Erica "digifox" Kovac

more code doesn't necessarily mean more features. more features doesn't necessarily mean more economic value. more economic value doesn't necessarily mean more utility.

There's a pretty broad rejection of those kinds of statistics, with some combination of "they have to because their bosses make them" and "it's bundled into all of their apps"/"forced down their throats" and "it's free and used to make slop, which will stop when they have to pay".

People are celebrating or mourning the Ant IPO, but I'm still trying to understand the worldview where frontier labs not being profitable *would have proven* AI isn't transformative. I think it's maybe a capitalist mysticism where social life is mostly Illusion, and only the Profitable is Real?

plain-language communciation breakdown between client and laborer is not a solved problem and never has been, as any freelance artist will tell you. it will never be a solved problem either, because it is existential. in a few years everyone is going to rediscover that code is what solved this

imo this scope creep (which i have noticed too) is two things. one is the Genie Wish Problem, where AI will give you what you ask for, not what you want, and in this framework, 'ask for' includes implication and invention, yes-anding into uselessness

I think ‘luxury beliefs’ are a real thing, but my mildly provocative take is that this is not inherently a bad or good thing about the belief in question. It being easier to hold a principled belief if you’re in a position of relative privilege doesn’t mean the principle is wrong.

looked at in longer perspective, it's striking how much this resembles the premodern system of exclusion, rents, and personalist connections, which was--and this part's important--radically worse than the modern system of impersonal rules and general taxation

The @cancivlib.bsky.social, @openmedia.org, and other privacy advocates are speaking out on the dangers of Bill C-22, which invites backdoors to encryption. If you’re Canadian, the Senate needs to hear from you now.

the whole world of bits is cheating at Zork. the proposed marriage of the world of bits and the world of atoms makes cheating at Zork the one thing that matters. you probably don't actually want that, lest your frobozz be xyzzyed.

you know how many webpages have, like, live credentials or links to 'internal' webpages or secret API endpoints or other strange things that probably shouldn't be there just in plaintext in the HTML source, commented out? ever just build a spider to look for them? it's kinda illustrative/scary

The only reason anyone is talking about Marissa Mayer or Dazzle is that her marketing team understands how to deploy rage bait, and most of the Internet still can't spot it in the wild.

The two big projects I work on: * the update system at Oxide. If this breaks, our product cannot be updated any more. The entire update process is autonomous, too * cargo-nextest. ~a quarter of professional Rust devs use it. If this breaks, many people have a bad time So yes, I look at the code

My big one is banning Claude from writing comments (it puts in TODO markers instead). Being made to explain things makes me find a shocking number of issues

It's crazy that learning styles, which are basically astrology, are treated as completely legitimate by everyone, including many education professionals

this is up there on The Worst Things I Have Seen On The Internet from people who don't literally wear swastikas it's r/opensource! what in the shit of heck is this

No need to pour cold water on some fairly effective evangelization. She's also just... right? Closed labs want to capture the ability to perform all human knowledge work, lock it in a box, and defend it with the US government's missiles. They don't claim otherwise

Where we're headed is relatively predictable

thanks emudhra for the assist. a list of the hosts that a 2025 tizen samsung TV talks to and what data ships - even with all of the data collection and interest tracking opted out of gist.github.com/haileyok/906...

being anti AI is a luxury belief only available to first world people, especially Americans imagine how important machine translation is for people whose first languages aren't that common

Fireplaces may be the strongest "pet beavers building dams indoors" instinct I know of for humans. The source of warmth, food, and civilization for half a million years, now totally obsolete, but still makes us feel those things more so than any substitute.

The sort of shit you can build in your garage is simply undescribable to someone living in the late 90s. One off manufacturing, flexible electronics, 3dp, harbor freight TIG welders, etc. We are living in a fundamentally different world

Yep. Complete with a ribbon telling me to activate, then that pop-up window. bsky.app/profile/saga...

We need to break the software enshittification treadmill

Humans, perhaps using LLMs, found most of the vulns (the PHP vuln in particular had been found by a human but they couldn’t put together an exploit)

how are we expected to turn a profit selling the random number four (4) when others are simply giving away much larger random numbers

An update from Brewster Kahle on today's outage.

hardwired-pause.ai this is an appalling proposal

Absolute trainwreck segment on @lbc.co.uk last night regarding #AgeVerification, with @simonmarksfsn.bsky.social not knowing about the criminalization of even cheesy step/milf porn + complaining that "taking phones away from kids will impact British retail" x.com/AlecMuffett/...

They're a walled garden for video games that we only really tolerated because it was how they were marketed for decades. And with hardware architectures converging rather than diverging their only real selling point is form factor, which Nintendo cottoned on to well before Sony or Microsoft did.

Are we gonna do this, Bluesky? Are we all just gonna not understand accounting? 72B$ of the 80B$ is convertible notes. They became greater liabilities because the company's valuation skyrocketed. They don't have an 80B$ loss in the sense that almost everyone here is imagining.

Headway requires clients to upload their photo ID (this is normal) and also requires facial geometry scans from 3rd party contractor Persona (linked to Peter Thiel and Palantir). Are therapists aware of this?

This is the primary bright side of AI, taking back some control from exploitative service + device vendors.

It’s amazing how tech policy got dragged down for years in arguments about “legal but harmful” content, whilst the “true crime” industry which exploits victims a second time for fun, profit, and clicks was allowed to metastasise to the point where its exploitative practices are the mainstream norm.

They paid more per work torrented than they have to since the ruling, since their current practice of buying and scanning books is, unshockingly, fair use.

Not to pick on Sam here, but this is a useful point to highlight some of the impossibility of trust & safety work. Meta actually used to have a program *exactly* like this, BUT it became a central feature of Frances Haugen's Facebook Files as an example of Meta being evil. I'll explain...

Yes, but the REASON for the immunity was to ENCOURAGE platforms to moderate, because without it, the only way for them to liable was to have knowledge. That would have encouraged no moderation (and lots of hate and garbage and spam) to avoid knowledge. 230 was put in place to ENCOURAGE editorial

People demanding Zuck be hauled before Congress to explain why No Kings insta was suspended... how would you feel if MAGA GOP hauled MSNow execs to explain why they covered Trump the way they do? Both are editorial choices protected by the First Amendment. If this annoys you...

It spent testnet eth dude, it was right that wasn't real money and it shouldn't count. It was at worst being a minor nuisance.