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There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

https://kottke.org/26/05/theres-no-earthly-way-of-knowing-which-direction-we-are-going
43•tobr•3h ago

Comments

falcor84•41m ago
I'll just put the Willy Wonka tunnel clip here - https://youtu.be/Xkg7dp1QY9k
JSR_FDED•41m ago
It’s crazy. Literally the only valid thing you can say about LLM use is “in the hands of an experienced person LLMs can be a force multiplier”.

But no, we have to replace entire companies with it. All the problems of LLMs stem from inexperienced people using it (by inexperienced I mean not skilled in the domain in which the LLM is being applied).

vkou•5m ago
That's not the problem.

There are two[1] problems. One is that a small group of people will own a critical part to all future economic activity. It's wealth consolidation at an unimaginable scale.

The other is that the reason LLMs produce so much fucking garbage isn't because their users suck at their jobs. These users were producing good to passable work for years before LLM slop started flooding the world.

It's because their jobs - their bosses - can't (or don't care to) tell the difference between good work and fucking garbage.

----

[1] These two problems are not an exhaustive list by any means.

bronlund•34m ago
I will argue that we are going forward - for better or for worse. In my humble opinion, taking into account the sad state of the world today, any change is welcomed.
antfarm•13m ago
The problem is that we are pushed forward, not going at our own pace.

In his commencement speech that got booed by the audience, Eric Schmidt says,

"When someone offers you a seat on the rocketship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on. [...] Find a way to say yes." [1]

That's the billionaire class telling you where your place is in their plan for the world. Nobody asks if you even want to leave the planet, figuratively speaking.

This part of the speech is not in the video linked in the article, but you can watch it here:

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MYggR_PPRg

The last sentence in particular shows the contempt he has for the students in the audience, and is reminiscent of another incident:

[2] https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/tried-to-convince-me-i-...

antfarm•10m ago
History shows that blindly welcoming change just because someone promises you a better future is a dangerous thing.
ramraj07•33m ago
What's wrong with the Polish author example?
xeyownt•22m ago
According to "experts", you have to suffer to make good art. She used a tool that reduced that suffering phase, so she's "garbage" now.

I don't know about AI, but I think the main problem nowadays is that a growing number of people can only deal with binary categories, either it's godly or it's trash.

To conclude, anything that is not written with a stone tablet is garbage.

grey-area•8m ago
Amazon books are now heavily infected with AI slop, I've yet to read a book which is detectably AI generated which is not garbage. When that stops being the case, perhaps people will stop objecting to it.

This isn't about suffering vs not, it's about quality vs garbage. If the judges truly couldn't tell though and actually read the book properly, I'd say it's fine to use AI in that sense as the author clearly heavily supervised it or just used it for inspiration and they produced something the judges valued.

Part of the problem with other use-cases is that we have up to now assumed that writing a book took significant effort and therefore do not have controls in place for quality. If it doesn't take significant effort to generate something plausible, all the rules have to change to take that into account.

cubefox•28m ago
The world will get a lot crazier in the years ahead, on the path to superhuman intelligence. Disruptions caused by past inventions, like the printing press, the steam engine, electricity or the Internet, will look unremarkable by comparison.
camillomiller•24m ago
Wait a minute, the Future of Truth is a book by Werner Herzog... Did this guy published a book with the same title? Why?
october8140•21m ago
Hank Green has had the best take I've heard which is AI is definitely something but everyones still figuring out what it is. It will likely end up being nothing like it is today.
devsda•20m ago
The commencement/graduating speeches including AI in the video at the end are infuriating. The message from people giving those speeches is literally "deal with it" and how tone deaf do they have to be to patronize those booing students with "I understand your fear".

The graduation episode where the AI readout missing some student names and then the college saying "we used AI to readout and some names were missed. We will not redo and you will not see your name on stage" is the worst.

I believe the main value of AI comes not from its productivity gains but because AI will increasingly become a tool for evading responsibility and accountability for actions in economic, social and worse even military functions.

rhubarbtree•14m ago
I suspect there is an unspoken factor here, which is that business leaders are not impressed by the WFH silent quitting attitude of junior staff, they’re happy to replace them with AI, and they don’t have sympathy because “yet another thing is hard.”

