Use Signal. We promise, no AI clutter, and no surveillance ads, whatever the rest of the industry does. <3

Since I've left my last job, I've been thinking about the guy who used me as an alternative to ChatGPT whenever he hit a problem that he couldn't vibe code the answer out of at work.

He basically rotted his own brain by compulsively using ChatGPT in lieu of actually thinking with most any of the projects he was working on. Instead of taking the time to read through code in our framework, look up documentation, or do any sort of debugging, he instead just begged and pleaded with ChatGPT to try and get somewhere because "it was faster." Basically just really hammering his brain with the Programmer's Slot Machine. (@davidgerard wrote a really good article here about this specific gambling addiction angle here. I highly highly recommend reading/watching the corresponding YouTube video:
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2025/06/05/generative-ai-runs-on-gambling-addiction-just-one-more-prompt-bro/ )

Back to the story; When that wasn't working, which was a significant portion of the time, he'd then just turn and use me as a "more informed alternative" to ChatGPT.

I worked fully remote and the majority of our interactions was via a Teams chat. which apparently crossed some wires in his monkey brain and made him start just... Basically verbally barraging me like he would with the company ChatGPT instance. No thoughts at all, just an immediate process of:

- Ask vague question
- Get guess for an answer with a request for more details
- Try applying the guess blindly without thinking if it's applicable at all
- Have it not work and just report back that it didn't work.
- No follow-up details, no further explanation of what was going on or what he's trying to do. Nothing added past the original vague situation
- If lucky, I might get a screenshot of part of the error, meticulously sliced before it gave something useful in the output because he stopped reading error output to things and made no attempt to understand it. (Why? ChatGPT can do that part!)
- Rinse and Repeat until I get fed up and get into a call with him
- Fix the thing in less than a minute, pointing out that he should have been able to tell what was wrong almost immediately if he actually dropped a break-point and debugged the code at *literally any point* along the way
- Fuck off immediately after getting his fix, no thank you or anything
- start the process anew the following day when he vibe coded himself into a corner all over again

I literally had to go to leadership and make them have a talk with him and get him to leave me the fuck alone at work, after repeated attempts to establish boundaries about it, due to how much time it sucked out of me being able to work on other projects. Effectively just doubling up my work and slamming me with burn out right at the start of the year for absolutely no reason other than his belligerent insistence to just Not Do His Job Without His Hand Being Held By A Chat Window.

It rapidly went from a "He sometimes asks informed questions that I can answer and help him with. I enjoy working with him" to "The dude isn't even trying in the slightest and is now basically offloading his work onto me because he broke his capacity to actually do work independently of an external chat window. I fucking hate him and I hope he gets in a car wreck so I can get a break from the bleakness of dealing with him every goddamn morning"

ChatGPT has basically just been an absolute blight for me since it's inception. Going from the team being generally pro-crypto to intensely pro-genAI/LLM because their favorite scammers (er.. I mean YouTubers) had them hooked on a fantasy of some day making it Big by jumping from one Hype cycle to the next. I sincerely was very close to just finding an entirely different career path altogether because of just how incredibly shitty it was working with that team on just about anything, but lacking the job experience on the resume to land someplace else.

Nobody wanted to be an actual expert, nobody really wanted to learn anything. They had their degree and ChatGPT, which means they learned all they ever will need. ...While working in an industry that tends to re-invent itself every half decade or so while half-assing solutions with an outsourced bullshit generator. 🫠

All in the name of "Well it got me from point A to point B faster." and leaving it at that, despite taking significantly longer than they should have from the get go over it.

I've seen and lived what an AI Fueled future looks like:
Mediocre men harassing their talented and likely autistic peers until their peers just up and fuckin leave to a different organization out of frustration and exhaustion.

I think down the road, we'll be able to measure the negative impact using LLMs has on people's cognitive faculties by comparing it to horse kicks to the head, and only be exaggerating it by a little bit.

After a 23-year career in HigherEd IT, I have been recently laid off and am ready to #GetFediHired for remote it support, application administration, and security roles.

