Be Wary of Digital Deskilling - Cal Newport

In his 1974 book, ​Labor and Monopoly Capital​, the influential Marxist political economist Harry Braverman argued that the expanding “science-technical revolution” was being exploited by companies to increasingly “deskill” workers; to leave them in “ignorance, incapacity, and thus in fitness for machine servitude.” The more employees outsource skilled activity to machines, the more controllable they become. […]

Boris Cherny is a senior technical lead at Anthropic who manages a large team and likely owns a significant amount of stock options in the company. Of course, he’s excited about the idea of agents replacing programmers, but that doesn’t mean we have to share his enthusiasm.

A Software Library with No Code by Drew Breunig

the whenwords library contains no code. Instead, whenwords contains specs and tests, specifically:

• SPEC.md: A detailed description of how the library should behave and how it should be implemented.
• tests.yaml: A list of language-agnostic test cases, defined as input/output pairs, that any implementation must pass.
• INSTALL.md: Instructions for building whenwords, for you, the human.

Drew goes on to list a bunch of scenarios when this will not be useful. But it’s an interesting way to look at libraries.

What’s on your desk, Stevie Bonifield?

I just got that when I moved last month, and it’s one of my favorite additions to my desk setup. It’s a double-decker laptop mount I got for around $30 on Amazon and just clamps onto the side of my desk (no screws necessary!).

I love reading these desk setups. This one has a nice clip on thing you can put your laptop in among other things.

Survey: Majority of Finns do not use AI at work by

A survey by recruitment and HR firm Barona has found that just 32 percent of people in Finland use artificial intelligence (AI) at work on a weekly basis.

A mistake that I often make is think that the world is filled with me. It’s not. I work in the IT industry. The majority of the world does not.

Hence, it takes a moment for me to say, yes, this makes sense.

Grok turns off image generator for most users after outcry over sexualised AI imagery by Helena Horton, Dan Milmo and Amelia Gentleman

Grok, Elon Musk’s AI tool, has switched off its image creation function for the vast majority of users after widespread outcry over its use to create sexually explicit and violent imagery.