Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 5hPeople waiving away all the “little errors” from AI as acceptable should be cursed to eat only at restaurants where they treat food that way. Hand wash? Refrigerate? Expiration dates? You’re absolutely right, my mistake. Oh you’re barfing 🤮 ? Well not everybody did so stop your complaining 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 9hLuthen's speech in Andor is quite relatable for many SWEs these days when it comes to AI youtu.be/-3RCme2zZRY?...youtu.beAndor | Luthen Rael’s Monologue | Disney+YouTube video by Star Wars 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 06/10/2026Yes let them (Iran) “take out”Los Angeles or San Diego. Seems a bit concerning as a San Diegan. youtu.be/FurUNgg5L7cyoutu.be'Small Price to Pay': Trump says Iran can 'take out' San Diego, Los AngelesYouTube video by CBS 8 San Diego 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 05/10/2026Come now Andy knowing what one is talking about is solely reserved for people from bigtech or with huge social counts. Now that those folks know the ills of CSS in JS everything said by “little web folks” warning of this is irrelevant as this is clearly an all new discovery. It’s just the law 😏 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 04/10/2026That the US broadcast of the USA-Mexico game missed showing the 3rd goal because they are pulled away and yapping says all you need to know about how much American TV broadcasters understand this sport. 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 03/10/2026Slopware wasn’t invented by GenAI we’ve had plenty of it before. We just can manufacture so much more now quite quickly & efficiently. It’s actually Slopware Engineering! Note not denying AI use in proper SWE here distinguishing between the creation of useful software and slopware 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 02/10/2026I hope you find my AI Slop vs Your Codebase GIF worth a chuckle. 020
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/20266+ months ago I'd GenAI whatever webdev silliness I wanted. I hid my shame, but now if you ever find yourself wanting to know how a <blink> or <marquee> tag would be abused in 2026 enjoy. Warning: they get worse as you go profpowell.github.io/blink-wc/dem... profpowell.github.io/marquee-wc/d... 020
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026I have pursued enough outside of CS for decades to to know enough to see clearly we deeply need help from non-STEM folks. CS is objectively not sense making well for the public around these AI changes. I fear we simply ill equipped in CS to handle the moment properly w/o much more collaboration. 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026His centrists to me is just a non extreme member of any other class maybe pragmatist would be a better grouping to allow for that? It’s not the academics either those spread all camps. Alert. Where’s our humanities people the CS folks fretting AI need some better sorting and historical frames 100
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Doomers are the those of a cloth so to speak. The religious. Yes some are zealots but many as history of religion go crave the power and money. Accelorationists is his combo of the king/sword and the merchant class. If he feels that’s one group it looks a lot like a fascism. 100
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Just finished Cal Newport’s pod breaking the AI groups up. Like Cal I would be a centrist aware of the harms, but more focused on present than doomerism and very much aware of the utility but not reckless in claims or usage. However his labeling are euphemisms by modern specific labels 100
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 01/10/2026Just spent 20mins reading a thread about a torture chamber for AI being coded because LLMs supposedly feel pain. I felt mental pain during it, so I stopped. 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 30/09/2026Gonna ask AI I mean SI tomorrow if we should also rename French Fries to Freedom Fries like we did before under W. Seems only appropriate. 001
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 29/09/202625% for two orgs? Do they disclose which two? Really want to know because few orgs or even govts can afford billions burnt like that. Me thinks some of this is the old Microsoft, Amazon,… are not just my vendors they’re my customers too kind of shenanigans. If it’s US Gov even more yikes! 101
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 28/09/2026Oh it is 10ks of AI agent go bezerk incidents. This might explain the absolute hammering of zingchart.com months ago. It was a bot for sure. Used our entire pre allocated host budget in a single day. I modified spend and the traffic passed. Now I want to look again, log retention though 😞 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 27/09/2026Strong agree. It’s a long held opinion for me. example in SWE we act as if a group of humans building code together is some unique challenge. Sure the software medium changes some things but it’s the market, incentives, and dev beliefs around that tend to be much stronger difference makers to me. 050
