Artisanal, farm-to-table entertainment systems.

Guys I’m starting to think that maybe capitalism and democracy are not 100% compatible

D:

In a few years, corpos will be desperate for programmers. Their codebases will be in shambles and the frontier models (that can barely make anything out of that mess) will not be so heavily subsidized anymore. (Or permanently offline.)

All artwork for the series was hand-drawn by Anna Rettberg (https://x.com/aerettberg) without generative AI.

For context:

Demetri Spanos (PhD) is a 25+ year veteran of AI development. He wanted to speak out about the negative turn that his field has taken, but he didn’t have an audience so he turned to…

Casey Muratori, an accomplished software developer with a considerable media presence. He makes a good fit for Demetri in this case because while Casey himself is an AI skeptic, much of Casey’s audience are young professional devs who are probably using AI (whether enthusiastically or reluctantly) in the workplace. Exactly the audience Demetri hopes to reach.

The title of the video should be read as “the ethical questions and proposed frameworks that have appeared throughout the past 30 years of AI research”, not “an affirmative argument for the question of whether the current crop of AI software is ethical”.

(Spoiler: Demetri makes strong arguments that the industry entered unethical territory more than 15 years ago)

Consistently under-reported: If you spend a few hundred million on security research, you’re gonna find a lot of vulnerabilities.

The real revelation is not how much more skilled Mythos is, but how much better funded.

How many vulnerabilities would’ve been found if we had spent several million dollars on human security researchers though?

Perpetual loop of “bounty encourages bad reports”, “canceled bounty”, “bug reports improve”, “bounty comes back”, “bounty encourages bad reports”…

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!”

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!

This whole ordeal is going to be quite a wake-up call for some orgs. They spent this whole time thinking they only paid devs to produce code, not to understand it, because the understanding part was invisible to them.

Now they’re like astronauts blasting off to space and not knowing they need to bring oxygen with them, because they’re never seen any.

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

In context, it sounds like he’s “disappointed a lot” by people choosing to use AI, which is a crucial distinction. His objection is about the kind of society we’re sleepwalking into, not the technical maturity of the current crop of software.

AI’s generated text is “too dry and too perfect, and I want something from a human being, and I’m disappointed a lot.”

JS for sure.

It has a reputation among programmers as being a bit of a mess, but I think the reasons behind that reputation are largely irrelevant to your use case.

Basically:

1. It has some bad decisions about basic stuff, like truthiness, equality, coercion. But those aren’t major stumbling blocks, really. When they run into those situations, they’ll probably already be aware that they’re trying something weird and won’t have the same already-developed intuition about “how it should work” that many of us are bringing to the table.
2. Production deployment can easily turn into a Rube Goldberg machine. I think this is mostly what the kneejerk “really? JS?” response is about. Different ES versions, module systems, WASM, dependency hell, transpilers on top of transpilers, and a billion different runtimes. And the fact that everyone and their grandma apparently wants to build a custom DSL on top of JS that requires additional transpiler plugins or codegen steps. But your students won’t have to worry about that shit. Just pick one environment and do that. Maybe warn them that stackoverflow might use different syntax (require vs import) or try to import stuff that doesn’t exist in their environment though.

The vulnerability is coming from inside the house

Yeah, items are licensed according to where they’re sold, not made. “More oversight” makes no sense.

I just know that when 404 Media reported on the ManyVids founder publicly slipping into AI psychosis, they mentioned that ManyVids was often described as being the only platform to give workers a fair deal.

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…