But then users start to report a weird bug. It's the 4th time your team has been trying to fix it. I mean... asking AI to fix it. Unfortunately, it seems like not even Fable can figure it out.
You go talk to the person who worked on this feature.
"So where does the data come from?"
"Hmm... actually I don't know. Let me ask Claude."
You sit next to each other watching an endless wall of text appear on the screen. Neither of you has any idea whether any of it is true but Claude seems very confident. [...]
This project has become so convoluted, with so many layers and services, that no one on your team could possibly start to understand what's going on.
— Florian Herrengt, AI is removing the middle class of software engineering
This is what software engineers need to fight. Not by not using AI but by having the discipline and the leadership level buy in to actually understand what they are doing and why they are doing. Cognitive debt is a brick wall that will hit companies left and right more and more.
On Friday, I got an email from actress Reese Witherspoon. She says she wants to turn my book The History of Jazz into a film.
Give Reese some credit—she clearly knows my book and describes it in painful detail. Okay, her email was a bit bland and verbose, but Ms. W. writes perfectly, without grammatical errors or even any typos. I feel clumsy by comparison.
And please don’t tell me that it sounds like a scammer with a chatbot. That’s so cruel. Who would dare catfish unsuspecting authors so callously?
Are you envious? Well, it gets better.
Please support my work by taking out a premium subscription—for just $6 per month (even less if you sign up for a year).
This morning, I heard from Jerry Bruckheimer, the famous Hollywood producer of films such as Top Gun and Pirates of the Caribbean. He wants to make a movie based on my book Music: A Subversive History.
I’m even more impressed by Bruckheimer. Not only does he know my work—and writes about it just as cogently as Reese—but he has read it in the Italian translation (Musica: Una Storia Sovversiva). What a savant!
Yeah, I hate dropping all these names. But as they say in elite circles: It ain’t braggin’ if it’s true.
That said, I’m worried I may have blown it already. Reese ghosted me after I responded to her solicitation.
So I decided to ratchet down my expectations for Jerry B. I’ve already sent out my response—with a more modest request.
I mean, if my book really is an “exceptionally visual foundation for storytelling,” it ought to be worth some socks, no?
Reese Witherspoon on the red carpet—maybe I’ll join her there some day? (Photo by Eve Rinaldi)
I definitely need some new opportunities—because all those book clubs that contacted me last month never actually came through with the goods.
I don’t understand it. They tell me, over and over, that my books are perfect for their readers, but they keep trying to get me on the phone for some reason.
On a totally unrelated note, I see that the AI backlash has ramped up in just the last few days. It makes you wonder why.
Just last week, I predicted that “we are now embarking on the stage where there’s pushback even inside the slop companies.” And this week it’s already coming true.
Even the bots are now battling the bots. For example, at Anthropic…
Bonds don’t get mentioned much by the mainstream media, but they will now determine the future of Silicon Valley—which increasingly spends more cash than it brings in.
When you borrow too much, you lose control of your destiny. That is now the new normal for the largest tech empires. And if lenders continue to back away, we will witness a fall of Humpty Dumpty proportions.
In a worst case scenario, this could push the whole economy into a tailspin.
That’s why I need to land one of these movie deals—it will be my safe port in the storm.
C’mon Reese, give me another chance….
POSTSCRIPT:
Some people are taking this article at face value. So I need to declare that I’m fully aware that these are scam emails. I shared them here for humorous purposes (and also as a warning to other writers).
I’m not really bragging about my relationship with Reese Witherspoon. I don’t have one, and I’m sure she had nothing to do with the email I received. The same is true for Jerry Bruckheimer.
I’m flattered that some readers saw these as legit, but my life is nowhere near as glamorous as they imagine.
Over the course of around an hour, Twitch chief product officer Mike Minton and head of community Mary Kish fielded an avalanche of questions, principal among them: Why not make this feature opt-in by default—thereby giving those who don’t hyper-vigilantly have their finger on Twitch’s purple pulse an actual choice—instead of opt-out?
“Now why is it not opt-in?” said Minton. “That’s what everybody here is spamming in chat. I get it. ‘Let me opt in versus making me opt out.’ There’s an honest answer, and I think most of you can probably appreciate this: If it was opt-in, nobody would opt in. That’s honestly the answer.”
