“I learn by failing, and if the LLM takes that work away from me, I won’t really understand what I’m doing.”

https://jacobharr.is/personal/i-dont-vibe-code.html

It’s so depressing people so hyped over the instant gratification of AI slop code at the cost of their own thinking and learning.

First, they came for your data and behaviors. Then they pushed custom algorithms to get you hooked on content. And now they want you to offload your thinking, creations, and wonders onto them.

Pick up a damn book, learn something, and go touch some grass. Ugh.

You're paying AI companies a monthly subscription fee to be fingerprinted like a parolee.

I got bored and ran uBlock across Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini simultaneously.

Claude:

• Six parallel telemetry pipelines.
• A tracking GIF with 40 browser fingerprint data points baked into the URL, routed through a CDN proxy alias specifically to make it harder to block.
• Intercom running a persistent WebSocket whether you use it or not.
• Honeycomb distributed tracing on a chat UI because apparently your conversation needs the same observability stack as a payments microservice.

ChatGPT:

• proxies telemetry through their own backend to hide the Datadog destination URL from blockers.
• uBlock had to deploy scriptlet injection — actual JS injected into the page to intercept fetch() at the API level — because a network rule wasn't enough.
• Also ships your usage data to Google Analytics. OpenAI. To Google. You cannot make this up.
• Also runs a proof-of-work challenge before you're allowed to type anything.

Gemini:

• play.google.com/log getting hammered with your full session behavior, authenticated with three SAPISIDHASH token variants, piped directly into the Google identity supergraph that correlates everything you've ever done across every Google product since 2004.
• Also creates a Web App Activity record in your Google account timeline. Also has "ads" in one of the telemetry endpoint subdomains.

When uBlock blocks Gemini's requests, the JS exceptions bubble up and Gemini dutifully tries to POST the error details back to Google. uBlock blocks that too. The error messages contain the internal codenames for every upsell popup that failed to load.

KETCHUP_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MUSTARD_DISCOVERY_CARD.
MAYO_DISCOVERY_CARD.

Google named their subscription upsell popups after condiments and I found out because their error handler snitched on them.

All three of these products cost money.
One of them is also running ad infrastructure.

Touch grass. Install @ublockorigin

#infosec #privacy #selfhosted #foss #surveillance

I've been wanting to write something lengthy about "AI" for a while, discussing the arguments for and against and arriving at a reasonable position, but I find myself completely unable to get past the most glaring point, which is that we are facing catastrophic ecosphere collapse because of capitalist overconsumption. Our species is literally committing suicide by capitalism right in front of my eyes and the architects of the climate crisis have latched onto data centres with the energy budgets of countries running sycophantic Markov chains as their latest engine of short term profit extraction and people are split right down the middle either happily burning the world down to keep continvoucly morging or whatever the newest slop models tell them to do next, or existing in a state of angry refusal to believe that anything is wrong as everything crumbles into ash around them other than that some people have the wrong skin colour or gender presentation.

*deep breath*

The few of us who don't starve to death as our food sources collapse may eventually die of asphyxiation when the wrong Amazon finishes burning down.

How do you get past that?

How does one even hope to connect with people who prioritise dismantling the structures of capitalism before it kills us all lower than asking Claude for coding tips?

I guess we know what the Great Filter is now.

This is such a fantastic video. It debunks so much of the myth of “things were better designed back then”, and discusses why today’s Fascist movements rely so much on referencing the design esthetics of old.

It’s worth watching the whole video. So good.

#design #esthetics #politics

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4haFPDNSuPY

"AI is built on the collective knowledge of humankind."

No. Nononononono. It is not built on _knowledge_, it it built on _data_. And not everyone's experiences are available as data, many communities are excluded. Also: "Collective" implies some sort of collaboration and shared activity. But "AI" is just accumulation by a few powerful.

So No. It's not collective but extractive, not knowledge but data, not humankind but the hegemonic western view. Everything in that statement is wrong.

About a month ago I started a side project: a cross-platform, opinionated replacement for iTunes that matches how I actually manage local music.

It strips out the cruft, streamlines metadata handling, and works seamlessly across Linux and Windows (macOS should work too—untested for now).

It’s still under active development, but the core vision is there. Very few settings, very strong opinions. Open source soon—probably not for everyone, but exactly what I wanted.

🧵 As a former Republican consultant who left in 2015, I'm often asked why Trump and his minions are willingly destroying science, K12 education, universities, international organizations, public broadcasting, and social welfare institutions.

There are many reasons, but the main ones are psychological rather than ideological. They struggle with abstract thinking and are afraid of the world...

Is it just me or do the macOS Contacts and Calendar apps feel like basically abandonware? I can't think of a single meaningful change to either of them in *checks watch* the past decade.

In today's "ugh really"… there's no way to remove people from the automatic "Birthdays" calendar who're dead. Nor are there ways to track anniversaries that *aren't* birthdays. Seems like utterly basic 1.0 functionality you'd want in the feature that's just not there.

What are these teams working on?!