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Baldur Bjarnason
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Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff.

Pretty sure that it won’t take long after all this has passed for most people to forget just how complicit The Guardian has been in stoking up anti-trans bigotry

Why?

Because all of you have already forgotten how instrumental they were in stoking up Wakefield’s MMR antivaccination scaremongering

So Ed Zitron has been digging into the numbers behind the AI Bubble and coming away pessimistic and, unusually, I actually think he’s downplaying the risks a bit because much of them are hard to quantify as hard numbers

https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/

- The only plausible growth story today for the stock market as a whole is magical “AI” productivity growth. What happens to the market when that story fails?

Knowledge tech that's subtly wrong is more dangerous than tech that's obviously wrong. (Or, where I disagree with Robin Sloan.): https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/subtly-wrong-is-more-dangerous/

Replying to Avatar Simon Lucy

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq6u7alxzkjugh6535altqqk5gx7g0a63x6m300l898nenys0rsjuq5ad6h6

Oh that blog post commits one major sin and misses a fundamental point.

The sin is that it's boring, and boring in every dimension.

The fundamental point it misses is that the Internet is not everything, and that everything written down is not everything. The only thing that it is Everything, is everything.

I would guess that more of Everything is not written down than is. That's all the perceptions all the reactions all the events.

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqf6jtu64e597aq3gapt6uu7nkzag8faev7mh4kxcmjjg97j5zq79qah9exn Yeah, that's exactly one of my issues with it. The internet is absolutely not even close to being a good representation of Everything.

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpqr0anlrfcrw5gwwt92errg7v4xl4qn8ds2j4t86fkjyz40xa5js6ql000q4 Yeah, there's so much missing in his line of reasoning. It's not a surprise that his post is loved by the LLM booster crowd

Replying to Avatar Simon Elvery

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq6u7alxzkjugh6535altqqk5gx7g0a63x6m300l898nenys0rsjuq5ad6h6 ooof, I agree. I think mostly this suffers from shallow thinking. I’m surprised, for a minor example, that he thinks media execs are in the ‘it’s not okay’ camp. It’s definitely the opposite in my experience, but they won’t say that loudly.

I’d like to read your reply.

Knowledge tech that's subtly wrong is more dangerous than tech that's obvious wrong. (Or, where I disagree with Robin Sloan.)

https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/notes/2025/subtly-wrong-is-more-dangerous/

I failed a saving throw against blogging.

Replying to Avatar Matt Hall

nostr:nprofile1qy2hwumn8ghj7un9d3shjtnddaehgu3wwp6kyqpq6u7alxzkjugh6535altqqk5gx7g0a63x6m300l898nenys0rsjuq5ad6h6

I love this.

For the better part of the last year I've had

*Resist Entropy*

written on my whiteboard where it's always in my peripheral vision.

“Against Entropy - Erin Kissane's small internet website”

https://erinkissane.com/against-entropy

> I am on the side of building conditions for life.

I disagree with pretty much both the core premise and every step of the reasoning of this post

I've long been a fan of Sloan's work and that makes me feel obligated to explain why

Maybe if I scream into a pillow the urge to write a reply blog post will go away?

https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/is-it-okay/

That feeling when you’re chatting with a neighbour, trying to tip-toe around political topics because you don’t want to start a “thing” until they drop a mention of “redistribution of wealth” being a positive thing into the conversation and you realise they too have been couching their words throughout the conversation 😄

“Is AI a Silver Bullet? — Ian Cooper - Staccato Signals”

https://ian-cooper.writeas.com/is-ai-a-silver-bullet

> But the flaw in prompts as a description of the code to be generated tends to be that natural language is a remarkably poor medium for expressing the model that we want to use in our software. Every time we move away from a 3GL to create a more natural interface, we rapidly get diminishing ability to author software.

This entire essay is excellent

“Critics keep talking as if it’s useles, but it isn’t. It’s cheap and even though it has some flaws, is extraordinarily effective at some of its use cases.”

“So, what? Are we supposed to accept all the downsides of LLMs just because it’s occasionally useful?”

“LLMs? No I’m talking about asbestos.”

Web dev: constantly figuring out new ways for people to experience the joy and perfection that is “this is best experienced in…”

Kudos to the original pioneers: Netscape and IE. Other innovators: yarn vs npm, Early iPhone era Safari. Modern Chrome

And now packages registries with JSR. Wonderful