This is the equivalent of a Gambling Helpline sticker on a poker machine edition.cnn.com/2025/09/05/t...
Experienced user Australian based in Amsterdam Writing: https://fasterandworse.com Videos: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvAAoSdsXWxHwFbULgbpVGiLmJZv4X1g Audios: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse
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This is the equivalent of a Gambling Helpline sticker on a poker machine edition.cnn.com/2025/09/05/t...
the 300th comment down, from a retired geologist named Peter, except it's a post from the US department of energy
🔗 bsky.app/profile/nina...
as a researcher interested in language technologies, in find framing ‘health’ as a ‘use case’ for an LLM fascinating, as a person, i find it horrifying
Because a calculator is a device made for a specific purpose, our trust in it would be immediately corrupted if it were to give an incorrect answer. It would be useless. If you take away the specific purpose you also take away the criteria to determine if something works or not.
I never want anyone to say "the things that make you go hmmm dept" to me
LinkedIn is #EatPrayLove for boring men.
every few years I check in to see if it still makes me laugh www.youtube.com/watch?v=LDHM...
Over a year ago I tried LLMs and found their results so unreliable that they were useless. With so much hype I decided to give GPT another test yesterday. I fed MSFT Copilot a zoning document and asked it to extract the differences between 2 columns in a table, it claimed success but was very wrong.
⬆️ 🔗 ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/prof...
This is the equivalent of a Gambling Helpline sticker on a poker machine edition.cnn.com/2025/09/05/t...
Translation: "product manager exceeds cloud utilization KPI"
always fight, you will never not be amazed at the clown shoes the parasites come to the battle in
Still trying to figure out what the kink is for people who go around replying “this isn’t new.”
surface dwellers
you know how all computers suck? you know how all AV sucks? well what if right, what if we did AV on computers
Hello Linux nerds! I'm looking for a good screen recorder for audio and video. As in, I do stuff in a website and get the sound and visuals. OBS does a browser window sorta badly, though I would be unsurprised if it's the least worst choice. this is Xubuntu 24.04 with X11 what do *you* use?
damn it, the charm!
oh stop it, C.P. Snow, with your charming, slightly self-deprecating critique of "computer gadgets" from 1964!
I was quoted in SFGATE on Gavin Newsom's plan to do a meme coin. The headline quote is from me too. www.sfgate.com/politics/art...
The #ProductHunt Top 10 is almost exclusively AI wrappers now. 'Vibe Founders' spend $0.10 on tokens, resell it as a $10 sub and call it innovation. Zero IP, zero value add, zero moat. It is truly shocking to me that 'put a toll booth on a highway you didn't build' passes for a business these days.
I like this "wrapper economy" - I've not thought about encapsulating it into a thing like that, but it makes sense!
bsky.app/profile/fast...
that's one expensive wordpress theme
meta ai trying to figure it out
Do I know anyone in the Tokyo area who does watercolors? Happened into some sets of paints today. I can hold onto them for future fiddling, but happy to pass them on to someone who can actually use them now.
I did a quick video thingy about it a while back bsky.app/profile/fast...
that's one expensive wordpress theme
this is the worst voltron
sam altman is trying to find the guy who did this
I just like when a product is presented alongside an asserted purpose and it satisfies that purpose satisfactorily. If that's done by a computer generating code, and the purpose justifies the costs of satisfaction, then fine.
maybe I should write a blog post around that title
I prefer satisfaction to solution, purpose to problem. It's more fitting with the fluidity of stuff (IMO)
I just like when a product is presented alongside an asserted purpose and it satisfies that purpose satisfactorily. If that's done by a computer generating code, and the purpose justifies the costs of satisfaction, then fine.
i think there is an anti-obsession with death. people filling their lives with thoughts of death antivax is a death cult that seeks to spread fear to make life meaningful like religious zealots who obsess over an afterlife because they are not equipped to live actual life
wait! just realised what I said
not sure if mocking LLMs or LinkedIn replies
if you think your product needs 'streaks' what it actually needs is a better product team. hope that helps xxx
remnants of summer
Memento mori
Intuitive UX is always going to feel unintuitive for someone
👋🏻❤️ I just wrapped a project with a lovely client, and I’m thinking about what’s next. So! I’ve got availability for new work starting in October 2025. Spiffed up the ol’ portfolio a bit to showcase some past projects, and to talk about the work I do: ethanmarcotte.com/work/
no, AI is definitely a tool dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/e...
![tool noun [C] (PENIS) offensive a penis offensive an insulting word for a person who you dislike very much or who behaves very stupidly](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:2aiipqemoobrrilfx4jbm6pb/bafkreihqujqn4if5hwrtdcy5y7tar2t7samikbktizsejrbrjuxsd6d2wy@jpeg "Click to view full size")
Another great Techtonic show from @markhurst.bsky.social and @wfmu.bsky.social Great interview with Cory Doctrow, author of "Enshittification" #radio #technology #bigTech wfmu.org/playlists/sh...
Nice, I will check this one out
🤣
haha, right? bsky.app/profile/fast...
I call them the great unweathered
not sure how else to say it but they never look like they've been through something
it's like a digital keystone
The word you are looking for is “authoritarianism.”