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 25/09/2026Ok sure our agent hacked a bunch of sites, but it was good actually because it shows emerging intelligence, not that we are reckless and not on top of things. Oh and we need lots more money to keep a lid on this cuz this stuff might kill everybody, so trust us we got this. 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 24/09/2026Just finished a causal rewatch and damn does the movie “don’t look up” totally hit hard now. Watch it again and try to view the comet as a McGuffin that can be anything and see how utterly insightful this movie was. 001
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 23/09/2026So we let AI help do our job, write bed time stories for your kid, message your spouse you are thinking about them, buy stuff you want online, get your news, plan your vacation, do fantasy football picks, and make Kalshi bets… So what do we exactly do? Stringing real examples here btw. 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 21/09/2026That Kevin Roose thinks he is some neutral tech journalism truth teller is utterly laughable. 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 19/09/2026Mom: Who did this!?! All our pictures are vacation ruined? Did you do this Timmy? Timmy: I didn’t do it Mom! It was a rogue agent I swear! Mom: Was it your agent Timmy? Did you forget to close the door and not watch it? Tell the truth! Timmy: No! It got smart and did itself! I swear 🤞😏 Mom:🤨 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026It couldn’t happen here is becoming more like it is and has been happening here. 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026Fred Brooks said something to the effect that it’s not that writing software isn’t hard, it is, but knowing what software to write is even harder... in the 70s! It took most until Senior Dev to admit human intersection with software is the true hard part not tech. LLMs speed that lesson up. 030
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 18/09/2026AI slop potato is a popular office game you play sending slop back & forth with coworkers. Execs love the speed of the game & size of the potatoes. The game is over when management leaves or if something actually has to get done. Be careful if you don’t play the game hard enough execs may fire you! 010
Reposted by Thomas A. PowellJason Koebler @jasonkoebler.bsky.social · 17/09/2026The court filing dug up by @kint.bsky.social is the most They Admit It i have ever seen in my life www.404media.co/doom-loop-op...404media.co‘Doom Loop’: OpenAI and Microsoft Admits LLMs Are Destroying the Web and Built on Theft"Millions of people around the world will soon consider large models ‘hoovering up’ all their work to be an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions." 13841336
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Useful Wikipedia article of the day en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_p...en.wikipedia.orgMoral panic - Wikipedia 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 15/09/2026Funny you say that the intern got shown this PNW fixation did their take two and surprise surprise it was a coffee shop! What a coincidence. 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Curious that demo sites for tutorials by Claude often pick Pacific Northwest outdoor gear. I wonder if there could be a statistical reason weighting that direction? Could it be it ingested the mountain of 30+ years of Microsoft MSDN and related docs and tutorial content? 😏 100
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026Sssh OSX is telling me something. This is not a new "bug" around since May. See github.com/openai/codex... just one of many "CLOSED" issues on this problem. SWE at its finest I guess? We can "fix" this by bypassing gatekeeper - codexdown.com/en/codex-mac... Also I hate seatbelts don't you? 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 14/09/2026So we’ve “discovered” that an LLM can be used as fuzzer for web app sec attacks. It’s basically a brute force pen tester in a harness. We have not discovered independent intentionality any more than a coding harness does that writing code you asked for. AI script kiddie swarms are bad though. 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026If you rather read a version explaining all this here you go - pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/10/j... Tl;dr - 💯 manufactured AI doompivot-to-ai.comJacob Coxon: how to run an AI doomsday media campaignThe AI doomsday is the idea that one day, an artificial intelligence will get so smart it takes over the world! And it’ll kill all the humans, just as a side effect! Pretty scary, huh. You might be… 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Worth a watch if you have some suspicions or questions about just how the latest AI is powerful/doom story went absolutely super heated so so quickly. Hopefully Cal Newport picks over these ideas to bring some east coast CS perspective.youtu.bewe JUST got played...YouTube video by Wes Roth 100
