcription from the video; any errors or discrepancies are mine).

He says this in the context of an argument that, especially in digital/online contexts, neutrality is conflated with truth, reason is identified with data and a quasi-scientific objectivity, and these conflations are damaging to democracy.

#internet #dev #tech #LLM #GenAI #GenerativeAI #democracy #politics

"Henry Ford understood, perhaps apocryphally but correctly in principle, that his workers needed to earn enough to buy his cars. The AI economy is eliminating the workers and expecting the cars to keep selling" -- Owen McGrann

#GenAI

https://www.owenmcgrann.com/p/the-dead-economy-theory

I like the phrase "the spread of AI". Like a rash.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

Attn Accenture employees! If you need to convert PDFs to PowerPoint slide decks, have a look at my handy online guide! It's free---no token burn!---easy, and fast: https://bucci.onl/notes/Converting-revealjs-slides-to-PowerPoint

This regards: https://mastodon.social/users/404mediaco/statuses/116805236234236215

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #PowerPoint #PDF #Accenture

If I'm honest, I do not think there is a nuanced position to take about current-generation LLM-based AI.

It is a sad technology emerging from a sad field of study initiated by sad men in a sad place sat atop a sad hill in New Hampshire. The technology generates sadness. It is soaked through with sadness. So many who use it feel sadness when they do. So many feel sadness when they watch others use it.

LLMs are like the sadness a child would feel if you showed them a beautiful cake and told them it was a real cake and they could have the whole thing, but it turned out to be styrofoam. Nathanael West once wrote that Hollywood is where the American Dream goes to die. LLMs are that sadness delivered to your bedroom (*). LLMs are DoorDash bringing you the styrofoam cake over and over forever while you hope it'll be a real cake each time.

It's OK to be sad. We all are from time to time. But what nuance is there in telling yourself the sadness is something else? Humans have been doing that forever. If there is nuance I think it lies in mourning what the existence of this technology is telling us needs mourning.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #LLM


(*) I assert that reading Nathanael West's oeuvre over and over is better for you than using LLMs.

RE: https://mstdn.ca/@teledyn/116652708401285794

"every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at scale"

1. The hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
2. Bias amplification
3. Environmental cost
4. Documentation — the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit

#AI #GenAI

To be clear about this: https://zeroes.ca/users/kimcrawley/statuses/116810584288856219

I like Kim and her work on StopGenAI well enough, but this post of hers is unwarranted and unfair in my view, as is the fact that several people chose to block me in response.

If you read the full context, which I link below, you'll see the objection boils down to the fact that I used the word "current" in a critique of LLM-based generative AI systems, in an attempt to be precise about what I was saying. Obviously people should block whomever they want for whatever reason they want, but I am not going to be cajoled by threats and ultimatums like this one into making sweeping claims just because other people want to see that. I've been crystal clear about my critique of generative AI for over 3 years now and my writing on it here stands for itself. I have no record of it but people who know me know that I was also quite critical of the hype around GANs in the late 2010s.

For context, here's my post: https://buc.ci/abucci/p/1782335950.858712

and here's Kim's objection: https://zeroes.ca/@kimcrawley/116807184909806502

which reads:

If it weren't for your "current" modifier, your comment would be great.

For reasons I don't understand the thread rapidly degrades from "this post would be great without that one word" to "you invited a murderer into my house": https://zeroes.ca/@kimcrawley/116810548823823670

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev

Warum ich es falsch finde, sich momentan zu sehr mit den Auswirkungen von generativer KI auf den Arbeitsmarkt zu beschäftigen:

Jegliches Verbreiten des Narrativs, dass "KI" bald alle Jobs ersetzen könnte, stärkt dieses anstatt es kritisch zu hinterfragen. Damit wird weiteres Geld in die Kassen von Big Tech und des amerikanischen Faschismuses gespült, anstatt in Lösungen zu investieren, die die Nöte der Menschen tatsächlich angehen. [1/4]

#ki #genai #noai #ai #faschismus #vektorfaschismus

RE: https://mastodon.social/@bagder/116908359337948457

The usual paywall-dodgers work fine and the piece is absolutely essential reading if you're a software person. #GenAI

This is a bit niche, but today I noticed the "Local REST API" plugin for Obsidian is now the "Local REST API with MCP" plugin. MCP, short for Model Context Protocol, is an LLM coding agent thing. "Local REST API" previously served a REST endpoint that let other apps, notably browser plugins, interact with your Obsidian vault. It's useful: for instance, there's a browser plugin that allows you to download a copy of any web page and stash it in your vault using the REST API this plugin serves.

