Old Fucking Punk @lwriemen@librem.one

RE: https://unstable.systems/@jneen/116618931097778342

Worth looking at both the quoted text here and •especially• the linked page, which is quite good.

I’ll add another item of my own. The first screenshot mentions giving an LLM the task of “implementing an HTTP server in JavaScript from scratch” in 90 minutes. Sounds impressive, right? Until you remember that every open-source Javascript HTTP server in existence ••was in the training data••.

1/

It’s just •astonishing• how many eye-popping stories of LLMs doing amazing omg-verge-of-magical-superintelligence things turn out to be just unvarnished plagiarism.

In the first months after ChatGPT’s release, I remember a French dept colleague being amazed that GPT could translate and summarize a passage of Le Petit Prince.

It was a lot less impressive when I dug up the 2 or 3 online passages which it had copied almost verbatim and stitched together (sprinkling in a couple of extra words that made it less accurate).

3/

Periodic reminder: 404 Media is the same Vice bros who broke their confidentiality agreement with Naomi Wu and put her in danger to satisfy the prurient interests of the Gamergate crowd.

Don't be surprised when they run slopaganda pieces. These people are not our friends, even if they are doing some useful reporting too.

There are so many reasons to deny the reality of climate #collapse:

"In the face of extreme climate risks, I am under pressure to cut my forecasts for the losses that disasters will cause in order to make insurance more affordable – and get my employer more business."
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/oct/14/climate-crisis-insurance-risk-disaster-catastrophe

One thing I'm only just now appreciating is how the shift to "agentic AI" serves to undermine any privacy benefits you might get from using a local model. Maybe the model isn't sending every prompt back to a data center, but if you're handing tasks over to agents, then they're likely out there leaving a trail of data all across the internet — and maybe with a preference for sites that filter back to the model vendor.

RE: https://mastodon.social/@lobsters/117449825505376513

“Matt Mullenweg Orders Accessibility Revert, Tells Core Committer to “Contribute Your Talents to Another Project” - The Repository”

https://www.therepository.email/matt-mullenweg-orders-accessibility-revert-tells-core-committer-to-contribute-your-talents-to-another-project

> Days after six years of accessibility work finally landed in core, Matt Mullenweg ordered it reverted, and Andrea Fercia’s WordPress.org account was briefly banned.

the reason that every consumer model takes great pain to hide raw "thinking" output is that if you actually see it then the entire illusion is broken and you see that what is actually happening is the worlds most expensive brute force process exploring every statistical linguistic possibility like an amnesiac dictionary before eventually taking a wild leap of chance back into its next hail mary execution. Every skill prompt for muse that's about introspection describes exhaustively how no thinking/reasoning text can be returned from it, but it's just right there in the filesystem. Claude code never even returns the true reasoning output to the client - it actually returns another LLM summarizing the thinking output as the commentary text. For every token you see, a thousand random wander tokens are emitted, and the token economy of Muse is the next escalation, if the amount of heat energy needed for a unit computer thing used to be a gas stove, Muse burns an entire star to deliver something sorta kinda resembling a unit computer thing

#WritersCoffeeClub – 16th Oct. How do you feel about people reading your works without buying a personal copy?

Long-standing publishing lore is, there are roughly four readers per book sold. This includes library loans, second-hand sales, and friends borrowing books. This is normal.

I don't get mad at warez sites (most downloads go unread, most readers wouldn't have bought one), but I *DO* get enraged by pirates who re-list and sell my ebooks on amazon (they're stealing income from authors).

“Epic Games goes full vibe code: MAXIMUM AI ACCELERATION – Pivot to AI”

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/10/15/epic-games-goes-full-vibe-code-maximum-ai-acceleration/

“Georgia’s Building Boom for Data Centers Comes With a Cost for Schools: $300M – The 74”

https://www.the74million.org/article/georgias-building-boom-for-data-centers-comes-with-a-cost-for-schools-300m/?ref=2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com

> The organization estimates that the losses in some of the state’s school districts would range from $3.6 million in Newton County to $35.5 million in Gwinnett County, the state’s largest district.

Turns out AI can cause more problems than it solves. Cleaning up AI slop is one issue. 36% of AI execs at companies with $1B+ in annual rev reported an AI incident that led to data loss, financial damage, brand damage or operational disruptions. Major companies are now limiting employee AI usage. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/oct/13/ai-companies-rushed-workers-fallout

“Make Shift”

https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/mis-shift/

> What ed-tech has forgotten to prepare students for: their present lives. Their humanity.