2026-02-13 13:31:00
Look, I use AI every single day. I've written about it before -- how it helps me code faster, automate scripts, orchestrate workflows. These tools just work. They save me hours of grunt work and make me more productive.
But here's what bothers me: the breathless exaggeration everywhere I look.
Scroll through X for five minutes and you'll see "essays" claiming AI has "judgment" or "taste" or "intuition." That it "knows the right call." Come on. What feels like judgment is actually careful prompting, context management, skills.md, memory.md, and statistical pattern matching -- all designed by the meat bags.
This hype misleads people. It inflates expectations and warps how the public understands what these tools actually do.
What really gets me are the people who aren't even technical writing these dramatic thinkpieces. You know the ones: "AI has reached a new level of judgment..." followed by the same tired predictions about replacing writers and coders we've been hearing for years. It's just clickbait.
And then there's the practical insanity this hype creates. People are rushing out to buy Mac minis to run something like OpenClaw (which is still bloated and messy) without even testing it. They don't spin up a $5 VPS or use a container to validate whether it works for their use case. They just drop hundreds of dollars on hardware because the hype train says "you need this NOW" and common sense goes out the window.
The problem is simple: Hype-men hypes. When it outputs something coherent or stylish, they say "bUt iT fEeLs dIfFeReNt tHiS tImE". You’ve been feeling that every time a new AI model drops, buddy.
Here's what AI actually is: human design, massive datasets, and careful optimization. It's impressive, sure. But it's not magic. It improves workflows and generates useful solutions, but it doesn't "decide" or "judge" like we do. It's a tool -- a really good one -- but still just a tool that depends entirely on us.
Want to celebrate what it does? Go on. But stop pretending it's something it's not. Please talk about AI honestly -- get excited about real capabilities, not made-up ones.
And respectfully, shove the taste and agency up yours, pal.
2026-02-13 08:28:00
If you're reading this, and you don't have a Facebook or Xitter account (because you either deleted it, or never had one to begin with), give yourself a pat on the back. This shit is hard. Which is evidenced by the fact that three billion users are still active on Facebook, as an example, in any given month.
Take a look at the vicious cycle of:
And how this can cause harm to us as individuals and to our society.
We'll end on a brief note on how non-algorithmic alternatives do exist; and why it may still be hard for people to leave the existing platforms.
The situation we currently find ourselves in is that, somehow, the billionaire-owned, walled-garden "social networks" are still popular.
A this point, "social media" may be a bit of a misnomer. I like a term that I recently came across in the shownotes of a podcast I enjoy: 1 Let's call them "algorithmic media" instead. I find that this name is a better fit, for a couple of reasons:
At this moment in time, more so than ever, algorithmic media may not be serving us - their users - anymore: Not serving us as individual humans, not serving us as a society, not serving us in how we govern ourselves politically.
If you follow privacy, digital-sovereignty, or anti-surveillance conversations, none of this will be news to you. But if you’re newer here - welcome! - or sharing this with someone just beginning to explore alternatives to billionaire-owned algorithmic media, here's a quick recap of the lowlights:
As things stand, many of us thus find ourselves "locked in" to platforms who keep us in a cycle much like this one:
A flowchart visualizing the relationships between human psychology, content sharing, engagement, rewards, and monetization. (Which, in case you can't tell, is not AI generated. Created by hand using draw.io, for better or worse.) I have done my best to provide a detailed verbal description of the flow below.
My attempt at a verbal summary of the above flowchart is:
Short answer: No.
For a number of reasons, one of the most critical of which is that the algorithmic media platforms themselves did not start out this way. YouTube did not have ads when it launched. Instagram had a non-algorithmic, chronological Most Recent feed until 2016. Xitter didn't show promoted content in people's timelines until 2010. Facebook, according to Cory Doctorow, began as an alternative to MySpace that promised it wouldn't spy on you.
This illustrates two things:
Cool! So now we have the Cliff's Notes of why people may be wanting to look beyond these billionaire-owned platforms, and look for alternatives. Alternatives that are more privacy-friendly, that show you the content that you signed up to see, and whose explicit goal is not to keep you glued to the screen for as long as possible and do a number on your mental health along the way. Great news:
The alternatives exist. They are out there. ActivityPub, the Fediverse, Mastodon, Pixelfed, Ghost, many others. They are out there and you can join them today.
And yet... Even folks who know all of the above, even folks who agree with all of the above, folks who continue to have shoddy experiences on the algorithmic networks, often cannot seem to shake themselves loose of thos platforms.
Why is that? Because of Network Effects. More on those in the next post!
As always, please feel free to get in touch with thoughts or comments! You can email or find me on Mastodon.
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Dr. Thomas Schwenke in Episode 145 of "Auslegungssache," by c't.↩
Side note: There is a lot more to this, like social goals, negativity biases, etc, but I didn't want to explode the flowchart right on the first node... If you are interested in a more nuanced approach, click some of the reference links in this article and explore from there!↩
2026-02-13 02:42:00
No seriously, I do. It’s not perfect, in fact it’s downright fucked at times and there have been many times in my life when I’ve wished it away in the dead of night.
But when I truly sit back and think about it, my life has made me who I am and there is only one of me.
I will return to stardust when it’s my time. For now, I’ll take the good times with the bad, because I know it’ll be alright in the end.
2026-02-13 00:35:00
There I was minding my own business, plodding through the working day, getting on with my tasks.
