2026-03-31 03:09:00
This page was inspired by Evie Fae, which was in turn inspired by Damola Morenikeji for readers to know my views on AI and if any content on this blog is generated with it (it isn't).
This is my view on AI and why I don't use it. My hatred for AI is based on my own experience and what I have read about it. I understand it's useful in some cases, but I still think it causes more harm than good.
I don't use generative AI at all. I used to use it a lot at work since the release of ChatGPT, but after 2 years of use I noticed I was actually getting dumber and I decided I should stop. That wasn't the only reason though, the huge flood of AI slop invading every single corner of the internet was a huge part of it. AI generated songs on youtube and spotify, AI brainrot on instagram and tiktok, and maybe the worst of all, AI generated linkedin posts. Oof.
Aside from my own dislikings, there's also the moral problem. LLMs were vastly trained on stolen data and art, without anyone's consent. The corporate world was investing heavy in copyright and making sure everyone complied, until AI reaped (reapt?) everything in it's path. And it still trains on top of the data it gathers from your chats. That incurs innumerable issues with privacy, but I'll leave that to ava.
Speaking of ava, she recently made a great post which made me feel a bit called out. I agree with most of the post, but I admit I was one of the people who thought, as she quoted:
"The more you talk about it, the more you speak it into existence."
I avoided talking about it because of that and also because I was simply tired of seeing so many posts about it. But those posts are exactly what she stands against, which is AI hype bros. However I don't think in the purist way that AI has no use, I agree that it's great for things like RegEx, analyzing logs, doing the "boring stuff". I work in webdev, AI can absolutely do my job.
What I mostly stand against is AI(in this case, LLMs) used for creativity. I just don't see a point. You're letting the "creative" part of it for the machine, it's like asking a street artist for a painting and saying it was yours. You can absolutely paint it yourself. The fun part is the process itself, learning, seeing your own improvement, especially after getting frustrated.
"But I don't have the talent! I simply can't draw or paint." listen to Bob, not me
"But AI is the only way disabled people can make art!" I disagree
And for things like typos, grammar and the like, I'm an advocate for letting them live in your text1, that's how you learn! My own blog is probably full of them, but that didn't keep me from writing my thoughts and sending my message.
And I still mention the huge ambiental impact it has, ava argues that it'll likely improve, which I agree, but it's not looking good currently, and it just looks like the brazilian expression: "mayor's promise2". Something that stuck with me was the case of Memphis, Boxtown. A neighborhood that already had bad air quality due to industries and the like getting built there, now facing a giant data center. There were increases in cases of cancer (even in non-smokers), asthma and other respiratory issues. I've also seen news saying data centers affected local wildlife, though I don't have a source to sustain this. But it does make sense, as it's a huge source of light and noise. All that said, if it does get better and the ambiental impact is negligible, I would even consider recommending for the mundane / daily tasks such as the ones I mentioned.
There's still some other problems, such as the parasocial relationships with AI which have been boosted by AI dating apps, and is also related to AI psychosis3. There's also the impact of AI on the brain, which I mentioned earlier when I said I noticed I was getting dumber, I actually was. I couldn't come up with solutions as efficiently as before-AI, felt like I took longer to think(?), like my mind was clouded. In my personal experience my brain did a 360 once I stopped using AI, reduced screen time and social media usage, started blogging and began reading books again.
There's also the pain that is AI in the hiring process, and once again I must mention ava, she has a great post regarding this.
AI being used on wars and drones is also a huge issue. I don't know about you but I certainly don't want a weaponized drone made for killing, that calls itself "MechaHitler" deciding if I'm a target or not4. I've seen the argument that this is the fault of the people who use it, not the AI, but that falls in the same argument of whether guns should be available to everyone or not.
That is, if you can, if it's a formal document or similar I would suggest searching help from someone you trust, as the AI would use that data to train itself and track more about you.↩
A promise for the improvement of something, or a new project that will solve a problem, with the intent of getting votes, and rarely, if ever, gets done / finished.↩
Which is also insane. Cases of people killing themselves or mass shootings that have been influenced by AI. Crazy stuff.↩
Imagine the Cyberpunk / Terminator hell that it would be a drone finding stuff like this article by scanning your face, lol.↩
2026-03-30 09:33:00
There was a few posts on my RSS feed that were..... out there. My title says it all about the crap I saw.
Hope all of you are having a great Sunday.
Be blessed!
2026-03-30 00:00:00
OpenAI is killing off Sora, their video-generation tool that was also licensed through Disney. Quote Forbes: "For a product that arrived with the air of inevitability, Sora ended with remarkable speed." Yep.
Maybe AI (read: LLM chatbots) isn't all it's cracked up to be, in terms of speeding up work and creating efficiencies? On top of that, businesses are slowly realizing that the jump on this particular hypetrain is turning out to be costing a lot of money.
Meta has been ordered to pay $375 mil after a court found that they misled consumers about the safety of its platforms, and endangered children. This is, to our knowledge, the first time this has happened.
Google may be having plans to simply, uh, go ahead and display something else than your website when people go and wish to visit your website. I don't even know what else to comment here as this breaks with basically all the tenets of the World Wide Web as we know it:
A patent granted to Google on January 27, 2026 titled “AI-generated content page tailored to a specific user” describes a system that evaluates your company’s landing page in real time and, if it decides the page won’t perform well enough for a specific user, replaces it with an AI-generated version assembled on the fly. The user never sees what your team built, they see what Google's machine learning model thinks they should see instead.
As part of their mission to lock down Android, Google is implementing a 24-hr wait before you can install apps of your choice. This is, of course, an attempt to make their plan of locking down android more palpable, since, see, you can totally still install all the apps you'd like to install! Side note, you may also see this process referred as "sideloading," which is very similar to the concept of "jaywalking."
