🇯🇴 Ben Little [they/them]

Always verify on multiple channels. Signal benlittle.32 Session 051e6469719199b832720243a242d9f41d8c012027868e96ea91aecc5ad7982c14

I'm patenting "Smog Computing" right now.

GPU over Websocket isn't real and can't hurt you.

Every computer system should bring people closer together. Shoving tech in between people who are already in effective communication makes about as much sense an hiring an interpreter to stand between two people who are speaking the same language. Unless of course, the goal is to disrupt them.

"Let me just install this one new service"

The thing that I find hardest to wrap my head around when I see speaking positively of coding agents: Thinking a tool that saves maybe 5 minutes of DIY coding every once in a while is worth TRILLIONS of dollars. And you get less comprehension and worse recall of your own decisions.

The central goal of AI is to accelerate climate change.

I cannot stop thinking about whether or not there is a reasonable complexification of an Ackerman-style function.

All modern animal DNA is essentially a series of patches on the worm. The fish release was pretty consequential tho.

it is shocking how much you can get done when you don't care about the quality of the codebase.

Dumb is a product far more valuable than intelligence.

Looking intensely at Xeon chips

IOMMU and SecComp are all a girl really needs.

Computer networks are a misnomer. There are human networks, and the machines that facilitate them.

I will be so glad when [political party] saves us from those crazy [political party]

They poisoning the wells of information.

You can't build reliable software on unreliable platforms. Unfortunately the move fast and break things mentality is a systemic problem, infecting every layer of modern computing.

Nearly half of Americans want Netanyahu arrested despite Israel’s multimillion-dollar propaganda drive

It really is a Chinese century.

Today Google offered to listen to my phone calls and take notes. Or rather, they told me about the notes they were already taking and offered to let me see them. Privacy died 60 years ago.

The proper response to "Have you seen someone in a red hoodie?" is "Am I free to go?"

I hate to say enshittification is good, but we kinda deserve it.

Soulless code is just as bad as soulless art.

The human brain, with 86 billion neurons and a million billion connections between them, runs on 20 watts, less than a lightbulb. Think we may be going down the wrong road believing data centres, needing megawatts or gigawatts of power, with all the environmental & climate costs, are the way to go.

Physical computing is fundamentally about tuning hardware.

The primary purpose of sticking cameras, microphones, and network devices into everything is espionage. Rich people want a programmable populace and that isn't possible without data.

Firing people while investing in boxes was exactly the future I warned people about 10 years ago. AI is fake. Unless the laws of thermodynamics are circumvented, it always will be.

I like that god is now intervening in the senate.

Linux is dead in the next few years. You cannot shove 2M lines of C into ring 0 and still have security. However GNU/Hurd has basically no adopters, and I don't know of any attempt to build on L4. The entire computing industry and everything that depends on it is in for an existential shock.

Nothing like patching linux before I've had my coffee

God did not hide the secret to happiness inside of a rulebook.

There are no jobs because some among us think things are more valuable then people.

I don't see much real discourse on the fundamental problem of machine learning: computational complexity. We can burn 100x as much oil, steal 1000x as much data, and still end up with a model that is only marginally better than what we have now. Changes in architecture cannot change the math.

CSS is becoming a functional reactive programming language.

If you need an LLM to summarize your code, you need to refactor your code.

Information is a weapon. One that will soon turn against its proliferators.

The last five years have just beaten the creative drive out of me. There's nothing worth making.

LLM company IPOs are the biggest hot potato moment. Industry is gonna flop so hard and no one wants to be holding that shit when it does.

Is it too much to ask for a world that isn't run by a bunch of jerks doing ketamine?

Every time I have done what I am "supposed" to do, my life gets worse. Break rules. Eat the consequences. Live free.

Automating something does not inherently make it better.

I am proud to announce the release of A Different Way To Do The Same Damn Thing v1.0.