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Patrick McSweeny

@patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social
72 followers 74 following 155 posts
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Reposted by Patrick McSweeny
Joseph Cox @josephcox.bsky.social · 14/09/2026
New from 404 Media: humans are reading ChatGPT conversations. OpenAI has hired an army of contractors who read real ChatGPT users' chats. I've seen internal docs, the review system, and real user prompts. Sometimes they contain very personal and sensitive information www.404media.co/inside-proje...
404media.co
Inside ‘Project Lily’: The Humans Reading Your ChatGPT Chats
Humans are reading ChatGPT users’ prompts to improve OpenAI’s models, and those chats can include sensitive, personal information, according to leaked internal documents and real prompts seen by 404 M...
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Ivan the K ™ @ivanthek.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
WE'RE GONNA NEED SOME MORE RED FLAGS IN HERE.
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Dana Houle @danahoule.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
Banks just giving more & more money to AI companies reminds me of when Eddie Murphy went undercover as a white guy & found out banks just give white people money for free youtu.be/l_LeJfn_qW0?...
youtu.be
White Like Me - SNL
YouTube video by Saturday Night Live
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Robin Berjon @robin.berjon.com · 08/08/2026
To act as if we still have time before making radical changes is in itself a form of climate denialism. Or perhaps we should call it collapse denialism. www.currentaffairs.org/news/the-mas...
currentaffairs.org
The Gargantuan Lie That is Collapsing The World’s Climate
Thinking we have time left to address climate change, or that “Net Zero by 2050” will save us, is driving us toward full social collapse in ways that become more obvious with every new broken temperat...
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Doctora Malka Older @older.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
keep thinking about the evil of this. It's not just destroying the physical books, bad as that is. They are trying to remove the underpinnings of knowledge, destroy all the accumulated wisdom - and silliness, and creativity, and whatever else humans have thought worthy of writing down.
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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 28/07/2026
People keep using the "can't put a genie back in the bottle" metaphor for "AI", even though in the stories they always get back in and current "AI" is more of a "we're spending trillions of dollars and the energy output of a continent trying to keep this bastard out of the bottle" situation
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Benjamin Harnett @benjaminharnett.com · 18/07/2026
A lot of tech leadership around ai is now just constantly asking “Why isn’t this working—wrong answers only?”
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Tess Snider @malkyne.com · 08/07/2026
I am exasperated with people accusing programmers of "gatekeeping" programming. We were practically dragging people through the gate. Do you know why a mindless LLM can tell you so much great programming information? It's because we've been sharing that information for free online for decades.
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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 30/06/2026
Protein folding and similar approaches are not meaningfully the same as generative models such a Large Language Models. Anybody who pretends otherwise is, whether they realise it or not, promoting a con.
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tante @tante.cc · 18/06/2026
@amnesty.org very based: "Amnesty International finds that standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, depend on mass invasions of privacy by design, and are fundamentally incompatible with IHRL. As such, Amnesty International is calling for a prohibition of such systems."
amnesty.org
Unlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI - Amnesty InternationalUnlawful by design: Exposing the human rights costs of generative AI - Amnesty International
This briefing examines how standalone generative AI systems, based on unlawful web scraping, are in conflict with international human rights law (IHRL) and standards through their design, development and deployment. While these technologies promise sophisticated automation and efficiency, they rely on data collection and model training practices that abuse privacy rights, enable discrimination, and threaten […]
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Dawn Xiana Moon @dawnxianamoon.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
The web should be accessible to people with poor internet connections & assistive technologies. As a UX designer, I will absolutely die on this hill.
mohkohn.co.uk
How building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight
My client was a utility company, and they had a big problem...
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 05/06/2026
Decided to pull out an important part of the interview. Generative AI is often justified with comparisons to the cost of Amazon Web Services ($57bn) or Uber's ($32bn) in losses, when its costs and losses are hundreds of billions of dollars worse. And there's no post-bubble redemption story.
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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 31/05/2026
Amnesty International understanding that this "generative AI" shit as currently conceived and deployed is a project which enables fascism and endangers the already vulnerable and marginalized populations of the world.
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Sachymetsu @sachy.dev · 29/05/2026
Coding is such an interesting intersection of math, logic, and sheer creative hackery. The nonsense you have to pull off to square some circles because that's what the hardware/feature/business requirement wants takes a serious amount of creativity. It's also fun & frustrating in equal measure. /1
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Patrick McSweeny @patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social · 28/05/2026
My dad is a retired neuropsychologist, and he says the creative versus technical thinking dichotomy is mostly a myth.
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Alex Elizabeth Byrne McMillan @undeniablyalex.bsky.social · 23/05/2026
YOU’RE LISTENING TO SISYPHUS FM, THE HOME OF NON-STOP ROCK
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jneen @jneen.ca · 22/05/2026
Extremely good and concise summary of the statistical/methodological shenanigans involved in measuring the so-called "AI boost" Here's a couple of my favourites:
Timing Artificial Tasks

