Banger post to start a blog.

Link seems borked. Fixed version: https://ti-kallisti.com/infosec/tales/vibes.html

Benn Jordan posted a mega-update video on his epic battles against Flock.

His incredible work doesn’t quite take the sting off my disappointment in his decision to use an AI-generated image at 18:30. (Come on, the option to badly crop your face onto the “This is fine.” dog was right there!)

Edit1: oof, it’s not a single incident. 20:30 now. I hope it’s just for this one sub-story, or I might not care to finish…

Edit2: It was kept in check afterward, though I suspect it was used for some assets.

I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that…

But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.

I’m sure enough people have told you to yeet her into the sun. I empathize if you decide you want to work this through with her. I have had issues like this with my own partner.

I found this video essay by Dr. Fatima helpful to empathize in my case. You agree on some of the fundamentals it seems. She has a habit and somewhat agrees that it’s bad. But due to stress or whatever reason she can’t kick it. So try to help her to work on this. It’s good to keep in mind that even half-measures can do lots of good. Maybe she isn’t super principaled in her AI abstention like you, but there’s a wide range between occasional indulgance and full-on dependency.

One seemingly small thing that reduced a lot of conflict for us was me replacing her search widget on her android. She kept quoting AI summaries from Google at me and I kept getting annoyed until I offered to help by changing it to DuckDuckGo. Maybe you’re better skilled in configuring your devices and can offer to protect her from addictive design patterns she is barely aware of.

Fine sneer by data journalist and senior engineer Jacob Harris: Why I Don’t Vibe Code

(slightly dated (Mar 2026) but first time I heard of this guy)

Is anyone familiar with the website I Can Eat Glass? It was apparently created in the 90s by a Harvard student, who was concerned that people learning foreign languages only learn common phrases (e.g. “Where’s the loo?”) which makes them stand out as tourists when they speak. If one were to say a truly uncommon phrase, it stands to reason one would be instantly respected as a native. So he set up a website to collect as many translations of the phrase “I can eat glass, it does not hurt me” as he could.

Surely you are riveted to your screens right now, desperate to learn what this very special brain genius has been up to since then. Ethan Mollick is a professor at a Pennsylvania business school and published “Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI” in 2024. Some say he is substacking about the exponential growth of AI capabilities to this day, but critically this book was apparently read by some german teaching influencer.

He in turn published a self-help book for parents of school kids this year, that got put on display in my local library. And of course it has a chapter on AI, so I had to lend it and hate-read a little. And of course he references Mollick and his Co-Intelligence screed, which he apparently absorbed as a base expectation what the future of AI will look like, and this is how I got to learn about one very special brain genius from Harvard.

My first association was Alex Jones screaming “I’M TEAM HUMAN” while ranting about environmentalists. So the brand is getting a little crowded it seems.

That seems totally reasonable too.

Idk, given that we can’t really conclusively prove that anything post-2022 is slop-free, don’t you think setting a no-AI policy is still good for setting social expectations? And making people spend effort to conceal AI work is not a bad thing, since one problem with slop-PRs is that they are low-effort.

And I use tons of old projects that haven’t made an anti-AI declaration (and have to use a bunch that are slop-permissive e.g. the kernel), but I still appreciate every one that does.

So I just stumbled into Team Human, because a Youtuber I kind of like (Kraut) published a video for them. They seem to run a campaign targeted at creators, pushing to get videos released on the 10th or 17th. So they must be having a bit of a high point right now. (Idk if cash changed hands.)

Their manifesto tries to amp up societal harms, but the existential risk is snuck in at the end (AI programmed pandemics, etc.) and they want to regulate AI chips like nukes. CAIS (Center for AI Safety) is listed as the sponsor. Seems a little “AI centrist” to me, as in aligned with the less insane billionaires, but still a typical AI safety astroturfing shop. Shame if any of your favorite creators fell for it.

though the lobotomized themselves weren’t among the loudest advocates of the procedure afaik

Also works for cocaine, I’m noticing.

Might be best as a comeback, if someone compares AI to a pharmaceutical breakthrough like antibiotics.

Just had a shower conversation with myself, and for some reason the crystal meth metaphor (methaphor?) is really coming together in my head.

“Have you even tried some frontier meth?”

“Sure, you can also get energy with exercising, eating well, and structure. But we don’t have to live like amish people, now that we can have meth!”

Nationalized Open Weight Models -> State-funded AI dispensory

There’s surely a rich bounty of comparisons left to mine.

The bubble will pop. It’s much too big to be sustainable.

But that won’t fix software industry employment because the Large Language Models don’t really need to work that well for this process. They only need to sort of work.

Get ready for the era of digitally sovereign on-premise open weight perpetual software sweatshops.

You can download an executable and surf websites with it, which will frequently break I guess.

Not sure how much help one can offer atm except donating or contributing directly.

I can tell you the two languages I would learn right now if I had the spare cycles.

1. Zig is a C-replacement language that took a no-AI stance early on. It doesn’t have compiler-assured memory safety like Rust, but it does try to revamp structures (like alloc or error handling) in a way that makes it more obvious to the programmer what is happening. I’d love to learn more, but cycles…
2. Gleam is a language that is part of the Erlang/BEAM ecosystem. It’s a functional language, so it’s a bit of a mindfuck if you come from a Python-/C-esque perspective, but if you like formal logic it might well be up your alley. It has a good web tutorial if you’re interested. Neither Gleam nor its runtime Erlang-OTP have taken a stance on AI as far as I know (Elixir has a permissive stance), but at least I’ve seen no red flags as of yet. The people at Gleam just generally give me a vibe of being deliberate and careful with their code.

I don’t think it’s impossible that the underlying tech of LLMs will be evolved into something undeniably useful. But I don’t think “helping with Python” will be that.

I think on !fuck_ai I can suggest, you could also just learn the relevant bits of Python? Learning to express your thoughts in code and understanding the tools you use feels way more empowering than relying on blackbox-extruded code.

In my book socialism is about workers controlling the means of production, and historical socialists did not agree how that would work in detail.

Libertarianism on the other hand is primarily about the rejection of personal restrictions, stuff like: “I should be allowed to freely copy and share media I have legally acquired.” or “I shouldn’t be forced to pay taxes.” This individualist thinking makes it usually unable to adress structural inequality.

But he also literally has a book titled “Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free”.

That sure sounds like a zinger, but going off Wikipedia he does argue in that book for a loosening of copyright, which is pretty much what I meant. I don’t hate those positions though I’ll note they’re more libertarian than socialist. He has a whole personal freedom + monopoly control shtick, which works great for me in a lot of scenarios, but doesn’t quite work on GenAI tech.

You can call me exceptionalist, but I think LLMs stand out because the adoption of the tech basically requires very capital-intensive and thus centralized operations for model training. This makes whoever runs them (likely capital or a state) a powerful arbiter of information space, maybe best comparable with algorithmic feeds in monopolistic social media.

I think it is necessary to say: “Hey, we as a society shouldn’t run things like that. There are better ways of distributing information that work just fine.” A tech-neutral attitude can’t achieve that.