✱ Bulletins

Nolan Lawson, on his feelings about AI and software development.

I don’t have a conclusion. Really, that’s my current state: ambivalence. I acknowledge that these tools are incredibly powerful, I’ve even started incorporating them into my work in certain limited ways (low-stakes code like POCs and unit tests seem like an ideal use case), but I absolutely hate them. I hate the way they’ve taken over the software industry, I hate how they make me feel while I’m using them, and I hate the human-intelligence-insulting postulation that a glorified Excel spreadsheet can do what I can but better.

In one of his podcasts, Ezra Klein said that he thinks the “message” of generative AI (in the McLuhan sense) is this: “You are derivative.” In other words: all your creativity, all your “craft,” all of that intense emotional spark inside of you that drives you to dance, to sing, to paint, to write, or to code, can be replicated by the robot equivalent of 1,000 monkeys typing at 1,000 typewriters. Even if it’s true, it’s a pretty dim view of humanity and a miserable message to keep pounding into your brain during 8 hours of daily software development.

You should read the whole post. Also you might as well have put a sheet of carbon copy between two empty sheets of paper and written his post to get a copy of how I feel too.

On deck this weekend: Agony Planet (2015) by Dust.

DUST IS AN AMORPHOUS, CONCEPTUAL TECHNO PROJECT KNOWN FOR FUTURISTIC ACID COMPOSITIONS AND NOISY, IMMERSIVE LIVE PERFORMANCES. AGONY PLANET IS A DARK PASSAGE THROUGH TECHNO, INDUSTRIAL, EBM AND ACID TO HELL.

A man standing in the weekend queue at the local pastry shop with a nape-of-the-neck tattoo that says “uncontrollable”.

The first warm bike rides of the year are the best. The absolute best.

Bikes.

The Economist’s Next Year in Moscow is an incredible podcast series. (So is Scam Inc).

No Linux on the beach!

A directive received by your author.

If you are considering an “AI” therapist, I urge you, with a shaking bordering on the feverish, to reconsider seeking a cure from the forces that pour gasoline on the fire of disease.

And it might be hopeless but if I lose hope
I bring on that еnding
And it might be hopeless but if I losе hope
I bring on that ending
And it might be hopeless but if I lose hope
I bring on that ending
And it might be hopeless but if I lose hope
I bring on that ending

…

I could stockpile in the basement, be a ruthless
Survivor itching to prove that violence is our
Nature and society was fleeting and futile
Take the satisfaction when my cynical
Conclusions come to fruition
Will I win then, when everyone is as selfish
And careless as me?
And if I can’t hope, nothing’s ever gonna change
So let your eyes roll, you’ll still be cool
When we’re in flames

And if I can’t hope, nothing’s ever gonna change
So let your eyes roll, you’ll still be cool
When we’re in flames

…

And it might be hopeless but I’ve gotta try it
It’s better than lying down and bringing on
Our fate

Lately I’ve been appreciating the distinction between “computing” and “tech”. Once upon a time they meant the same thing, now not so much. I always have and always will love computing. Computing is delight. Tech (now) is the culture of applying dark patterns and nihilistic capitalism to computing.

Imagine having more money than god, master and mistress of all you survey, then being handed the chance of a time and place to take a stand and be remembered for greatness, only to throw it all away to be a nobody who licked a boot for an extra dollar. Imagine that.

Everybody knows that I’m five foot five
But don’t come around here when your likkle man talk
I’ll punch man down to my size, yeah.
I make a man think twice
I make a man go look for advice

Damn. How hard are the last two lines?

Happy new year. May you too make a man think twice and go look for advice in 2025.

🎵

Jeremy Bowen: Syria’s new ruler is politically astute - but can he keep his promises?

I love a textbook example of Betteridge’s law.

Gregory Sholette, the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, describes how workers in a Pennsylvania factory spent their break covering a wall of the plant with “newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar bits and pieces.” They called it “Swampwall.” It reminds me of the sculpture on a high shelf in the back of a diner where I worked, composed of unusually shaped potatoes. Its form changed with each new tuber contributed by the cook on prep shift.

Such spontaneous projects are signs of life: physical evidence of the liberating fact that not all time at work can be measured or processed into productivity. Swampwall was inutile: a means to itself. It was allowed to flourish until the company was bought out by a global corporation, at which point the massive collaborative mural was “expunged.”

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age - Thea Lim

We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?