I’ve seen the silent quitting attitude in a workplace and it is toxic. OTOH young people have had a lot to deal with, and social media is damaging their mental health. OTOOH quit social media and try to address some of the issues you have. It’s very hard to know where the balance between sympathetic arm-round-the-shoulder and tough-love-develop-some-grit should lie.

adithyassekhar•12m ago
Why do you assume it’s the juniors who are silent quitting?
tonyedgecombe•3m ago
[delayed]
dv_dt•5m ago
I believe that most people naturally want to work, to contribute and build in groups. They want to do it and should expect to do it with reasonable boundaries and benefits for their labor. Silent quitting is a response to ever increasingly extractive work relationships for fewer and fewer benefits and increasingly irrationally low levels of compensation.
silver_silver•4m ago
This reads like an avocado toast critique. Businesses which respect their staff, particularly junior staff, are few and far in between. Why should anyone not “silently quit” when the attitude of their employer is to extract as much value for the lowest cost before a round of layoffs?
ramon156•1m ago
[delayed]
apt-apt-apt-apt•11m ago
I was surprised to find out how much hate there is for AI in art.

An artist, Yuumei, is the perfect candidate to use AI– drawing by hand since early 2000s, wrist injury precluding heavy work.

People seem to think art should be done only by humans, that AI steals art, and is bad for the environment.

But she wants to use it to be able to produce the work she wants, including comics with lots of art and such. Given that she's ultimately still responsible for the creative direction and result, this seems like something AI is greatly help for.

Example hate video and comments: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495VOuAnCJM

KronisLV•9m ago
> tools that let users build personalized mini apps tailored to their needs.

We’ve reinvented Java Applets. I mean, I do like the idea behind that sort of stuff, it’s just that all sorts of little things break along the way. For example, I asked Claude to put together a specific recipe, it could do that, I got my Artifact/cooking widget/whatever. It even let me switch between metric and imperial (and didn’t save that preference) and let me change the quantity and updated the ingredient amounts (except the phone going to sleep led to it all resetting).

Sometimes I feel like we are very much stuck in being able to produce things but they simply aren’t high enough quality (which might take years or decades more of model training and efficiency improvements) and also that maybe we’re doing things a decade too soon. Imagine trying to build AI data centres with 2010 or 2000 hardware and how limited the models you’d be able to run would be. Maybe that’s also why the current outcomes are sometimes shitty. The other theory is that there’s simply not enough high quality data to train truly good models and we’ll plateau and model collapse in training will be common.

KnuthIsGod•7m ago
If people want to work from home, I see no reason why their role

cannot be outsourced to someone prompting an AI / LLM / whatever the next technology is / from Guntur or Wajir.

Very few people are irreplaceable.

throwaway81523•6m ago
AI slop farms are churning out anti-AI data center memes on Facebook

https://www.fastcompany.com/91544842/ai-slop-facebook-conten...

gherkinnn•3m ago
LLMs as a technology are neutral and largely act as amplifiers.

Now, there is not an ounce of decency between our SV overlords and I have zero trust they will choose to amplify the right things. On the contrary, their apparent ideal state is a vast swath of technoserfs force fed ever more content and ads and more content, getting by on Uber-for-everything, where you spend what little money you have saved up being a delivery boy on things you don't own. We will stumble about in barren apartments, living a fake life through VR goggles, watering virtual plants with virtual water, all of which we pay for of course. All the while Zuckerberg, Musk, and Thiel are tucked away on the moon, their vile hands clinging to a last hope of immortality, just as hopeless as the people below.

There's no earthly way of knowing which direction we are going

https://kottke.org/26/05/theres-no-earthly-way-of-knowing-which-direction-we-are-going
43•tobr•3h ago•24 comments

Railway Blocked by Google Cloud

https://status.railway.com/?date=20260519
470•aarondf•8h ago•220 comments

FiveThirtyEight articles on the Internet Archive

https://fivethirtyeightindex.com/
178•ChocMontePy•7h ago•39 comments

Gemini 3.5 Flash

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/models-and-research/gemini-models/gemini-3-5/
760•spectraldrift•15h ago•535 comments

Everything in C is undefined behavior

https://blog.habets.se/2026/05/Everything-in-C-is-undefined-behavior.html
146•lycopodiopsida•2h ago•110 comments

