Especially galling when the sentence starts with “like it or not”. Wrong. AI is not like a disease or a natural law that stays with us whether we want it or not. If humanity decides we don’t like AI, we could just stop doing it. “Like it or not, hitting yourself is here to stay” is only true if someone is actively forcing me to hit myself, and whoever is forcing me probably doesn’t honestly think they’re doing me a favor.

Homeopathy is here to stay and (a) that’s a bad thing, (b) it could be more popular, but thankfully is not, © we don’t need to believe fraudulent claims about its benefits, (d) we could and maybe should try and make it even less popular, and (e) the continued practice of homeopathy in parts of human society should have little to no impact on the daily lives of most people and the vast majority should be given the opportunity to ignore it instead of integrating it into every possible facet of their lives. Same goes for AI slop.

Today’s bullshit that annoys me: Wikiwand. From what I can tell their grift is that it’s just a shitty UI wrapper for Wikipedia that sells your data to who the fuck knows to make money for some Israeli shop. Also they SEO the fuck out of their stupid site so that every time I search for something that has a Finnish wikipedia page, the search results also contain a pointless shittier duplicate result from wikiwand dot com. Has anyone done a deeper investigation into what their deal is or at least some kind of rant I could indulge in for catharsis?

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as “content”. “Content” is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you’re designing the layout and don’t know what actually goes on the page yet. “Content” is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car’s trunk. “Content” is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

“Content”… is Whatever.

I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how “content creator” has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it’s used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck’s sake.

Also HP has so far had this kind of a reverse Midas touch where they turn every networking gear company they touch into HP.

HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.

Comic Book Guy energy

Our plagiarism machine is not a plagiarism machine. In fact, it’s so much not a plagiarism machine we added an optional feature that lets it detect when its plagiarism is too ovious and make its plagiarism less ovious.

I have a Kubernetes cluster running my AI agents for me so I don’t have to learn how to set up AI agents. The AI agents are running my Kubernetes cluster so that I don’t have to learn Kubernetes either. I’m paid $250k a year to lie to myself and others that I’m making a positive contribution to society. I don’t even know what OS I’m running and at this point I’m afraid to ask.

They quickly accelerated their way out.

Tech support workers who may or may not speak English as a second language or with a strong accent can sometimes be of actual help and sometimes not, much like people with possibly more familiar accents can. A call center AI has never been anywhere close to solving a problem I’ve had.

You’re no less fucked but instead of a human being getting underpaid for the trouble, a shitty tech corporation is overpaid.

A tool uses an LLM, the LLM uses a tool. What a beautiful ouroboros.

Someone ask if those fucks wanna see how much of the modern world was actually built by China? Wanna let them run it instead?

Yea, what if the master owns a wrecking ball, a bulldozer, a heavy duty excavator and a bunch of dynamite?

Yes, this is a metaphor for C programming, how did you know?

You’re both incorrect. I am the least fascist programmer and I’m here to tell you programming is inherently fascist.

The simultaneous problem and benefit of the stubstack thread is that a good chunk of the best posts of this community are contained within them.

I think you’re deliberately setting up for this response, so: “more like human sole”.

Refreshing. An online community that wears its intentions on its sleeve.

Absolutely. Take the reverence for “SysV” init* to the point where the init system has all but eclipsed the AT&T Unix release as the primary meaning of “System V”. The BSDs (at least the Net/Open branch, not sure about FreeBSD) adopted a simplified BSD init/rc model ages ago and Solaris switched to systemd-esque SMF with little uproar. Personally I even prefer SMF over its Linux equivalents, despite the cumbersome XML configuration.

I somewhat understand the terminalchud mindset, a longing for a supposed simpler time where a nerd could keep a holistic grasp of one’s computing system in their head. Combine that with the tech industry’s pervasive male chauvinism and dogmatic adherence to a law of “simplify and reduce weight” (usually a useful rule of thumb) and you end up with terrible social circles making bad software believing they’re great on both fronts.

* Rather, the Linux implementation of the concept

make it a Python script that does all the hard bits with a system call to bash

Oh god, please no. I have PTSD from 50-line Python scripts by anti-bash fundamentalists full of os.system, subprocess.run and/or subprocess.call that could have just been 15-line bourne shell scripts.

If you’re gluing programs together, shell scripts are often the best way to do it. If you’re not gluing programs together, do you even Unix? If you want to be fundie about it, obey shellcheck.

It sucks that bash is such a footgun. Perl was supposed to fix a lot of that, but now everyone hates it, because it also lets people to do clever and subtly incorrect things, which have then become quasi-idiomatic. Mom, can we have a sensible human-computer interface?

“Funny” is one way to put it.