Baldur Bjarnason

@baldurbjarnason.com

Writer, web developer and consultant based in Hveragerði, Iceland. Lapsed Interactive Media Academic. Webby Tech Stuff and webby book stuff. https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/ https://softwarecrisis.dev/

I will not only be relieved but truly *ecstatic* to be wrong, if more and better studies soon start showing that AI actually improves learning and cognitive motivation. But so far they all show the opposite, and that is consistent with the evidence that I and other educators are seeing on the ground

Shannon Vallor@shannonvallor.bsky.social · yesterday

We are soon going to have to come to grips with the fact that this shit is asbestos for the mind

I’ve had a few fruitless conversations with UK civil society over the years along the lines of: you know the far right is outplaying and out-strategising and out-organising you in every way, while you’re wanking around with a Mastodon install and calling it impactful advocacy b/c it’s decentralised

Your regular reminder that my daughter Alice’s death wasn’t counted in Appleby’s report, despite her meeting all the criteria. And when I emailed the Tavistock adult GIC to inform them they could take Alice off the waitlist, because she’d died by suicide, they never replied. It’s a disgrace.

QueerAF@wearequeeraf.com · yesterday

QueerAF can reveal figures that show 618 people have died while under the care of an NHS gender clinic, at least 21 by suicide. www.wearequeeraf.com/the-deadly-t...

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Historian: We don't have primary sources from that period, as is often the case, but the candidate's performance (Nome et. al, 1-2) in the surrounding years (Ibid., 2-3) builds sufficient pattern (Ibid., 1) to move forward.

👻madeline bOoOoOoOodent👻@oldenoughtosay.com · 3h ago

Interviewer: can you explain this gap in your resume? Building conservator: air flow beneath the joists is critically important to prevent a build up of humidity, which can lead to rising damp, rot, and mould

Have I ever told you about my favourite spice? Hockey Pulver is pure salt licorice/salmiak bliss. You can sprinkle it on whatever you like, of course, but I mostly use it on ice cream and in smoothies. It’s good on popcorn too.

A can of Hockey Pulver topping

In other words, it is the job of scientists to devise experiments that can test their claims, to always be cautious abt what they are claiming, and to critically evaluate the claims of other scientists. By these well-established standards, no serious science is happening behind Anthropic's claims.

In the vein of "public libraries could never be created today," a pitch for a calculator would get you thrown out of the boardroom. What do you mean, it just maths? Where are the ads supposed to go? How does it send usage telemetry back if it doesn't even have wifi? There isn't even a leaderboard.

Rich Burroughs@somewhattolerable.com · yesterday

Another massive difference is that a calculator isn’t answering your questions in a way that’s specifically designed to get you to continue using the calculator.

Not to take away from celebrating Carson, but she's a "former professor" here in large part because the university shut down her department and cancelled its classes. What pride does the institution claim now—years later—when austerity is forcing other scholars out? What does that 'pride' do?

McGill University@handle.invalid · 3d ago

Former McGill professor Anne Carson has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature. 🏆 Awarded “for her bold and inventive oeuvre", she has helped redefine contemporary literature through poetry, essays, translation and criticism. Congratulations! ➡️ mcgill.ca/x/5HS

Shokunin Studio: Attack of the Vibe Coded Clones - on all the hugely publicised bad and broken vibe-clones of Photoshop https://www.shokunin.studio/blog/2026/10/9/attack-of-the-vibe-coded-photoshop-clones

