Epochalypse countdown:
11 years, 7 months, 30 days, 15 hours, 44 minutes, 5 seconds
▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓▓░░░ 82.85%
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The ongoing stream of software engineering pieces that mention that the future is in writing spec but never bother to define what a specification is or at what abstraction levels it should be is appalling; arguably, tickets are a spec, the code is a spec, and work between both is connecting dots.
The underlying argument as far as I can tell is that we might now operate at a higher level of abstraction in spec definition, but without stating which level it is or how we can switch across abstraction layers for various degrees of specificity, this whole thing is meaningless.
peek//peak #photography #janacore
i think it's long past time that patents were done away with and copyright term significantly reduced
the experiment succeeded. we stoked incredible amounts of invention and innovation and moved our global civilization into the next age. now it's time to slow down and explore the ways of using all the things we made and deal with the consequences of making them.
we have so many new things now, and the benefits of those things are distributed incredibly inequally. we do not need to continue incentivizing and subsidizing more new inventions until everyone has had a chance to play with the ones we have and we've cleaned up the mess that we made in the process.
(this does not mean we should stop inventing or innovating, and i think nobody can or should get in the way of a particular type of person continuing to do so. but the incentive structure, as i see it, no longer benefits us)
the experiment succeeded. we stoked incredible amounts of invention and innovation and moved our global civilization into the next age. now it's time to slow down and explore the ways of using all the things we made and deal with the consequences of making them.
we have so many new things now, and the benefits of those things are distributed incredibly inequally. we do not need to continue incentivizing and subsidizing more new inventions until everyone has had a chance to play with the ones we have and we've cleaned up the mess that we made in the process.
(this does not mean we should stop inventing or innovating, and i think nobody can or should get in the way of a particular type of person continuing to do so. but the incentive structure, as i see it, no longer benefits us)
i cannot clone anything from github from several of my cloud-hosted servers right now because cloudflare returns HTTP 409 Conflict
it's only broken with ipv6
But if you use a LLM to write your code, and only look at it, when it doesn't do what you want, you are not training to become a better programmer, you are training to become a better "incoming code quality inspector".
But there is no training-path from incoming code quality inspector to good programmer, because you are (deliberately) not investing the 10k hours.
At the core it comes down to passive vs. active vocabulary: You only grow your active vocabulary by expressing yourself.
2/2
I think I can finally put words around what truly bothers me about the "AI changes everything" meme, as far as programming goes:
Programming is fundamentally hard for our brains, because it requires fractal perfection.
(By fractal perfection I mean that each code line must be perfect, but so must the overall architecture and all intermediate levels.)
They way your brain gets better at that is training by doing.
The oft quoted 10k hours is probably about right, also for programming.
1/2
i wonder why it is that both kamoso and spectacle on my kde desktop systems (work, personal, multiple distros, whether built myself or from flatpak) seem to be incapable of recording more than one video in a row without me closing and reopening it.
videos past the first one are corrupted, and if they play at all, are cut off at 22 seconds if the video was longer than that
videos past the first one are corrupted, and if they play at all, are cut off at 22 seconds if the video was longer than that
First version of PebbleConduct! A Pebble app showing my train data on my wrist ready to depart on time!
Currently just displaying my last shift, coupled from the employee portal! (Yes there will be an open data based fan version)
Feels so nice to revive this old device with the Pebble community coming back 😍
why is every KFC outlet not divided between The Colonel and User Space
I've seen a few people trying to defend Bambu Lab's bullying of an open source developer over completely legal AGPL code use...
Now @conservancy is raising funds to stop companies like Bambu Labs from abusing the AGPL and open source devs: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2026/may/18/bambu-studio-3d-printer-agpl-violation-response/
Bring back AltaVista!
🇨🇦RE: https://fosstodon.org/@freedosproject/116601624334574365
As-Easy-As is freeware now, with the freeware serial number 570-110-0424-3.
https://web.archive.org/web/20220318180326/http://www.triusinc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10
RE: https://chaos.social/@janbeta/116603460811528786
Web rings, IRC, Usenet, FTP archive sites: we never knew how good we had it.
Bring back webrings!
