Someone suggested not pulling any April Fool's pranks this year and I think we all need to get on board with that.

Because, you know, all this.

The big news in the Hicks-Juavinett household is that Ashley just started a newsletter 🥰 🥰 🥰

of note that choosing ghost was not a small choice, because every SINGLE popular science author in her network insisted she HAD to be on substack, so she is starting with a serious penalty in not benefitting from her large existing network all on substack who would have promoted this newsletter across their many science reader audiences. I hope we can get it to flourish 🫶

https://graymatter.ghost.io/the-limitations-of-neuroscience/

It's clear that AI assisted coding is dividing developers (welcome to the culture wars!). I've seen a few blog posts now that talk about how some people just "love the craft", "delight in making something just right, like knitting", etc, as opposed to people who just "want to make it work". As if that explains the divide.

How about this, some people resent the notion of being a babysitter to a stochastic token machine, hastening their own cognitive decline. Some people resent paying rent to a handful of US companies, all coming directly out of the TESCREAL human extinction cult, to be able to write software. Some people resent the "worse is better" steady decline of software quality over the past two decades, now supercharged. Some people resent that the hegemonic computing ecosystem is entirely shaped by the logic of venture capital. Some people hate that the digital commons is walled off and sold back to us. Oh and I guess some people also don't like the thought of making coding several orders of magnitude more energy intensive during a climate emergency.

But sure, no, it's really because we mourn the loss of our hobby.

🚨 New publication out!

I've contributed to the edited book on "AI Infrastructures and Sustainability" <OPEN ACCESS> by coining the methodological concept "Following the Thing AI" that defetishises AI commodities by revealing the socio-environmental impacts that underpins it.

👉 https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-032-09748-4_2

My desire to use Mastodon is basically at zero now because post-"Claude", hanging out here means inevitably I'm going to have a conversation with someone who tolerates, or even uses, "generative AI". And what's the point of being in a community where that's a risk. Interestingly* there is absolutely no chance of this on Bluesky, because there are artists there

* And oddly, given how "AI"-brained the *admins* there are

In Paris gewinnt der Sozialdemokrat Emmanuel Grégoire die Bürgermeisterwahl, nachdem dort über Jahre seine Vorgängerin auf eine Mobilitätswende setzte, die sich anhand der Menschen und Gesundheit ausrichtet.

Nach dem Sieg radelte er ins Rathaus.

Es gibt sie, die guten Nachrichten ♥️