Jeremy Kahn

@trochee@dair-community.social
2K Followers
1,013 Following
19.1K Posts

NLP (the nerdy kind). Wrong-half Jew. Privilege-traitor.
Linguist. Empiricist. Rager against machines. formerly #indymedia
Also, #comics, #SFF #scifi, languages, big data, algorithms, software design, and more.

#LLMSkeptic. farm-to-table organic free-range prose only. Don't send me generated text.

#WestSeattle #Duwamish unceded land

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I offer Cassandra's Complete Class Theorem¹.

All "good use cases for AI" break down into one of four categories:

I. Bad use case.
II. Good use case, but not something AI can do.
III Good use case, but it's already been done without AI.
IV. Not AI in the LLMs and GANs sense, but in the sense of machine learning, statistical inference, or other similarly valid things AI boosters use to shield from critique.

https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/115766140296237983

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¹Not actually a theorem.

2026’s Schroedinger’s tech job is going to be like

It can simultaneously be replaced by AI and also you can only do it from a physical office, never remotely

Bicycles for your mind are great and important but libraries are public transit for your mind and we need them too.
Wildly different things, tasks, techniques, subspecialties being lumped into "AI" and then being conflated with each other, doesn't help. Different types of models vs the techniques to train them vs the tasks they are supposed to accomplish, all being bucketed under "AI", is misleading. This is why @emilymbender and @alex say to name the specific thing being discussed rather than calling it "AI". 🧵

Some thoughts I had for rating incidents on more than just severity:

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2025/12/22/another-way-to-rate-incidents/

Another way to rate incidents

Every organization I’m aware of that does incident management has some sort of severity rating system. The highest severity is often referred to as either a SEV1 or a SEV0 depending on the or…

Surfing Complexity
#3184 - Funny Numbers

Back in 2005 I tried to legitimately put up this billboard. When The Sun found out they contacted the billboard owner & got it cancelled. And then they made sure no one would ever see my sick propaganda by printing it full colour and half a page of a national newspaper

I eventually put it up a few months later.

So my own personal compromise is to use "AI" to mean "the anti-labor anti-art anti-environmental anti-human bullshit that capital owners are currently forcing down our throat and calling AI" and trust that folks can understand what I mean from that context. Perhaps that compromise isn't ideal, and perhaps that trust is sometimes misplaced, but it's the best spot I've found to land on "how the fuck do I communicate about this when the other side is being actively dishonest about what words mean?"

@xgranade AI has helped me get motivated to write code!

For example, I once said "I could make a script for that but meh, I won't have it ready for Monday", a friend said "ask ChatGPT to do it", and that suggestion disgusted me so much that I wrote the script by hand in 15 minutes out of spite 🙃