Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

Companies are *already* quietly hiring people to come in and clean up the digital asbestos that is "AI" slop, or re-hiring the same folk (who did the actual work) that managers and CEOs ditched with surpassing cruelty.

Please, if you're a consultant or getting re-hired, MAKE THEM PAY.

None of that needed to happen. The tech doesn't fill a need, for the most part - the parts that are valuable to people could just as easily have been implemented under strict consumer protection rules.

❞
If intelligence is a necessary precondition for stupidity, and intelligence and stupidity scale together such that it takes real intelligence to be spectacularly stupid, then super-intelligence will be the opening act to an era of super-stupidity.

AI hallucination might be the first evidence of this dynamic. Large language models produce fluent, confident, detailed text that is, with some regularity, factually wrong. And this is not a simple bug but a structural feature of systems that optimize for appeal and plausibility rather than truth. And the danger is not that the AI will be wrong, after all, humans are wrong all the time, but knowing this, humans have invented means to detect and correct errors. We call this the scientific method.

The danger is that an AI will be wrong in ways humans can no longer detect because the very capacities that would catch the error have been outsourced to the machine or exceed the capacities of human minds. We face the prospect of a stupidity so sophisticated that it becomes indistinguishable, to its beneficiaries, from intelligence. This is the parable of Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, where the answer to the ultimate question, the meaning of life, the universe, and everything, is 42.

I would like to make a modest proposal and suggest that we need a science of stupidity as rigorous as our emerging sciences of intelligence. This will not require billions of dollars of investment. It would involve inquiries into the mechanisms by which intelligent systems produce stupid outcomes. It would include studying the evolutionary dynamics that maintain stupidity despite its selective costs. It would promote the development of design principles that distinguish tools which enhance cognition from tools which replace it. And it would include surveying the institutional conditions under which collective intelligence degrades into collective stupidity.

Stupidity is not what remains when intelligence is subtracted, it is an active mechanism with its own logic, its own dynamics, and a capacity for unbounded growth parasitic on ingenuity. In a world obsessed with ever more powerful cognitive technologies, understanding stupidity is not merely an academic exercise, it might prove to be the most intelligent thing we do.
❝

https://nautil.us/what-makes-humans-stupid-1282459

The gap between hype and reality for AI is vast.

https://karlbode.com/the-ai-hype-reckoning-is-upon-us/

“The system does not simply reflect inequality—it produces it.”

Jeremy Cherson of the Bail Project writes about bail, democracy, and why no one should be jailed simply because they are poor.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/bail-funds-jail-prison-america-250

“boy don’t you feel foolish, you fell for this LLM generated code/generative art for a few minutes”

no fucker, I feel angry

why in fuck would this ever be a shame on me situation

you’re a conman running a con, and like all conmen you got really good at tricking people for long enough to mug them and run

“you couldn’t tell it was slop if I lied” said the same fried brain that thinks “Key Takeaways 🚀” is a feature of a readme any fucking human wrote

besides everything else, a ban on LLM code is a ban on low-quality code

the sealions doing their work yet again to DARVO us about an LLM ban can’t process that, because they think LLM code is good

we don’t in fact have to accept low-quality trash

we don’t have to accept good code from dickheads either

LLM slop happens to be both very bad and contributed by someone you really don’t want as part of your community

👋 Hi, I'm looking for work!

🚀 I am...
- a detail oriented #frontend senior engineer with 15 years of experience
- proficient with #JavaScript & #TypeScript, #CSS, #Vue, TDD
- experienced with #React, Ember.js, GCP, Terraform

🔎 I'm looking for:
- a collaborative environment between eng + product & design teams
- a #Bonn based (onsite) or a Germany / EU-based (remote) company
- ability to learn and grow

🚫 no crypto, big oil, gambling, gen-ai, web3

🙇 boost appreciated!

#FediHire #GetFediHired

Who gets chosen to “police the boundaries of what we’re allowed to think about and what we’re allowed to do”?

Adam Johnson and Steven Thrasher discuss media complicity, campus crackdowns and the machinery of liberal power.

https://inthesetimes.com/article/steven-thrasher-adam-johnson-books-palestinian-liberation-complicity

Nigel Farage, haunted former wanker banker, has resigned from his seat as MP and announced he’s standing again in the same seat - he’s trying to dodge responsibility for a crypto funding scandal by hiding behind the electorate.

All the rival parties have refused to put up candidates so now a man with a bin on his face has entered, and is doing media rounds with interviews.

https://youtu.be/3XO3FwWfPLc

@Azuaron @AngelaCarstensen @futurebird

Also, all the software being "created" by vibecoding legitimately sucks, and as skilled SWEs concentrate in companies that don't use LLMs or at least require use, the shakiness of vibecoded shit is going to accelerate and eventually turn into critical bugs that nobody knows how to find, let alone fix.

All while the companies spend through the nose to pay models to piss out bad advice and worse code that won't help them out of the ditch they're digging.

Just thinking about a personal failure of mine during my time at Mozilla, to get anyone to care about the idea of warning labels like ISO safety labels, on tech products. "This product requires a server to work", "This product sends telemetry to a different jurisdiction", etc, the same way we have "poisonous", "flammable" or "corrosive" labels.

Idly wondering how different the world could have been today, if these things had to be visible and legible on the box instead of buried in fine print.

The amazing folks at @yunohost are running a fundraising campaign to cover their operating costs for 2026.

I personally make a monthly recurring donation to them but wish I could give more 🥲

If you use their services and you can afford it, please consider donating to their project. Every Euro / Dollar / Yen counts:

🔗 : https://yunohost.org/donate.en.html

#NotAllHeroesWearCapes #SelfHosting #empowerment #resist #YunoHost

When people ask me what the phrase "artificial intelligence" means, my short answer is, it means "venture capitalists, give me some money".

But OUP asked me for a longer answer, given here and summarized in the section headings:

https://doi.org/10.1093/9780197852712.003.0067

Smart glasses with cameras and microphones built-in and facial recognition to come are the latest fad in surveillance tech.

For my blog & newsletter ~ this week in security ~ I wrote about why the backlash against smart glasses — aka "pervert glasses" — is justified from a security and privacy perspective. Please read and share!

More: https://this.weekinsecurity.com/reframing-smart-glasses-as-pervert-glasses/

Sign up/RSS for my weekly newsletter: https://this.weekinsecurity.com

Librarians removing AI from phones and teaching people they have a choice. Not political. Just information literacy, same as fighting book bans. The real work was always about helping people think critically.

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2026/07/02/midcoast/midcoast-culture/maine-librarians-are-helping-patrons-resist-ai-joam40zk0w/

Are you a Wet Bulb or a Dim Bulb? https://www.patreon.com/BrianMcFadden/posts/climate-or-162637186

https://www.firefund.net/espacioflora

Flora is an anarchist social centre in Valparaiso, in the territories dominated by the Chilean state. Comrades there are raising funds to keep the project going. If you've got a few bucks to throw in, please show them some love!

Five reading lists, 50 titles each, tracing what the last two and a half centuries actually built.
Sale runs all thru 8/1. Get 40% off all titles included in the reading lists with code 250 at checkout.
Shop here: https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_list&c=277