Boosts
I am moving to a usage-based billing
Dear employer, I will no longer charger a flat monthly salary, instead I will move to token based billing. Included will be every token I receive as input, including but not limited to emails, slack messages, spoken words and mandatory multi-modal meetings that could have been emails. Included will also be output tokens in the form of code, documentation and small talk. Tokens will also be consumed by my internal monolog as I reason about problems.
I am staggered by the sheer hugeness of this.
The #WelshGovernment has a policy of bilingualism. All meetings include translators, so that speakers of English or Welsh can participate equally. But every member of the Welsh Cabinet is a native speaker of #Cymraeg, so the Cabinet meetings will be held in their native lsnguage.
Imposing the #EnglishLanguage was a key component of the imperial project of Britishness. But the tide has turned. 💚 🏴
So this is a mini essay I wrote for my employers, to explain why I refuse to use AI tools at work. They have recently been pushing it and I wanted to make my position crystal clear and attempt to open up discussions. I'm not in a management position so don't have any voice when it comes to decision making. I also struggle to express myself verbally and miss out context.
I initially sent it to my manager on Tuesday. She then had a meeting with her manager and brought it up, and he suggested I send it to him and 2 members of the extended leadership team above him, who are directly below the CEO.
My managers managers response was very positive, he messaged me to say it was very powerful and he wanted to take the weekend to process.
Anyway it's not my best writing but here it is.
Why I refuse to use AI tools such as Co-pilot, ChatGPT, Claude etc.
Written by human hands and mind – Jax Ven****
As *** leaders increase their push for employees to use AI tools, I would like to lay out the reasons why I refuse to do so. I feel the need to do this in order to show that I am not acting out of a fear of new technology, but as someone who understands technological progression and has been interested in this field for decades, studying virtual reality and AI at university 15 years ago and following the industry closely since. I also hope that this may convince you to pause and reflect, and commit to allowing every employee to choose for themselves if they wish to use AI tools, without being penalised or left behind should we choose not to.
I have always been very optimistic about what AI could bring us and how it could benefit our lives not just in the workplace, but also at home and for society in general. However, to borrow a phrase used often in online tech circles, ‘this is not the AI we were promised’.
Instead we have AI that is unreliable at best, and risking our lives and our environment at worst.
The environmental impact of data centres is huge. A recent report by the IEA (International Energy Agency) found that data centre energy usage had surged during 2025 and was set to continue.
“According to the report – Key Questions on Energy and AI – power consumption per AI task is declining rapidly, with efficiency improving at a rate unprecedented in energy history. However, more people are using AI, and energy-intensive uses – such as AI agents – are on the rise. As a result, electricity consumption from data centres is set to double by 2030, and power use from those focused on AI is poised to triple.”
The IEA article goes on to speculate that AI may drive the creation and large-scale adoption of greener tech, but we are not there yet and the current state of play is dangerous and damaging to our environment right now, regardless of future potential. Future potential does not cancel out current harm.
I do not wish to contribute to this.
In addition to the environmental impact the creation of new data centres is having a detrimental effect on neighbouring communities with the blatant disregard for them. For example, residents of a town in Michigan voted overwhelmingly to not have a 21 Million square feet data centre built close to their town, with the town commission also voting in favour to reject due to the impact it would have on the local environment, electricity demand and increased traffic. Related Digital (OpenAI, Stargate Initiative) successfully sued the town and are going ahead anyway.
https://fortune.com/2026/05/06/ai-data-center-michigan-saline-politics-farmland/
These data centres are costing billions and billions. The people paying for them are well aware that they have enough money to be able to do whatever the hell they like while making promises of increased opportunities and future green tech. All while they risk destroying the communities surrounding them.
I do not wish to contribute to this.
AI is now being used in war. The same companies that are used to summarise emails or generate a slide deck are being used in cyber defence.
“WASHINGTON — On April 27, the Army convened 14 senior cybersecurity executives from leading technology companies at the Pentagon for the second iteration of its artificial intelligence tabletop exercise, an effort designed to accelerate adoption of agentic AI for cyber defense.
The exercise, known as AI TTX 2.0, brought together C-suite leaders from companies including Amazon Web Services, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto Networks and others alongside Army and Department of War leadership. The Office of the Principal Cyber Advisor hosted the half-day event, with design and moderation support from the Special Competitive Studies Project, and partnering organizations including U.S. Cyber Command, U.S. Army Cyber Command and the Army Cyber Institute at West Point.”
https://www.army.mil/article/292158/army_convenes_industry_leaders_for_ai_tabletop_exercise_focused_on_cyber_defense
I do not wish to contribute to this.