This was followed by a torrent of all-caps chat responses that included “THEN DON’T ROLL IT OUT,” “SO WHY EVEN DO IT,” and “IF NO ONE WOULD OPT IN THAT MEANS NO ONE WANTS IT.”
Twitch
The remainder of the stream saw users barrage the duo with questions equal parts fast and furious, to which they replied in empathetic tones while completely failing to justify the new feature. At the crux of Minton and Kish’s argument was the idea that companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are already scraping the entire internet for data anyway, so Twitch and Amazon—the smol-est of beans—can’t help but follow along.
"If models were trained on your VOD, it may or may not even have been Amazon,” said Minton. “It was likely any one of the...dozens of companies that are creating models that are using any publicly available content they can find."
"It's a delicate topic, and I think our community has the reaction that I expected you guys to have, which is that you don't like this,” said Kish in response to a question about streamers potentially losing money because viewers might leave Twitch over AI. “Because this is industry standard, going other places won't absolve you of this…It's not as easy as saying everyone's just gonna leave, because this is something that's really across the board. It's something that's happening on livestreaming communities across the space."
But of course, when it comes to livestreaming, Twitch likes to position itself as an industry leader, so these words rang hollow to many in chat.
"If GenAI is 'industry standard,' why are you not helping us fight against it?” asked one chatter. “Why are you rolling over and hiding behind excuses?"
Minton and Kish also took great pains to distinguish between Amazon’s AI training and AI currently in use on Twitch, which already powers captions, safety, and newer features streamers can opt out of like stream summaries and auto clips. Twitch features, said Minton, are powered by pre-existing models, not whatever Amazon has cooking. As for how Amazon plans to use Twitch streamers’ livestreams, VODs, and chat, it’s bewilderingly unclear.
"I'm not responsible for Amazon's training efforts in terms of use of this content, generative AI training,” said Minton. “I would assume anything that's part of your channel content [is fair game for training]."
"We do know that it's being used to train models, but it's a broad stance of what you can train a model for,” Kish later clarified. “Giving you a list of 500 use cases I don't think is actually helpful."
Twitch also does not plan to add any sort of labeling system that will help users tell at a glance who’s opted in and who hasn’t. Additionally, even if you opt out, your chat data can still be used if you spend time in the chat of someone who’s opted in.
Twitch
Has Amazon already been using Twitch data to train its models? Also unclear.
"Twitch has not been training models,” said Minton. “I can't speak to what Amazon is training or not training as it relates to any specific usage of content."
But again, other people are almost certainly doing it, so Amazon—only one of the biggest companies in human history—really doesn’t have any choice here.
"There's 10-25 companies around the world that are creating some of these, what we'll call, 'frontier' large language models,” said Minton. “I don't know this conclusively, but I think it's a pretty reasonable assumption that almost any available content is being used for model training in one form or another, whether permitted or not. So I think we also just need to acknowledge that there's a lot here that is even beyond our direct control."
Minton did clarify, however, that Amazon and Twitch don’t sell data to other third parties, which is, I suppose, the infinitesimally smallest speck of something.
"We do not resell the data to other companies that are training models,” he said. “That's not what's going on here. We're not profiting or making any money by selling your data."
Viewers in chat also repeatedly brought up a pre-existing UserVoice feedback form requesting that Twitch make AI features opt-out by default. Minton and Kish acknowledged it but once again acted as though Twitch’s hands were tied.
“‘Wasn't this clear in the UserVoice?’” said Kish. “There's no misunderstanding."
"We're not tone deaf in terms of knowing where the community stands,” said Minton. “We hear you loud and clear."
In response to that and similar questions, the two again encouraged users to opt out, with Kish even noting that she’d done so with her own channel because she’s aware that members of her community would disapprove otherwise. Minton, on the other hand, said that if, hypothetically, he were a streamer, he’d probably keep the feature on.
