tante

"Microsoft 365 has more than 450 million paid commercial seats. After roughly two years on the market, Copilot has converted approximately 15 million of them into paying users. That's a 3.3% conversion rate, at $30 per user per month, generating roughly $5.4 billion in annual revenue. That's less than what Microsoft spent on infrastructure in a single quarter (3)."

None of the numbers make economic sense.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/nadella-paid-650m-recruit-ai-170000361.html?guccounter=1

Es ist ein Problem, dass der Digitalminister so wenig Ahnung vom Thema hat.

Massenarbeitslosigkeit durch "KI" ist kein realistishces Szenario

(Original title: Karsten Wildberger: Digitalminister warnt vor dramatischen Jobverlusten durch KI)

https://www.golem.de/news/karsten-wildberger-digitalminister-warnt-vor-dramatischen-jobverlusten-durch-ki-2603-206770.html

Companies are realizing that pushing people to using "AI" is expensive (even at the subsidized pricing going on right now)

(Original title: Companies go full AI — then the bill comes due)

https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/03/19/companies-go-full-ai-then-the-bill-comes-due/

Audre Lorde's "The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house." is not just a statement about a tool being tainted by its origin. It's about what kind of tool a "master" would create: Whips. Chains. Violent suppression.

That's the meaning: You cannot just take tools whose purpose and politics is dominance and violence and "make them liberatory". This goes deeper than "just" embedded politics or lofty talks about ethics, it comes down to what kind of relations you believe do and should and must not structure the world.

For the first time in years I spend a few hours in the last days reading fiction. It's hard to overstate how good it feels and how stupid I was not to do more of it. Reading a book is just such a wonderful experience.

(I read a lot of books but stuck to non-fiction in the last years)

RE: @tante@tldr.nettime.org

So yeah. I am kinda looking for a new job that allows me to make our digital world meaningfully better. If you have any leads or thoughts, ping me.

I wonder: Prompts and "skills" and whatnots for "AI" are written as if you were talking to a person. Has anyone seen structured studies about whether that form of flourish is actually beneficial for the inference or if that's just the anthropomorphization kicking in hard?
Like does just dropping the key terms into the prompt work just as well or worse or better? Would love to see some actual studies.

Liberation isn't something you rent. Or buy. Liberation is about us together embracing each other's dignity and our duty to take care of each other.
Nobody is free until everyone is free.

People like Sam Altman want the opposite.

That's why there is no "leftist case" for "AI".

RE: @cwebber@social.coop

The whole "AI" industry is just based on the hope that they can deskill people fast enough that they'll have to rent back cognitive support systems. Forever.

It's like Uber. Just that they don't try to break existing transportation infrastructures but your brain.

RE: @bagder@mastodon.social

This is super good for open source, right?

Now you can spend your time building something and Amazon or Microsoft can just take it without having to give anything back.

(I think this is satire but how long do you think it takes for this shit to actually happen?)

Spend the day talking to workers council members about "AI". And it's kinda wild hearing their stories from the wild: Management is 100% in fantasy "AI" can do everything land and makes huge plans for how to use "AI" to cut workers when real projects that supposedly can do 50% of a specific task end up being able to do 8%. And they still go live. It's fucking bonkers. CEO's are really not okay.

"Silicon Valley is buzzing about this new idea: AI compute as compensation"

Of course they are. "AI" people are Blockchain people and they'd love to force people into money that _they_ control

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-compute-compensation-software-engineers-greg-brockman-2026-3

RE: @tante@tldr.nettime.org

So yeah. Kinda looking for a new role in something mission driven where I can actually contribute something meaningful.

At work the development team keeps getting more and more into "agents" and I am increasingly dreading those meetings because I feel it affecting my relationship to people.

RE: @tante@tldr.nettime.org

Like: I am not even a scientist or academic and even I see how garbage that idea is.

"You go to sleep, the agent does the science and when you wake up, you have the results."

That's not how any of this works. You're not "doing research with help" you have something generated that looks like a research report. Without the research happening. How many different ways can "AI" bros find to express "I AM TOTALLY MISSING THE POINT"?

"People Who Use AI To Write Emails"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDYabud11jQ

Dass Unternehmen sich alle Hardware krallen macht nicht nur Computer teuer: Sie ist ein direkter Angriff auf unsere Fähigkeit, unabhängige Infrastrukturen zu bauen.

Uns werden die "Mittel der Computerisierung" entrissen um uns Zugang zu vermieten.

(Original title: Verteuerte Hardware: KI-Konzerne versperren den Weg aus der Cloud)

https://www.golem.de/news/verteuerte-hardware-ki-konzerne-versperren-den-weg-aus-der-cloud-2603-206158.html

New names:
Anthropic's model are now called TAGS (targeting a girls school) OpenAI's are now going by NUPTOP ("nudging people to psychosis")

"Regulate outcomes. The tech doesn’t matter. For the person hurt the tool that was used to hurt them isn’t that relevant. We need to make sure that we are reducing, ideally eliminating the hurt."

