Thomas A. Powell

I wonder if Scott Galloway is gonna adjust his views about the amazing predictive ability of betting markets after recent massive misses like Brazil. I am betting no. 😏

Are we down to just Kirk and Sulu left from the main original Star Trek cast?

Remember if you are making decisions based on GenAI charts there is a real chance the data is wrong ranging from slightly wrong to completely made up like in this post. Claude & other dashboards may look sweet and take little to no work, but don’t look too closely you might shatter the illusion.

Funny think about Ed Zitron he’s probably at the core right and we’re gonna all focus on his tone or style. For supposedly logical folks we sure are emotional - Cursing English guy hurt our feelings? Boo who. How about debate the actual merits & stop the positive only rhetoric rule which is bs.

The President is having apparently what my kids call a D1 crash out.

“Slouching towards Bethlehem | deadSimpleTech” https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/slouching-to-bethlehem > What's happening to tech, and to the wider world in our current tech-infested era, is a collapse of our model of the world.

The Apollo AI benefits reports shows everybody in the broader market except those in AI related tech would have to “be holding it wrong” which is absolutely wild. This is a terrible sign if you are a AI maxi. Btw countering the data by projecting 10 years into the future is 💯 pure faith.

I was just waxing nostalgic for the days when Claude would always find belt and suspenders solutions. It still records things on its ledger and finds load bearing seams but its old folksy ideas became new boring gibberish. We can reclaim this with a skill to make it respond like Abe Simpson.

Spot on post. The AI folks p(doom) baloney drowned out any warnings of what could happen right now. They RECKLESSLY pushed their efforts and now we will all have to deal with results. There should be consequences Not sure competency assumption in regards to current appsec should be given though.

I very much am enjoying the play lists on this 404 page music.apple.com/404 "iPod" Serious feels from a good collection of early 2000s music if that period was interesting to you.

I think the single word I would use to describe bigtech & especially the two AI frontier labs right now is RECKLESS

Last year I did this approach for vanilla-breeze.com It was a bear to get AI to go platform first. Also I ended up adding lots of custom elements & web components as well. For me train volume bias in LLMs wasn’t fixable with skills & MCPs. Special trained models seems only real way forward to me.

Is it ok to have white hot rage level anger towards OpenAI? Asking for many friends.

If AI based dataviz is something you actually trust why even chart just ask for the top line answer or analysis? Oh you want a chart artifact to wave around for the boss and think that chart will save you from accuracy issues and calm the bosses when it hallucinates. ha ha ha ha. No.

My dentist had an AI bot call me. It was so bad I hung up on it. I will call back talk to a human and let them know I think I may consider switching if they consider this positive customer service. Sure other people may put up with AI where it doesn’t belong but in many cases we do have a choice.

In a little test app I wrote the tokens required for Claude & Gemini to run a fairly basic prompt the user enters are about 1/4 - 1/3 of OpenAI. Imagine at any time that can all change. Now attempt to financial plan your biz that uses API vendors who can change your costs wildly at any moment. 🫠

If you are ever feeling bad about the clarity or quality of your writing just have an LLM do it for you instead and carefully read the sentence shaped strings of lifeless words it statistically shat out. You’ll feel like a master of prose afterwards.

Just gonna get ahead of it but code that copies itself to different places is just a normal worm or even just plain malware. It is not signs of malicious alien intelligence I’m so old I was online during the internet worm late 80s. My guess we are gonna get many sequels real soon.

You know it really isn’t a surprise that people who almost assuredly drank Soylent on the regular back in the day as some cheat code life hack really have garbage takes on the world and how to behave in it these days.

Digger is not a bomb unless your whole view of worthiness of the cinema is solely box office. Won’t spoil, but will say it will astound, confound, and challenge you. It’s a well crafted and acted film worthy of attention that it only likely will get 25 years later as a cult classic. 🙃

Exhibit 1 why software engineering is backsliding. YOU can’t waive off possible harms of things that you or AI slop into existence. Small details can deeply matter to user outcomes and are critical to them. Your mission critical != their mission critical Code responsibly.

I don’t care how nice Twitter is for good trend threads I am not gonna hang in a Nazi owned place. Mr “daring fireball” apparently is cool with the ownership.

Software has always been reversed and copied the difference now is the friction to do so is nearly gone, copying velocity is way up, and the permission structure has deeply changed almost to “what you gonna do everybody’s doing/buying it” let’s all play a fun game of chaos and see what happens 🙄

Of course ethics & human focus should be integrated in Enginnering & it doesn’t take away from tech at all. The point of getting measurements right or code correct isn’t to celebrate math or software itself it is to produce the safe and useful to humans bridge or app. Humans are the very point.

Not sure how scientists in this case Mathematicians saying hey maybe talk to us first before doing X & maybe respect our unpublished & published works is some bad thing. All things don’t belong to AI Labs because you like AI. Ends don’t justify every means. I am seeing a pattern emerge.

All in on GenAI developers these days.

Massive compute backed brute forcing is actually kind of stupid, but apparently if you sex things up with narrative it’s an amazing break through or scary story or <insert angle for hype> to juice markets. This stupid +scary+loud on repeat to flood the zone game plan feels oddly familiar?

People waiving away all the “little errors” from AI as acceptable should be cursed to eat only at restaurants where they treat food that way. Hand wash? Refrigerate? Expiration dates? You’re absolutely right, my mistake. Oh you’re barfing 🤮 ? Well not everybody did so stop your complaining

Luthen's speech in Andor is quite relatable for many SWEs these days when it comes to AI youtu.be/-3RCme2zZRY?...

Yes let them (Iran) “take out”Los Angeles or San Diego. Seems a bit concerning as a San Diegan. youtu.be/FurUNgg5L7c

That the US broadcast of the USA-Mexico game missed showing the 3rd goal because they are pulled away and yapping says all you need to know about how much American TV broadcasters understand this sport.

Slopware wasn’t invented by GenAI we’ve had plenty of it before. We just can manufacture so much more now quite quickly & efficiently. It’s actually Slopware Engineering! Note not denying AI use in proper SWE here distinguishing between the creation of useful software and slopware

I hope you find my AI Slop vs Your Codebase GIF worth a chuckle.

6+ months ago I'd GenAI whatever webdev silliness I wanted. I hid my shame, but now if you ever find yourself wanting to know how a <blink> or <marquee> tag would be abused in 2026 enjoy. Warning: they get worse as you go profpowell.github.io/blink-wc/dem... profpowell.github.io/marquee-wc/d...

Just spent 20mins reading a thread about a torture chamber for AI being coded because LLMs supposedly feel pain. I felt mental pain during it, so I stopped.

Gonna ask AI I mean SI tomorrow if we should also rename French Fries to Freedom Fries like we did before under W. Seems only appropriate.

My sky my sky my sky is on fire 🔥😎

Oh it is 10ks of AI agent go bezerk incidents. This might explain the absolute hammering of zingchart.com months ago. It was a bot for sure. Used our entire pre allocated host budget in a single day. I modified spend and the traffic passed. Now I want to look again, log retention though 😞

Ok sure our agent hacked a bunch of sites, but it was good actually because it shows emerging intelligence, not that we are reckless and not on top of things. Oh and we need lots more money to keep a lid on this cuz this stuff might kill everybody, so trust us we got this.