Links, June 6, 2025 • lyonheart

§tldx

A pretty neat command-line tool for checking on domain name availability:

$ tldx google --prefixes get,my --suffixes ly,hub --tlds com,io,ai
  ✔️ mygooglely.com is available
  ✔️ getgooglely.ai is available
  ❌ mygoogle.ai is not available

§Why Bell Labs Worked.

Kelly and others would hand people problems and then check in a few years later. Most founders and executives I know balk at this idea. After all, “what’s stopping someone from just slacking off?” Kelly would contend that’s the wrong question to ask. The right question is, “Why would you expect information theory from someone who needs a babysitter?”

A great read about what made the center of American technological progress in the 20th Century work.

§Mu (mythical lost continent)

I somehow had never heard of this before, and I love this sort of thing, silly though it may be:

Mu is a lost continent introduced by Augustus Le Plongeon (1825–1908), who identified the “Land of Mu” with Atlantis. The name was subsequently identified with the hypothetical land of Lemuria by James Churchward(1851–1936), who asserted that it was located in the Pacific Ocean before its destruction.1(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_\(mythical_lost_continent\)#cite_note-chlost26-1) The place of Mu in both pseudoscience and fantasy fiction is discussed in detail in Lost Continents (1954, 1970) by L. Sprague de Camp.

§A request for developers of feed reader apps and services

Hopping straight into an app removes a significant barrier to subscribing to a feed. Moreover, I suspect an experience that’s akin to subscribing to podcasts would feel familiar to newcomers, hinting that this whole feed thing might not be so weird after all.

Yes, please. I’m adding the buttons from this post to my to-do list for this website.

§Weird in Public

We all feel weird by the standards imposed by our society. This isn’t an accident, it’s a deliberate mechanism of control. If you can afford it, and if it makes you feel good, be weird in public spaces. You will enjoy it and you might just save a life.

The post is short, to the point, and entirely correct.

§By Default, Signal Doesn’t Recall

I have some spicy thoughts about Signal’s approach to log export & legal compliance, but I do have a begrudging respect for where it comes from, and how that attitude also leads to them abusing DRM features to work around Microsoft’s Screen Recorder:

If you attempt to take a screenshot of Signal Desktop when screen security is enabled, nothing will appear. This limitation can be frustrating, but it might look familiar to you if you’ve ever had the audacity to try and take a screenshot of a movie or TV show on Windows.

§Confidence does not equal competence: Socially dominant individuals are more confident in their decisions without being more accurate

A research paper that supports what a lot of us already knew to be true:

While prestige requires a reputation based on previous success, socially dominant individuals may acquire rank by convincing others of their ability in the absence of explicit evidence of previous success.

Your LLM Addiction is Going Great

§OpenAI Is A Systemic Risk To The Tech Industry

This piece by Edward Zitron is a long, but easily skimmable, read about how and why the bubble is going to pop — soon — and what’s going to happen in the wake of that:

Or, more likely, I can’t see a realistic way in which OpenAI gets the resources it needs to survive. It’ll need a streak of unlikely good fortune, the kind of which you only ever hear about in Greek epic poems:

§Diabolus Ex Machina

a horror story, presented as a series of unedited screenshots of a thread of interaction with ChatGPT

person: It is very very disturbing that your response is always to lie.

§Economics & labor rights in AI Skepticism

There is a farther-reaching consequence to this, which is that: the more roles that companies eliminate under this increase in efficiency, the higher the supply of the labor market, which as market economics 101 will tell you means that the price for labor will go down, worsening the crisis of stagnate wages.

May you live in interesting times, indeed.

§Pro-AI Subreddit Bans ‘Uptick’ of Users Who Suffer from AI Delusions

“LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities,” one of the moderators of r/accelerate, wrote in an announcement. “There is a lot more crazy people than people realise. And AI is rizzing them up in a very unhealthy way at the moment.”

If you haven’t yet learned to spot narcissistic personality traits, cult indoctrination techniques, or cons & scams, doing so may help someone you care about.

§The Copilot Delusion

This isn’t about tools or productivity or acceleration. It’s about the illusion of progress. Because if that programmer-if that thing, that CREATURE- walked into your stand-up in human form, typing half-correct garbage into your codebase while ignoring your architecture and disappearing during cleanup, you’d fire them before they could say “no blockers”.

But slap Microsoft’s marketing label on it and plug it into the IDE of every developer in the org? Now that’s innovation. Science. Progress. Profit.

Or, as @jenifferplusplus put it:

In other words, a stopped clock is always wrong.

It doesn’t matter that it will coincidentally display the correct time twice per day. That coincidence doesn’t have any connection to a clock’s function as a tool. It’s not doing the thing you think clocks do. It’s not right about the time any more than a photo of a clock is.

But the epistemological crises have been building for a while now. This post gets into consequences:

The problem isn’t just laziness. It’s degradation. Engineers stop exploring. Stop improving. Stop caring. One more layer of abstraction. One more lazy fetch call inside a render loop.