The effect of regular use of AI tools on cognitive function is still being studied but so far the results are extremely concerning. I enjoy using the skills I’ve developed over the last 30 years. I enjoy figuring things out and learning new things. I enjoy putting my thoughts into words with my own voice. These are the things that motivate me.
I thoroughly believe that the more we rely on AI tools, the easier it will become to offload simple tasks to these tools and the temptation to have them do as much of our workload as possible is too great, especially when we are being told to use AI tools to increase our productivity.
“A new MIT study titled, Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, has found that using ChatGPT to help write essays leads to long-term cognitive harm—measurable through EEG brain scans. Students who repeatedly relied on ChatGPT showed weakened neural connectivity, impaired memory recall, and diminished sense of ownership over their own writing. While the AI-gener”ated content often scored well, the brains behind it were shutting down.
I do not wish to be a victim of this.
Things I am also concerned about but have not written about here in great detail (or this would be 20 pages long) are;
‘Enshittification’ of the internet: can no longer trust search results, or that academic papers, news reports, images, videos and music are not AI created.
Security Risks; apps and software being developed by ‘vibe coding’ are being found to contain serious security flaws that would enable hackers to obtain sensitive customer and company data. Who is checking vibe coders code?
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jodiecook/2026/03/20/vibe-coding-has-a-massive-security-problem/
AI is a technology that I would love to be using, and it should be a natural progression of my career. I should relish digging in and getting to know how everything works, being creative and finding new ways to use it. That’s who I am. I would fully embrace it and advocate for it. But not in it’s current format, with it’s current harms, and it’s current masters. The likes of Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jensen Huang are billionaires who do not live in the same reality as the rest of us, and do not have our best interests at heart. The AI models these people are enabling are not the AI we were promised. For all of the reasons outlined above I cannot in good conscience contribute by becoming a user. This is at the core of my ethics and my beliefs, and it would devastate me to be forced to take part. This may seem dramatic but I am just one of many, many people worldwide who are also refusing to take part and that number is growing day by day. I guess we are ‘conscientious objectors’.
It’s not just about an individuals personal use. One could argue that the amount of energy one person uses or their monetary contribution to AI companies from simple day to day workplace tasks is not great enough to be an issue. However, it is about collective use and about ethical standpoints. Do we, as a company with a mission to help people embrace greener technology, really want to contribute to all of these things? Sometimes the only power we have is to choose where our money goes. It’s something I do as an individual consumer and something that companies can do on a grander scale to take a stand and be on the right side. Yes, I understand the need to increase productivity and remain competitive but we were already on the right track before the push to use AI tools. I also believe it is a mistake to rely on them too much as subscription costs are set to soar and the ‘AI Bubble’ predictions are looking more and more likely. I think it’s far better to pause or greatly limit use, allow employees to decide they don’t wish to use it at all, and see what the state of play is in a year or two. ‘Fear of Missing Out’ is a very real phenomena that I sadly see playing out here.
I guarantee I am not the only one at *** who feels this way, but with the job market as it is right now (thanks to AI) it can be very risky to speak out. I know people in other companies who are being forced to use AI tools or risk losing their jobs and I would like to think that we are better than that at ***, but this still feels risky. However I cannot stay silent any more and need to make my position, and my reasoning for this position crystal clear and hope that everything I have outlined can be given serious thought.
Thank you for reading and I look forward to discussing this in more detail should you wish.
The Coming Election Takeover
open.substack.com/pub/therickw...
The Coming Election Takeover
DontSurveil.Me has put together a great explainer on Bill C-22.
Canadians need to pay attention.
Expanding surveillance powers, retaining metadata, and weakening encryption all threaten privacy, free expression, civil liberties, and digital rights.
If we care about privacy, digital rights, and a free society, now is the time to speak up, contact MPs, and push back before this becomes law.
Learn more: https://dontsurveil.me/c22.html
HYPNOTIST: Are you ready, my dear subject? Are you ready for a state of trance? ME: 😵💫😵💫😵💫 ARMIN VAN BUUREN: Welcome friends it’s a new episode of A State of Trance, 1277 how we feeling Amsterdam (studio audience cheers)