aesthelete

Or if we had a functional federal government we could just make this practice completely illegal, and then pass privacy laws while we're at it.

"anonymized"

These bitches are ruining my career and wasting my life talking to themselves about how they know what the real issue is....but wait!

Man I miss the early days of the Internet with the bullshit hit counters that were completely inconsequential when wrong and anyone could game.

Now somehow cuz it's big business, those same bullshit hit counters can be used to move big mountains of money.

"feature"

Algorithmic music is incredible for discovery and that’s about it.

This may be true for most but was not for me. I was on streaming services for two years and discovered maybe five new bands. I went back to my old process of discovery (reading magazines, reading online reviews) and discover many more every year.

Algorithms tend to pump you full of similar sounding artists. I'd rather be challenged as a listener and grow than be stuck in a same sounding culdesac.

Bandcamp is good for this. You can stream stuff you bought on there for free through the app if you want to. I download my purchases and add them to my enormous library that I started in the late nineties.

Since a plane requires the most thrust at takeoff, you could use ground-based catapults to get the plane to takeoff speed (or faster even) and then you could carry smaller batteries and propelling machinery.

Don't you dare talk about catapulting using electric technologies in America though. Steam only! 🇺🇸🗽🦅🏈

I think this is honestly one of those 100% vs >80% issues. I get that it's very possible — maybe even easy if you care — to subvert this, but we have had several SITTING POLITICIANS read a fucking AI prompt in the middle of their "big speech" and nobody bats an eye. If they add a measure to outputs that works automatically for 100% of outputs without the people reading it knowing, there's no chance that it won't allow you to determine whether or not many outputs are AI.

They aren't even actually probabilistic. They're deterministic with pretend probabilistic characteristics.

Pseudo-random is pseudo. It isn't really random. That's why some of them have a setting called a "temperature". They're just a fucking program they should have a seed value to behave 100% predictably from the same prompt. The people who own them are fucking responsible and obviously so.

Spoiler alert, we continued to take it.

And maybe your point is what Doctorow was trying to make all along, but he pushed too far in the other direction? Even now, Code Generation is a useful tool, as long as it’s used as only a tool by someone who knows what they’re doing.

In this piece — which I read via RSS feed a number of weeks ago before it was published in this medium — he is writing about what most peoples' experience is in a company where they have decided to "do AI", and what most CEOs think about when they think about "doing AI".

This usually comes in the form of a company chatbot or "agentic workflow", and in the vast majority of cases these things are very much not helpful and can actively be annoying because attention is paid to developing these things when more practical and useful features could be developed instead (see: https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/).

In other pieces, he discusses — using what I would call sort of esoteric terms that he often defines inline — people in saner places that get to choose how and why to use AI to assist with their jobs. But that's not the majority of people's experiences and that is certainly not what CEOs are often talking about.

I think he's being somewhat hyperbolic in this particular piece, and maybe that's due to the amount of "AI is changing everything" or "AI has changed everything" that is appearing in LinkedIn / X posts everywhere, when it's difficult for most to even name a single thing that the chatbot has spit out that has improved lives, and the vendored chatbot attached to an existing piece of software (which is mostly what people end up doing when they "do AI" at a company) is completely useless.

If I take myself as an example, he's largely right that I have to play this game with internal development teams that come up with "agentic workflows" and try to get me to use them to do my job when it's a lot easier and better to just....use Claude code myself.

AI hasn't "changed everything". The only thing it's really done so far is produce a lot of chatbots and agentic workflows that aren't very useful. It remains to be seen if: (1) it can ever be made to work more efficiently, (2) if you can ever actually run a profitable business building or running a "neocloud", and (3) what the broader effects on software will be from mass usage of this technology.

The early signals on all of these very real concerns (not to mention others such as environmental, cultural, and economic impact) are not very positive.