"I saw a recent survey that said more than half of adults now use some form of AI on a daily basis,” he said. “Its usage is as high as it's ever been. Now you wouldn't know that from reading Twitch chat, of course. That is a general population-type study. It's also true that the anxiety and anger about AI is as high as ever. Those two things are in conflict. Our bet is that in the long run, the concerns of creators and all the participants in the ecosystem will be addressed, and that in the same way past technology transformations had concerns that were addressed over time, by focusing on improving the experience for creators and viewers on Twitch ... it helps viewers understand what's going on."
He added, however, that "I understand that I live in a bubble that is not your reality as it relates to this technology and the use of it."
None of this left viewers feeling particularly satisfied or hopeful—something else Minton was only able to meet with vague platitudes.
"I saw some folks comment in chat,” he said. “It's always hard to do these streams where the community is super angry. It's not that we're unprepared. Just know that what we're trying to do is triangulate answers to questions that are complex questions that have in some cases concerns from a 'What we say can get us in trouble' perspective—not just with the community, but literally in trouble in different ways around the world. Obviously I am not speaking on behalf of Amazon in terms of any of their efforts. So there's this triangulation going on in terms of trying to find an answer that is as hopefully as helpful as possible to explain what's happening here and why without breaking into jail."
We know this because, a few weeks ago, a Dutch physicist named Thijs — who owns Mollie — rigged up the rescued hamster’s running wheel to Strava, a popular app that runners use to log their miles. Thijs found that Mollie typically runs around six miles every night.
“He’s beating me,” Thijs told the CBC. “Almost 70 kilometres a week, which I think many people doing marathon training would be happy to hit.”
The internet loves a quirky animal story, and this one has gotten plenty of attention on Reddit and X. Mollie even got a recent profile in Runner’s World, and he now has over 9,000 followers on Strava. Mollie’s Strava updates are headlined with cute puns like “No Rest for the Whiskered,” and “The Fast and the Furriest.”
I get why so many people are cheering on Mollie and his commitment to going the distance: Hamsters are adorable, and the idea of one logging miles on Strava is extra charming. But the light-hearted virality of the story masks a fundamental problem with owning small pets like hamsters. Mollie evolved to run in an open and diverse ecosystem, but he lives in a small cage and doesn’t have much to do besides circle endlessly in a simple wheel.
Big problems with small pets
Most pet hamsters are Syrian hamsters, native to that country’s Aleppinian plateau — steppe terrain in the northern part of the country. In the wild, they regularly traverse the landscape to forage for food, consuming a wide sampling of seeds, fruits, insects, and green vegetation. They store their haul in their cheeks while journeying back to their two-foot deep burrows.
But, as pets, they’re largely fed a monotonous diet of grain pellets and are confined to tiny cages where they can’t engage in their natural behaviors, like building proper burrows, traveling for food, and exploring their turf. Confining a dog or cat in a kennel for all or most of their lives would no doubt be a severe form of cruelty, yet we’ve normalized doing so for small animals whom we’re less likely to view as capable of suffering, even though there’s no scientific basis for that assumption.
And while you might think it could be nice for an animal to not have to work for their food, research has found that many species don’t like to freeload (cats might be one exception). On top of all of that, according to some research, these smaller pets are less likely to receive veterinary care to address their ailments and injuries than cats and dogs.
Their tedious and confined existence can contribute to “stereotypic” behavior: repetitive motions, like gnawing on cage bars, that are indicators of stress. Some animal welfare researchers have proposed that wheel use could also be a sign of stress — or that it could indicate an urge to run or escape. One other study suggested it might help reduce other stereotypic behaviors.
“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told Vox for a previous story. She was talking about small pets in general — not just hamsters, but also species like snakes, fish, and birds, most of whom are still much more wild than our domesticated cats and dogs (who also might not be as happy as we think).
Thijs, for his part, is sympathetic to these concerns, which he told me over email were fair. “I hope the attention that Mollie got will not result in people impulsively buying hamsters (and then forgetting about them after it turns out their hamsters just sleep 80% of the time),” he said.
He adopted Mollie from someone who could no longer take care of him and who kept him in an even smaller enclosure. “[Mollie] showed some behaviour that really concerned us back then (climbing, biting the fence, etc),” Thijs said over email. So, within the first week, he upgraded Mollie to a larger cage and a larger wheel and got him some toys, which seemed to improve his mood.
