Friday’s Finds

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

—

“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

Read more

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

Shared by my Daughter” “I need privacy, not because my actions are questionable, but because your judgement and intentions are”. In response to “if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear”. via @itisboller

The Odyssey may likely be the first example of misogyny in a written work. —Retrieving Gender Balance

“One day, Penelope comes downstairs and she hears a bard singing very sad songs about how difficult it is for people like Odysseus, her husband, to get home. And she says to the bard, quite understandably, ‘Oh bard, play something a bit more cheerful.’ And this young, wet-behind-the-ears teenager Telemachus comes over to her and says, ‘Oh mother, shut up. Speech is man’s business.’” —Mary Beard

Read more

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.

“I reject the idea that we have to be slaves to surveillance capitalism in order to participate in the modern economy.” —Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew, after rejecting a 350-acre data centre outside of Winnipeg, via @Dulce Maria

“When I first encountered a word processor, decades ago now, it was as if my writing and my mind were suddenly liberated from the text-to-paper prison of yesteryear. Free to add, subtract, shift, experiment, hone, refine, or chuck and restart, I found that the entire writing process became an exciting adventure. I have no interest in offloading that excitement, that adventure, to AI.” —@jd

Read more

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.

Anytime anyone says: “thoughts and prayers” — my response is going to be: “pitchforks and torches” —@Julie Webgirl

Could this be because they can recognize it as mansplaining as a service? — @Diogenes Pontifx
“… women were consistently more skeptical than men that AI benefits would outweigh its risks, and were less convinced that their professional lives would gain because of the technology.” —Fortune

Read more

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.

The Four Classes of Military Officers (Or Office Workers): Clever, Diligent, Stupid and Lazy

Clever and Lazy: While most senior leaders will deny this classification, it applies well, and not just for the reasons cited by Hammerstein-Equord. These are the leaders who have the breadth of experience and depth of wisdom to ask the right questions, see the future for what it is, and make the right decisions under the greatest duress. They’re also renowned for finding the simplest solutions to the most difficult problems, and that drives a lot of people crazy.

Read more

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.

“Grab your pens and shovels, rabble rouser rebels. Take to the streets. Dig in for the long haul! Globally, communities of creative resistance are saying no to bullies. Artists and scientists, homemakers and caretakers, workers and kindreds in kindness and LOVE. — Unite. CREATE! Imagine. Fear not!” —Sheree Fitch

A new world is being born’: author Rebecca Solnit on the ‘slow revolution’ the far right cannot tolerate

A government can take away your rights, but no one can take away your belief in those rights. The first points of challenge to fascism are memory and history.” … “I often quote my friend Bill McKibben [the environmentalist]. We were sitting on a concrete floor at an activist space during the Paris climate treaty process [the Paris Agreement was adopted in 2015]. Somebody walked up and asked him a question he gets asked all the time. ‘What’s the best thing I can do as an individual?’ He said, ‘Stop being an individual.’ You may have your own quirky playlist and eye-makeup techniques, but you also have this solidarity. When you act, you act with others.”

Read more

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.

“Those who love how machines ‘think’ tend to think like machines themselves.” —Fiona Tribe

Software engineering in 2026 be like “we need you to be physically present in the office so we can replace you with AI” —Tilton Raccoon

“No, I don’t want an AI assisted experience. I want clean air, forests, and a future for the next generation.” —Greenpeace

Oh, sure—when *the company* automates my job and keeps collecting the profits, that’s “innovation,” but when *I* automate my job and keep collecting a paycheck, that’s “time clock fraud.” —Max Leibman

Gall’s Law: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” —Antoine Buteau

Read more

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.

“Rights aren’t rights if they can be taken away. They’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: A bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that the list gets shorter and shorter” —George Carlin

“GenAI sits at the intersection of fascism, capitalism, labor, climate change, and environmental degradation. It is the quintessential technology of our time, the epitome of our current struggles. Defeating it is the key to defeating capital.” —Ben Lockwood

Read more

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.

RETRACTED: Safety Evaluation and Risk Assessment of the Herbicide Roundup and Its Active Ingredient, Glyphosate, for Humans

via @Jan Wildeboer

The article’s conclusions regarding the carcinogenicity of glyphosate are solely based on unpublished studies from Monsanto, which have failed to demonstrate tumorigenic potential. The handling (co) Editor-in-Chief also became aware that by the time of writing of this article in the journal, the authors did not include multiple other long-term chronic toxicity and carcinogenicity studies, that were already done at the time of writing their review in 1999. —Science Direct [undated retraction but assumed to be recent, after 25 years since original publication]

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” —Viktor Frankl

Read more

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.

“The real power of PKM shows up not at the end, but in the consistent rhythm of seeking, sensing, and sharing.” —Bonni Stachowiak

“America putting most of its eggs in the generative AI basket, China going hard into green tech. When history looks back on this period, someone is going to look awfully stupid.” —Nicholas Grossman

Read more