Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI (05 Dec 2025)

link-sharing for internet archaelogists

Sequentially arranged sentences composed of words (and punctuation)

How we make our lives unnecessarily harder

Bunch of links about reading, history, bit of AI, and so on

I recently wrote about how code review is dying as a gatekeeping mechanism. Pull requests take seconds to create and hours to evaluate. Since writing that po...

Instead of writing my tech comms predictions for next year like I did in 2024, I’ve written a fictionalized account of my day as a technical writer in 2030. It’ll be interesting to see whether we get there or not. Take it as a window into a possible future, one where AI usage is safer, more regulated, and better integrated with our workflows (as it should be).

rOpenSci is testing preliminary policies on the use of generative AI tools, with proposed updates to documentation and procedures for authors submitting software for review, for editors, and for reviewers.

Whose shoulders can you stand on, if you can’t associate with different groups of people?

Clinical trials, cancer research, book reviews, coffee making, photography, and the like.

Blog about things

Ruby news The drama continues to rumble on with the core language group now taking on responsibility of the dependency management from the US Ruby Central group. I’m not sure this really repr…

Why you really should stop using online AI tools: a look at **the true benefits** they bring, the **environmental costs**, and the **financial state** of the industry.

Let's get into personal stuff, freelance work, and open source projects.

Automations are great. It’s pretty cool to explore building them. And it’s exhillarating when it works. This is the appeal behind Factorio, a game entirely about building and optimizing supply chains. It’s addictive watching your expanding world of conveyor belts, resource extraction, and processing facilities. Building the POSSE script for this website has felt similar. It’s easier than ever for workers in the knowledge economy to build automation into their workflows. As knowledge workers, we often build automations to save time, but without intentional design we inadvertently build systems that make demands on us. When you propose some kind of automation, people will respond to it based on how that system can be deployed in a context where it’s used to accelerate and coordinate work. This post is a call to consider the human element when we’re building and promoting automation.

Notes on design, development, and creative process from Vi Saint, a product designer and web developer.

I was coding with Claude the other day, and like many engineers, I experienced the magical surge of productivity, and awe, watching it produce options for so...

Glenn Fleishman is singlehandedly keeping me interested in Kickstarter. Just this week he has set up another campaign: the proposed book title is “That One Matt Bors Comic” and it is a book about a meme which was supposedly viral but I don’t remember seeing until two days ago. Still, the concept is interesting and I would like to learn more. And just as I finished backing Fleishman’s, I noticed that Cory Doctorow also a campaign. It is for The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, a book based on a similarly-named essay about “reverse centaurs” — people whose job it is to augment AI instead the other way around — i.e., potentially, all of us proles. Yes, even doctors. Particularly doctors.

We live in a stupidly polarizing world where nuance is apparently not allowed. Everyone wants you to be for or against something—and nowhere is this more exhausting than with AI. There are those wh…

Legal risks of AI, approaching AI with ethics, and a recap of Anil Dash's Day 1 keynote. That's a wrap for 26NTC!

Exploits will soon be cheaper to develop autonomously than they earn. What then?

1 The knowledge class and its enemies Writing for The Nation, Elizabeth Spiers reaches for Richard Hofstadter's Anti-Intellectualism in American Life to frame something that should have been nagging at the edges of tech criticism for quite some time. Hofstadter's great insight was that anti-intellectualism in America has historically come

SECURITY | AI | PURPOSE :: Building AI that upgrades humans.

I’m thrilled to announce that Harvard’s Graduate School of Design has invited me to teach a second semester long workshop! It’s called Re-imagining the Archive, and we’ll be engaging with the holdings of prominent institutions like MoMA and Harvard Art Museums to investigate the intersection of culture, technology and society. We recently published a “studio”...

As a movement, it has largely refused to engage seriously with AI, ceding debate about a threat and opportunity to the right