I created an issue on the plugin's GitHub about removing the MCP functionality into a separate plugin, and the maintainer immediately converted it into a discussion, which is here: https://github.com/coddingtonbear/obsidian-local-rest-api/discussions/272

I'm getting the impression from all the LLM-related discussions and commits that this is a lost cause and I'll probably have to fork this plugin if I want an MCP-free version of it. Looks like they took up slop coding earlier this year too, which is another area of concern.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AgenticAI #LLM #Claude #Copilot #AIPoisoned #NoAI #Obsidian #MCP #REST #API

Anthropic deserves mass chargebacks for predatory billing policies - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MnazGJzK4UY

#AI #GenAI #Anthropic #Claude #ClaudeCode #Enshittification

This rsync thing has me thinking about the difference between the "free as in beer" model of free software and the "free as in freedom" model the FSF originally put forward. There are important differences, and it's meaningful when a project changes from one model to the other, which is one way to narrativize what's happened to rsync.

I think "free as in beer" software is more appropriately called "Libertarian and Open Source Software", or LOSS. Among other things it involves no obligations on other people, and expects no obligations in return (*). But this means it's an everyone for themselves, anti-communitarian endeavor. We should be honest about this. We should also be honest when a project changes state from FOSS to LOSS, because that's a meaningful change, and actually is a loss in my view.

I continue to believe that enthusiastic embrace of AI/LLM coding tools is a leading indicator of an impending FOSS→LOSS transition.

It seems to me at least one driver of the uproar over rsync is that a bunch of people thought it was a FOSS project but it had, in a short period of time, converted into a LOSS project and the shock was jolting (understandably). As a FOSS project, rsync served a community function, leading people to depend on it, make assumptions about its longer-term stability, and so on. Those are reasonable expectations of a communitarian project. As a LOSS project, rsync is under no obligations to anyone and the maintainer(s) can change the software at any time, for any reason, at their discretion alone. It seems rsync is a LOSS.

#tech #dev #software #SoftwareDevelopment #FOSS #freedom #rsync #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs

(*) Putting aside whether this principle is consistently applied or hypocritical.

quick reminder

there's zero necessity to use "#genai" when building things.

that's a false premise and a con: we did fine* before that nonsense was foisted on the world.

the fact that it has been constructed (at our expense) doesn't change that.

it's the cutting edge of the war of capital and the #tescreal cult against the people.

the speed of "generating" stuff isn't the benchmark.

* maybe we didn't overall, but the way one "democratizes" creation is via education.

I found this to be excellent: https://mass-driver.com/article/from-human-hands

From human hands.
We don’t use AI in any of our design or production processes. Here’s why.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #ImageGeneration #fonts #typefaces #art

You probably saw the headlines about SpaceX and the S&P500 - here's a useful but short explainer from Matt Levine. I rarely have warm feelings about financial institutions but am smiling in the direction of DJ/S&P this morning.

https://newsletterhunt.com/emails/360269

#genai #spacex

AI Fear and loathing 1: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-26/chinese-hedge-funds-warn-the-ai-super-bubble-is-ready-to-burst
AIF&L 2: https://www.ft.com/content/e81ce414-e4bd-4e8c-bac7-94f7bf17def4?syn-25a6b1a6=1
AIF&L 3: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-06-26/ai-anxiety-is-fueling-burnout-across-silicon-valley-s-tech-workers

That last one is really soul-shredding.

#genAI #aibubble