A colleague asked me to proof-read his report and offer feedback. I am the kind of guy that lets a lot of things slip. I appreciate we all write in different styles, grammar, and tone; we all mangle punctuation to suit.
If am asked to critique, I prefer constructive rather than, "hang on while I rewrite this in my own style" kind of approach. Today I simply suggested that the report open with a summary paragraph, introducing the topic — it had launched into a discussion, assuming the reader was already familiar with the topic.
I kindly offered a topping paragraph, consisting of a few sentences.
and I quote:
Thanks for that. Totally agree. Your opening paragraph is amazing and sets the scene perfectly. Did you run it through AI?
Well, you can imagine my reaction upon reading this. I was incandescent with rage.
How 🤬 dare someone assume that I've used a machine to write this. I am more than capable of stringing a few sentences together. I am paid to do it. I am not paid to force words into a sausage machine and accept the resultant diatribe.
I put my flowery language to the side and offered a quick response, in a jocular fashion:
Hi Bob (fake name), have you ever met me? How long have we worked together? Surely you know my feelings towards AI?
Rest assured, those are all my own words. No super-computer, consuming megawatts of energy, was needed. Just my little brain.
Glad I could help with the report. It's a good read.
And breathe!
Is this what the world is becoming?. Everyone assuming that we are all sitting at our screen eagerly anticipating what the Artificial monsters will say?
Can I get off the world please?!
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2026-02-12 12:59:00
After attending tonight's dreadful Raptors game my son friend and I ended up at a bar. We had been to this bar together a few times and as such we recognized the bartenders, and one of them recognized us, and so we ended up in a few concurrent conversations (me/him, us/one of them, us/both of them) over the course of like, 90 minutes. One of the conversations included that Larry Nassar should get stabbed all the way through his head in prison. Another was about how our culture used to be more literate. The subtext of that second one is that a decline in literacy often coincides with the presence of autocracy, but we were also discussing it within the context of our culture's obsession with productivity and concomitant commitment to joylessness.
Like, I was born to be a satyr misbehaving in the moonlight in the meadow. Instead, I spend my days getting hatefucked by Microsoft Teams.
Anyway, eventually of the bartenders mentioned that she was interested in becoming a copywriter, and because I am a copywriter and also pathologically addicted to mentoring (and also two edibles deep), I gave her some advice on how to build a portfolio, explained how spec work works within that context, and then dropped two names that she (and you!) may want to deep dive:
My bff Helen Androlia, who is an advertising strategist without peer with track record of excellence, a beloved college prof, and an actual, literal character in the Marvel Universe (Earth-616)).
Aisha Hakim, whom I don't know IRL but with whom I chat from time to time (people used to make friends and acquaintances on Twitter) and who created The Art of Deckmaking.
Even if you are not in advertising, you should click around in there because you will almost certainly learn something.
Hard conversational shift in
3...
2...
1...
Over the past few days I have been in the middle of some challenging stuff, and that stuff made me return to "why am I the way I am?" type questioning. This gave way to "is it okay that I am the way I am?" The answer to that question, today, is yes. The answer to that question from 1989–2020 was not.
I have always known who I was, but for most of my life I didn't accept who I was, When I started to accept myself, the pain stopped.
If you don't know who you are, someone else will tell you, and the thing they will tell you that you are is almost always a person other people can use and exploit and drain until there is nothing left but a fingerprint that can unlock a phone with no photos in the camera roll because all the apps that spy and report on you are clogging up all the memory like Zach Edey in the paint.
Remember kids, the panopticon will not be televised.
Advice: don't bend, ascend.
🌲 gonna
🌼 go
🌱 touch to
🌳 grass sleep
🌷 now
Be good to yourself.
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2026-02-12 01:14:00
It’s already been over 2 years since you have left us. You still leave an incredible hole in our home and our hearts.
Only toward the end of last year, I finally got rid of your old medication and your food. I haven’t taken down the sign at my door with your face on it. Every year, we use the reusable photo calendar with pictures of you on it. We have Christmas tree decorations with your face, too.
The time shortly after was rough. Then it got a little easier, slowly. It all felt like one big vacation you were on. You weren’t gone, just somewhere else, living your own life, traveling. But recently, it feels like it’s been too long, like someone you love who’s taking longer than usual to return home.
It feels like slowly losing touch because everything is changing, we are changing, and you can no longer witness it. We can’t see you change, either. We are no longer growing together, and it’s becoming more apparent with time. You’ll always stay stuck the way you were, and we increasingly become different people than we were with you. It’s so scary to feel like it all happened in a parallel universe.
Each walk we go on, we miss you and want you with us. It’s surreal to know we used to walk the same paths in the forest together.
I’m scared that with time, I will forget the way you felt, the way you smelled, and all your little quirks and silly behaviors. We have videos and we still have your fur, but it feels like it’s not enough.
Vigdís wrote a poem for you yesterday:
Grief is not a Liquid
Though it flows
Grief is not a Plant
Though it grows
Grief is not a Thorn
Though it stings
Grief is not a Bird
Though it sings
Grief is not a String
Though it tears
Grief is not a Fire
Though it sears
Grief is not a Robber
Though it takes
Grief is not a Mourner
Though it wakes
Grief is not a Stone
Though it weighs
Grief is not a Friend
But it stays
At least I can write about you so everyone knows you existed and you mattered.
Your Ava
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