https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtue_ethics

“If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.”

Soooo, programming?

It’s definitely AI writing. Still a decent summary of how the GCC security situation is changing.

A lot of it probably isn’t legal, but who’s gonna prosecute them?

Whatever specific class I am, my play style is definitely “glass cannon”.

Patching a library is fine if you’re building a final executable — something where you know what the final dependency graph looks like ahead of time.

It’s not fine if you’re building a library. You don’t know if a consumer will also want to use an unpatched version of that library, and depending on the scenario that could result in duplicated instances (each with their own internal state), failure to build or load, or mismatches in data layout or function definitions.

I would avoid using a library like that if I could.

Of course, sometimes the person who can make that decision is the creator of npm itself, and says “No I don’t believe I will”: https://github.com/isaacs/jackspeak/issues/20

Anthropic, without an ounce of self-awareness: “Hey, just cuz you used AI to change it doesn’t mean you can copy our stuff and use it to compete against us!”

Oh absolutely, I understand that the language allows implementations to violate my proposed equivalence — I’m saying that’s a bad implementation (some might say a bad language, for allowing bad implementations, but I don’t necessarily agree)

They would rather see zero.

Dan, thank you for this question. It’s really at the heart of the work that I’m trying to do now, which I call thanatocracy. So, it was John Locke who said political power is making laws punishable by death.

And I think anyone who’s studied Marx or studied other political economists will see that the human surplus arises from reducing the value of the workers to zero, as close to slavery as you can get. So, that’s the matter of value theory and political economy. But I think it rings true for most everybody that the boss is trying to reduce wages, the workers trying to increase them.

And the boss, unless he reaches some opposition, will go down to zero. You know, as long as labor is plentiful, as long as a new generation is created, or as long as immigration is possible, slavery is the tendency of capitalism. When I say slavery, I mean reducing the value of the human life to zero, to nothing.

From The Dig: Breaking the Machine w/ Peter Linebaugh, Feb 17, 2026 https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-dig/id1043245989?i=1000750229034&r=1662

Hot take: if a += b is not the same as a = a + b, you done fucked up

Just another accountability sink used-up and replaced.

That’s one social arrangement for AI. Here’s another: last May, the Chicago Sun-Times included a 64-page “Best of Summer” insert from Hearst Publishing, containing lists of things to do this summer, includ­ing a summer reading list. Of the 15 books on that list, ten did not exist. They were AI “hallucinations” (jargon used by AI hucksters in place of the less sexy, but more accurate term, “errors”).

This briefly lit up the internet, as well it should have, because it’s a pretty wild error to see in a major daily newspaper. Jason Koebler from 404 Media tracked down the list’s “author,” a freelancer called Marco Buscaglia, who confessed that he had used AI to write the story and professed his shame and embarrassment at his failure to fact-check the AI’s output.

…In a discussion on the 404 Media podcast, Koebler offered perspective on this, describing the early days of his career when, as an intern at the Washington Monthly, he would be called upon to contribute to guides like Hearst’s “Best of Summer” package. In those days, three interns would be assigned to each of the lists, overseen by a professional journalist and backstopped by a fact-checking section.

Seen in this light, the story of the nonexistent books in the summer reading guide takes on an entirely different complexion. The “Best of Summer” guide contained ten lists, almost all written (or rather, “writ­ten”) by one person: Buscaglia, evidently without any fact-checking whatsoever (many of the other lists also contained egregious errors).

In other words: Hearst’s King Features, who published the “Summer Reading Guide,” replaced 30 interns, 10 newsroom journalists, and an entire fact-checking department with one freelancer. No one has reported on how much Buscaglia got paid to write all those lists, but if it comes out to the total wages of all those people whose job he was doing, I’ll stick my tongue in a light socket.

…

I don’t know if Hearst told him to use a chatbot to generate their “Best of Summer Lists,” but it doesn’t matter. When you give a freelancer an assignment to turn around ten summer lists on a short timescale, everyone understands that his job isn’t to write those lists, it’s to supervise a chatbot.

But his job wasn’t even to supervise the chatbot adequately (single-handedly fact-checking 10 lists of 15 items is a long, labor-intensive pro­cess). Rather, it was to take the blame for the factual inaccuracies in those lists. He was, in the phrasing of Dan Davies, “an accountability sink” (or as Madeleine Clare Elish puts it, a “moral crumple zone”).

https://locusmag.com/feature/commentary-cory-doctorow-reverse-centaurs/

Just to be clear: My reply was a (sarcastic but not inaccurate) summary of the attitude of the blog post.

“Harm”? What is “harm”? There are only well-made products or not-so-well-made products!

Part of the trilogy: Mean Girls, Median Girls, Mode Girls

Went from believing “yes” is inevitable to believing “no” is inevitable instead of learning the lesson that most of this is just random

Middle ages:

Peasants share common land and tools — it’s not so much that they collectively “own” it, but that “ownership” is not a concept that applies, because the land is an obligation and not a product.

Then come the enclosure acts, which take all of the land that the commoners have spent their lives contributing to, and give it to the wealthy.

And then come some of the bloodiest revolts in history. And coinciding with this, you have the Luddites objecting to the wealthy replacing their common workspaces with factories that maim and kill people.

The Luddites attack the factories, and destroy the machines. And the British eventually defeat them, using an occupying army larger than the initial wave they send to fight Napoleon.

Digital age:

Peasants share common online spaces — it’s not so much that they “own” them, but that they share a mutual obligation to each other to maintain these spaces.

Then come the tech oligarchs with their AI, and…

Indeed: Everything was already AI

This has been a very long project — separating conduct from consequences, in order to maximize profit. AI is just a breakthrough tool for doing it.