CIRCLE WITH A DOT

#LispyGopherClimate show

About 6 hours from now: https://anonradio.net/listen/

I will be guest-hosting the show this week, Wednesday 2026 February 11 at midnight UTC, giving a bit of relief to @screwlisp@gamerplus.org

Feel free to comment on this post for topics, or in response to things we say on the show.

Join the IRC-like chat, which is not IRC but MUD ("Multi-User Dungeon"), the Lambda Moo server, using telnet:

telnet lambda.moo.mud.org
connect
join @screwtape

#tech #podcast #LispyGopherClimateShow #Lisp #ClimateChange #GopherProtocol #GeminiProtocol #PublicAccessUnix #Tildeverse #SmallWeb #Permacomputing #Degrowth

References to reports and articles:

• "Lie to Me," a poem about trust and honesty, by Kent M. Pitman
• AI cannot live up to the hype
• 2025 European Lisp Symposium: Robert Smith: Toward safe, flexible, and efficient software in Common Lisp (a presentation about Coalton)
• Olympics Torched: How the Winter Olympics being a platform for polluters is melting the snow it depends on
• World Bank: World Annual Fresh Water Losses Could Supply 280 Million People
• Continental Drying: A Threat to our Common Future
• Our World in Data: Global primary energy consumption by source
• Our World in Data: What's the difference between direct and substituted primary energy?
• International Energy Agency: Energy Demand for AI

#LLM technology, what people call #AI or #GenerativeAI nowadays, has long had trouble counting how many R's there are in the word "strawberry," or winning a game of chess against a computer built in the 1970s. Quoting @lproven@vivaldi.net in the linked article:

As Daniel Stenberg, author of curl, caustically observed

"The "i" in "LLM" stands for intelligence."

And yes, @lproven@vivaldi.net I too am sick and tired of these damn hype cycles. In my lifetime, the only technologies for which hype around them have been vindicated are:

1. the invention of the "microcomputer," which made personal computers a reality. Before that, everyone thought computers were only useful for huge corporations who needed to do accounting and payroll for thousands of employees, and/or physics simulations. The idea that anyone would need a computer in their home was absurd, until the invention of the microcomputer.
2. the invention of the World Wide Web, which was the technology that made the Internet useful for ordinary people. Prior to the WWW the Internet was pretty much only available to academics, scientists, and engineers. The idea that you could use your computer to collaborate on projects with anyone anywhere in the world suddenly went from science-fiction to reality.

I have yet to see a hype cycle around any technology that comes anywhere near the level of "disruption" than those two things. Smartphones don't count, they are just a result of "Moore's Law" applied to microcomputer technology. If anything, Smartphones have been a regression in UI/UX design; one step forward, one step back. Combine that with massive centralized social networks, then smartphones amount to two steps back.

#tech #computers