I have been fortunate to have a long and varied career:

- remote technical support
- SharePoint document management,
- preparing monthly CIS security metrics for our team,
- designing and implementing the first systems-wide combined endpoint asset inventory,
- application administrator for the PaperCut printing platform.

Good morning! just a regular lazy Sunday morning in 2025, time to make coffee and leisurely survey the news to check the essentials, and see if:

- my carton of $2/ea eggs need to be in the trash because they’re going to kill my family
- the air quality is going to be unbreathably bad today because of wildfires
- the air quality is going to be unbreathably bad because of tear gas
- the US is (still?) under martial law

Truly the origins of the public mental health crisis are a mystery

Did you know there's an entire category of anti-feudalism fonts?
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They're the sans serfs fonts.

@cratermoon @jwz They have electric motors, right? So no change should be required, other than smacking sense into the offenders

🤯👇🏼
In 2010, Aaron Swartz downloaded 70GBs of articles from JSTOR. He faced $1 million fine and 35 years in jail. He took his life in 2013.

Meta illegaly downloaded 80+ terabytes of books from LibGen, Anna's Archive, and Z-library to train their AI models without any punishment.

@wdenton Now? Not really. For some reason that feels like an overwhelming question, even though it should be simple.

Last night I reached out to Bernard Dionne, the bass guitar teacher I had 30+ years ago to thank him for introducing me to new music genres, musicians, and music theory (on top of everything else).

He has lived a life of passion for music, specifically jazz, and he is still learning and growing. His most recent project was working in a band called "Uptown Brigade" that released an album and an EP last year. They did a transformative cover of Nirvana's Heart-Shaped Box. Worth a listen!

In her last week as Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden worried about America losing access to its history. In an interview with GBH News, Hayden spoke about the country and the library's future. Hayden was fired by Trump last night. https://bit.ly/4k9ak5d #libraries #librarians

@mike nice, now get rid of "email[at]example.org" attempts to avoid scrapers too!

@mhoye "in the chapter 'The White Man's Burden'", no less.

Deranged.

I need to be very clear, that the push towards "vibe coding" - that is, deliberately deskilling people - is because AI code assistants are an (increasingly expensive) subscription service.

If you know how to code, you can just write Python, C, Java, R, PHP, whatever for free and make things. You may not own the tools of production, but at least you're not renting them.

If you have been deskilled so you only know how to vibe code, you will be paying for that privilege forever.

This also goes, by the way, for researchers who are starting to be convinced they don't need to learn how to be scientists anymore, because "the AI" can just do the science for them. Nope.

Actually, elevating Karina Gould should be the second thing PM Carney does.

The first should be taking affirmative, high profile public steps to protect our information spaces from corporate America, like requiring all government social media accounts to post from the government's brand new Mastodon instance (allowing mirrors to other platforms).

Otherwise, if Zuck, Musk & others can do as they please with our communications, Carney won't be PM for very long.

#CdnPoli
https://mastodon.online/@dcdeejay/114421296192353244

@ieure Looks like a Rickenbacker into an 8x8 Ampeg cabinet? I don't recognize the head but I would hazard a guess that it's Ampeg as well.

@massonpj @conservancy Damn I would love to attend but no way in hell am I crossing the border 😫

Wish there was a remote option but I know that's a ton of extra work.

Thanks to all who responded. I think, also, yes. I don't think violence would be required for countries like Canada to provide supplies into Gaza, especially from the sea, from air drops, and possibly from the Egyptian border crossing. I don't believe that Israeli troops would fire on their allies just for feeding hungry and sick people.

Seeing Microsoft advertise a feature to make emails you send longer followed minutes later by a feature to summarize overly long emails was certainly a moment.

More to the point: I find the idea that communication must be sanitized and candy coated to be childish.

@gemelliz @djfiander Goes along with the goal of lowering hiring standards for federal service workers. "We don't need sophisticated thinkers, we just need people who will unquestioningly do what we tell them!"