Interesting Things on the Internet: April 16th 2026 Edition

These used to get scheduled to be published on the Monday after I started drafting them, and would then include whatever I’d collected over the following week. Since I migrated the blog to Jekyll I’ve lost the scheduled post option. At some point I’ll reinstate that, but for now it’s interrupted the posting of Interesting Things as I keep collecting-but-not-publishing. This is a note (to me mostly, given I doubt anyone else cares when they get published) that I’m going to switch to a more whenever-there-are-a-few sort of posting frequency. Anyway, while this rambling is on the Internet, I’m not sure it counts as interesting. Onwards!

• I used AI. It worked. I hated it.. It would be great if we could get beyond the “AI is going to solve cancer and become sentient” and into actual discussions like this one about which tools might work and how it might be possible to use them without surrendering our agency and control to tech VCs.
• If No One Pays for Proof, Everyone Will Pay for the Loss. Another way of looking at the “AI” question; particularly if, as society currently seems set up to do, we take the quick-fix and externalising the costs onto somebody else. “But he also insists that a model does not know whether its answer is correct, and that millions of lines of AI-generated code will never actually be reviewed by humans. Once that is clear, every apparent gain in speed is really a shift of burden downstream. Someone still has to reread, compare, test, contextualize, and sometimes rewrite. And if no one seriously takes on that work, the cost does not disappear. It reappears later in the form of errors, urgent fixes, loss of trust, and eventually litigation. What is presented as a productivity gain is often just an accounting displacement.”
• On The Enshittification of Audre Lorde: “The Master’s Tools” in Tech Discourse
• Consent (an angry note for fellow anarchists) “The ultimate extent of this freedom is the monarchist freedom: freedom from the law itself. This is the freedom the Epstein class want. This is the freedom of the dictator, of the Russian Oligarch.”
• Cyberselfish. I’m pretty sure I didn’t read this when it was first published; it’s sadly prescient, given that we could have done things differently over the past three decades if we’d paid more attention. I guess some of us have been trying for a while now, and maybe we’re starting to realise that we need to not surrender our power so easily. (Found via Phil Gyford’s post about Wired Books)