Reposted by maegulSean Carroll @seanmcarroll.bsky.social · 03/10/2026I do think philosophy as a discipline has dramatically underperformed at answering the question “When would an artificial system qualify as conscious?” Should have nailed that one long before it became a practical issue. 4217916
maegul @maegul.net · 08/09/2026I thought so too, but poked around today, and the “new” thing I saw was about a cluster of “agents” with shared prompts/materials getting closer to intelligence/AGI. Which is like, ”yea, of course”, that’s likely what a brain is roughly. But also, “torment nexus”, which is again obvious. Soo 🤷♂️ 011
maegul @maegul.net · 08/09/2026Seeing a bunch of the anti v pro #AI talk, and it feels like both sides just don’t want to address the elephant in the room: the real issues are way bigger than whether they help you be productive right now. And disagreeing about these is also way bigger. We got work to do and are being dumb. 000
Reposted by maegulGlyph @glyf.bsky.social · 07/09/2026truly, spoken like a man who doesn't know what trains or bicycles are 56514
maegul @maegul.net · 07/09/2026“No ethical high ground” - interesting. Something can be inevitable and unethical/wrong/bad at the same time. It can also have direct benefits with outweighing secondary negatives. So: AI safety, human social agency, economic and political structures, and war ethics. Don’t be worried about these? 0100
Reposted by maegulBenjamin Riley @benjaminjriley.bsky.social · 20/08/2026So we know AI helped a negligible number of students. But how many did it harm? I've crunched the raw data provided by the lead researcher, and what I've found is that ~9,500 students using AI studied less than even the *least* studious, non-AI using student. This should shock the conscience. 20885460
Reposted by maegulMike Masnick @masnick.com · 20/08/2026So I get that there's (yet again) a big debate going on about AI on Bluesky. I am turning off replies to this post because I don't want to have notifications flooded one way or the other on this one. I just want to share what I've heard multiple times in just the past two weeks. 137387
maegul @maegul.net · 20/08/2026I didn’t know the AI divide was already at the point of driving ppl away from a platform and to another. But I’ve been saying this: AI may lead to a real divide in society that I don’t think we’re ready for. It’s too pervasive to just “get along” and many of us have strong feelings about it. 000
maegul @maegul.net · 16/08/2026Oh I’m sure! But it feels like there’s a potential sundering coming to a people who are naive to what that means … who are presuming we can all be one people. 101
maegul @maegul.net · 16/08/2026I feel like too many anti-AI folks aren’t ready for how much they/we may just become an awkwardly/dismissively/aggressively tolerated minority. Like vegans in 90s or Catholics in UK. Like any minority really, except they’re waiting for the world to realise that they were correct all along. 201
maegul @maegul.net · 14/08/2026Yea, agreed, and I think that’s kinda been my big take for a while. You can see the struggle on the Fedi where the structure is all instances=communities, but the quality of social and community interaction on the Fedi is abysmal. Interesting Q is whether good social can even happen online now. 030
Reposted by maegulLaurens @laurenshof.online · 12/08/2026What if some of our deepest core assumptions are wrong? 4192
maegul @maegul.net · 13/08/20266. Maybe it’s still worth asking the hipster’s affectation: what exactly are we trying to do that blogs, RSS and email and chat rooms couldn’t? 020
maegul @maegul.net · 13/08/20265. All of which is the doomscrolling malaise. An itch impossible to scratch. A longing for something that never existed in the first place. Almost like the idea of social media is the first and ultimate addictive algorithm. 120
maegul @maegul.net · 13/08/20264. And the sad thing about us children of big social, that we’re all in denial of, is that we’re just not enough for each other. We don’t want “popular” shopping malls & TV. We’re too niche or whatever. But we need that booming “everyone’s here” energy. Niche but universal. 120
maegul @maegul.net · 13/08/20262. So there’s no “new hip thing” energy you can channel. But there is big vanilla shopping mall energy, which is what most will consume. 3 cuz social media is just TV and has been for a while. 120
maegul @maegul.net · 13/08/2026Ooohh! This is still going on?! It’s years now since the Twitter migration and “we” are still “losing”? If you’re interested I’ll rant my silky opinions like old times (also, hi!) 1. New social media can’t take off now cuz the whole idea is old: Wierdo nerd platforms aren’t edgy, they’re annoying. 210