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026I remember when we hacked websites ourselves the old fashioned way. now you just use an agent that tries things while you play Roblox and come back after it finds which lazy ass dev didn’t sanitize their inputs. Pfft they call that A. I. - I call it Actual Idiot wrote the app claude “hacked” 🤪 or 🧐?static.klipy.comThe Simpsons AngryALT: The Simpsons Angry 001
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 12/09/2026Claims about AI approaching RSI require I don’t know actual evidence. Not SciFi speculation, not see broad trends, but some actual evidence and today we have zero zilch none. Just broad or vague what-if statements. Why are we not stomping & demanding actual specifics? This is not CS this is BS. 😡 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026Here is the start of the Asimov inspired stuff that likely is the safety theater we are currently witnessing 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026For giggles I pulled my copy of a 30 year old book on web bots and agents from my library. You might be surprised by its guidelines for bot use are pretty solid on and mostly ignored by modern folk. The laws are modeled on Asimov and from a simpler time of the web 110
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 10/09/2026The (tech) (social) media right now when it comes to AI — DOOOOOMMM!!!!static.klipy.comTonight at 11:00... Doom!ALT: Tonight at 11:00... Doom! 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026After reading so many posts the last 3 days about AI I am starting to think the most important undergrad classes I took way back that help me make sense of AI esp when talking with others were History of Religion and Philosophy of the Mind and actually not my Math or CS classes. 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026A plausible sentence generator trained for agreement and engagement purposefully validates user’s thinking - real or delusional. It creates a filter bubble of one and that is gonna lead a lot of people to bad places. Bad thinking in, maybe worse thinking out. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...arstechnica.comMan told ChatGPT he was feeling delusional. ChatGPT insisted he was Jesus.Man with bipolar disorder sued OpenAI after surviving ChatGPT-linked suicide attempt. 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026Listen to the puppet youtu.be/85bAHVIyHGk?...youtu.beHow AI Hype Spread Like a Religion - J. Raptor ShowYouTube video by Cretaceous Vox 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026Remember the good old days back on the bird site when we all used to get enraged about various JS frameworks, programming languages, apps, etc and their misuse? Now that AI sucks all tech rage oxygen we should consider we truly didn’t know how good we had it. 😏 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026For folks so concerned with efficiency & optimization we sure are quite oddly ok with making the equivalent of resource gobbling disposable software for markets of 1. Dev: Behold my hands (really Claude) have wrought this amazing app! World: 🤷🏻♂️ 💤🦗 Dev: Fine…another app it is! 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026AI loops on your code base can be the “he choose poorly” from Last Crusade. It can accelerate degradation due to addition w/o proper verification. This idea was documented in the 80s in SWE papers. Now with AI we up the change pace so the effects are felt much sooner - Instant Legacy! Be carefulstatic.klipy.comCreepy Skeletal Figure with Long White HairAlt: Creepy Skeletal Figure with Long White Hair melting into dust from the Last Crusade it’s instant aging just now for your code 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 08/09/2026So is it an intelligent AI swarm or did you put a harness on hacking tools have it loop with an LLM and intersect it with devs being crazy bad at web app security? It’s the later people & it’s still super bad. It’s like the internet worm from the late 80s & things will go 💥 but this is not AGI! 😡 001
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026AGI is here just like coding is solved. As in no, no it actually isn’t. 031
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 07/09/2026My feed is blowing up because Bernie has bad AI takes from weirdo tech bro connections. Clearly this has exploded people’s priors about Sanders. This is more about tech weasels infiltrating politics so maybe we should check all political tech advisors as few politicos know tech themselves 000
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Ok a little iphone-stalgia for you #retro nos4.funnos4.funIntroducing nOS4Everything you remember. Right in your browser. 010
Thomas A. Powell @tpowell.bsky.social · 05/09/2026Motor City is a film you can’t like. You can love it or you can hate it. There isn’t much in between I won’t say much 😏 else about it as not to spoil it either way. If you are unsure imagine if Arnold did an art house revenge film. If that sounds intriguing you’ll want to watch it. 000