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September 2026

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I Don’t Want to Interact With Stochastic Parrots
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 09 Sep '26

09 Sep '26

I DON’T WANT TO INTERACT WITH STOCHASTIC PARROTS by Ploum on 2026-09-09 https://ploum.net/2026-09-09-ai_policy.html > My AI policy is "I don’t want any kind of interaction with that thing." And this should be all you need to know. I don’t care if you call it AI, LLM, chatbot, or whateverGPT. I simply don’t want to interact with it in any form. If you interact with me, make sure to never send me any output from those nor to use it as a "source" to justify one of your arguments. I’m one of those people deeply interested in all the extraordinary stuff other humans have to say. Unfortunately, life is already too short to hear them all. I need to make a lot of choices. That’s why I will not tolerate any attempt to steal the little time I’ve on this planet by making me interact with stochastic algorithms trained to produce tons of "average," non-human content. The direct consequence of my choice is that I will refuse to interact with humans who take pride in making themselves a meat interface between me and the algorithm they’ve chosen to replace their free will. I will not read your website, I will ignore your emails and I will happily walk away from real-life conversations as soon as it is clear that I’m not talking to a fully sentient Homo sapiens sapiens but to an empty shell who has happily delegated their cognitive abilities to an external proprietary tool designed to be some sort of "random average garbage." I will not read the text ======================== The very essence of writing is what makes you think. When you write, even something as mundane as a short email, you transform a bunch of contradictory neural stimuli into an ordered thought. If you don’t care to write it, there’s no reason I should waste one single second reading it. The effort should be on your side first. I don’t mind mistakes, typos, or badly formed sentences. In fact, I subtly appreciate them when we interact because they are part of you, they tell a lot about yourself. I’m not a literary agent, I will not judge your way of writing: I’m there to exchange ideas, knowledge, and experiences. If you find yourself typing a prompt to express your idea, then just send me that prompt. I’m not interested in what an algorithm would do with your prompt, I want to know what you asked in the first place. I care about you, the human. You may find it hard to express yourself, to write what you think: remember that the less you practice, the worse it will be. Prompting might feel easier. It does not make it right. If it is from an algorithm, it is not you. Only you can write what’s inside yourself. I will not look at the pictures =============================== Generated images. Seriously. They all look hideous. When I spot one in a given context, I immediately have a feeling of cheapness, bad taste, and poor culture. Like this fancy restaurant of a luxury hotel I saw in a big European city. It had a huge AI generated picture on its main building: a kid eating malformed fries with his six- fingered hand and putting them in his skull through his cheek. Or this other restaurant which had a very nice menu, full of pictures of Italian cities. Until the kid’s menu which, was shockingly out of place and totally unnecessary. It also showed a kid awkwardly eating a pizza even though there was no pizza on the kid’s menu. If you don’t have the resources to pay for an artist, you probably don’t need a picture at all. If you are making a poster, write what is important to know instead of burying it in a gloomy generated picture. If you write a blog post, I will not read if it is illustrated by generated pictures. A website illustration, if any, conveys an emotion, a feeling. I sometimes spend more time finding a good illustration for a post than writing it. If I don’t find a satisfying picture, I don’t put any. The first feeling conveyed to me by a generated picture is an uncanny unease, an obnoxious emotion that immediately makes me want to leave. It also tells me enough about the author not to want to know more. It might be a kind of overreaction. But as I said, there’s too much to read anyway so it’s a good first filter. No, that picture is not pretty. No, it is not funny. It doesn’t share any human feeling, any artistic expression. You like it because you had fun generating it. But it is wasting my time. I will not run the code ======================= I don’t want to run generated code on my computer. Good code is knowledge. Even in a purely productivity-oriented business, every line of code should reflect the choice of an employee knowing the business and choosing a way to solve a business problem. Reality is, of course, different. I’ve worked with enough different codebases to know that proprietary software is simply badly coded. Each line is written assuming "I will not be there anymore to deal with it in a few years." But at least we know that each line, as bad as it can be, was added by a human for a reason. LLMs move the needle from "no need to care in a few years" to "no need to care right now." You cannot assume anything about generated code. Maybe it was simply hallucinated and, by chance, it compiled. Which means that, as soon as generated code is added to a project, the whole project becomes unmaintainable by humans. You can’t understand the code because there’s nothing to understand in the first place! It follows that the whole project now needs LLMs for any change which, will make it even worse from a human perspective. We end up adding more and more lines of code nobody understand where the problem has always been "There are too many lines of code and too few people understand them." I’m convinced that accepting generated code will lead most