Reposted by maegulJennifer Ouellette @jenlucpiquant.bsky.social · 03/06/2026Americans Are Starting to Really Hate Data Centers—and It’s Making the Tech Industry Nervous gizmodo.com/americans-ar...gizmodo.comAmericans Are Starting to Really Hate Data Centers—and It's Making the Tech Industry NervousA recent survey shows a dramatic swing against new data center construction. 38187812455
Reposted by maegulSean A. Morgan @memphisbelle1114.bsky.social · 15/05/2026I want to announce that I have recovered. After nearly 8 years of hardly reading at all, I read AN ENTIRE BOOK last night. I'M SO BACK. #Booksky 1624698158
maegul @maegul.net · 15/05/2026Hot take response: You could be all “Bro just one more letter to congress and I’ll swear we’ll patch all capitalism’s problems” Or … Boycott the shit and its tech bros hard and let the technology be integrated slowly and organically. A moratorium and anti-tech stance. We’re not going anywhere. 1130
Reposted by maegulLaurens @laurenshof.online · 18/02/2026new from me - Where Does Community Live? A deep dive into how protocols shape what communities can be build on the open social web connectedplaces.online/where-does-c...connectedplaces.onlineWhere Does Community Live?ActivityPub and ATProto both promise to rebuild social life online, but they answer the question of where community actually forms in fundamentally different ways. Protocol design is institutional des... 37825
maegul @maegul.net · 29/12/2025But it’s the “fear”, correct or not, I’m citing. Historically, I’d imagine it involved distrust of institutions/Govt’s as well as an instinctual fear of the invisible toxicity of radiation. I wonder if both of these are translatable to AI. 000
maegul @maegul.net · 29/12/2025I keep wondering if nuclear energy is the best/closest analogue as something with obvious pros and cons but which everyone generally noped out of. I wonder if the history of it bears anything out. If it was radiation=bad, maybe interesting. If it was the bombs/meltdowns, then you’re prob right. 120
maegul @maegul.net · 27/11/2025Made me think of @xkcd.com ’s flying with Python “moment” (but now for AI?): xkcd.com/353/ Especially the “fun again” part, true or not. Also how different many people’s outlook on the tech industry likely was in 2007 (yes, the comic is that old).xkcd.comPython 063
maegul @maegul.net · 05/10/2025One big personal take for me since the “Twitter migration” is that the main missing piece of big social has been “seamless” movement between various levels of private/public in a single/standard interface. Neither fediverse nor atmosphere really target that, and so are both disappointing to me. 010
maegul @maegul.net · 05/04/2025Had similar thoughts today looking at things from the outside. My head immediately figured “31 Dec” is still 2025, and that if one person rides one train once, that’d count as ‘open’. 130
maegul @maegul.net · 21/03/2025For those paying attention, musk has been a problem or suspect for a while. I’d heard opinions from people I trusted that he was BS - a decade or more ago. The lesson, I think, is the power of marketing/branding at large enough scales should be viewed as like weapons of mass destruction. 021
maegul @maegul.net · 17/03/2025Timing, pacing, characters, landing moments, coherence etc … all seemed off to me, with a kinda incoherent mishmash of vibes, scenes and events. I got the distinct sense the director had actors yell a lot because they knew things weren’t landing well on set. 100
maegul @maegul.net · 17/03/2025Anyone else feel Mickey 17 was actually embarrassingly bad? Saw it yesterday, expecting the negative reviews to have missed the point or vibe. But half way through, for me, it was “objectively” bad. Like the director already knew while on set that they were in trouble. 100
Reposted by maegulErin Kissane @kissane.myatproto.social · 14/03/2025I think I say this every year or so but…having been brought up in an apocalyptic doom-prepper destroy-the-evil-globalist-government evangelical movement/cult and then having spent my early adulthood really far from that world, this all feels like the third act of a horror movie. 3777975
Reposted by maegulCarl T. Bergstrom @carlbergstrom.com · 06/03/2025Let's talk about this Nature piece in more detail. I've rarely read something so anti-scientific anywhere short of the National Review. www.nature.com/articles/d41...nature.comThree AI-powered steps to faster, smarter peer reviewTired of spending countless hours on peer reviews? An AI-assisted workflow could help. 621622688
Reposted by maegulLaurens @laurenshof.online · 27/02/2025New: Last Week in the ATmosphere The ATProto tech news: - Sync 1.1 is a proposal to make relays cheaper to run - Multiple PDS browsers now show backlinks, making them a new type of entity in the network - Bluesky has 2 new vacancies to expand their T&S team fediversereport.com/last-week-in...fediversereport.comLast Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.dWelcome to the bi-weekly tech-focused update on everything that is happening on Bluesky and the wider ATmosphere. The theme continues to be: “can ATProto scale down“? Next week will be focused again o... 0419
