Stocks fall and oil prices rise after Trump's latest delay in the Iran war fails to raise much hope

https://apnews.com/article/stock-markets-trump-iran-war-894e6adadff8cb4be04b05fce819461a

That techdirt (at least the dirt is accurate) Mike Masnick piece, was an awful read.

The comments? Where Derek Powazek, who's webpage is cited as awe inspiring in the article, retorts with: "Genuinely, how dare you." is at least awesome!

Mike Masnick, doubling down and arguing with the shoulders upon which he explicitly claims he stands? Is dumb founding.

Like, OK Mike, "AI Might Be Our Best Shot At Taking Back The Open Web" is your idiotic perspective, we get it! However, even LLMs can be manipulated to stochastically parrot back they were wrong, when they are corrected. Apparently, you can't. So, instead of artificial "intelligence" we get to witness, in the comments, some real stupidity!

Not that I needed to read the comments, to fathom that.

Just take this line, regarding the "open" nature of the web (thanks to the "View Source" feature of web browsers):

"you could just build what you wanted, even without a CS degree"

My daughter was writing webpages in middle school, as class assignments. No CS degree.

Maybe, let's go for something a little more challenging than web design though, how about reverse engineering, without "View Source" just compiled binaries?

Friends and I were cracking software copy protection in elementary school. No CS degree!

Who told this d00d that you need a CS degree to do anything meaningful or useful with computation?

Friends and I, as teenagers, still without CS degrees, were improving systems at nps.navy.mil, unpaid, uncited, after hours. Meanwhile, those with PhDs? smdh, looked friggin worthless; exploiting minors as unpaid labor, while they got grants for machines that cost tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands (more than the mortgage on my parents' home) heck, tens of millions of dollars (I was told that some of my code ran on the $30,000,000.00 Cray at FNMOC [Fleet Numerical Meteorology and Oceanography Center] when I was in high school from a sysadmin at nps.navy.mil; albeit I wasn't allowed to access that myself. They wouldn't even let me touch it, just look at it from behind plexiglass when my high school computer club that I co-founded with a friend, took a tour of their facilities. No CS degree!). tbh, many PhDs still do not impress me. I know way too many PhDs, fewer than a handful, have made me think they maybe were worth knowing.

Writing assemblers, linkers, microcode and more! I was doing all of that, as a kid, no CS degree. When I finally encountered a C compiler? It felt bloated. C still feels horrifically inefficient to me and what's worse: many other programming languages are implemented in C and are multiplicatively less inefficient (scowls at Python [become a 60x slower "engineer" than a C dev with that interpreted BS], Ruby, etc.). Still, learning more about C, decades ago, with no CS degree, explained a lot about the godawful binaries I had been hexediting though in my youth.

The largess of those who had access to more RAM and clock cycles and disk space, than sanity. People who never knew a night going hungry, or homeless. To me?

Idiots, in ivory towers. Probably lots of those people have CS degrees, and are completely out of fucking touch with reality. Lost in their "cloud" computing and overly abstract relations to false realities.

This Johnny-com-lately seems to think that being able to date himself with NCSA Mosaic, is some kind of early online realm?

Give me a break! I encountered computers on the Internet, before TCP flag day even happened. Web browsers to me, were and still are: some of the worse software ever created. To quote Alan Kay:

"The Internet was done so well that most people think of it as a natural resource like the Pacific Ocean, rather than something that was man-made. When was the last time a technology with a scale like that was so error-free? The Web, in comparison, is a joke. The Web was done by amateurs."

Honestly, I think that is a little offensive to amateurs. I was, arguably, still am, an amateur. Sure, I have been paid to code; but that is the minority of my existence. I was coding for well over a decade, building hardware, even volunteering as a SysOp for multiple BBSes, long before anyone paid me to do anything with computers. For the most part, for me? Computers have been a time and money sink. They are not a way for me to make money. For me, music is similar. I am not some globe trotting performer, sure I deejay, sure I have performed in music festivals since I was a child. I do not earn money from these interests. I spend money on those interests. They make this hellish existence, slightly less hellish.

I didn't make billions ripping off other people's code, like Bill Gates did with BASIC (which was invented by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1964, and shared freely and had over 5 million users before Microsoft shipped a commercialized BASIC ported to the MITS Altair 8800.) or undercutting DR-DOS sales with a rebranded rip-off to IBM. Making money off of plagiarism, would have presumably, gotten me expelled from school. Instead, I graduated from a University with a B.A. in Language Studies. Not a CS degree.

I consider myself a survivor of at least one previous so-called A"I" winter. I remember all the insanity around A"I" research the last time that dead end reared its ugly head. Believe it or not, I was tasked with writing anti-A"I" code, in the 1980s on others' systems. Who is writing that code today? It is vitally required, again, apparently.

These rich, dumb jerks, never learn. They just want to be coddled I guess? Why learn to write a webpage (HTML is a Mark Up Language, not a friggin compiler, not an assembler, not a linker, it's already SO HIGH LEVEL I find it offensive), have "genAI" do it for them?! Don't get your hands dirty, ever, just use a chauffeur or Lyft or Uber instead of learning how to drive, call AAA instead of changing a flat tire, use Jiffy Lube or whatever, instead of learning how to change oil for yourself. Full Self Driving in your Tesla for fElon Musk soon to be trillionaire neo Nazi, because you are too cheap to pay for a chauffeur or Lyft or Uber? smdh

I watched 'The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist' earlier today? It is not nearly dystopian enough. Not at all.

