Anders Gulden Olstad

133 Followers
483 Following
934 Posts

My biggest problem with the concept of LLMs, even if they weren’t a giant plagiarism laundering machine and disaster for the environment, is that they introduce so much unpredictability into computing. I became a professional computer toucher because they do exactly what you tell them to. Not always what you wanted, but exactly what you asked for.

LLMs turn that upside down. They turn a very autistic do-what-you-say, say-what-you-mean commmunication style with the machine into a neurotypical conversation talking around the issue, but never directly addressing the substance of problem.

In any conversation I have with a person, I’m modeling their understanding of the topic at hand, trying to tailor my communication style to their needs. The same applies to programming languages and frameworks. If you work with a language the way its author intended it goes a lot easier.

But LLMs don’t have an understanding of the conversation. There is no intent. It’s just a mostly-likely-next-word generator on steroids. You’re trying to give directions to a lossily compressed copy of the entire works of human writing. There is no mind to model, and no predictability to the output.

If I wanted to spend my time communicating in a superficial, neurotypical style my autistic ass certainly wouldn’t have gone into computering. LLMs are the final act of the finance bros and capitalists wrestling modern technology away from the technically literate proletariat who built it.

I wonder which is more environmentally friendly?
eBooks
50.7%
Paper books
49.3%
Poll ended at .
EnshittifAIcation

Three episodes, one week. AI bots that hallucinate VPN requirements, recommend Apache configs on nginx servers, and suggest replacing 128 GB of RAM with a cloud VPS. A field note on the cost of mistaking confidence for competence.

IT Notes

Meet Fedibook!

The idea came from thinking about what it actually takes to get regular users onto the fediverse. Mastodon is great (i love it), but the follow-based model feels unfamiliar to some. Friends and Groups though — that's something everyone already understands.

So Fedibook is a fediverse platform built around exactly that, using ActivityPub. Think federated address book meets social network, with the kind of social graph people are already used to.

Current status:

- Friend requests across servers working
- News feed working, with visibility levels: public, friends-only, or local server only

Hoping to open up for early testing and feedback soon. Open source of course.

#fediverse #activitypub #fedibook #danmarkskifter

The goal is to make corporate data less profitable.

Even stuff as simple as setting your birthdate to 1970-01-01 everywhere, adding [TEST] or [DELETED] as your name or account notes anywhere you don't need them to know your name.

Using plugins like AdNauseam to poison ad trackers (and cost them marketing dollars).

Using VPNs set to different locations.

Signing into data broker sites to "correct" outdated info (they'll often let you do that with little-to-no proof of identity, but will require your passport or state ID in order to delete your info). Bonus points if you correct it to someone else's info on their site that's similar to yours.

Only fill in required fields when you sign up for anything, but only provide correct info if it matters for you to use the service, otherwise provide plausible, but incorrect, data.

If you use LLMs anywhere, use the free tier and always vote thumbs up for bad answers and down for good ones. It wastes their resources and drives up their costs while making their training data worse.

@Edent The only place I find important to be amongst the early adopters is the buffet table.

🆕 blog! “I'm OK being left behind, thanks!”

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable.

"You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered.

That struck me as a bizarre sentiment.…

👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/03/im-ok-being-left-behind-thanks/

#AI #crypto #future #technology

I'm OK being left behind, thanks!

Many years ago, someone tried to get me into cryptocurrencies. "They're the future of money!" they said. I replied saying that I'd rather wait until they were more useful, less volatile, easier to use, and utterly reliable. "You don't want to get left behind, do you?" They countered. That struck me as a bizarre sentiment. What is there to be left behind from? If BitCoin (or whatever) is going…

Terence Eden’s Blog
Probably been discussed already, but any #recommendations for a good #usb #WiFi dongle for #FreeBSD 15? #RunBSD
Photo by Marcin Ryczek.
#blackandwhitephotography
@secid @briankrebs In the days of yore, the baker risk getting dunked in the town sewer for baking too lightweight breads. This should definitely apply to the manufacturers of this shit