I always said that I thought AI was going to "democratize" creative pursuits so that those who do not have the ability to make art can make art, and so on. But I don't think I fully understood until now just how deeply that will run. I've tended to pride myself on my overall passion for creating, my ability to actually finish projects, to ship. A lot of people don't ship, for whatever reason. I could speculate, but chances are if you're reading this, you're a person who has some project they abandoned part way through, maybe even over half way through. Why'd you abandon it?

Well, with AI by your side, those blockers will likely be a thing of the past. Everyone who has a great idea can ship now, and pretty easily. They can very quickly add hundreds of features to whatever it is (which is a new problem, in a new dimension, for all of us to learn how to deal with together) and ship all day long. If you thought there was a deluge of to-do list apps already, good lord, just wait until you see how many to-do list apps with advanced artificial intelligence driven heuristics to track your mood level throughout the day so it can recommend specific tasks to you when you are most likely to do them and it can even begin to predictively create tasks for you after learning your routines–there will be about 1,000 of these, maybe 10,000 of them. Every single wacko who thinks their workflow is the second coming of Christ gets to ship now. In the past they had to write self-help books detailing their pen-and-paper organization systems, and hope it took off randomly.

And, you know what, it's not like they don't deserve to get to ship. I mean, everyone's got the right to express themselves, at least if I was in charge that's the way it would be. But this basically describes my own minor AI reckoning, which I've been successfully pushing off by embracing, embracing, embracing. So... yeah. The fact that I ship more often than most no longer makes me particularly interesting. And even though I can ship with AI, I'm still attracted to simpler, basic projects. My workflows in life are simple. I see a to-do, I do it, I check it off. What more do I need? So if I were to make a to-do list app, how could I compete with aforementioned 10,000 AI-powered emotion tracking to-do list journaling apps? (Since I last mentioned these apps, they've all vibe coded in a journaling function.) I don't care about that stuff, so I am not going to spend my time building it. Now, suddenly, that's a serious disadvantage. Probably? Okay, it already was, I guess.

99.9% of humans have so much untapped potential, it's not possible to be human and not experience some twinge of fear at the idea that there's going to be a lot more creativity pouring into the world, sucking up all those precious eyeballs–and those eyeballs are the currency of the world, and not just financially, but emotionally, too. So many of us have traded community for an audience, every interaction online is just us selling ourselves to the crowd, begging to get even the smallest taste of going viral so that we know we're worth something. How do we stand out when anything that made us unique becomes a commodity accessible to anyone and everyone?

I love AI or whatever but whenever there's a feature that goes "the AI will take direct control of your computer" I'm immediately like "nope, no thanks." I don't think I will ever give an AI unfettered access to my computer. Claude Code already has too much access but because I trust its tooling to keep it restrained to its current folder, and I don't just sign off on any ask to run a command without checking it, I feel safe. But I'm probably already in a foolish position.

well i just lost a friend who said AI is morally and ethically wrong on a fundamental level, and that anything i make with the help of AI tools has no value, so that sucks. is this what it feels like to support the wrong political party these days??

what's funny about it is that they seemed unaware of the fact that saying my AI-assisted output has "zero value" could be seen as offensive. then when I pointed out most of the internet in a few years will be running on AI generated code, all the services we use will be AI generated, they said "and those have no value either, only to the shareholders"... uh... what about the people who use those services and derive, uh, value from the services........ and that's why they use the services........?

anyway, sad that anti-AI brainrot has stolen a friend from me. it was a slow build.

AI psychosis or otherwise negative effects people experience from using AI is such a huge problem we haven't even begun to see the ramifications of. I already know a handful of people who have undoubtedly suffered negative effects to their personality and mental well-being after becoming obsessed with AIs. Most terribly there's a guy I know who was a really good writer, but he's clearly leaning on AI to write everything for him and his unique voice has completely vanished. It's a tragedy. Sometimes it's more minor, like when a bozo suddenly thinks all of their bozo ideas are actually fantastic because an AI has glazed them into delusion. But then sometimes it causes someone to go fully off the rails into raw delusion, usually delusions of grandeur about their capabilities, so basically the bozo problem but just mixed with neurodivergence or mental illness, so it starts to seem a little more schizophrenic. Ugh. I love this technology but it's like feeding methamphetamine to children who've never even had sugar before.

