Nolan LawsonNew post: "We mourn our craft" https://nolanlawson.com/2026/02/07/we-mourn-our-craft/
No comment on this one.
James Widman@nolan
1) there's no way that the people using the mockup-generating machines actually understand their mockup codebases to anywhere near the degree as people who actually spent time thinking about the problems and their solutions. The mockups are therefore unmaintainable.
2) if we could ban asbestos, then we can ban these horrible destructive machines. We can organize, and we can have them all dismantled, and their DRAM & CPUs can be put to less-destructive use.
@nolan
3) we have no convincing reason to tolerate defeatism anymore. With examples like the Mamdani administration, we can all see that there is no excuse.
https://sfba.social/@vij/116014712128853121
We *can* switch off the orphan-shredding machine, and we must.
@nolan i've never made this request to anyone before in my life, but... in this moment, defeatism like that amounts to advocating compliance in advance. And it may actually convince some people to give up before they even think about the necessity of resistance. And that could result in a weaker resistance. For this reason, i sincerely but respectfully urge you to consider deleting that blog post.
@JamesWidman I get where you're coming from. To be clear: this post is not really a plea to anyone in my audience to stop resisting, become a "collaborator," etc. It's really a conversation between me and myself from a ~year ago. You can make of it what you will.
Matt Campbell@nolan @JamesWidman Yourself from a year ago no longer exists. All that matters now is what effect the posts have on other people today. And I think these posts do have the effect of discouraging people from resisting, whether you meant it that way or not. You've said that you didn't ask for this future, and you're not celebrating it. Wouldn't it be better, then, to join your efforts with the people that are fighting it, or at least not harm that fight by proclaiming inevitability?
@matt @nolan ...
But the pieces of hardware that enable gen-a.i. (particularly the accelerator chips, or at least, data centers with huge numbers of them) are *not* the same thing as the grim reaper. They are *physical* things. They can be switched off, they can be scrapped, and they can be regulated out of existence. Previous generations did that for other physical things, and we can do it too.
anyway,
https://mastodon.social/@JamesWidman/116032953161658413
@JamesWidman @matt Matt, I cannot credibly cheer on the resisters because I'm no longer one of them. Believe me, I was one of the most annoying anti-AI voices inside of Salesforce (anyone who worked with me will attest to this), but I just don't have the fight in me anymore. I see it as a lost cause.
I admire people who fight for what they believe in, though, so I think it's the job of the anti-AI crowd to persuade the rest of us, push to regulate LLMs ala James above, etc.
@nolan I'm sorry if I pushed too hard. The truth is, I'm not sure if I have the fight in *me* either. A screed like the one I linked yesterday morning can make me feel like I should, but we'll see how long it lasts.
@matt Hah, no worries! You're my friend, I don't mind you pushing back. Maybe someday I'll be embarrassed of what I wrote; wouldn't be the first time. 😛