Arf! I’m Tony Bark. Artist by day, programmer by night. Gamer all the way.

Foxtrot Delta TACO.

  • 17 posts
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Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: June 4th, 2023

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos believes that artificial intelligence is going to lead to unprecedented productivity gains which could result in cheaper food, housing, and two income households deciding that they no longer need two incomes. Internally, Amazon employees mock the company’s AI tools, refer to its output as “slop,” and joke about the company’s failed attempt to motivate employees to use AI tools effectively.

The memes are yet another example of the contrast between what AI companies say in public about its potential power and benefit versus the reality of how the people who help create these AI tools use and criticize them internally. Amazon employees told me about these memes after they saw my story last week about Google employees also internally sharing memes critical of Google’s AI tools.

“Now I have everything I need,” says the text over an image of a jet taking off in one meme posted by an Amazon employee. The jet is edited to carry the purple ghost logo for Kiro, Amazon’s AI-powered coding tool. “Narrator: He did not have everything he needed,” says the text over an image of a bunch of people left behind on the tarmac. I’ve recreated all the memes rather than share screenshots from the Slack channel in order to protect sources.

We recently wrote about Torvalds’ atypically subtle and nuanced position on the use of LLM bots in coding. It seems that the reasons have suddenly become a little clearer.

Google’s Antigravity LLM has been winning other friends of late, including Register columnist Mark Pesce, who wrote that “vibe coding will deliver a wonderful proliferation of personalized software.” Some other big names in the world of FOSS have also come out in favor of LLM coding assistants recently, including Redis creator Salvatore “Antirez” Sanfilippo, who wrote “don’t fall into the anti-AI hype.” Said hype is, of course, a subject about which Torvalds opined previously.

Torvalds’ position has been more moderate, which is not entirely like his former self. He is famed for his outbursts at Nvidia, GitHub, third-party companies, and kernel contributors. We could go on, but you get the picture.

Imagine a free and open source software (FOSS) developer seeking to distribute an application on Apple’s iOS or iPadOS. The developer aims to have the software curated within a non‑profit, free software‑oriented repository, similar to F‑Droid on Android. This matters not only for the developer but also for users who want to avoid a distribution model where Apple controls how software is made available.

This is, indeed, only an imaginary scenario, since this isn’t possible on iOS or iPadOS. Apple offers no option for a non-profit or community-driven FOSS app store. The company actively blocks such initiatives through steep financial requirements and tight restrictions, preventing users from freely installing software. This issue was discussed during the 2024 Article 19 Digital Markets Act (DMA) Enforcement Symposium and even led to a formal complaint submitted by civil society groups in 2025.

  • I was part of project that scoffed at the idea documenting code. Comments were also few and far between. In retrospective, it really seemed like they wanted to give that elitist feel because everything reeked of wanting to keep things under wraps despite everything being done out in the freakin’ open.

Rust 1.89 is now released, expanding x86 and x86/x86_64 platform support with new processor instructions and features, including additional AVX-512 intrinsics. The target_feature attribute adds support for SHA512, SM3, SM4, KL, and WIDEKL, giving developers better access to modern CPU capabilities directly from Rust code.

Full changelog: https://blog.rust-lang.org/2025/08/07/Rust-1.89.0/