projects to become broken beyond all hope of repair in only a few years. "Carefully reviewing" will soon not be enough. Unfathomable code will eventually slip in and gradually destroy the whole project. I predict that the projects too important to be left to rot and die will take decades to recover from those couple years of "assisted productivity." We need to remember that what we call "code" is merely a specification of the software we want. Those specifications will be given to the compiler to make the real software. The role of a coder is to take vague, imprecise, and contradictory specifications from a manager or customer and then make sure to remove any ambiguity. This could be done by clarifying with the customer or by silently making choices. History and mathematics have demonstrated that humans cannot make unambiguous and non-contradictory specifications without using a formal language designed expressly for that purpose. Natural languages simply cannot remove ambiguities and this may be an evolutionary feature. Removing the coder and replacing them with a tool designed to pretend to agree to anything said could never produce good, maintainable software. It may produce a small throwaway script. It may find security holes more efficiently than fuzzing. But it will never be able to build something useful and reliable for the long term. Which is what I expect from software. I want to be able to trust software enough to invest time in learning it. That has always been one of my main arguments for using open source: if a free software is good enough, I trust that there will always be people to maintain it or to fork it if needed. If I have a problem with a free software, I can always look at the code to understand what the humans who designed it wanted to do. I may also modify it. This is not theoretical: I’ve done that with countless pieces of software in the last 20 years. I rely on it! For that reason, I will carefully avoid running any openly "vibecoded" tool, and I’m trying to focus my efforts on projects that actively try to distance themselves from the current bubble. I will not listen to the discussion =================================== "I’ve asked ChatGPT and…" That’s it. No need to say more. All those years speaking about "fake news" and "checking your sources" just to blindly repeat a random series of letters assembled by a stochastic algorithm? Seriously? I don’t care about your credentials, I don’t care about your experience. With a couple of words, you gladly announced that you are obliterating them and refusing all forms of free will. Goodbye! That’s not very friendly, I know. I never pretended to be. And I didn’t start it. I will not grade the student report =================================== Across the last years, I’ve not managed to find one single student who astonished me with their use of a chatbot. In every single case I’ve met, the use of a chatbot made my student perform worse. Sometimes spectacularly like, this student who contributed to a project on Github but, when asked, could not even tell me what the project was about. On the opposite, forcing the student not to use any AI makes them better every single time. No exception. It also vastly improved their self- confidence. Giving University Exams in the Age of Chatbots (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2026-01-19-exam-with-chatbots.html It is not a matter of "learning to use the tool". You cannot learn to use a proprietary stochastic tool which can be changed at any time. You don’t need to "learn to chat" (and if you do, not in my course). What the "tool" is really doing is making you lose the essential ability to learn, making you lose your self-confidence. As John Scalzi points out: playing Guitar Hero is fun. But even thousands of hours of playing Guitar Hero will not enable you to play "Happy Birthday" on a real guitar. Generative “AI”: The Guitar Hero of Creativity (whatever.scalzi.com) https://whatever.scalzi.com/2026/08/06/generative-ai-the-guitar-hero-of-cre… I consider that my students are in my class to learn. Chatbots are actively preventing any kind of learning. That’s why, from now on, I make it a strict policy that anything my students are submitting should be entirely produced by them. It can be short. It will be imperfect. It will be full of mistakes. It may even be wrong. The report will have fewer bullet points and emojis. But it will be yours, and that’s what I want to see. I will not technologically "enforce" this rule. Cheating has always been part of university. If you are smart enough not to be caught, you probably deserve to pass. But it will probably require a lot more effort on your side than simply writing your own goddamn report with your bloody fingers on a keyboard. I will not judge what you do in private ======================================= AI/chatbots/LLMs are known to have a terrible impact on your brain. They are bad for you, for the whole economy, for the political atmosphere, and for the environment. They consume huge resources, destroy the whole Internet and our ecosystem. But they are addictive, I get it. They make you feel productive (which, studies have demonstrated, is largely a feeling). I consider them a kind of drug. AI Isn’t Breaking Work. It’s Already Broken. (calnewport.com) https://calnewport.com/ai-isnt-breaking-work-its-already-broken/ They may also be useful when you are forced to accomplish a stupid one- time task you don’t want to do but is required. We all have to deal with our share of bullshit jobs, I get it. Using AI is like a shameful drug addiction or a weird sex fetish. If you want to use it privately or between consenting adults, it’s up to you. As long as you don’t brag about it, I will not judge. Just make sure that I don’t have to interact with it. Human made logo by Matt Kindt (commons.wikimedia.org) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_made_logo_by_Matt_Kindt.png

