I think you're right. Since I started working at $DAY_JOB, the company has transitioned from a completely paper filing system to an electronic system. It has been a long process, identifying a process, digitizing the records, and creating internally developed applications so ordinary employees (like me) involved with the process can record the information which used to be scratched onto paper forms and stuffed into filing cabinets.

For a long time, they were doing okay. They got locked into FileMaker pretty early, but otherwise the whole system was created and maintained internally. Then one day, management got sold on this expensive proprietary ERP system. Spent a couple million dollars on integration, and now everything is tied to this absolute dogshit, poorly integrated system for eternity. The thing absolutely sucks and for the same money they could have just used fucking PostgreSQL and developed a much better-integrated suite of applications internally.

These decisions are made for exactly the reasons you mention. Managers are universally illiterate, incurious, self-confident bastards who will set millions of dollars on fire and shackle the company's future to parasitic vendors simply because they are affiliated with a large firm owned by a political kingmaker who sent a marketing rep to jingle keys in front of their face. We had a new executive who was trying to "modernize" the company he inherited from his father, and apparently modernization simply means getting fleeced by one of the richest firms in the world.

The managers who were responsible for this course of action are all gone now (not because of this), but their legacy remains. As much as they should get rid of it, the technical burden is now likely too high. They would have to migrate a decade's worth of records and re-develop about 50 internal applications from scratch.

On the other hand, you could literally just watch TV shows on YouTube because they hadn't figured out automated media fingerprinting yet.

Copyleft software licenses come with the requirement that you must publish and distibute your changes in a practical form, and that you are not allowed to restrict how people use those changes. They use copyright as a legal mechanism to do the exact opposite of what copyright is normally intended to do, which is to prohibit distribution, transparency, creation of derivative works, and to place arbitrary restrictions on how a work can be used. By circumventing copyleft, we are ushering in the final enclosure of computation.

This process will not bring about the end of copyright. Disney will still sue you for seeding their movies or creating works with their trademarked characters, and the courts will still enthusiastically rule in their favor. On the other hand, it will be (it already is) impossible to develop any aspect of digital infrastructure without it being scraped and incorporated into the labor-theft machine so your expertise can be re-applied by some dickhead at Microsoft to build surveillance tech for Israel.

There is also a difference between distribution ("copyright infringement") and plagiarism (taking someone else's work and hiding the source). There is absolutely no reason why we should abandon attribution in a post-copyright world. We should still venerate the authors of meaningful works. We should understand the origins of ideas, discoveries, and cultural trends. The technology which exists today is designed to do the exact opposite. To completely separate our understanding of history, culture, and the development of technology from its actual historical roots.

I think it is possible to have ethical "LLMs", but the technology does not exist. An ethical LLM would require us to re-imagine the entire process, from data gathering, to tagging and organization, to ML training, to applications. There is no ethical application for the existing technology. (I put LLM in scare quotes, because with the required changes, you might not categorize the end result as an LLM any more, though there are broad applications for the use of machine-learning techniques on large bodies of information)

First and foremost, ethical LLM technology must be environmentally sustainable. We are in the middle of a run-away climate crisis and there is no excuse to be wasting energy like this. Everyone responsible for LLMs and proof-of-work cryptocurrency should be executed right alongside the oil execs. It must preserve attribution. It must not be a tool for crime-prediction, surveillance, and social manipulation (e.g. profile-based advertising). It must be accessible and democratic.

In my mind, instead of having software which synthesizes language (human or programming languages), it would function as a highly sophisticated search engine. You might prompt "I want to make a REST client which can speak the Matrix protocol" and based on the corpus of training material it can identify the required aspects of an implementation and source material for each required component. This would be a very useful tool, but it is not useful in the way LLMs are being deployed today, which is to steal dead labor (the corpus of free software, documentation, internet discussions, and literature in general), in order to make living labor redundant.

That said, I would make the argument that LLMs are not the core problem in software engineering. They are deeply exacerbating the actual problem which is a crisis of complexity (which is why I think using them makes you an automatic dickhead). We're sprinting into a world where we rely on essential components (the kernel or the web browser, for instance), which have completely outrun the capacity for responsible public maintenance. The deficit in maintenance is papered over by using LLM's to "accelerate" development and review duties, but this only results in even more complexity. I believe this crisis is going to reach a tipping point fairly soon, and it is completely unrelated to the financial situation of the looming AI bubble.

It will work. The Democracts will get their projected landslide victory. People doing this larp about protecting the integrity of the process will feel self-assured. Nothing will change.

The Gentoo maintainers finally threw in the towel on Chromium about a week ago.

!!! All ebuilds that could satisfy "chromium" have been masked.
!!! One of the following masked packages is required to complete your request:
- www-client/chromium-151.0.7922.169-r1::gentoo (masked by: package.mask)
/var/db/repos/gentoo/profiles/package.mask:
# Sam James <sam@gentoo.org> (2026-09-24)
# Increasingly challenging to maintain with increased release cadence,
# upstream toolchain changes, and conflicts between trying to provide
# a consistent experience for Gentoo users (avoiding bundled where possible)
# vs. getting updates out in a timely manner.  Many unfixed vulnerabilities.
#
# Keeping it in ::gentoo isn't a matter of just supplying an updated ebuild,
# but a commitment to keeping it up to date and finding a compromise between
# users' expectations (like various USE flags & not forcing all bundled
# components) and maintainability.
#
# Still supported packages include:
#   www-client/google-chrome variants
# Other chromium-based browsers:
#   www-client/microsoft-edge
#   www-client/opera
#   www-client/vivaldi
# qtwebengine-based browsers (uses chromium's engine):
#   kde-apps/konqueror
#   www-client/falkon
#   www-client/qutebrowser
# Other browsers:
#   www-client/firefox and www-client/firefox-bin
#   www-client/seamonkey
#
# Removal on 2026-10-24.  Bug #982204.

The condition of your teeth is a major influence on your diet, which leads to all sorts of other health conditions. Even under our evil system of for-profit health insurance, there should be an interest in taking care of this shit. You can fix shit up front to mitigate larger problems down the road.

I'm seeing claims that there was a substantial "supply chain" attack vectored through Anthropic's Claude Code VSCode extension. Might be related.

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/117528831681803563

Tutanota update: https://mas.to/@zzt/117526295436699436

lol. lmao. Fuck me I just subscribed yesterday.