Timnit Gebru, an underappreciated critic of A"I" is given what feels as it is is mere seconds of screen time in the documentary. I wasn't using a stop watch, but if I had to guess, the director is sucking Sam Altman's dick about their mutual "we're about to be dads" BS than Timnit Gebru is on screen.

It is a shockingly, bad take. The editorial largess, replete with a "fake" ending? The screen time of the director's wife, calling him out on his BS there, which also probably got more screen time than Timnit Gebru, was at least honest. The "documentary"? Is not doing the world much of a service, with its "Kumbaya" 'we just gotta organize and get together' rhetoric at the end. It fails to acknowledge the disparity and abuses of wealth and power and privilege and how the rich few, are oppressing the masses.

It is not a revolutionary film.

So instead, you can watch it and if you have a clue acknowledge the present reality: human existence is a realm hell, and society at large? Is throwing more money at the people who are cranking up the heat.

Within the documentary, they estimated approximately 20,000 people are currently working for pay, on making the next A"I" happen. Whereas estimates there are fewer than 200 people, globally, trying to prevent an A"I" driven doomsday scenario.

It reminded me of the job I had, decades ago, as a Network Security Specialist, where one of my coworkers (also in "ops" all, two of us) observed how we had something like 10 programmers. As he phrased it to management: "we have more people capable of creating new problems, than we have people capable of remediating them."

As the "joke" used to go in the 1980s: "Who needs artificial 'intelligence' when there's more than enough real stupidity?" It's not funny anymore. It wasn't funny then either, but at least the damage wasn't so offensive that its advertising filled every billboard. It wasn't an international arms race of stupidity. It was mostly, constrained to the ivory tower academics and too rich for anyone's own good fiefdoms.

One of the people in the documentary claimed that if someone thought that A"I" was bad, then all the more reason they should work in the industry to try to solve that.

Yeah, because changing the system from "within" works so well (sarcasm), when you're effectively enslaved and A"I"'s harms are impacting societies, at scale, globally, regardless of nation state boundaries (there are multiple factions, from different countries, treating A"I" as the current nuclear arms race, essentially). They don't see the scale of the problem, nor how trying to effect change from "within" is worthless.

With human "intelligence" that bad, how on Earth could they ever hope to create an artificial "intelligence" that is anything of value?

Gil Scott-Heron wrote Whitey on the Moon circa 1970? Humans still haven't learned its wisdom. They're still sending manned missions to the Moon. While billions of humans subsist below the poverty line, contending with starvation (what the "educated" refer to euphemistically as "food scarcity") and homelessness (what the "educated" refer to euphemistically as "houselessness"). fElon Musk, wants to go to Mars. A planet, like our Moon, known to be inhospitable to life as we know it, with no atmosphere.

Not another penny, should be spent on such idiocy.

Not a fractional cent.

Same for A"I", which smarter folks, decades ago, in the 20th century, already knew was a dead end.

Doug Engelbart, that brilliant individual whom folks estimate we only ever realized about 3% of his vision? Who helped give us collaborative computing with NLS (oNLine System) which later got funding and renamed to (D)ARPAnet, what we now call the Internet? In an interview with Robert X. Cringely, described how JCR Licklider (who had previously given Doug's research at SRI [D]ARPA funding) apparently erroneously thought that NLS should be training its users how to use it, with A"I", decades ago, and cut their funding. To paraphrase Doug: "it's been a few decades since then, and I have still never encountered an A'I' system, that could train its users, how to use it."

SRI (Stanford Research Institute), had cross licensing agreements with SAIL (Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab) and Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center).

Even now, in 2026, SRI shares a parking lot with my parents' church in Menlo Park.

I knew folks like Engelbart, personally.

What on Earth does Mike Masnick know?

Jack, fucking shit, apparently. Dirt. OK, sure, what is tech about it? Retreading dead end ideas? Wasting money and resources?

That isn't intelligence.

There are real problems we need to solve as a species, as societies.

A"I" isn't going to help with any of them.

What an awful read.

A waste of time.

The comments? Seeing Mike Masnick make himself look like even more of a moron to Derek Powazek?

What will it take, for these sorts of A"I" money seeking shitheads, to learn?

I don't know.

I can write a rant. I can (and do) actively contribute to libre/free open source software which is, as far as I know, devoid of LLMs and A"I" influence.

Is it enough?

It sure doesn't feel that way.

It hasn't alleviated my debts or gotten me out of homelessness.

While more money and resources continued to be wasted on manned missions to the moon, and Martian moronic aspirations, while the current US administration ear marked half a trillion dollars on more A"I" research and every for-profit capitalistic driven entity is slapping an A"I" label on their slop, to try to get a piece of that money pie.

My rants, are not sufficient either. Who the hell is reading anything I write and taking it to heart?

I don't need nor want the likes or retoots, or whatever, honestly. I know a waste of bandwidth when I encounter it. That tech "dirt" piece will doubtlessly be read many more times than this rant. Their web page had at least 27 trackers caught by one of my adblockers.

This? Has no analytics engine for profit foisting behind it.

No one to promulgate my message en masse, on the chance that someone who needs to read it, might.

Fight Fire with Fire, like that Ageless Linux guy is trying to do?

Efforts such as those, ethical as they may be, on the right side of ourstory unfolding into the future?

Feel more akin to fighting a forest fire, with a candle.

Good luck, but we'll need a lot more than good luck.

More than rage.

More than ranting, against the machine.

A lot more than a candle.

But y'know, do what you can, with what you've got!

It's all anyone can ever hope for in the end anyways.