maegul @maegul.net · 21/02/2025Any other non-USians finding this place basically not worth it since Trump 2.0? ( I get it, you’re going through stuff, but the “I gotta post about it” energy seems counterproductive, honestly a little sad, not a good use of microblogging, and strangely not informative/interesting from outside ) 010
Reposted by maegulKath Barbadoro @kathbarbadoro.bsky.social · 21/02/2025There is a type of like pop science journalism geared toward educated liberals (your Kara swishers, your freakonomics, etc) that I think has the potential to rot your brain nearly as much as Joe Rogan type stuff 2660549
Reposted by maegulRoxane Gay @roxanegay.bsky.social · 17/02/2025I keep seeing this. Guys, their literal job is to figure out what to do. They are not helpless even if they are not the majority. I really hope we can stop treating some of the most powerful people in the world as helpless and without sentience. 23892501425
Reposted by maegulneutral @neutral.zone · 17/02/2025Sometimes I feel like there are no words that could adequately describe how to grieve for the future. The complex sense of loss, uncertainty, the weight of what seems not just likely but inevitable. Not simply mourning what’s to come, but mourning what’s already slipping away. 1121142
maegul @maegul.net · 16/02/2025If go with With you were here, mainly cuz the long plays there she better on repeat for me. 010
Reposted by maegulneutral @neutral.zone · 13/02/2025The long game gets even longer, because before you can even teach people to recognize patterns, you have to convince them that there’s something to recognize at all. 282
Reposted by maegulneutral @neutral.zone · 13/02/2025I keep thinking about this post. I'm in this liminal space myself, the last generation with a real memory of an analog world before the internet fully saturated everything. That gives perspective, but it also makes me a witness to a transformation that’s irreversible. 4284
Reposted by maegulLaurens @laurenshof.online · 13/02/2025This week's news about ATProto and the ATmosphere: - @roomy.chat is building a P2P public group chat app on ATProto, now in public alpha - Microcosm is a new selfhostable API that tracks backlinks for the entire network - Tracking all lexicons with Lexidex fediversereport.com/last-week-in...fediversereport.comLast Week in the ATmosphere – 2025feb.bWelcome to this week’s edition of all the news that happens in the wider ATProto ecosystem. This edition is somewhat more technical, next week I’ll focus again on Bluesky and the growing ecosystem of ... 39127
Reposted by maegul🇬🇾🗽Sydette The Dreaded Gorgon🗽🇬🇾 @blackamazon.bsky.social · 13/02/2025I’m at the point where we have to stop saying “Our media must do better” and start talking seriously about why the don’t and how long they haven’t And the reflection necessary isn’t happening 1622774
Reposted by maegulJoseph Howley @illdottore.bsky.social · 12/02/2025you fucked up a perfectly good computer is what you did. look at it. it's got innumeracy 1083161624
maegul @maegul.net · 12/02/2025Yea, I’m no staff eng, but the uptick also seemed a bit suspicious to me (quantitatively that is) as I imagine it’d be somewhat more hit and miss than the graph suggests. 000
maegul @maegul.net · 12/02/2025Yea, the situation for juniors has been the danger zone from the beginning IMO. You could tell when everyone zeroed on the “it’s like having a dumb but fast junior always on hand” mental model. So what are juniors supposed to do then?! 010
Reposted by maegulaustin @aparker.io · 11/02/2025read serce.me/posts/2025-0... this morning and it mostly tracks with my experience.serce.meThe LLM Curve of Impact on Software EngineersIn this article, I share my personal mental model of how LLMs affect software engineers at different levels, and why this leads to both excitement and scepticism. 6385
Reposted by maegulLaurens @laurenshof.online · 11/02/2025Wrote about the different responses to the superbowl and Lamar’s halftime show between fedi and Bluesky, and what that means for people who want to bring the fediverse into the mainstream 3258
maegul @maegul.net · 11/02/2025I also find it disorientating to see two different but maybe connected py bad versions of a revenge of the nerds. US’s technocracy, that’s winning and it’s bad, and then the weirdly confused Fedi thing that is not winning, which is also arguably a bad thing. Like, tech culture is just broken??! 020
maegul @maegul.net · 10/02/2025There’s plenty hurtful/ignorant us non-USians could say about seeing the US from afar ATM. I can’t help but notice how boring all the noise is. All basic/shallow takes like no one can think. And those with thoughts are defensive about sharing, dodging the shitty engagement. Like a party gone bad 010
