On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds.
“In ages past they stole the commons so you had to work for them to live. Then you had to work for a wage, so they stole your wages and labor. Now they steal your thoughts and ideas to lease them back to you on subscription. They are thieves of not only wealth and power, but of our creativity, our histories, and our potential.” —@kalshann
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“I was trying to work out yesterday why LLM users annoy me so much and it came back to my basic notion of rudeness: impolite behaviour stems from assuming that your time is worth more than other people’s.
If someone doesn’t bother to write coherent words in a message to you so that they can type faster at the cost of your comprehension speed, they’re trading your time for theirs and that’s rude.
If someone uses an LLM to create more words from fewer ideas, that saves them time in careful expression at the cost of more work for you. That’s rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write code that doesn’t work and expects other people to help debugging it, then they’re saying that it isn’t worth their time to learn but it is worth your time to help them. That’s rude.
If someone uses an LLM to write some code that looks like it works and expects you to put effort into reviewing a PR, again, they’re saving work for themselves at the expense of your time. That’s rude.
Almost all LLM uses are like this: they save the user time (at least, in the short term) by making more work for someone else. They’re machines optimised for creating rudeness.
There are a bunch of places where you do trade different people’s time. In particular, if tasks A and B need doing, but person 1 can do either and person 2 can do only task B, then it makes sense for person 2 to do task B so that person 1 can do task A. That’s not because person 1’s time is more valuable, it’s because person 1 doing task A is more valuable. It’s not that your time is more valuable than the cleaner’s time, but the cleaner doing their job means that you can spend my time doing more valuable tasks.”—@David Chisnall
Error by AI scribe during medical appointment leaves patient devastated
When Rebecca Green arrived for her first appointment with a urologist, she was asked whether she consented to having the appointment transcribed by artificial intelligence (AI).
She said yes without hesitation.
“I don’t want to be in her bad books or be that annoying patient who takes up more of her time,” she said.
But that decision would cause her a lot of stress, with the AI scribe making up the serious but false claim that Ms Green was taking illegal drugs.
The useful comparison is not office good, home bad, or the reverse. Different jobs contain different mixtures of focused work, mentoring, customer contact, equipment use and creative coordination. An RTO mandate is a policy about who decides the mixture.
Canada should ‘keep our options open’ on acquiring nuclear weapons, former defence chief says
Canada’s former top soldier says this country should keep its options open on the question of acquiring nuclear weapons, broaching a subject that has largely been closed to debate for decades.
Retired general Wayne Eyre was speaking Monday at a forum in Ottawa. The event’s topic was national sovereignty and Canadian military capability in an age of geopolitical turmoil and shifting alliances.
Mr. Eyre, who stepped down as chief of the defence staff in 2024, said Canada can’t be fully autonomous when it comes to security and defence unless it has nuclear weapons.
“I would argue that we will never have true strategic independence, absent our own nuclear deterrent,” he told the event, which was organized by the Conference of Defence Associations Institute and advisory company Catalyze4.
