That is how crashes work. AI is not going anywhere. Did the internet disappear when the dot com bubble popped in 2001? Because I think I still see me some internet around here.
Just because you want something or believe something doesn’t mean you must live in fantasy world. Why do so many people do this?
Stewart has the right idea. Anthropic should’ve included more books; all the books it could get its hands on. The idea that AI is a “plagiarism machine” is a fucking ludicrous notion by unserious people. And that $1.5 billion is a ridiculous judgment as no actual author was harmed in any way by an AI “reading” their work that then transforms the text into tokens, runs that through the LLM’s network and then only keeps the weights at the end (no book text). That’s a really, really basic gloss of how LLMs work. If you accept that as plagiarism, then your brain is also plagiarizing any time it reads something.
I’d like to give an throp up side the head to anyone who instigates shit like this. Copyright prevents so much, and now the idiot left — after being against copyright maximalism for three decades — has gone to that camp because it now appeals to their degrowther tendencies. Fortunately, Stewart is on the left but not the now-majority idiot left.
The degrowthers are always moving the goalposts. For example, with self-driving cars. Degrowthers:
1) Self-driving is impossible anywhere and shouldn’t even be tried!
Reality: Self-driving is working pretty well via Waymo in quite a few cities, and is improving all the time.
2) Ok, self-driving works but it’s incredibly dangerous.
Reality: Self-driving appears to be much safer by any measure.
3) Self-driving can’t work in bad weather conditions! Ever!
Reality: Also improving all the time and humans are also terrible, terrible drivers in adverse weather.
4) Self-driving cars can’t work while being attacked by a dinosaur during an earthquake combined with an alien invasion and the gates of Hell opening up!
Reality: Well, ok, you got me there.
Degrowthers just hate any improvement in life, tech (especially) or anything else. It’s like some horrid personal affront to them. So let’s affront them a lot more, since they suck!
In the main, developers attempt to implement microservices because they have no networking knowledge and do not understand the huge latency of network calls compared to a local call. Concomitantly, they believe that a millisecond is not much longer than a microsecond1. (In fact, a millisecond is 1,000 times longer than a microsecond.)
From this nonchalant cluelessness, much pain is caused.
That is the easiest way to get banned from anywhere — go against the herd. I find myself running away from the stampede often enough so I know how that works. It’s how I got banned from Reddit the first time. I disagreed with the wrong people and they kicked me out. And the closer to being right you are, the more likely you are to be shitcanned.
It’s annoying to think about how much better and actually-used and useful Firefox could have been if the devs had concentrated on making it distinguishable from other browsers rather than attempting to shape it into a third-rate Chrome clone. That was never going to be a successful strategy as many, many people including me told them over the years. In fact, I even got banned from all of Reddit for laying out the case in very clear terms. (And no, I didn’t violate the Reddit TOS. I just got the ire of every Firefox dev because my predictions started coming true).
Firefox was the last bastion of the old internet. Now effectively dead; a walking corpse that’ll fall into the first pit it stumbles across. It could’ve been different and the path there was fairly clear, but the devs chose a direction that granted them the most power rather than empowering the users.
And that was their grave mistake.
Western civilization has been so successful in providing personal safety that natural selection is no longer eliminating people who lack the most basic life-preserving instincts. https://t.co/UUFJxxtEEc
— Coddled Affluent Professional (@feelsdesperate) November 30, 2025
I think this is accurate. Just as with the clownish anti-vax rightists where anti-vax beliefs can only prosper where there are safe, effective vaccines, the sort of sentiments that Alyssa expresses can only proliferate when people are safe and cloistered from most harms.
It’s a disease of prosperity and safety. In both cases. “Suicidal empathy” like many other symptoms of terminal civilizational decline will be largely wiped out in the world war that’s coming up in the next decade or so.
Everyone buckled in?
Something else I’ve noticed about Gen Z and younger Millennials: they are extremely concerned with their “boundaries” and telling you all about them, but not at all interested in what they themselves have to offer in a relationship.
This is a symptom of how terrified they are of, well, everything and how closed off from the world they are. There is nothing wrong with boundaries as we used to think of them back in the 1990s. However, the version of those bounds now is designed to prevent any risk, stand in the way of closeness, and to forestall even the possibility of vulnerability.
Those aren’t “boundaries,” unless you consider four walls in a 6×8 cell with bars for a door to be a safe haven. No, all they’ve done is created a prison with a more PR-friendly name.
we've lost the imperative to fit the most detail possible into a tiny space, which is funny considering that we have 4x the resolution and perfect sharpness now, but we use it to draw very smooth very big squircles https://t.co/aMcWn1wMaR
— justin ouellette (@jstn) November 29, 2025
Society turning authoritarian in general; devs want the power and control while pretending it’s for “security.”
I think that’s true what Wilfred says.
And, weirdly, tons of Gen Z people think that any expression of sexuality and love is mutually exclusive. Which is yet another reason they are so fucked up.
XFCE, especially in its latest version, is the only actually-good desktop interface out there.
Sad times.
Mozilla is run by clown idiots and the Firefox developers are complete dipshits. And getting worse.
Get you a lover who'll fight as hard for you as left-wing Americans do for Black career criminals and South American narco-traffickers.
— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) November 28, 2025
Brutal. But accurate.
I like open source, but if often spawns absolutely atrocious technology. For instance, Docker, Kubernetes and Git. All of them are poorly-designed and overly complex. None of them are all that well-suited for the use cases to which they are typically applied. Only Git works better than the tech that preceded it, and that’s only because it’s just shitty instead of incredibly shitty. The bar there was so low that anyone with reasonable coding skills and project management capabilities could exceed it.
These three technologies were adopted heavily because of their complexity, rather than in spite of it. That’s what developers are attracted to and that is who — largely — runs the tech world now. When it was more my type in charge (systems people), we gravitated to simpler, better-specified tech that was constrained, well-specified, focused and fast.
Those days are long gone now, and the world is much worse for it.
The only thing I know about most people is they be clownin’.