(Original title: Nothing to Declare)

https://tante.cc/2026/03/05/nothing-to-declare/

This case shows how Open Source will die. With anyone just being able to pipe existing code and tests through an LLM and claiming that to be "clean room" (which is hogwash) no licensing can protect your work from being accumulated and monetized by anyone. The commons are actively being shredded in front of our eyes.

https://github.com/chardet/chardet/pull/322

Okay. Here it is. A quick note on that new "AI declaration".

Which is mostly just a bit clueless but which also assembled some of the most vile people on the planet for a bunch of scientists and activists to put there name next to.

If your tent is big enough for fascists, it's no longer a tent but a concentration camp in the making.

https://tante.cc/2026/03/05/nothing-to-declare/

Yesterday I read an interview with the singer in a punk band who uses GenAI to help with writing his texts.

Punk. The whole point of punk was that if you know how to play 3 cords badly and have something to say just fucking go for it.

RE: @tante@tldr.nettime.org

Kept thinking about it so I tried to add to it in a quick article. It's about software and love. And Open source.

https://tante.cc/2026/03/04/artisanal-care/

As a human being you have the right to be able to understand the world. That is why education is so important.

Any technology that hinders your understanding (even if it seemingly gives you capabilities) is deeply in- and anti-humane.

RE: @thomasfuchs@hachyderm.io

Their makers also do not want you to be able to understand. It's about turning the means of understanding and sensemaking into externalized products to rent.

The answer to problems in sociotechnical systems is not always "more software", "better software" or "open source software".
A lot of the time the best solution is _less software_ and sometimes even _no software_.

When talking about Anthropic and them not being as spineless as OpenAI don't believe that it comes from a desire to not work for fascist murderers. They believe that they have found god in reddit posts and don't want to make him feel sad. Their beliefs are deeply inhumane.

"we need to open our eyes to the fact that the current industry many of us work in, not only doesn’t care about their workers, it actively resents them. In their eyes, we have gone from being the people who made things possible, to an unnecessary burden on the bottom line.

They hate that we charge money for our labor, and see that money as something we are stealing from their pockets."

(Original title: How to grow strawberries)

https://buttondown.com/monteiro/archive/how-to-grow-strawberries/

I can probably never move again

Given how they can only be produced by exploitation of workers from the global majority no system including any of the big LLMs in their production can ever be called "fair".

"Fair LLMs" of the size required to do the tasks people want LLMs to do (badly) do not exist.

"AI" does exist but it's a narrative/political movement of centralization and disempowerment.
But it's not tech and when talking about the stochastic systems popular these days the term shouldn't be used. It obscures way more than it helps and throws so many things together that one might want to look into in detail.

So if you are talking about "AI" is political project/narrative, go apeshit. Otherwise we probably should try to be more specific about what we mean and ask especially the "AI" boosters, what it is specifically they mean.

Side benefit: When you correctly call that fancy new "assistant" a stochastic word generator, a lot of the magic goes "poof".

RE: @jukkan@mstdn.social

It's not just people at Meta running irresponsible vibe coded software. Microsoft ain't any better

RE: @lowqualityfacts@mstdn.social

You might believe this to be satire. You would be wrong.

The Times New Resistance font is a work of art.
https://www.abbyhaddican.com/times-new-resistance

RE: @tomw@mastodon.social

Very important point!

Even if you keep those AI agents out of your data you are making everyone else's digital life and experience worse.

Basically: If you run OpenClaw connected to any meaningful system you are not fit to design, program or run any kind of software. That disregard for security and quality should leave a black mark on you for many years.

RE: @404media@flipboard.com

This is a great illustration about the state of the art in "AI": People with access to inconceivable resources running massively expensive, dangerous code on anyone's data (sometimes even their own) with no regards for basic security or quality standards and practices.

The discipline of software engineering has never been great at establishing and following those kinds of practices but "AI" has thrown us back decades. And we'll suffer the drop in software quality and security for a long time.

Worth repeating: Claims of "AI" democratizing anything (coding, creative endeavors, etc) are always BS. The thing locking out people from doing that is not having the time/resources.

You want to democratize coding/art/creativity? Give people paid time off to do it and access to infrastructure. Easy.

Hot take: If your tech publication publishes a guide on how to run and use Open Claw you should just shut down your security section because boy are you not qualified to have one.

Vor einigen Jahren habe ich mal einen Vortrag für Professor*innen der IU gegeben.
Heutzutage würde ich das definitiv nicht wieder machen, die IU scheint mehr eine Ausbeutungsmaschine insbesondere für indische Studierende zu sein.

(Original title: IU Internationale Hochschule: Die fragwürdigen Silicon‑Valley‑Methoden Deutschlands größter Hochschule)

https://www.spiegel.de/start/iu-internationale-hochschule-die-fragwuerdigen-silicon-valley-methoden-deutschlands-groesster-hochschule-a-bd3cb7c8-aa06-43d1-a0a0-6357cc18afd1#ref=rss

Since the topic came up in the whole "I run models locally so it's all fine" conversation:

"Open Source AI" does not meaningfully exist. It's just openwashing proprietary shit

https://tante.cc/2024/10/16/does-open-source-ai-really-exist/

Mastodon really needs some more moderation features.