ajdecon

I do appreciate that I work in an area that is Very Relevant.

At the same time, I really try to stay in my lane as an infrastructure dude. So 🤷‍♂️

But also: I tend to be less-tolerant of drive-by opinions. If you’re arguing, you should have done some work in the space. Otherwise I will in fact mock you.

FWIW, I do genuinely try to be aware
of the biases that come with work in all those areas. I don’t promise to avoid being snarky tho.

My employment history includes
working in all of: national security,
social media, and artificial intelligence.

So really, I’m sorry, you get what you get.

Oh absolutely. I genuinely think that we’re unlikely to find ourselves in a scenario where there’s nothing productive to do.

I do think that most repetitive or predictable tasks are eventually automate-able. Which is why I advocate and vote the ways I do.

"If they hadn't been told then the comparison isn't complete; information is being concealed. If they don't care, then they're unlike any group of humans I've ever encountered." "But if you can—". "Ziller, are you concerned that Minds Als, if you like-can create, or even just ap pear to create, original works of art?". "Frankly, when they're the sort of ori- ginal works of art that I create, yes." "Ziller, it doesn't matter. You have to think like a mountain climber." "Oh, do I?". "Yes. Some people take days, sweat buckets, endure pain and cold and risk injury and-in some cases—permanent death to achieve the summit of a mountain only to discover there a party of their peers freshly arrived by aircraft and enjoying a light picnic." "If I was one of those climbers I'd be pretty damned annoyed." "Well, it is considered rather impolite to land an aircraft on a summit which people Page 298 of 402 74%

hard way, but it can and does happen. Good manners indicate that the picnic ought to be shared and that those who arrived by aircraft express awe and respect for the accomplishment of the climbers. "The point, of course, is that the people who spent days and sweated buckets could also have taken an aircraft to the summit if all they'd wanted was to absorb the view. It is the struggle that they crave. The sense of achievement is produced by the route to and from the peak, not by the peak itself. It is just the fold between the pages." The avatar hesitated. It put its head a little to one side and narrowed its eyes. "How far do I have to take this ana-logy, Cr. Ziller?". "You've made your point, but this mountain climber still wonders if he ought to re-educate his soul to the joys of flight and stepping out onto someone else's summit." "Better to create your own. Come on; I've a dying man to see on his way." Page 299 of 402 74%

From “Look To Windward” by Iain M Banks” — even if you reach a mountaintop by flight, you should respect those who climbed.

I am admittedly someone who would probably go completely nuts without some kind of productive work to do.

That said, I do think that a Star Trek future — or even a Culture scenario — should be the high-level goal.

Fully automated luxury queer space communism is in fact a good idea.

Mostly thinking of this given that today’s ML systems are trained on ridiculous amounts of human text, and we should therefore expect them to reflect human thoughts and biases. For better and worse.

I’ve been reading/re-reading some of Neal Asher’s Polity novels lately, and one of the interesting notions is that the AI characters consider themselves as extensions of humanity by other means.

(With, of course, disagreement and drama because fiction).

Text above a Venn diagram reading “Work as if you live in the early days of”. This text points to the intersection of a Venn diagram. On the left, the circle reads “a better nation”. On the right, “the Jackpot”.

I found this on Twitter many years ago (I wish I could find the source), and I continue to think of it on a regular basis.

A white and brown spotted fluffy puppy on a wooden patio

Introducing the puppy to being out on a patio. So far doing well at people watching without barking.

TBH such a common story in tech.

And while hilarious, also a good reminder that you should know where your lines are and pay attention to if they’re being crossed.

Out of curiosity, are there particular feeds or news sources you rely on to keep up to date?

I’m feeling like my current list of feeds isn’t capturing the intersection of infra and model training as well as I’d like, and I’m gradually trying to refresh and tune my list.

I mean I’m over 40 and I remember doing this. The building was large, my locker was remote from the classrooms I went to, breaks between classes were short. IIRC during my senior year I didn’t even know where my locker was 🤷‍♂️

This. I’m not sure I’d make all the same choices, but the BlueSky team has been thoughtful about their technical choices and clearly had the time and freedom to prioritize that.

I’m not qualified to evaluate some of the specific bits of this, eg in linguistics or neuroscience. But it’s definitely a good read and thought-provoking.

On the other hand, if the models enjoy (or understand the concept of) fiction, your novels may have provided a welcome break compared to thousands of pages of reddit comments!

A short note that the predictions that LLMs would favor "boring technology" that's over-represented in the training data don't appear to be playing out as expected with the latest models - once you attach them to a good coding agent harness at least simonwillison.net/2026/Mar/9/n...

I’m pretty sure some derby folks still follow me these days. David is an excellent guy and a great person to learn from.

Look, it's a mess out there and you can react to that mess by deciding everyone else is a moron or you could react to it by deciding most people are trying to get by with a different context than yours and start working the problem. Those are your choices pretty much, can't choose "no mess"

IME Claude (and recent LLMs in general) are good at gathering and providing detail on a *lot* of information.

I think they’re still really bad at producing documentation I’d want anyone else to read. 😬

I use them in a “research assistant” mode - lots of raw notes that I use to produce real docs.

Cat points out a real problem. Rather than “everyone builds their own custom app” with all the overhead that entails, my working hypothesis is that we’ll see an explosion of what @inkandswitch.com calls malleable software www.inkandswitch.com/essay/mallea...

A solid core + ability to extend

The article itself is actually decent, and I’d be really interested to hear a Fated Mates discussion on the topic.

The bsky replies/quotes are mostly very shallow, and it’s clear most people don’t really talk to any romance readers. It’s a whole world of its own.

Building VBA Applications and Workbooks for a Microsoft HPC Pack Discover how to optimize Excel calculations using HPC Services for Excel and Microsoft HPC cluster. Learn to create high-performance workbooks with VBA macros.

It sort of does! At least for certain types of calculations.

omg our house is >100 years old so I do regularly complain about previous DIY work

I love it when I post and immediately get the *perfect* reply.

A bald man with a beard and glasses wearing a black shirt which says “i am ai” in green text

Today is a project day around the house so I’m wearing a silly shirt from work. I feel like this design hits a lot differently than it did when it first showed up in the swag shop in 2019 or so!

Really interesting thread! Worth reading since I’ve seen some folks holding up the NY legislation as a good model

Oh I like this description. Then again I also like linear algebra…