Author @gilduran.com was just banned from “free speech absolutist” twitter for criticizing the Palantir CEO’s manifesto— so here’s his upcoming book: www.simonandschuster.com/books/The-Ne...
Absolutely one of the best pieces I've read lately.
AI LLMs have serious ethical issues - environmental impact, theft of the training data. But as tools, they have value. For EXPERTS.
AI integrated into the training / education of novices is an incredible danger to their skills development.
getting a job (insect their resume looks just as good) is what keeps me up at night.
We will lose a generation of expertise if those of us who participate in the training of novices (in any field or industry) don't begin to push back.
I'm not anti-AI per se; rather "AI is dangerous to minds"
I have been sharing this piece everywhere this week -- I just noticed your footer comment about your post here.
Your point at the end re: us not knowing the difference any more between people who actually have the habits of mind to be experts in their fields vs those who AI-vibed their way to +
Screenshot of paragraph from the article. It says, "Grammarly has never been interested in writing, or even improving it. Grammarly's only interest is in making money; in May 2025, the company announced the closing of $1 billion in financing that it will presumably use to make more ads. The company's business model is designed to make people feel insecure about their own writing so that they believe that they need an Al assistant to do something as simple as send an email. You do not need bad advice from a computer wearing the skin of Stephen King or bell hooks to write a better email. It makes sense now that a company that fundamentally misunderstands what makes good writing would name itself in the form of an adverb, a part of speech notorious for diluting or obfuscating meaning. As the real Stephen King wrote, "I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and | will shout it from the rooftops.""
Grammarly has always annoyed me. I'm glad we have tools to help folks who aren't comfortable in their writing skills, but using G. is like running your writing through a steamroller - smashed down, unrecognizable, nothing stands out.
So I cheered this. Solidarity
defector.com/vindicated-a...
do everything from picking their sock color to replacing their agency over every key element in their lives, at the cost of $20 or $200 a month subscription to Grok / OpenAI / Claude / whatever.
Read the link up there, it's a good post.
This was mine last year:
medium.com/cross-cut-in...
are blindly, happily leaping into AI in education as a good solution when every single one of them ought to understand that AI in education will fundamentally strip students of any opportunity to learn anything of value beyond how to become completely reliant on a superficial "intelligence" to+
having failure as a teacher.
You cannot remove friction from learning and actually accomplish anything.
Just like you can't go to the gym and watch a robot lift weights and think it's going to do a bit of good for your muscles.
I am aghast at how many people in education who should KNOW BETTER
home is that YOU WILL NEVER LEARN by using AI to do the work for you.
We are looking at a world where (assuming we survive the next year), junior-level employees know nothing because they learned nothing because it's so damn easy to just let the AI do it.
Because no one can make you learn like +
that befall you in networking, in secure access to private information, in all the various ways programs can leak critical, sensitive information because you don't actually know anything about software development.
You're just "vibe coding."
And all that aside, what that essay link really hammers+
what the code is "supposed" to look like for a correctly written function.
You don't know what data structure would be the best fit for this use case.
You don't know why the AI is recommending certain design architecture or spooling out yet another longwinded function.
You don't know the dangers...
then sure, you can hand an AI each of those small pieces, have it spit out the 25 lines of code for that class or function, check the output to make sure it makes sense, and slot that into your code.
But if you don't have that skill already?
You don't know where the AI is wrong.
You don't know ...+
I wrote from a single angle last year -- AI is useful for people who already have deep skills in what they're asking the AI to do. If you already know how to design code from the ground up, laying out data structures and design architecture, planning for outcomes, clarifying the roles of each class+
This is an absolutely fantastic assessment of why we are going to lose so much to the wide rollout of AI. I am not "anti-AI" in principle (in reality: many ethical and practical obstacles), but you are absolutely kidding yourself if you use it w/o expertise. (1/x)
ergosphere.blog/posts/the-ma...
the levels of elite impunity we are seeing now and the levels of war crimes we are seeing now are two aspects of the same path of historical development. right now they see war as our problem (and their investment opportunity). it is world historically important that we make war their problem again
everything we are seeing now is the consequence of having a political environment in which indifference to the deaths and suffering of other people - even by the state whose supposed responsibility is to safeguard their welfare - is a superpower rather than a political liability
23 people could stop this genocidal war criminal. That’s it. 23.
20 Republican senators and 3 republican reps in the house and he’d be out of politics forever. But they won’t.
They’re addicted to power. A drug so strong they’d rather see a civilization die than give it up.
The Artemis mission photos and stories have been like water on dry ground for my soul. Everything else in the world seems so dark.
This is so true. It's incredible to me to look around in my very red state and see literally no "machinery" for the Democratic Party. No one invests anything in raising up potential candidates for future runs. I appreciate Obama but his presidency tapped local networks for 2008 then abandoned them.
... reliant on support systems that are often more expensive than one person or one family can afford. Someone living on disability, scraping by. That's the American legacy right now - 95% of us trying not to die while the other 5% own everything, party hard, and collect wealth. An ugly reality.
Agreed - because of how the shut-in image subverts the cowboy. We mythologize the cowboy because we see him as powerful, independent, rugged, the master of his fate. (I don't know that 1800s cowboys were that, but we'll roll with the mythos.) By contrast, the shut-in is dependent, vulnerable ...
New article: today we talk about the psychological impacts of functioning in a thoroughly enshittified economy where everything seems to be routed through tech:
A couple thoughts on why I keep playing Marathon when I bounce off other "hard" games
medium.com/crit-hit/som...
This is an excellent piece by Doctorow on how prediction (betting) markets are breeding further corruption.
Goodhart’s Law vs ‘prediction markets’ by @doctorow medium.com/p/https-plur...
No kings except Regina
Meanwhile in Denmark
youtu.be/aKoCZKtpS3Q?...
The book is still good. If you don’t want to give him your money, borrow it from the library.
Image 1
The Venezuelan poodle moth
Original post
Michael B Jordan went to an In-n-Out Burger after winning his Oscar and I love this photo so much.