A widely cited study found that developers who used GitHub Copilot completed a task 55% faster than those who did not [Peng2023]. The task was implementing an HTTP server in JavaScript from scratch, in ninety minutes; the developers had no other obligations that day. Real software development involves navigating a large codebase you did not write, understanding a requirement described ambiguously in a ticket, coordinating with colleagues, and attending meetings. Speed on a greenfield toy task does not predict speed on any of that. A randomized controlled trial with experienced open-source developers found the opposite of what participants themselves predicted: giving them access to AI tools increased task completion time by 19% [Becker2025].Comparing AI to Nothing

Studies that compare AI-assisted developers to a control group using nothing have chosen a baseline that does not exist in practice. Developers without LLM assistants use documentation, colleagues, and the time they would otherwise spend thinking through the problem themselves. The relevant question is whether LLM tools outperform the alternatives developers already have, and that comparison is rarely made [Peng2023]. Choosing a weak baseline makes any tool look good; it does not make the tool useful.
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Baldur Bjarnason @baldurbjarnason.com · 20/05/2026
Software development practices spread using the exact same cognitive biases as beliefs in homeopathy
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James Martin @jamesmart1n.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
The world’s "safest" AI provider now runs on the world’s dirtiest data centre: Musk’s Colossus. Powered by 35 methane generators, most unauthorised. A massive slap in the face to locals - led by @keshaunpearson.bsky.social & co - and to all those who thought Claude was the responsible choice 🙄🤢
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Patrick McSweeny @patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
It's usually more important to develop software right than to do it quickly.
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Patrick McSweeny @patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social · 16/04/2026
I wrote a blog post.
patrickmcsweeny.com
The Future Is Bright for Human Software Engineers
My reasons for being optimistic about the future of humans creating software despite the recent developments in LLM technology
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Patrick McSweeny @patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social · 06/03/2026
I created my first Ruby gem. I mostly made it to use on my own projects and to give myself a challenge. I wrote the entire thing without the help of any LLM tools and I learned a lot in the process as a result. github.com/PatrickMcSwe...
github.com
GitHub - PatrickMcSweeny/rails-integration-test-generator
Contribute to PatrickMcSweeny/rails-integration-test-generator development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Matt Zoller Seitz @mattzollerseitz.bsky.social · 27/12/2025
This is a metaphor for the tech industry overall circa 2025
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Anton Tkachov @antontkachov.bsky.social · 09/12/2025
November ChicagoRuby × @cisco.com — what a night 🔥 Thanks @kphurley.bsky.social & @alan.codegardener.com for making this collab happen. 🎙️ @andycandrea.bsky.social — Reusable JSON Schemas 🎙️ @patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social — Hotwire Your UX Practical, clean, immediately usable.
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Alex Russell @infrequently.org · 25/11/2025
Frontend is failing. 75% of devices with browsers are smartphones, but not even half of sites pass Core Web Vitals on them. Why not? Too much JavaScript, added to indulge SPA fantasies the data is falsifying in real time: infrequently.org/2025/11/perf...
infrequently.org
The Performance Inequality Gap, 2026 - Infrequently Noted
Embedded in this year's network and device estimates is hopeful news about the trajectory of devices and networks. It has never been easier to deliver pages quickly, but we are not collectively…
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Micah @rincewind.run · 20/11/2025
"don't pay attention to any of that frivolous humanities education, STEM all the way - what, do you think you can hack a computer with poetry or something?" apparently, yes
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Anton Tkachov @antontkachov.bsky.social · 24/10/2025
ChicagoRuby meets at one of the world’s biggest Ruby codebases — cisco.com 🔥 Nov 5, 6–8:30 PM 433 W Van Buren St, 7th Fl, Chicago Speakers: patrickmcsweeny.bsky.social, andycandrea.bsky.social ❗️Registration & ID required Registration: www.meetup.com/chicagoruby/...
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Alex Russell @infrequently.org · 03/10/2025
The tech press are Tim levels of cooked. Absolutely nowhere will you see any mention of web apps and PWAs as an alternative to censorious native app stores (I looked), and that's a bloody scandal.
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John Allsopp @johnfallsopp.com · 25/07/2025
this from ‪@jono.id is a position I've been suggesting for a while now–that modern APIs and CSS like View Transition obviated the need for the SPA architecture. www.jonoalderson.com/conjecture/i...
jonoalderson.com
It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA
Native CSS transitions have quietly killed the strongest argument for client-side routing. Yet people keep building terrible apps instead of performant websites.
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 05/12/2024
Using OpenAI's new, powerful "reasoning" model to calculate the amount of states that have R in them. Welcome to the future, everybody
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Sy Brand @tartanllama.xyz · 30/11/2024
It's been interesting to witness in real-time how the usage of "algorithm" in many places has shifted from a neutral "sequence of instructions" to a negative "controlled ordering and boosting of information".
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