An excellent essay by Jack Whittaker on why age verification threatens online security & privacy. Here's more on what Techdirt calls the "surveillance stack" behind age verification.
Unfortunately, when we were all playing Pokemon Go, we weren't just catching 'em all.
Edited image based on original work by Mediamodifier on Unsplash.
I'd been planning to get started on this series for a while, but there was always something a little more pressing to write about - but now! It finally happened.
The article recommends privacy-friendly, less shitty and less tracky alternatives for messaging, browsing, and search. It is for you if you have had all the data-harvesting, ad-targeting, and Big Tech surveillance up to here; It is also for you, and also all your friends and family, even if - especially if! - they're not steeped in privacy and digital surveillance conversations.
You can switch away from Big Tech today. No need to be a tech expert - this can be an incremental process. Don't forget to always do your due diligence before installing apps and signing up for tools, and lastly, don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.
Read the full article for all my browsing, search, and messaging picks, and for links to other privacy-focused recommendations on the web.
Part 2 coming Soon! ™️
This is a new section in the Technically Good newsletter. In it, we'll highlight positive developments in the space of digital rights, digital sovereignty, and privacy, to show that it's not all doom & gloom.
The European Parliament has killed Chat Control, which means Big Tech will be forced to stop scanning private messages starting in April. Hooray! Let's forget for a moment how creepy it is that this was a thing that had to be banned in the first place.
Germany has made the Open Document Format mandatory for its "Deutschland-Stack" (its sovereign digital infrastructure ecosystem). This format is open-source and used by the LibreOffice ecosystem, reducing reliance on e.g. Microsoft and its proprietary formats.
GenZ can tell when they're faced with visual slop, and ad conversion rates are tanking because of it. That's the market responding rationally though, right? Or are we not allowed to call it that because it's AI?
After a lot of work by contributors and advocates, Wikipedia has banned AI content in articles. Hooray!
An excellent blog post by Elena Rossini on why public institutions should embrace the Fediverse. Beats me why a lot of institutions, governmental and otherwise, are still treating Twitter like their de-facto official news outlet.
If you would like to learn more about the Small Web, and why it is nice and how you can participate in it, give this article by Aral Balkan a read.
I've been enjoying the concept of the "BlurBlog:" It provides an interesting mix of an old-school RSS feed reader, and some social elements (like sharing and commenting), without the algorithmic bloat and distortion. I am trying it out as a way to quickly re-share interesting RSS-feed articles to my own feed.
You can subscribe to it directly if you also use NewsBlur - or you can treat it like a regular RSS feed and subscribe to it that way. How very meta! Original content, like articles and newsletters, will of course remain on BearBlog.
2026-03-29 20:59:00
The weather outside is definitely groaning,
Mother nature is angry, I can hear her moaning.
Hustling & rustling, the dead leaves sound awoken,
If the wind is her voice, then she's loudly outspoken.
At the window I reach to pull up my blind,
I am looking for a tree to free my messy mind.
I can smell my fresh coffee that I have not yet drunk,
I see a huge Chestnut with a hunk of a trunk.
Winds whirling,
wooshing & wickedly whipping,
Creaking & swaying,
I swear this big tree is tipping!
Yes, a storm's out there & I've named her Gail,
She's destroying everything that's fragile & frail.
A whacked, weak sapling – winter's light has forgotten,
An old Oak tree that stands infested & rotten.
She'll huff & she'll puff, determined to bend
All that Mother nature has failed to defend.
I see a Sycamore stump with wrenched tree roots,
Gail tore & tugged at teeny tiny shoots.
Bruised leaves fly away from a year-young Larch,
Fungi is forced off bashed, brittle Birch bark.
Snapped twigs on earth's carpet are now where they lay,
Alongside a recycle bin & its contents astray.
What was an ice cold current is starting to ease,
But there's still a sharp breeze that will make your skin freeze.
An ancient Ash, which now looks trashed,
Next to a Maple that's mangled.
A carrier bag flies past fast,
Caught in withered Willow & gets tangled.
Trees have fallen onto the ground,
Wood gatherers will come collecting, so bound to be found.
The must of this gust is now proving much less,
Hello mellow bellow, no more trees in distress.
Mother nature will now nurture all her creation,
While I seek a calm tree to start my meditation.
2026-03-29 19:00:22
One thing that women do significantly better than men is nagging. I recently learned that from Bearblog's feminist icon (unfortunately, not me; I have competition as it turns out) xmargins. I girlboss the men I know, I don't nag. But when I choose to nag, I nag the fuck out of them.
Lately, I've noticed that men cannot nag, they only neg. They tell me that I'm not pretty, sexy, or desirable, and then one day I dress hyperfemme, take off my hijab—like the emancipated post-muslim diva I am—and voilà! The men love-bomb me. I get showered with praise. I realize that men have little egos and that they need to inflate their own by pinning down mine, but like, can't you be more creative in making my life less promiscuous? I don't want you anyway.
It gets tiring and repetitive after a while, something I'm not used to from my rotating set of bedmates. They make sure to spice up the verbal abuse and use vocabulary that not even someone as high class and educated as me knows. I probably don't know all those non-fancy words because of my upbringing, who knows.
Anyway, thank you xmargins for matching my freak. I love reading your posts and wondering what kind of drugs one has to take to write like that, keep at it!
Triple Blessings!
2026-03-29 05:50:23
It's true. You gotta put your own stake in the future for progress to matter. Find something you are passionate about, and make it fucking better for all of us. Please. the doomerism of the current moment is casting a pall across our public consciousness. There are still so many things for us to collectively strive for, so many things we can do to affect the future for the better. Find your thing, throw yourself into it. I promise I'll do the same, too.