Clark Kampfe

The role of the University is to resist AI

• "'I speak about radical monopoly when one industrial production process exercises an exclusive control over the satisfaction of a pressing need, and excludes nonindustrial activities from competition. The establishment of radical monopoly happens when people give up their native ability to do what they can for themselves and for each other, in exchange for something 'better' that can be done for them only by a major tool.'"

• "Critical thought is not something you can stochastically optimise, and I agree with Hannah Arendt that thoughtlessness is a precondition for fascism."

Reaction to a FP evangelism talk last week by Michael Pilquist

• "If you ask a long tail application developer responsible for HTTP services what their problem is, the problem is not Jetty, Jetty works great. The problems are in the application layer."

Nobody Has A Personality Anymore

• "Everything about us is caused, categorised, and can be corrected. We talk in theories, frameworks, systems, structures, drives, motivations, mechanisms. But in exchange for explanation, we lost mystery, romance, and lately, I think, ourselves."

• "Free yourself to experience, not explain."

The rise of Whatever

• "It begins to feel like a broad celebration of mediocrity. Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don't have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don't have to write a three-line fetch call. I don't have to know anything, care about what I'm doing, or even have an opinion."

• "I don't want to help someone who opens with "I don't know how to do this so I asked ChatGPT and it gave me these 200 lines but it doesn't work". I don't want to know how much code wasn't actually written by anyone. I don't want to hear how many of my colleagues think Whatever is equivalent to their own output."

• "What are you all even writing that so much of it consists of generic slop?"

• "The tone is unbearable. The lying as a fallback is offensive. The advertising keeps focusing on how you can coast through life without caring about your work or family because you can just generate a birthday card or whatever. The people funding and pushing it keep openly salivating at the idea of replacing as much human input as possible with a machine best known for generating titles of books that don't exist."

you are what you launch: how software became a lifestyle brand

• "they're not building a tool, they're building a taste. a tone."

• "[Obsidian] feels so arch linux-coded that people are shocked to learn it's not open source."

• "people don't just use these apps. they use them to imagine themselves differently. more organized. more intentional. more in control."