Google is forcibly installing Gemini Nano onto every Chrome installation without the user’s knowledge, and actively re-installing it if the user deletes it. Probably an attempt to juice the numbers.

(h/t Matt Roszak)

New blog from Iris Meredith: Engineering judgement and the Claude Code paradox

Based off her own unusually good experience with Claude, the general thrust is about sneerers being better-equipped to use AI than boosters.

Cape Breton fiddler Ashley MacIsaac has sued Google for defaming him with AI, over his cancelled concert in December caused by Google’s AI overview calling him a sex offender.

Starting this Stubsack off with a double bill from the tech world.

First, Blender accepted cash and slop commits from Anthropic, and Adobe’d their public image in the process. They put out some corpo-speak to try and quell the mob, but it isn’t working.

Second, FFmpeg put out a showcase of AI’s coding prowess:

At some point, Anthropic puts up its prices so much the companies try to go back to brain coders. They hand these actual human coders a toxic waste dump of AI slop code that is literally incomprehensible to humans and can’t be fixed in less time than it would take to start over. This does not end well.

Given the slop bots have been actively destroying their users’ coding abilities for the past 2-3 years, finding someone capable of unfucking their codebases will be a bit of a challenge.

Picking red guarantees your survival by endangering everyone else, making it morally fucked, but risk-free. Picking blue puts your life at risk, but saves everyone’s ass if it pays off, making it the more moral option overall. Picking blue also requires you to put some trust in your fellow man, so I’d have probably picked red if I didn’t know how the Twitter poll came out.

Someone else on the orange site claimed the experiment would end with only red-pushers left if it went for multiple rounds. Adding my two cents, the outcome would depend on how the first round goes - if red wins round 1, voting blue looks like suicide, shifting the calculus in red’s favour, and if blue wins round 1, you have reason to trust everyone will continue voting blue, making it a lot less risky and shifting the moral calculus in blue’s favour.

Another lament about the tech industry has come to my attention, as Ky Decker asks themselves “Do I belong in tech anymore?”

Pretty solid piece all around, recommend checking it out

Two tech-related links for today, both relating to fascism.

First, tante has a new blogpost about AI being overtly fascist in nature, which he’s also posted to LinkedIn, seemingly for kicks. (Found on red site, too)

Second, the Nazi laptop company has sent a second pre-release laptop to DHH, showing they have not changed at all since they went full fash six months ago:

Don’t do drugs, kids. You might end up like these guys.

A more effective anti-drug PSA than anything DARE ever tried.

shot:

chaser:

New Blood in the Machine, about the escalating violence against the slop-mongers.

The optics is that his actions would paint EA in a bad light.

I think SBF’s Scamfest Spectacular did a good enough job of that already :P

HN is more focused on the idea that Altman and co. are fomenting class hatred and the attack is more akin to Luigi Mangione’s attack on a health insurance CEO.

Altman and co’s antics have repeatedly shafted the working class to billionaires’ direct benefit, so I’ll give the orange site that on the “fomenting class hatred” part. Thinking his actions are any way related to Luigi Mangione nailing the healthcare billionaire’s fucking wild, though

Nice. </obligatory joke>

Found an interesting sneer that compares the AI bubble to the Great Leap Forward.

Also discovered an “anti-distill” program through the article, which aims to sabotage attempts to replace workers with AI “agents”.

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Starting this Stubsack off, Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps have threatened to blow up OpenAI’s Stargate datacentre in Abu Dhabi.

They’ve already bombed commercial data centres before, so I’m inclined to believe this isn’t an empty threat.

On the one hand, Yud’s vision of AI doomsday is specifically “AI turns sentient/superintelligent and kills us all because reasons”, not “Humanity wipes itself out because they trusted lying machines”.

On the other hand, the absence of sentience/superintelligence hasn’t stopped AI from causing untold damage anyways, as the past two to three years can attest.

That, and plenty of FOSS software’s been infected with AI-extruded “code”. And plenty of software engineers got one-tapped by the slop bots.

DeviantArt decided to make an “AI-powered” “video creator” (roughly a day before Sora got shitcanned), because its not like dA can make things worse by doubling-down on that shit. Special highlight goes to the opening of that announcement, which asks:

What if your art could (quite literally) move?

Have these people ever heard of animation

(h/t @krakelwok on Bluesky)

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