One thing that keeps me up at night is the progressive certainty that we as a society are slowly but surely losing our ability to be bad at things. We are ceding that skill to AI.

"You don't understand, without AI, I couldn't have drawn this/written this/designed this." says a person, certain that surely this, this argument right here is the nail in the coffin of the anti-AI argument. Utility: "Without this thing, I would have been bad at this task."

Yes. Correct. You would have been bad at it. And that's ok. Not only because it's just... Ok to be bad at things in general. But also because being bad at a thing is the first necessary step to learning how to do a thing.

Every musician you love has spent thousands of hours first being bad at being a musician. Every artist that brings you to tears has spent thousands of hours being bad at art. Every single designer with a master's degree in design has spent thousands upon thousands of hours designing things that are utter crap.

We learn how to do a thing by first being bad at it. And then noticing what skills we need to acquire to be better at it. And then honing those skills on a million failed attempts. And THEN we are finally good at doing it.

And being bad at things isn't just about learning how to do it yourself. It also teaches you how to listen more effectively to music. How to see art with the eyes of an artist. How to study a design for design flaws before it's even built. It teaches you good taste. How to perceive the humanity in the things all around you - things built by humans, for other humans.

No, the biggest problem with AI isn't that it makes bad art - although it most assuredly does also do that. It's that it robs human beings of the legitimacy of creating bad art ourselves.

How can anyone ever be expected to learn to do a thing if we can't ever be bad at it first?

@edwinb my current thought is that humans need to develop and understand the core of an application or system. Here, we should define strong boundaries and hook points an LLM could generate against. Whatever an llm generate should be contained and easy to rip out and replace. Either with a real, human made and understood solution or another shot at the llm slot machine.

Letting the llm do the core and grander architecture is a guaranteed mistake.

@nileane jesus christ, they’re going fully off the rails, aren’t they? o.O

# Email from AliExpress:

Your parcel has moved two centimetres to the right. We will update you as soon as it moves.

# Another email from AliExpress:

It has moved! Your parcel has moved another two centimetres to the right.

# Email from UK parcel delivery company:

We have your parcel. It is probably somewhere in the UK, between arrival and departure. At some point, we will chuck it in your general direction. Your driver's name will be Ethan.

«Trotskisme, histoires secrètes – de Lambert à Mélenchon» paraît jeudi en poche dans une version actualisée. Le livre éclaire des errements de la gauche (notamment de la direction de LFI) d'autant + graves que l'extrême droite est aux portes du pouvoir.

https://blogs.mediapart.fr/laurent-mauduit/blog/300826/de-l-interet-de-savoir-d-ou-vient-melenchon

@anthony @simonzerafa residential proxies are scattered around the world. If your audience comes largely from one country it's very effective to filter traffic from other countries given the vast majority of it will be bots. Heavy levels of proof-of-work filtering are very disruptive to users but seem to have become the norm if you want to keep the bots out:

https://people.kernel.org/monsieuricon/creepy-crawlies

I can see why people would chose a simpler solution that doesn't really affect their audience much.

@AnarchoNinaWrites *stab stab stab*

@pluralistic

THIS 👆👆

Cory Doctorow deftly explains how prioritising property rights over all other rights creates the rigged system we have today.

@lowqualityfacts If the alpha male is a unicorn, what does that make me, a certified gamma™️ male?

@gedankenstuecke
Thank you for pointing this out. Indeed, Crimea is listed both in the Ukraine and Russian folders. Both in Organic Maps and in CoMaps. Still not sure, whether this is such a great solution. This means they will have to put Luhansk, Doneck, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson regions in both folders too. I am unsure why they haven't done this yet actually.

@lavaeolus @map_per

what the fuck, a museum with AI slop?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5YDkQ6oFcE

#noa #slop

Stan Kroenke has reached an agreement to add Major League Baseball's Los Angeles Angels to his portfolio of professional sports teams. https://www.japantimes.co.jp/sports/2026/09/02/baseball/mlb/kroenke-acquire-la-angels/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #baseball #mlb #losangelesangels #stankroenke

He's just forcing #Meta employees - the cowards - to submit. Bullies get off watching the submission.

#TodayInTheClassroom:

First year chem are learning about how to read chemical formulas and molar mass. They'll use their periodic tables to calculate molar mass of compounds for practice.

Comp sci is continuing with hardware, doing some binary/decimal conversions, and start to learn about Internet traffic routing.

AP chem is finishing a lab practicing taking precise measurements and performing calculations with sig figs.

#teaching #chemistry #webdev

Die Merz-Regierung verkauft ihre Einkommensteuerreform als großes Entlastungspaket. Doch bei den Menschen kommen nur ein paar Euro mehr im Monat an – und steigende Sozialbeiträge fressen sie größtenteils wieder auf. Was sie in eine Tasche steckt, nimmt sie aus der anderen.