The way things are going you will be called a domestic terrorist if you do not have a subscription to an AI service. “Intelligence as a service.” AI as utility. A service that will be required like car insurance. Mandated usage to increase revenue and surveillance because is AI profitable? No. But is it good? Also no.

It’s gotten so bad the Pope is now writing about it. In Magnifica Humanitas, an ecclesiastical letter, it says:

In this sense, the true alternative is not between enthusiasm and fear, but between two paths of development: a progress that serves individuals and peoples, or a progress that subjects them to the mentality of power.

And so I have to ask as an atheist, though also a confirmed Roman Catholic, probably falsely, definitely heretical, if instead of using the ignored “AI is immoral” argument to oppose AI transformation at work, I can use the much grander “AI is schismatic” and argue that its usage would be a violation of my Charter Rights?

Google I/O was barely a week ago and in an inspiring moment of fast-follow the company managed to instantly make everything worse. Google search got worse. The calculator is gone. The dictionary broke. Asking Google to define “ignore”, amongst many other similar phrases, would have returned “Yes sir. I’ll ignore everything.” and never give you the definition. All the icons for everything got worse. And they stuck more AI into everything, including your personal photos, email, and drive. 

The old heads would remember the controversy around Google introducing non-contextual ads into Gmail. The fear was that Google would read your emails, that your data would go somewhere, and you’d be served targeted ads. Now they’re expecting you to give them access to everything.

Of course Google doesn’t care because it’s not in that business anymore, even though its business is on that infrastructure. Google is an ad company and very little of the tech coverage of I/O seems to acknowledge this. Google focuses on the consumer facing products to build hype but hides the marketing, ad sales and auctions, targeting, within side events. 

Which is why Matthias Ott’s “Ad Infini­tum”, a distillation of Google ad research and changes, got so much links:

So yes, Google didn’t talk about ads in the I/O keynote. Everything they announced is the new ad system. One that, in the eyes of Google, no longer needs the open web as an intermediary. And now, they’re gradually turning it on.

Do not trust anything coming out of Google services. 

LLMs Corrupt Your Documents When You Delegate. Good to know now that Google is thrusting AI into your docs. fuck off ai music. The LLM Is Not a Junior Engineer | jacobharr.is. I am not a Software Engineer — huronbikes. Why do we keep doing this? Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want https://archive.is/BD5dD. And why would they remember? They live  disassociated from reality. Or, more appropriately, they do know what they want: AI as a Fascist Artifact.

Everything on social media is fake https://archive.ph/OreAF. A Meta engineer, who after 10 years most likely earned multiples of millions, talks about the “horrors” of working there. He cries in the shower. Then checks those stock options. Then he got laid off. Cry me a fucking river. Meta Employee Makes Over $300,000 a Year, Doesn't Own Car, Couch or TV - Business Insider.

Anyway here are some nice classic OS screenshots: The Virtual OS Museum. Nicole Express looks into arcade Shanghai, by Sunsoft. Rick Carlino summarized the Gnutella protocol. And all those links made me nostalgic for pre-AOL nullsoft, winamp aesthetics, and limited computing. You could have stuff then. Now it’s all leased to you.

The Google changes ultimately mean bad news for websites. Some are saying this is the end. The social contract has been broken. And maybe it’s true for most. It’s an attack on the open web, sites that depend on traffic and ad views, but the small web remains small. It doesn’t need Google. It can fuck off. 

I’ve been reskilling in those web front-end basics, HTML, CSS, javascript, free of frameworks and constraints and KPIs, for my own personal site and I’ve been having fun playing around with fonts and CSS transitions. Many have been de-skilled on these basics. It’s getting worse with code generators. And maybe it’s not marketable anymore, most places have lost any ‘frontend’ or ‘full stack’ developer titles in favour of more generic “individual contributor” or “AI builder” nonsense, but fuck that too. This is what I enjoy. I’d rather fumble aimlessly over some CSS in a text editor than ever have to speak to or with another AI ever again. They can’t ever take that away from me.

Listen to this

You could be listening to the faux nostalgia of the new Boards of Canada album (it’s fine), or you can be like me and loop Hatch’s early-era dubstep mix for Tempa, released on CD, circa 2003. Back then those 2-step UKG influences were still front and centre. The flourishes were light, the sounds more minimal. I’ve been been listening to a bunch of stuff from that era and catching up since a lot of if it I missed contemporaneously, I was into other styles, and I appreciate it a lot more now.

interdum,

sometimes.