Attack of the Vibe Coded Photoshop Clones

Over the last several months I have been tracking AI guys trying to create vibe coded clones of popular apps, especially Adobe’s apps which have always been the most pirated apps since the 90s. 1. There are now about a dozen vibe coded attempts to clone Photoshop and some other Adobe apps, not including dozens of forks of them. 2. The amount being spent in AI tokens (API costs) is in the thousands of dollars per project. 3. The largest attempt to vibe clone Adobe’s apps has over 70 devs using Claude to submit 100s of pull requests per day. The amount they are spending on tokens must be over $50,000 in the last two weeks. I will not name this project and don’t want to give them traffic that they do not deserve. 4. Yet despite this not one of these vibe coded projects has been able to create a brush engine that matches Photoshop’s brush engine. The performance of their brushes collapses once the canvas size is over 8K x 8K pixels. Photoshop’s brushes work smoothly even when you’re working with 100 megapixel images out of a Hasselblad or Phase One camera. 5. Those defending the poor performance of vibe coded apps have parroted the famous lines AI guys used in the past - “It is only days old” and “this is the worst it gets”. They make the mistake of equating human app development time with generative AI development time (hundreds of times faster). A vibe coded app is, in human hours, not only a few days old but closer to two or three years old. If a brush engine or transform tool works badly after the human equivalent of three years of development that is a demonstration of bad planning or an AI model not doing a good job. 6. Brush performance aside, each of these projects struggle with 100% file format compatibility and lossless images editing. So instead of innovating and pushing forward they have successfully rewinded the clock back to 1996 when there was a lack of industry standardisation and quality. 7. They’re spending minimum $2K to vibe code a Photoshop competitor when Affinity Photo is free and Photoshop costs $200 a year. Not very smart economics. 8. They rant and claim the era of subscription software is finished, but they are subscribed to AI services and AI software. The amount they are paying to AI companies is far higher than the cost of Adobe, Autodesk, Canva or Maxxon applications, and the result is barely usable vibe coded apps that will need to be continually maintained at high cost. 9. Vibe coders brag about their app binaries being much smaller than Adobe’s app binaries, as if that has something to do with the quality of the code. It does not. Application code (which is just text) takes up very little disk space in any application. What takes up the most amount of disk space are the frameworks, libraries, models and media assets an app ships with. The more advanced and capable an app is the larger it will become. But the size on disk is largely irrelevant in the age of terabyte+ size disks. The size of an app in memory, the app’s performance and its stability are how you judge the quality of an application. 10. Continuing from the last point, they and internet commentors have often made claims that Adobe’s apps have “bloat” in them, but if you ask them to qualify what they mean by bloat they cannot. They will revert to application binary size again. These are mostly people who have no knowledge of programming and parrot each other. An app either has good quality code that performs well or it doesn’t. An app can have tons of redundant functions in it but functions do not run unless they are called by a tool. 11. Whether software is vibe coded or not, open source software has rarely challenged commercial software. Krita has been around for years and is a decent application, but Clip Studio Paint’s subscriptions earn Celsys millions of dollars a year. Nobody is giving up Clip Studio Paint for software that has rough edges. Blender is a fantastic application, but Cinema 4D and Maya are still the 3D animation applications of choice for larger studios and commercial productions. They lead, Blender tries to follow. 12. And when it comes to customer support things become even sadder looking. One or two guys in a Discord chatroom cannot support a global user base, especially when those two guys are hunting for underage children to speak to on Discord (yes, I have seen what vibe coders do). The saddest part in all this is how it feeds into the ignorance and online hate campaign against Adobe that we have seen in the last 5 or so years. Some have labelled it ‘Adobe derangement syndrome’, but whatever it is it is a mix of stock market manipulation (some admit it) and anger that Photoshop has been getting harder to pirate ever since cloud services were integrated into Adobe’s application suite. We should clear the air here. Subscription software exists when cloud services and cloud compute are integrated into a software suite. It is the only way to pay for the running costs at wide scale. If you remove these modern services there is limited progress in software development. You'll have to move all high cost compute locally which is impractical because most users cannot afford a high end workstation GPU or cloud server. Instead of hurling hate speech and bile at thousands of software engineers who lead innovation at large companies (Adobe, Autodesk, Maxxon, Celsys, and others), show them some gratitude for their efforts. They are the engineers who innovate and everyone else follows. Just because they work at a big company doesn't mean they are committing human rights abuses. We have a generation brainwashed by envy and hate instead of urging everyone to be greater and bigger. If they have an issue with companies being large, they now have the tools to compete against them. But instead of vibe cloning poor quality rip offs why not build new original creative applications around fresh ideas that have never been tried before?

shokunin.studio

If inanimate objects which show patterns of pain (whatever that means) have a claim to suffering isn't that just serving companies? My laptop can run a weather model and display patterns of rain, but it's not going to have water damage. There's an ontological difference between model & phenomenon.

our colleagues from the tech workers union are hosting a two day summit this weekend. I can guarantee you it'll will be much more informative and real than the actual government summit we have a line-up of stellar speakers. join us tomorrow and Sunday www.datacwu.ie/ai-counter-s...

AI Counter Summit | DATA Ireland

Workers’ AI Counter Summit Become A Member Download the Agenda Here AI Counter Summit Registration10th – 11th October 2026Click Here Who gets to shape the future? On 16th October, the Irish Government...

datacwu.ie

the Irish government continues to cater for the AI industry while ignoring independent experts, impacted communities, and CSOs "Prominent speaking slots at the event will feature US AI firms Google, Microsoft & OpenAI, with Meta, IBM, Intel, Nvidia, Amazon, Anthropic & AMD represented on panels"

Liz Carolan@lizcarolan.com · 2d ago

Irish Gov is hosting its "International AI Summit" next week Even I was surprised by how industry heavy is it 83% of speakers are corporates, 0 independent experts, 1 union rep I'm not explicit about this in the piece -but- surely this is, at best, tone deaf? www.techpolicy.press/at-irelands-...

A key part of the cognitive omnishambles in which we find ourselves is that everything now has a shitty AI generated summary that purports to tell you what's inside, but that no one ever checks for accuracy.

Anthropic banning “abusive or cruel behavior” toward Claude in its new usage policies is proof to me that tech companies are going to moderate violence against AI before they ever moderate violence against women and minorities

The advice that you shouldn't constantly try to explain yourself and add detail to your argument, because non-autistic people will just interpret that as defensiveness and rationalisation, or see it as a weakness and an opportunity to get you to change your position, is unfortunately too often true