FOSS infrastructure is under attack by AI companies

LLM scrapers are taking down FOSS projects' infrastructure, and it's getting worse.

No One Dies in this Dystopia

I am all done with grading for the semester just past, but the work sticks to me in a way I can’t yet manage to fling off.

The Omg Lol Times · We have to talk about AI “art”

Note: In this post I’m going to use the term “AI” as a lazy shorthand for “generative content creation via large-scale pre-trained models” because time is tight and I’ve got arthritis. I know it’s not really “AI”, but please, let me give my typing fingers a break here.

They're putting blue food coloring in everything

"Why is my burger blue?" I asked, innocently. "Oh! We're making all of our food blue, all the best restaurants are doing it now." the waiter explained. But I didn't want my burger to be blue.

A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment

On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions

I Am An AI Hater

I am an AI hater. This is considered rude, but I do not care, because I am a hater.

A Vibe Coded SaaS Killed My Team

We lost the capitalism game and they're trying to get a second wind through a broken vibe-coded SaaS platform.

In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Update 8/8/2025 – I wrote this the day before a certain post by a popular developer services company. I’ve seen some comments this is a rebuttal – it wasn’t meant to be! But…

An Open Letter to Cory Doctorow: Ollama is part of the enshittification!

A response to Cory Doctorow's defense of generative AI, examining the contradictions in supporting Ollama while championing open source principles, and an …

AI Artists Have No Role Models

Prompt Engineers Lack Any Canon, Don't You? AI artists have an existential problem: they consume only their own work, severing the dialogue of culture that…

Vibe Password Generation: Predictable by Design - Irregular

LLM-generated passwords appear strong, but are fundamentally insecure. Testing across GPT, Claude, and Gemini revealed highly predictable patterns: repeated passwords across runs, skewed character distributions, and dramatically lower entropy than expected. Coding agents compound the problem by sometimes preferring and using LLM-generated passwords without the user’s knowledge. We recommend avoiding LLM-generated passwords and directing both models and coding agents to use secure password generation methods instead.

Pluralistic: Code is a liability (not an asset) (06 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

Code is a liability (not an asset). Tech bosses don't understand this. They think AI is great because it produces 10,000 times more code than a programmer, but that just means it's producing 10,000 times more liabilities. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our high-tech society:

The Honest Case for the Humanities

Or: Why I’m Tired of My Colleagues Making Arguments That Only Work on Us

How AI text watermarking works

A gentle visual guide to how a statistical mark hides inside generated text, and what erases it.

The load-bearing vocabulary of Claude

ChatGPT talks too much and it’s ruining learning

How the UX of AI chat can hijack our brains to compromise learning in schools and beyond