If AI is a weapon, why don't we regulate it like one?

Thoughts on the fight between Anthropic and the Department of War.

https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/if-ai-is-a-weapon-why-dont-we-regulate

I can't believe people are writing articles like this seriously, comparing LLMs to nuclear weapons was a stretch but this guy goes fully off the rails.

If Anthropic wins the race to godlike artificial superintelligence, and if artificial superintelligence does not become fully autonomous, then Anthropic will be in sole possession of an enslaved living god. And if Dario Amodei personally commands the organization that is in sole possession of an enslaved god, then whether he embraces the title or not, Dario Amodei is the Emperor of Earth.

Emphasis not mine, that's in the original, he's purposefully highlighting the most ridiculous shit in his own essay for us. Does this guy want to get into exactly how he defines god? Because I'm pretty sure the idea of god, and even more so the idea that a god could be enslaved, is right out of fantasy novels, anime, and so on. So, hats off to this guy, while everyone else was satisfied plumbing the depths of sci-fi for their doomer scenarios, this guy is going straight past sci-fi and right into full blown fantasy.

Why not compare AI to dragons, my guy?

At the bottom of this ridiculous essay, he quotes someone else who is also enjoying the smell of their own farts a bit too much.

I'd like to dismiss this, except that the RC airplane hobby managed to spin off the leading weapon category of the century (so far). What used to be a fun hobby for dorky guys flying their toys at the edge of town, now takes out oil refineries and major radar installations.

Bro, I can't wait for this guy to hear about sticks and ropes. The things humans do with them, and they seemed so fun and harmless at first! But, more seriously, has this guy never heard of missiles? Does he really think remote or computer controlled flying objects that explode didn't exist until RC drones became affordable to consumers?

Also, LOL @ "Department of War" all over this stupid essay. What a joke.

John Gruber has some weird takes but I think his support of corporations losing free speech rights to a power-drunk authoritarian-aspiring administration is pretty wild. "No one gets to tell the federal government what it can and can't do except for the federal government," sounds pretty bad, especially in a climate where our system of checks and balances lie in tatters. We're supposed to speak truth to power, not accede to the demands of power. After all of John Gruber's tough guy masculinity hero worship nonsense over the years maybe it shouldn't be a surprise he's on the side of the bully.

I like this post on BlueSky...

Hmm now talk about how state power should destroy other individual actors that amass too much power that threatens US Democracy in the form of private wealth.

Yeah they're not gonna talk about that. Ben Thompson and John Gruber are pro-capitalist bootlickers. We're talking about people who make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year sitting around doing fuck all. They're not about to rise up against the capitalist system that keeps them comfortable.

Maybe if Gruber gets the dick of capitalism out of his mouth for a second he could do some reading and opt to change his views. But who are we kidding?

Man, I was ahead of the time on cancelling my ChatGPT subscription and going full time Claude!

So the government turns its back on Anthropic for disallowing two use cases and then turns around and makes a deal with OpenAI that disallows those same two use cases? Are the people in charge of our government total fucking morons or what? Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.

Recently a friend of mine, who is undoubtedly an expert on the topic of which he was speaking, said, "Your current bot is better than most of the other free stuff I use". So... there's that. I've got that at least.

i heard a new one today from the realm of "agentic superstition"... a friend told me his coworker swears opus 4.5 was a downgrade for claude code, now they use claude code to plan an implementation, then they take the implementation doc over to Codex to have Codex write the code.

i have to wonder what is going on in the heads of people like this, the people who fill reddit every day going "x LLM is bad today! x LLM gives me better results at 1am than at 12pm! x LLM used to be so much better just days ago!", what are they doing?