“I think some behavioural aspects (more running, digging tunnels in the bedding, ‘foraging’ if we hide food in the bedding) make his behaviour closer to natural, but it’s, of course, never like in the wild,” he said. Thijs also wonders whether his data-gathering might provide insight into how certain actions — like when he cleans Mollie’s bedding or when he stays up late watching Netflix — affects Mollie’s running behavior.
“People often talk about pets being ‘happy,’ but, especially with small animals, that’s difficult to assess objectively,” he told me. “I’m curious whether long-term activity data might give us useful clues about changes in his behaviour or wellbeing!”
Inside a “hamster mill”
While Thijs adopted Mollie, there’s also the question about where many of these pets come from. A 2024 undercover investigation by the nonprofit Last Chance for Animals into a massive US “hamster mill” documented thousands of rodents being bred and raised in overcrowded, small, barren cages. Some of the animals were dehydrated, diseased, and suffered from wounds. Individual animals weren’t provided with veterinary care, and breeding hamsters whose production dropped — along with litter runts — were gassed to death.
Investigations into otherrodent mills have foundsimilar problems. Such investigations, combined with veterinarians’ concerns with keeping small animals as pets, has driven some cities — including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC — to prohibit pet stores from selling rodents and other small pets.
I don’t mean to single out Thijs for his interesting experiment, especially considering he adopted Mollie and immediately improved his life. But animal ethicists like Pierce argue that however much effort one puts into giving these small pets a better life, it likely doesn’t ever add up to a good life, considering the constraints of cage confinement and other common care issues.
To Pierce and some of her colleagues, the sizable gap between what small pets need and what they often get reveals a largely hidden but serious crisis of animal neglect and suffering. And that’s rarely mentioned, if at all, in viral social media posts or news articles about these critters.
If we take a moment to pause and see Mollie’s life for what it is — and examine the industry that breeds these small animals for profit — all those miles he’s logging on Strava seem more like daily posts saying that he’s striving for a far different life with no way to get there.
“This entire ‘track his runs on Strava’ thing started off more as a geeky side-project, I never expected it to get anywhere near this much attention,” Thijs told me. “But it’d be nice if you can use it as a way to educate people (including me!) about the ethical considerations!”
I’ve seen a strange problem in my inbox that I haven’t been able to put into words. A saga involving a botched app release helped me figure it out.
I remember when I came up with my first idea that I shared with the world.
It was a dating site for people who didn’t want to share photos of themselves, but build text-only connections. I didn’t know what I was doing; I only really knew HTML and CSS at this point. The idea, so esoteric, died on the vine; I often forget about it myself.
Eventually, I found another idea that I thought had real potential. But I had a different reason for building it: Beyond having been laid off, I hated not finishing projects, and I wanted to understand what it would feel like to see something through.
So, I did. That became my site ShortFormBlog. It was a lot of work, and a lot of heart went into it. At the time, there were always new, weird things that emerged online.
This spirit of creation is what gave us interesting sites like Hacker News and Product Hunt, where something new is always on display.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because I’ve seen a sudden surge of emails highlighting various new projects, some seemingly personal, some clearly the start of new businesses or viral plays. And I don’t want to take away from that spirit of creation, which has given me so much over the years. But I think there’s a danger in how much AI gets used for these projects. I’m not going to name names, nor attack any one user, but I do want to note that it’s often quite clear, when these projects land on my doorstep, where they come from.
Generally, they start with a message that attempts to flatter my work or highlight just how much of a fit their thing really is with my thing. But when I click in, it’s clear that so much of what’s been built, soup to nuts, is AI. Even the email is AI, which is why it’s so flattering. I’ve been around long enough to know that it’s often not a personal note, but a hustle of sorts.
Unlike in the 2010s, when a new startup pitching a thing felt like a PR email, these messages instead come across as being of the spirit that I created my projects. And given that it’s messaging like a personalized can-do project while actually being a PR email, it has started to bother me.
I haven’t been able to figure out why I’ve been feeling this way about these messages, but a story that blew up over the weekend I think really made it clear.
Terry Godier’s Dark Hours, as it existed on the Web before it was taken down over the weekend. (Internet Archive)
Did Claude copy an app idea wholesale?