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I Don’t Have a Smartphone…
by Ploum.net (English posts only) 02 Sep '26

02 Sep '26

I DON’T HAVE A SMARTPHONE… by Ploum on 2026-09-02 https://ploum.net/2026-09-02-i_dont_have_a_smartphone.html …or, at least, I wish I didn’t. =============================== "I don’t have a smartphone," is what I tell people and professionals nowadays. This allows me to cut the crap about companies insisting that I install their app or restaurants wishing that I scan a QR code to access their menu on a small screen. "I don’t have a smartphone" is, according to my experience, the easiest explanation, the shortest way to force people to get their shit together and take the required actions to allow me to live without being glued to a small screen dependent on a huge American megacorporation. When I buy something, from a small kitchen appliance to a car, I’m now forced to get formal confirmation by the seller that I will be able to use it without installing one, two or three different apps. I kept the count: in the last year alone, I had to argue against the installation of 18 smartphone apps. Just in my toilet, I’m supposed to have an app for the seat, an app for the flush and one for the ventilation. It is quite fascinating because if you assume using each app for only 3 minutes per day (which basically means opening, closing and does not include doing the upgrade every other day or debugging some problems), that’s nearly 1 hour of your day! 22 full days of your year (assuming 16 waking hours per day). What installing your app means ============================== When you ask someone to install your app or to scan your QR code, you make the following assumptions: 1. That person owns a smartphone (which is at least a couple hundred dollars). 2. That person has the smartphone on them right now. 3. The smartphone is in working condition. 4. It has enough battery to install your app, use it then finish the day. 5. It has enough storage left for your app. 6. It has enough network coverage. 7. That person has enough data left on their data plan. 8. They have a valid and connected Google account (or, an Apple one). 9. They are comfortable with taking out the phone and dedicating some time and attention to the screen right now while not paying attention to all those notifications that the phone surely gathered since its last use. 10. They are willing to accept all the conditions of your apps, including sending you personal data, registering an account, etc. When you think about it, this is an awful lot of assumptions. Just regarding point 8: your Google account could be terminated right now, without reason. It happens every day. It could happen to you. Or an American president could decide your country should not have that service anymore. Et si vos comptes disparaissaient demain ? (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/et-si-vos-comptes-disparaissaient-demain/index.html If only one of those 10 assumptions is false, for whatever reason, the person will not be able to use your app. You will have to deal with it. People always tell me I’m weird for not installing the app but, looking at this list, I find it weird that you even find people to install it in the first place! But here we are… Those 10 assumptions have become the new commandments everyone should obey. Why I will tell you I don’t have a smartphone ============================================= Ten assumptions that are a bit too long to explain to a vendor or a worker. So, instead of arguing about the time lost and my quest to be Google free, I took the stance of answering, "I don’t have a smartphone." Reactions vary. Pure salesmen try to convince me that you can’t live without the app, that I need to do the mandatory "update" Why? If it’s connected, it can do its update alone. If it is offline and it works, it doesn’t need any update and updates have a higher probablility to worsen my situation than to be helpful. If it is offline and it doesn’t work well, why should I buy it in the first place? On the other hand, real workers, those with dirty hands, often smile at me and tell me I’m right or that they wish they could not have a smartphone. On one occasion, a worker installing an appliance told me: "Oh, we will get along well!" Which tells you something important: nobody wants the app. People install the app because they believe it is mandatory in some sort of way. Because they are afraid of missing out on something. Because they are told so by the salesman. But they just don’t want it. In fact, when pressed, most salesmen even have a hard time justifying why I should install the app. So "I don’t have a smartphone." But it is not true. Mudita Kompakt, my not-so-dumb-phone ==================================== My main driver is a Mudita Kompakt, a small minimalist smartphone with an e-ink device. I’ve spoken at length about it in the following piece: Une vie sans notifications (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2025-09-02-mudita.html The main point is that, despite being an e-ink device and being totally Google-free, the Mudita is an Android smartphone. I can install apps and, yes, I love the smartphone concept for the tools I choose. I have Signal (well, I use Molly to connect to Signal). I also have the app of my bike GPS. I don’t use it often but when I’m lost far from everything and it starts raining, I launch the Komoot app, ask for the shortest way home and upload it to my bike computer. That’s very useful innovation! I