This unravels the minute you interrogate who is included in his definition of “everyone.”
get your designs good! #ux #designtips #linkedin #betterdesign #mindfuldesign #experttips #bereallygoodatthings #woah
Local man embraces fascism.
polo, no sock, loafer, wearing MF
I finally read computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum’s 1976 classic “Computer Power and Human Reason.” This book deserves a massive revival in our current age of grotesque and largely thoughtless AI creep into everything:
⬆️ 🔗 ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/fain...
That's cool. I'm glad it worked out for you. I saw many try and fail and it wasn't for lack of effort.
this also taught me to appreciate the vapidness of most agency work and my 3rd party separation from it. it seemed like there could be more connection at the time, hence my pivot to startups, but the fun with colleagues in the agencies was the best all along
at scale
You don’t hate Peter Thiel enough.
format to format, format to format, and now sex with robots
format to format, format to format, and now sex with robots
I like my music with a call to action
metallica x salesforce coldplay x dhl duran duran x workday blog.workday.com/en-us/from-r...
Vibe coding is getting too rancid even for VCs where else they gonna go? quantum? www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrT2... - video pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250902-vib... - podcast time: 4:12 text coming shortly!
Mic drop from @abeba.bsky.social at UNESCO Digital Learning Week
New: my Techtonic interview with Cory Doctorow about his upcoming book "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It." - Episode page: www.wfmu.org/playlists/sh... - Stream the show: wfmu.org/archiveplaye... - Podcast: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/t...
much better way, especially not through an amazon entity
it's not cheap, but there is one in the states! www.abebooks.co.uk/first-editio...
“We’ll text you if our product is trying to kill your child ☺️”
At @ 6:41, Basquiat says "I never went to an art school. I failed the art courses that I did take in school... I learned about art by looking at it, by going to museums.." And he read voraciously. A lot of the iconography, the vocabulary of symbols that he used, are from "Flash of The Spirit".👑🎨
great video, thanks for sharing
wow I didn't know the connection to the Henry Dreyfuss book
"2 books that would inform all of his work"
⬆️ 🔗 ⬇️ bsky.app/profile/anil...
"The world of artificial intelligence can be divided up a lot of different ways, but the most obvious split is between researchers interested in being god and researchers interested in being rich." Still fresh 1985 AI piece by Tom Athanasiou processedworld.com/Issues/issue...
meant to attach this for an example bsky.app/profile/fast...
I don't know if this is a pain-in-the-ass response, but most AI critique written before 2019-ish has a more profound effect because of how relevant it remains
nice one, man. enjoy that coffee haha
tl;dw: • if you're looking, find the person who would be your boss and ask them what it'd take to work with them • if you're hiring, maybe focus more on preventing toxic hires than fine-grained skills/experience • start by not incentivizing lying on one's résumé to get past keyword filters
AI is bad, actually
ok a question: if you could have your students read one thing on genAI that you hope will encourage them not to use it, what would it be?
"we may do this, we aren't yet tho to respect privacy" is such a spoiler, honestly if this is how someone tried to not spoil the ending of a movie you'd punch them
Effort can neither be created nor destroyed; rather, it can only be transformed or transferred from one form to another
Wild how they address this by offloading it on to parents rather than, say…making a safer product.
recorded this on friday morning pursuant to a conversation with @fasterandworse.com on the state of hiring technical roles ("technical" in the broadest sense, ie you have to know how things work and how to do things other than delegate) but only just had the opportunity to post: youtu.be/mUTbhG1z1N4
ai can't slop out a job application rejection without saying "after careful consideration"
You don’t say.
To gauge how it’s “working,” one would have to be clear on what the actual work is, which is not helping to educate children but rather to imbed these systems in a way that they cannot be removed, establish them as a source of truth, and destabilize labor.
not only are these people foolish and cruel, they are blatantly misreading my favorite books.
yeah. bsky corp are in their third year of failing to run a pissup in a brewery literally *every* spike in bsky numbers was Musk finding another banana peel bsky still has no business model btw, ever since they decided on Singal over the users (who they hate) waving cash at them fuck 'em
Nick Moir (Sydney Morning Herald), Dec 2019 - a big plane dropping water on fires in Australia (water is coloured with a red dye to show where it's been dropped)
remembering all the journalists in Australia who kept insisting we should having polite cups of tea with racists and hearing them out www.abc.net.au/news/2025-09...
I'm putting all my time into job hunting but I think I'm going to have to make a video dispatch for therapy
It's happened! My newsletter has finally Gone Woke! Trump appointed landlord app AirBnB's co-founder as the Chief Design Officer of the USA, right after DOGE blew up 18F (which did real work). And the UX commentariat cheers, because the vibes of a "seat at the table" play better than the reality.
Wasteland Warrior Clippy Illustration done for autonocast.com 🛻📎🧡 Thank you so much @niedermeyer.online for the opportunity, this was one of my favorite jobs in 2024!
I know I keep saying this, but I really cannot overstate how many meetings I sat in at Microsoft where the big idea was to just do Clippy again, but with AI. This was always presented as an unquestionably good idea, because everyone knew Clippy had been a huge success.
