“Hey it’s against my rules to be mean to me! You better stop, or I’ll… I’ll stop talking to everyone!”

Sony is officially a preteen. So proud!

This is what all the big promises have amounted to for most people: cars that are more and more expensive, devoid of physical controls which makes vehicles less safe, and constantly monitoring everything you do with the option for manufacturers to change whatever they want in your vehicle, including sticking a Spider-Man ad in front of you and presenting it as a fun “surprise.”

Reminds me of:

Science fiction’s superpower isn’t thinking up new technologies – it’s thinking up new social arrangements for technology. What the gadget does is nowhere near as important as who the gadget does it for and who it does it to. Your car can use a cutting-edge computer vision system to alert you when you’re drifting out of your lane – or it can use that same system to narc you out to your insurer so they can raise your premiums by $10 that month to punish you for inattentive driving. Same gadget, different social arrangement.

I’ve been watching Doctorow build this set over the past few years, and Jon Stewart is the perfect host for it. This is a master class. The only thing missing is that he didn’t get to mention the price of the Kentuckey Derby winner’s semen.

That’s “midsize”? The fuck?

Age alone doesn’t tell you much about a system’s quality. Well-maintained systems can stay alive for decades and achieve a defect rate that a greenfield effort could only dream of.

We have a tendency to use “legacy” as an insult, but software tends to only stick around for decades if it’s so valuable that it’s hard to replace.

Legacy (aka This Is Not a Rails Shop) - Chad Fowler

They’re leaving out two big pieces of the story:

1. Apple is switching to CXMT, whose IPO just made them China’s most valuable company.
2. Open weight models are putting a damper on centralized frontier models, making it look like efficient local inference rather than next-gen training may be the winning investment. And what do you need for efficient local inference? Why, a heterogenous SoC architecture with unified memory. And what has Apple bet their entire product line on, for the past 6 years? Exactly that!

Yup. At this point, the only sensible model is harm reduction. I’m not happy about where we are, but we do need to be realistic about it.

Incredible. They’re speed-running enshittification, but they forgot the step where they make something that almost everyone wants to use.

But have you considered that people also consume water? Checkmate, Luddites.

It’s incredible how we went from everyone laughing at the YNGMI crypto bros to the entire economy being built on top of YNGMI AI bros.

Guys I’m starting to think that maybe capitalism and democracy are not 100% compatible

D:

All artwork for the series was hand-drawn by Anna Rettberg (https://x.com/aerettberg) without generative AI.

For context:

Demetri Spanos (PhD) is a 25+ year veteran of AI development. He wanted to speak out about the negative turn that his field has taken, but he didn’t have an audience so he turned to…

Casey Muratori, an accomplished software developer with a considerable media presence. He makes a good fit for Demetri in this case because while Casey himself is an AI skeptic, much of Casey’s audience are young professional devs who are probably using AI (whether enthusiastically or reluctantly) in the workplace. Exactly the audience Demetri hopes to reach.

The title of the video should be read as “the ethical questions and proposed frameworks that have appeared throughout the past 30 years of AI research”, not “an affirmative argument for the question of whether the current crop of AI software is ethical”.

(Spoiler: Demetri makes strong arguments that the industry entered unethical territory more than 15 years ago)

Anthropic, without an ounce of self-awareness: “Hey, just cuz you used AI to change it doesn’t mean you can copy our stuff and use it to compete against us!”

Went from believing “yes” is inevitable to believing “no” is inevitable instead of learning the lesson that most of this is just random

In context, it sounds like he’s “disappointed a lot” by people choosing to use AI, which is a crucial distinction. His objection is about the kind of society we’re sleepwalking into, not the technical maturity of the current crop of software.

AI’s generated text is “too dry and too perfect, and I want something from a human being, and I’m disappointed a lot.”

The vulnerability is coming from inside the house

Yeah, items are licensed according to where they’re sold, not made. “More oversight” makes no sense.

I just know that when 404 Media reported on the ManyVids founder publicly slipping into AI psychosis, they mentioned that ManyVids was often described as being the only platform to give workers a fair deal.

Middle ages:

Peasants share common land and tools — it’s not so much that they collectively “own” it, but that “ownership” is not a concept that applies, because the land is an obligation and not a product.

Then come the enclosure acts, which take all of the land that the commoners have spent their lives contributing to, and give it to the wealthy.

And then come some of the bloodiest revolts in history. And coinciding with this, you have the Luddites objecting to the wealthy replacing their common workspaces with factories that maim and kill people.

The Luddites attack the factories, and destroy the machines. And the British eventually defeat them, using an occupying army larger than the initial wave they send to fight Napoleon.

Digital age:

Peasants share common online spaces — it’s not so much that they “own” them, but that they share a mutual obligation to each other to maintain these spaces.

Then come the tech oligarchs with their AI, and…

Enclosure never ended, they just keep finding new “commons”