busybee fluffy rambles Notes

No I will not be running it

It does absolutely nothing to slow crawlers down (it’s not like they’re going to wait for a page to finish loading before they move on to the next one, crawlers are super optimized to just constantly grab as much bandwidth as possible in parallel), there’s already so much AI slop on the web that it’s not going to contribute meaningfully to model collapse, and all you’re doing by running it is wasting even more resources. Giving the LLM crawlers more content to slurp up just gives them more reasons to waste even more resources, and only continues the death spiral of making the Internet an even worse place.

This isn’t like interfering with scammer call centers through scambaiting or the like. Computers have no problem with having their time wasted.

And meanwhile it does nothing to actually solve the problem.

If you are actively hiring for positions in a company that is friendly to transgender people, in a country that is safe for transgender people, and you are willing to sponsor visas for people seeking to emigrate for these positions, I would like to hear from you.

Ben is good people and an excellent ally. If you know of anyone matching the description above, please get in touch with him.

I like when things keep it simple, and I’m always elated to see webmention.js being used in the wild.

Just had a fascinating lunch with a 22-year-old Stanford grad. Smart kid. Perfect resume. Something felt off though.

He kept pausing mid-sentence, searching for words. Not complex words - basic ones. Like his brain was buffering.

Finally asked if he was okay. His response floored me.

“Sometimes I forget words now. I’m so used to having ChatGPT complete my thoughts that when it’s not there, my brain feels… slower.”

He’d been using AI for everything. Writing, thinking, communication. It had become his external brain. And now his internal one was getting weaker.

Made me think about calculators. Remember how teachers said we needed to learn math because “you won’t always have a calculator”? They were wrong about that.

But maybe they were right about something deeper.

We’re running the first large-scale experiment on human cognition. What happens when an entire generation outsources their thinking?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m beyond excited about what AI and AI agents will do for people in the same way that I was excited in 2009 when the App Store was launched.

But thinking out loud you got to think this guy I met with isn’t the onnnnnly one that’s going to be completely dependent on AI.

Instead of building better business cultures and reinventing our work rhythms to adapt to information overload and an abundance of busywork, the vision here is to let the busywork happen between AI. It’s an office full of ghosts, speaking to each other on our behalf, going to standup meetings with each other just because.

The current fixation on genAI tools means that we basically have AIs talking to AIs for no benefit to the people anymore. We have AI resume builders optimized for AI recruiters who use AI to determine which AI is the best match for the AI-generated position at the AI-dominated company. AI tools for writing a lot of useless scaffolding around our business emails which then get fed through an AI to extract the salient points, when the emails could have just been written with only the salient points to begin with.

It’s so maddening.

As a kid I remember a scene from The Smurfs where one of the Smurfs created a machine as an artistic statement that did nothing but scoop up dirt to fill in a hole that was created by the same machine. At the time it was very much meant as an anti-capitalist metaphor, but today it feels like it’s specifically about AI tools.

At least the Zoom thing highlights the absurdity of meeting-heavy business culture.