BlueMonday1984

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he/they
New(ish) Baldur Bjarnason - a fairly politically charged one at that, going into the US hegemony powering the current tech industry (and the AI bubble by extension), and how the Hormuz crisis is all-but guaranteed to topple the whole thing.
The old world of tech is dying and the new cannot be born

Writing at the end of the world, from Hveragerði, Iceland

AI is bad at everything, part infinity: AI transcription whitewashes 18th-century documents
Caitlin G. DeAngelis (@caitlindeangelis.bsky.social)

Recently, FamilySearch digitized and uploaded tons of microfilmed records, including many from 18th-century Massachsuetts. They're using some sort of AI to transcribe/summarize the handwritten documents. I've noticed that the AI strips out references to race and enslavement in 18thc documents.

Bluesky Social
In more positive news, the Slopfree Software Index recently hit 100 stars.
slopfree-software-index

A list of open-source projects that reject AI-generated code

Codeberg.org

Dusk (Twilight Princess PC port) released

https://awful.systems/post/8277428

Dusk (Twilight Princess PC port) released - awful.systems

Building on the completed decompilation [https://github.com/zeldaret/tp] of The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess and the Gamecube/Wii compatibility later Aurora [https://github.com/encounter/aurora], another unofficial port’s come to the PC. (announcement post [https://twilitrealm.dev/posts/2026-05-09-dusk-v1-released/] - release trailer [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9fQ4ZB-wvk])

PS3 emulator RPCS3 has put up some guardrails against slopcode, and responded to the AI bro shitfits by sneering them:

Bonus response:

GitHub - RPCS3/rpcs3: PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger

PlayStation 3 emulator and debugger. Contribute to RPCS3/rpcs3 development by creating an account on GitHub.

GitHub

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026

https://awful.systems/post/8263538

Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 17th May 2026 - awful.systems

Want to wade into the sandy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid. Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no. If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high. > The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them. (Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Google is forcibly installing Gemini Nano onto every Chrome installation without the user’s knowledge, and actively re-installing it if the user deletes it. Probably an attempt to juice the numbers.

(h/t Matt Roszak)

Google Chrome silently installs a 4 GB AI model on your device without consent. At a billion-device scale the climate costs are insane. — That Privacy Guy!

Google Chrome is downloading a 4 GB Gemini Nano model onto users' machines without consent, with no opt-in, no opt-out short of enterprise tooling, and an automatic re-download every time the user deletes it. The pattern is identical to the Anthropic Claude Desktop case I wrote about last month, but the scale is between two and three orders of magnitude larger. This article does the legal analysis and, for the first time, the environmental analysis. The numbers are not small.

That Privacy Guy!

New blog from Iris Meredith: Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox

Based off her own unusually good experience with Claude, the general thrust is about sneerers being better-equipped to use AI than boosters.

Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox | deadSimpleTech

Looking at my peers, this seems like a consistent pattern: the people who get the best engineering results out of coding agents are not only *not* the boosters, they're the people who think the whole enterprise is dubious and that basically everyone who manufactures these tools is deeply morally compromised. This is a downright *weird* phenomenon: while a similar thing has happened with other technologies before, it's surpassingly uncommon, and for most technologies, the people most excited about them are also the most adept at using them effectively. What the hell is going on?

deadSimpleTech
Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac has sued Google for defaming him with AI, over his cancelled concert in December caused by Google’s AI overview calling him a sex offender.
Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac sues Google over alleged defamation | CBC News

MacIsaac claims the online giant defamed him by falsely identifying him as a sex offender in an AI-generated summary.

CBC

Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world.

First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working.

Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess: