Mike Taylor 🦕 on nostr

"The idea that outright racists who shout slurs at brown people in the street can be placated by lowering the number of small boat arrivals this quarter is absurd."
https://iandunt.substack.com/p/the-return-of-race-politics-036

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790922780

"This week, Suella Braverman — who was born in Harrow, educated at Cambridge, and lives in Hampshire — took to the internet once again to insist that she is not English - ostensibly because of her ancestry, but in reality because of her race. It’s like watching a wounded animal feast on its own intestines, a grotesque parable about confusing short term and long term incentives."

https://iandunt.substack.com/p/the-return-of-race-politics-036

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790840188

So, so important to understand:

"The model is not lying to you. Lying would require it to have a concept of truth. It is bullshitting you. It produces plausible-shaped text with total indifference to whether the world matches. When it’s right, it’s right as a side effect of its training data, not out of conviction. When it’s wrong, it’s wrong with exactly the same confidence and exactly the same beautiful prose.

That’s not a bug in the model. That is the model."

https://www.jsnover.com/blog/2026/07/20/llm-models-are-bullshit-engines/

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790281987

"You treated visitors to your website with the same respect that a restauranteur would treat patrons who had sat down to eat a meal; it would be exceedingly weird and creepy if you were to film them eating, or if you wrote down every word they said to each other and sold them to a stranger, or if you sniffed them while they ate and then said “I think I can guess what brand of perfume you’re wearing, can I order some more of it for you?”"

https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790281929

"You didn’t read the terms of service. You didn’t agree to accept cookies. I didn’t consent to having my site pulled into the training model for that AI system that’s going to use to sell the fruit of my labor for profit. I didn’t agree to have my activity tracked across all these different websites and cobbled together into a creepy and inaccurate profile of my preferences that gets sold without my permission. Nobody asks for anything, they just take it. "

https://www.anildash.com/2025/05/27/internet-of-consent/

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790259714

#InternetOfShit
#FridgesShouldNotBeSmart
#TheresNothingDumberThanASmartAppliance

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790253925

"If you believed otherwise, our apologies for not communicating more clearly to begin with."

I love this. They're actively taking on the blame for what might have been the reader's misunderstanding. It's the opposite of the kind of nonpology that begins "I'm sorry if you were offended by ...", which puts the blame on the hearer.

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1790170696

I woke up this morning and the name Beth Orton was in my mind for some reason. I didn't even know who she was — author, actor, musician, whatever. (I know. I'm ignorant.)

Well, she's a musician, and I picked an album of hers more or less at random to listen to: Sugaring Season https://bethorton.bandcamp.com/album/sugaring-season

I like it *a lot*. This could be a big discovery for me.

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1789977148

#ShareGoodNewsToo

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1789891429

"This steers me to ask whether dark archives can be justified. Yes, we can computationally check checksums and run as many automated tests as we like, but the only way truly to know whether an item remains usable is by actually letting someone use it."
— @nprofile1q... at https://eve.gd/2026/09/17/vaults-and-locks-that-fence-them-from-the-public-eye-and-use/

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1789126847

"I’ve asked ChatGPT and…"

That’s it. No need to say more. All those years speaking about "fake news" and "checking your sources" just to blindly repeat a random series of letters assembled by a stochastic algorithm? Seriously?

I don’t care about your credentials, I don’t care about your experience. With a couple of words, you gladly announced that you are obliterating them and refusing all forms of free will. Goodbye!

https://ploum.net/2026-09-09-ai_policy.html

Mike Taylor 🦕

@Mike Taylor 🦕 1789126603

"If you find yourself typing a prompt to express your idea, then just send me that prompt. I’m not interested in what an algorithm would do with your prompt, I want to know what you asked in the first place. I care about you, the human."

100% this.

https://ploum.net/2026-09-09-ai_policy.html

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