Patrick McSweeny

Banks just giving more & more money to AI companies reminds me of when Eddie Murphy went undercover as a white guy & found out banks just give white people money for free youtu.be/l_LeJfn_qW0?...

To act as if we still have time before making radical changes is in itself a form of climate denialism. Or perhaps we should call it collapse denialism. www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-mas...

keep thinking about the evil of this. It's not just destroying the physical books, bad as that is. They are trying to remove the underpinnings of knowledge, destroy all the accumulated wisdom - and silliness, and creativity, and whatever else humans have thought worthy of writing down.

People keep using the "can't put a genie back in the bottle" metaphor for "AI", even though in the stories they always get back in and current "AI" is more of a "we're spending trillions of dollars and the energy output of a continent trying to keep this bastard out of the bottle" situation

A lot of tech leadership around ai is now just constantly asking “Why isn’t this working—wrong answers only?”

I am exasperated with people accusing programmers of "gatekeeping" programming. We were practically dragging people through the gate. Do you know why a mindless LLM can tell you so much great programming information? It's because we've been sharing that information for free online for decades.

Protein folding and similar approaches are not meaningfully the same as generative models such a Large Language Models. Anybody who pretends otherwise is, whether they realise it or not, promoting a con.

@amnesty.org very based: "Amnesty International finds that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with IHRL. As such, Amnesty International is calling for a prohibition of such systems."

The web should be accessible to people with poor internet connections & assistive technologies. As a UX designer, I will absolutely die on this hill.

Decided to pull out an important part of the interview. Generative AI is often justified with comparisons to the cost of Amazon Web Services ($57bn) or Uber's ($32bn) in losses, when its costs and losses are hundreds of billions of dollars worse. And there's no post-bubble redemption story.

Amnesty International understanding that this "generative AI" shit as currently conceived and deployed is a project which enables fascism and endangers the already vulnerable and marginalized populations of the world.

My dad is a retired neuropsychologist, and he says the creative versus technical thinking dichotomy is mostly a myth.

YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK

Extremely good and concise summary of the statistical/methodological shenanigans involved in measuring the so-called "AI boost" Here's a couple of my favourites:

Software development practices spread using the exact same cognitive biases as beliefs in homeopathy

The world’s "safest" AI provider now runs on the world’s dirtiest data centre: Musk’s Colossus. Powered by 35 methane generators, most unauthorised. A massive slap in the face to locals - led by @keshaunpearson.bsky.social & co - and to all those who thought Claude was the responsible choice 🙄🤢

It's usually more important to develop software right than to do it quickly.

I wrote a blog post.

I created my first Ruby gem. I mostly made it to use on my own projects and to give myself a challenge. I wrote the entire thing without the help of any LLM tools and I learned a lot in the process as a result. github.com/PatrickMcSwe...

This is a metaphor for the tech industry overall circa 2025

November ChicagoRuby × @cisco.com — what a night 🔥 Thanks @kphurley.bsky.social & @alan.codegardener.com for making this collab happen. 🎙️ @andycandrea.bsky.social — Reusable JSON Schemas 🎙️ @patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social — Hotwire Your UX Practical, clean, immediately usable.

Frontend is failing. 75% of devices with browsers are smartphones, but not even half of sites pass Core Web Vitals on them. Why not? Too much JavaScript, added to indulge SPA fantasies the data is falsifying in real time: infrequently.org/2025/11/perf...

"don't pay attention to any of that frivolous humanities education, STEM all the way - what, do you think you can hack a computer with poetry or something?" apparently, yes

ChicagoRuby meets at one of the world’s biggest Ruby codebases — cisco.com 🔥 Nov 5, 6–8:30 PM 433 W Van Buren St, 7th Fl, Chicago Speakers: patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social, andycandrea.bsky.social ❗️Registration & ID required Registration: www.meetup.com/chicagoruby/...

The tech press are Tim levels of cooked. Absolutely nowhere will you see any mention of web apps and PWAs as an alternative to censorious native app stores (I looked), and that's a bloody scandal.

this from ‪@jono.id is a position I've been suggesting for a while now–that modern APIs and CSS like View Transition obviated the need for the SPA architecture. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/i...

Using OpenAI's new, powerful "reasoning" model to calculate the amount of states that have R in them. Welcome to the future, everybody

It's been interesting to witness in real-time how the usage of "algorithm" in many places has shifted from a neutral "sequence of instructions" to a negative "controlled ordering and boosting of information".