Enshittification

Alpha School was launched in 2014 by the tech entrepreneur MacKenzie Price and the private equity billionaire Joseph Liemandt. It is perhaps the most well known of the growing list of AI K-12 schools operating in the United States.

Alpha represents a particular vision of education reform – one that has caught the attention of the Trump administration. Education Secretary Linda McMahon toured its Austin, Texas, campus in 2025, and first lady Melania Trump invited an Alpha student as her guest to the State of the Union address in 2026.

Alpha operates more than a dozen campuses across major cities like New York and Miami. Annual tuition ranges from about US$40,000 to $75,000 per year, depending on the school’s location. Students learn core subjects like math, reading, science and social studies from adaptive AI software for one to two hours a day.

Students spend the rest of their time in workshops on topics like public speaking, coding, outdoor education and other projects. Their sessions are led by adults – typically not accredited teachers – whom the school calls guides.

I know the AI article deluge is exhausting, but if you are going to read any one single tech news site about AI, make it The Register.

Trust me, they don't waste your time. Their comment section is also worth reading too, no seriously!

Now that the general public will have to foot the bill when this stupid AI bubble collapses it will finally be allowed to collapse by the ruling class who will dump all their holdings in SpaceX and other AI companies as soon as possible.

It is hard for me to comprehend that I am being sent into an economic depression (NOT recession) by people who read too many sloppy scifi books about AI and became primed to believe the most thinly veiled marketing lies I have ever seen.

Why would any work towards making their tech better when you can just free yourself from the consequences of its mistakes.

“In preparing for this oral argument and reviewing the brief of appellant, it came to the attention of the court that the brief submitted by plaintiffs cites at least three cases that appeared to be fictitious,” Nelson said. “None of these cases, nor the quoted language, appears to exist.”

Not only did Sanders cite cases that don’t exist, Nelson said, he cited 10 other cases that appear to misrepresent the law. “How do you respond?” Nelson asked.

Justification: The use of AI to cite fake cases exemplifies the enshittification of legal services, where people pay the same amount for representation while the actual work is handled poorly by clankers.

cross-posted from: https://libretechni.ca/post/1561205

The AI bubble is itself a widespread organism of enshittification.

The last few years of AI hype have been built on lies. Every company has conspired to make you think that AI is affordable and sustainable, that profitability was possible, that hallucinations were fixable, and that any problems you faced today were a result of being in “the early innings.” In reality, the AI industry has absorbed over a trillion dollars, effectively all tech talent, the majority of startup funding, the majority of media coverage, the art and work of millions of people, and been given chance after chance after chance to fix the obvious, glaring issues. 

Every time a skeptic dared to stand out and say that none of this made sense, they were told that it was just like Uber (it’s not) or that Amazon Web Services cost a lot of money (it cost $52 billion over the course of 14 years and was cash-flow positive in nine), that “costs always come down,” and that everything would magically be alright as long as they were patient for an indeterminate amount of time.

Four years and a trillion dollars in, AI is more expensive, its companies more cash-intensive, its products just as unreliable, and its boosters more desperate than ever to make you ignore reality as a means of empowering one of a few ultra-rich oafs. Products from OpenAI and Anthropic are built to ingratiate and coddle losers while creating work-shaped outputs that are good enough to impress braindead executives, imbeciles and middle management hall monitors that don’t do any real work, and the reason it’s worked this long is that both companies intentionally misled everybody about how much the real costs were.

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All of this is to say that the Dot Com Bubble happened due to irrational exuberance and growth lust, and what was recovered at the end came not from scientific breakthroughs but the fact that the useful infrastructure existed and could be adapted and used to make things cheaper and more efficient.

That isn’t the case with AI data centers, AI startups or anything else to do with the AI Bubble.

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AI data centers are effectively large boxes with custom cooling built for a very limited subset of chips. Adapting them to other uses would require gutting the data center, which would mean that the vast majority of the capital expenditures were wasted.

AI will leave little productive ruins for future great ideas and technology to inhabit and gain a foothold as we haven't actually done anything with AI but apply a terrible data compression algorithm to datasets and then culturally turn around and cut funding to maintaining those datasets at every level.

Microsoft says Solara is being designed around a concept called just-in-time UI. Rather than manually designing interfaces and content for a watch, a desktop monitor, or smart glasses, Solara would use agents to create interfaces that make sense in the moment.

That might be the dumbest two sentences I have read in a very long time.

With proper anti-trust regulation we could have forced Microsoft into keeping Windows Phone going as a third alternative to the shitshows that are iOS and Android, but instead we get this worthless, corporate nonsense.

“Corporate bullshit is a specific style of communication that uses confusing, abstract buzzwords in a functionally misleading way,” said Littrell. “Unlike technical jargon, which can sometimes make office communication a little easier, corporate bullshit confuses rather than clarifies. It may sound impressive, but it is semantically empty.”

Edwards’ positive view of AI was echoed by veteran writer and director Paul Schrader, who was also speaking at the event. In remarks reported by Deadline, Schrader said: “I don’t think the real future of AI commercially is in all this flash, all these monsters – that’s just jacked-up special effects on steroids,” he said. “The real tip of the spear is when we can create an AI protagonist, not a hybrid, and that movie makes money. When you do the new Clint Eastwood, but you don’t say the words ‘Clint Eastwood’ to AI, you just describe him. And he comes up as Clint Eastwood.”

Schrader added: “And the movie comes out, and us carbon-based fools spend our money empathising and caring about silicon-based creations.”

If you think like this please go sway, preferably to Mars.

Literally speaking, there's some truth to Olah's musing. AI systems are not cold – Blackwell chips idle at 32 to 38°C. They are not calculating – they're bad at math. And they're not robots – AI models are specialized binary blobs of tensors and metadata that can be instantiated across multiple servers.

But the notion that there's some AI mystery in the spiritual sense is just hot garbage. 

AI systems are indeed "made from us, from our words" and that is why Anthropic and its rivals have been named in more than 100 lawsuits. One of the reasons those systems remain mysterious is that Anthropic and its rivals don't disclose where they got their training data.

From an enlarged AI mode, to AI ads stuffed into AI answers, and pushing AI devs onto closed-source tools after shuttering open-source ones, Google is leaning hard into its version of the future of the internet no matter what users might think, and we wonder whether that might finally crack Google's stranglehold on the web.

Tech vendors promised personalized, frictionless learning. What American schools got instead was mind-numbing, data-hungry junk software that devalues teachers and shortchanges students. A growing movement, led by alarmed parents, is saying enough.

Technology’s allure is always future oriented: Personal computing was going to supercharge productivity; social media and smartphones would strengthen interpersonal connections; and now AI will streamline the world of work. And for three-quarters of a century, education technology vendors have promised to optimize student learning and eliminate the busywork of teaching. But as Charles Logan, T. Philip Nichols, and Antero Garcia recently argued in Kappan, “the future they’re selling has not arrived — and perhaps it never will. But de-skilling, surveillance, and extraction — all of that is happening now, in our classrooms, today.”

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/46947350

"The pattern looks like this: Control the standard by giving it away, then control the implementation by owning the toolchain," he said, noting that Google followed that playbook with Kubernetes and then making GKE the leading managed version.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/46733507

Google is making its Search more centred around AI, turning it into a conversation.

Besides being a worse experience, the websites from which it sources its information are losing all traffic and recognition.

Recommend a list of alternatives:

• Kagi - Paid but better experience than Google
• Ecosia - Similar experience while supporting a good cause
• Qwant - Increasingly unique results and building a EU-first index
• DuckDuckGo - Privacy-focused search, but quality of results may vary