also use Comaps, an online calendar and the local train schedule app. So, seriously, I do really like the smartphone idea. It’s just that I don’t have any browser or "social" app on it. And I don’t want anything else than what I have. I wish I could say it is all I have, that I’m a true minimalist. But it is not true. The secondary desk phone ======================== Somewhere on my desk, I keep an old FairPhone 3 that I repaired after it took a deep plunge into the ocean. It runs the Google-free /e/OS operating system. But why? The reason is simple: sometimes, you are forced to use an app. Those apps may even check if your phone truly uses Google. So /e/OS has a solution to fake it (microG). The main use case is banking apps. I highly prefer to do banking on my computer. But, having been brainwashed enough by Google, banks think I cannot be trusted to do banking on a computer I own while doing it on a small piece of glass that I keep in my pocket is "safe." Logging in on banking websites requires me to authenticate on a smartphone that checks for Google services. It is not only banking: this secondary phone is very useful to test apps without cluttering my main phone. I’ve learned, thanks to my teenagers, that Strava will not launch without Google services. But it will also refuse to login with the fake microG. The solution is thus to launch Strava with microG enabled, to disable microG while keeping Strava running, to log into the app then to re-enable microG. A similar problem happens when using filters on Snap. Living without Google is not always painless. At least, I can say I’m Google-free. But this is not true. The third, real android phone ============================= I still keep in a drawer an old OnePlus 5 I bought in 2017 with a pristine Android system. The screen is cracked, the USB connector is wobbling but it works. It is still connected to a Gmail account I created in 2001 (invitations were still required!) and that I didn’t even open for the last 10 years. This phone is sometimes necessary. Like when a known bug in /e/OS prevented my banking app from working for several months. Anecdotally, this phone is also the thinnest, the lightest, the best screen I’ve ever seen. Il also takes the best pictures (without any AI). It demonstrates that current smartphones are worst in every aspect compared with those of 10 years ago. The only exception being the CPU: that phone has a very hard time loading Anubis-protected webpages. Everything else is fine. It is hard to have this phone in your hand and not consider we are heavily scammed when we buy a modern phone. In my country, businesses and governments are pushing hard to mandate the use of "Itsme", a proprietary authentication app developed by a commercial joint venture with the explicit intent to extract personal data and sell them commercially (yes, that was explicit in their conditions when they launched the service). I’ve always refused to register and use that service but it is becoming incredibly hard to find alternatives. New EU regulations may also push more apps to check for the "Google Play Integrity" to ensure that they are running on a true Google owned Android. I’m fighting hard but I foresee a moment when we will all be officially forced to have a Google account. If you have children, you are also forced to have a Meta account as everything school related now happens through Whatsapp. So I’m living Meta-free because my wife volunteered to handle the Whatsapp groups. I’m living Google free because, deep in a drawer, there’s still a solution for the day when I could not work it out without Google. Who could have predicted ======================== I’m European. The whole continent is assumed to have a Google and a Meta account. To always have in their pocket a Google or Apple certified and remotely controlled piece of hardware. It is even sometimes assumed to have a Microsoft account (like that time when the platform to be reimbursed from a cancelled ticket assumed a Sharepoint login). This is frightening. We are putting all our eggs in the same basket. And our milk, our water, our house, our furniture and our loved ones. In an electrical-auto-closing basket remotely controlled by a foreign entity that openly spies on us and wants to extract as much money as they can. For some reason, it is considered weird not to like the basket. At least, some are trying to build alternatives Why there’s no European Google? (ploum.net) https://ploum.net/2026-01-22-why-no-european-google.html The Privacy Respecting European Phone (jolla.com) https://jolla.com/ Delta Chat, decentralized secure messenger (delta.chat) https://delta.chat/en/ At the same time, European politicians are focusing on "not seeing" this elephant in the room while dedicating huge money and effort to promote "European AI" or "European Blockchain." Seriously. They are so blind to easy, innovative and existing solutions (Peertube, Mastodon, European mail hosting,…) that I’m starting to suspect that being dumb doesn’t explain it all, that they are truly corrupted. In the meantime, I do my small part. I defend my small hill. I’m an Offpunk. Offpunk Manifesto (blog.ayom.media) https://blog.ayom.media/ideiasdechirico/offpunk-manifesto And when requested anything about an online service or a smartphone, I answer: I don’t have a smartphone! Picture of a broken phone by Ashwin Kumar https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Samsung_Galaxy_S2_shattered_screen.…

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