I’ve built a virtual museum with nearly every operating system you can think of

https://virtualosmuseum.org/
754•andreww591•16h ago•168 comments

Infomaniak transitions to a foundation model to protect user data privacy

https://news.infomaniak.com/en/infomaniak-foundation-sovereign-cloud/
37•darktoto•3h ago•3 comments

Google changes its search box

https://blog.google/products-and-platforms/products/search/search-io-2026/
518•berkeleyjunk•14h ago•698 comments

Remove–AI–Watermarks – CLI and library for removing AI watermarks from images

https://github.com/wiltodelta/remove-ai-watermarks
264•janalsncm•10h ago•147 comments

Show HN: Forge – Guardrails take an 8B model from 53% to 99% on agentic tasks

https://github.com/antoinezambelli/forge
461•zambelli•20h ago•171 comments

Japan is gripped by mass allergies. A 1950s project is to blame

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260515-the-1950s-blunder-which-causes-mass-hay-fever-in-japan
71•ranit•7h ago•12 comments

Apple unveils new accessibility features

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/05/apple-unveils-new-accessibility-features-and-updates-with-...
667•interpol_p•20h ago•344 comments

OpenAI Adopts Google's SynthID Watermark for AI Images with Verification Tool

https://openai.com/index/advancing-content-provenance/
273•smooke•13h ago•142 comments

Nostalgic Kits Central (2024)

https://www.nostalgickitscentral.com/
22•cf100clunk•2d ago•9 comments

Mistral AI acquires Emmi AI

https://www.emmi.ai/news/mistral-ai-acquires-emmi-ai
252•doener•13h ago•70 comments

CopyFail: From Pod to Host

https://xint.io/blog/copy-fail-pod-to-host
10•tptacek•15h ago•0 comments

RISC-V and Floating-Point

https://fprox.substack.com/p/risc-v-and-floating-point
16•hasheddan•1d ago•3 comments

Gemini CLI will stop working from June 18, 2026

https://developers.googleblog.com/an-important-update-transitioning-gemini-cli-to-antigravity-cli/
191•primaprashant•14h ago•101 comments

Testing MiniMax M2.7 via API on three real ML and coding workflows

https://andlukyane.com//blog/minimax-m27-workflows
18•Artgor•3h ago•0 comments

Skills in Web, iOS, and Android

https://x.ai/news/grok-skills
24•surprisetalk•1d ago•2 comments

In 1979 engineer Hugh Padgham discovered "gated reverb" – by accident

https://producelikeapro.com/blog/how-one-recording-mistake-created-a-musical-phenomenon-in-the-80s/
38•bookofjoe•2d ago•6 comments

GitHub is investigating unauthorized access to their internal repositories

https://twitter.com/github/status/2056884788179726685
412•splenditer•8h ago•212 comments

Minnesota becomes first state to ban prediction markets

https://www.npr.org/2026/05/19/nx-s1-5821265/minnesota-ban-prediction-markets
640•ortusdux•13h ago•198 comments

The Mercury logic programming system

https://github.com/Mercury-Language/mercury
60•Antibabelic•2d ago•15 comments

Simulated Evolution on the PICO-8

https://bumbershootsoft.wordpress.com/2026/05/16/simulated-evolution-on-the-pico-8/
4•ibobev•1d ago•0 comments

I’ve joined Anthropic

https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/2056753169888334312
1305•dmarcos•17h ago•543 comments

Growing Neural Cellular Automata

https://distill.pub/2020/growing-ca/
106•pulkitsh1234•2d ago•12 comments

Lisp in Web-Based Applications (2001)

https://sep.turbifycdn.com/ty/cdn/paulgraham/bbnexcerpts.txt
74•bschne•1d ago•6 comments

HTML-in-Canvas Demos

https://github.com/GoogleChromeLabs/css-web-ui-demos/blob/main/html-in-canvas/awesome-html-in-can...
37•simonpure•8h ago•12 comments

Why is almost everyone right-handed? A new study connects it to bipedalism

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2026-05-15-why-is-almost-everyone-right-handed-the-answer-may-lie-in-ho...
125•gmays•17h ago•196 comments