Earlier this year, Terry Godier won a lot of fans among techies for suggesting a new approach to RSS readers, which became his Mac and iOS app Current. He’s continued to build ideas like that, along with an impressive blog, when he ran into a bit of a snag with his latest app, an astronomy app named Dark Hours.
The app was blocked from the App Store after a review, with Apple citing the app’s astrology content, a category it has long banned. Astronomy isn’t astrology, you’re thinking, right? That’s what Daring Fireball’s John Gruber also thought when he wrote a full-throated defense of the app, based in part on a behind-the-scenes conversation with Godier. Turns out, it started as an astrology app, only to become an astronomy app. (Weird leap, right?) That undermined the entire point of Gruber’s post, and led to a rare retraction from Gruber.
If that was all, that’d be one thing. But the app, built with the help of Claude, appeared to be a close copy of another open-source app built with Claude. The creator of the existing project called Godier out, and shit really hit the fan at that point. Godier responded by stopping distribution of his app and encouraging people to use the existing open-source Dark Hours.
The OTHER Dark Hours app, which the developer noted appeared to share portions of his code.
Some are skeptical of Godier’s explanation of what happened, given that he appears to have misled Gruber. Godier denies even being aware of the other app, but he used the same name, and the developer shared specific examples of ideas copied from the existing tool. The optics ain’t great.
I’m not going to credit malice, as I’m not close enough to say whether he did anything wrong. But it does dovetail into the problem that I’ve been seeing in my inbox.
How human should vibe-coded apps be if you’re going to share them publicly? (DepositPhotos.com)
When you can’t trust the weekend tinkerer
Technology has long been a space of hustlers, of people who want to impress. By that standard, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two of the greatest hustlers that ever lived. But my heart has always been with the people just getting started and trying the new thing, as that’s always the mode I’ve seen myself in.
Which is why I’ve been at least mildly optimistic about vibe coding helping make room for new types of creatives. I’ve never liked the “learn to code” gatekeepery stuff and I certainly don’t want to gatekeep people who just want to see an idea through. But there’s clearly a problem when people building new things, going through the steps of launching it and sharing it with the world, can’t even write the email announcing the thing themselves.
I’ve been clear in my views of AI, the bionic arms of it all. I don’t think it’s necessarily dangerous if you’re being honest about what you’re doing and why. But if you’re building a thing, there has to be a point when the tool stops and you begin. I don’t mean that you even have to code the damn thing if you don’t know how; I reject gatekeeping every day of the week and refuse to take a knee-jerk approach to artificial intelligence. (If gatekeeping is bad in one situation, it is bad in every situation.) But I do think it needs to reflect you, your passions, and your creativity.
If the Dark Hours situation is true, and Claude did end up copying an existing open-source project and turning it into an app, the whole idea of whether you created it becomes an open question. But even if it isn’t, an infusion of your own interests and personality go a long way to make that story yours.
That spirit of creation, which got me so excited about the internet when I first got online, is real. Back in 2009, I helped a random site that I thought was interesting but was poorly coded with a redesign, just because I thought it would help make it successful, and because I thought it could bring me traffic. (It did, on both counts. I didn’t ask to be paid for it, I just liked scratching someone else’s back.)
I’m seeing email after email suggesting these users built a thing they’re truly passionate about. But if we can’t trust that this passion is real, legit, and from the heart, we’re in trouble.
Take a step back. Is this thing you built a reflection of you?
Gatekeeping-Free Links
I love it when rare cartridges show up in the wild, and we just had a case of that involving 97 pristine late-era versions of the Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt cart—the pack-in cart for most U.S.-model Nintendo Entertainment Systems.
I guess we gotta talk about this, too. Hank Green ran into a scandal very similar to the discussion above, when he made it clear (after getting accused of using AI in a script) that he was sometimes using AI for his research. This video is effectively an apology to his team. He likely lost a lot of goodwill over this mess, but given that, it’s a fine apology. Dude is overworked. Let’s all work less and make better stuff.
Today’s reminder to maybe not use random domains for your dummy emails.
Interesting, although there are still great search engines that seem to be preserving that modality for now. Kagi works great for me, although I’m also experimenting with using their assistant feature for certain things.
Log in
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