Pluralistic: Why businesses lie about AI (01 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

• The other question Suresh implicitly raises is, “How can you reconcile the failure of AI in the enterprise with the individual claims of skilled technologists who insist that AI is helping them do great work?” The answer is that these AI users are “centaurs” – experienced workers who are assisted by automation on terms that they set for themselves:
  https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/11/vulgar-thatcherism/#there-is-an-alternative
  Thanks to their skill and experience, these workers possess discernment, the ability to tell good code from bad, and (more importantly) good uses of code-generation tools from bad. They demonstrate the adage that worker-driven automation improves quality, while capital-driven automation improves throughput:
  https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/28/hitl-ers/#ai-ai-oh
  An automation technique that requires close supervision by skilled and experienced workers isn’t going to be a raw productivity powerhouse. You don’t “100x” your code this way, at least, not in the sense of firing 99 of your coders and having the remaining programmer pick up all their work. Rather, an automation tool that requires the continuous and conscientious exercise of discernment will let individual practitioners improve their work in extremely satisfying and useful ways. It’s a way to spend more on operations in order to produce better outputs. It’s not a way to cut your workforce, realize a gigantic savings, and still produce comparable goods and services at a far lower cost.

Tasks

• Banking stuff – triaged
• Start writing review – done! Six more to go
• Pack – started. Waiting for things to charge

SBIRs

• Weekly status – done
• Some Pyside6 – did a little vibe coding. Curious how well that will work
• Tech summit