Gamers Nexus put out their April Fool's joke for this year, and became the first journalistic outlet to break Betteridge's law of headlines in the process.
this post was submitted on 30 Mar 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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I've been doing some micro tasking to train LLM's the last few months to earn some extra cash, the last month it's all dried up, no tasks available. I can't help thinking that is a sign of a bubble deflating.
Please please please
Prize for least funny, laziest AFJ goes to, no surprise, LW:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/2NGKYt3xdQHwyfGbc/lesswrong-has-been-acquired-by-ea
On the bright side, Derek Lowe has also escaped containment, which is nice
has he? where?
Lots of politics outlets have been linking his recent work. He's done a great job documenting the consequences (and gravity) of the ongoing grant apocalypse for the AAAS journal Science. I've loved him for years for being the FOOF guy.
OK hear me out: they make a new season of Hell Girl, but she only gets people who use gen ai
SMBC using the ratsphere as comics fodder, part the manyeth:
transcription
Retrofuturistic Looking Ghost: SCROOOOOGE! I am the ghost of christmas extreme future! Why! Why did you not find a way to indicate to humans 400 generation from now where toxic waste was storrrrrrrred! Look how Tiny Tim's cyborg descendant has to make costrly RNA repaaaaaaairs!
Byline: The Longtermist version of A Christmas Carol is way better.
bonus
spoiler transcription Scrooge: I tried, but no, no, I just don't give a shit. :::
Your mistake, distant future ghost, was in developing RNA repair nanites without creating universal healthcare.
Ed Zitron breaking out the anime references for April Fool's:
Jesus, fine, I'll watch it already, God.
OpenAI: Nah, I'd become profitable
every so often I think of how Rat-brain is just bleach-dyed "the power of positive thinking" for nerds who don't get out in the world enough
Finally Tim Pool will get what is wrong with AI
A recent chapter of one of the official Touhou Project manga had a jab at crypto schemes. This isn't one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
This isn’t one of the works of art I expected to so explicitly dunk on these unscrupulous scams, but I welcome it all the more for that.
Crypto is nigh-universally hated outside of the techbrosphere (doubly so for NFTs) - they are synonymous with scams and cringe in the public eye. I'd be more shocked if you found a work which presents crypto without immediately dunking on it.
I didn't mean I expected it to be pro-crypto, just a little surprised it actually namedropped NFTs and blockchain at all.
Ran across an animation mocking AI art on Newgrounds recently - found it a pretty good watch.
wow, surprisingly 00s in its feeling, nice
I knew the HN reaction to Marine Le Pen being banned from being elected to public office would be unhinged, but weirdly I did not have "good, she's a woman and weak so now a strong man can lead RN to glorious victory" on my bingo card. More fool me, misogyny is always on the card.
There's a comment in there about how well it reflects on the British system that Bobby Sands was allowed to stand as an MP for Sinn Féin despite being an IRA member and a prisoner. This ignores that a) Sinn Féin policy was and is not to take seats in the British parliament, so he wouldn't have been voting or sitting on any committees, and b) Bobby Sands died in prison on hunger strike.
Why yes, I'm sure 29 year old Jordan "El italiano 93" Bardella, who 10 years ago was uploading Call of Duty videos to youtube, is a much stronger candidate.
Update on The Shadiversity Drama^tm^: he's still malding about being an utterly soulless waste of oxygen:
Now, some of you may be wondering "Monday, how is that AI-generated? That piece actually has a soul!" Well, as it turns out, it wasn't AI - Shad quite literally stole someone's artwork and passed it off as AI.
Ok. Full disclosure. When you said “Shad”, I thought you meant a different internet person who is shitty for creating morally degenerate art, so when I read this I thought that they had pivoted to AI and was like, I guess that tracks. But no, different shithead.
Anyway. Bland and uninspired? All actual art is inspired, just by default. If it were truly bland, you wouldn’t be able to discern anything from it, which is just not the case. So Shad isn’t actually giving a valid opinion, he’s throwing out an insult, just so that he can elevate AI slop.
Now AI slop, on the other hand, is uninspired and bland. It is uninspired because machines do not have the ability to be inspired. It is bland because it has no intention to be discerned, so contains nothing of substance.
Not that you, under any circumstances, "have to hand it to" alleged convicted assaulter Shädman, but at least he drew his immature shock porn using his own mid artistic skills.
Not to mention he also didn't write a third-rate rapey-as-shit "dark fantasy" novel, throw nonstop tantrums about people criticising/making fun of him, or jump on the anti-woke content mill grift train.
Just to make this perfectly clear, yes, I am saying that >shadman has more dignity than Shadiversity.
Anyone who uses gen AI is my opp, status report:
- so far every restaurant that I've been to where I noticed AI slop as part of the decor has sucked. One of the ones local to me closed, hooray!
- IDF: haha look we are Ghibli please send us more machine guns
- a third thing
jesus fucking christ I think that IDF tweet is the worst thing that has ever existed
Taking the "insult to life itself" to a whole another level.
I've been browsing bluesky a fair amount recently and it's chock full of artists making non-AI Ghibli inspired art in response to the AI trend. Which is neat.
That’s great. In a better world, all genAI users would become black goo-producing inhuman monsters to reflect their inner selves, but I suppose this is as much justice as we’ll get
In other news, the Guardian landed an exclusive scoop on cuts to "AI cancer tech funding in England". Baldur Bjarnason's given his commentary:
Turns out rebranding even the genuinely useful Machine Learning as “AI” doesn’t help them get funding. The only beneficiaries of the bubble seem to be volatile media synthesis engines
You want my opinion, future machine learning research is probably gonna struggle to get funding once the bubble bursts, both due to the "AI" stench rubbing off on the field, and due to gen-AI sucking up all of the funding that would've gone towards actually useful shit. (Arguably, its already struggling even before the bubble's burst.)
"Goonernomicon: Grummz | Part 1" just dropped! Posting this as a stub because it's only adjacent to the ordinary purview. A+++ chud hater content.
full disclo: I did not know who Grummz was before this
Another good older vid mostly about Grummz, buy youtube essayist Shaun: Stellar Blade: The Fake Outrage. A bit on the more twitch/video game side of things.
Great vid. A good reminder that all the culture war people are real fucking stupid and I am right to disengage from scrapping with them.
It must be nice not being so terminally online as myself, for reasons which at least partially escape my ken, I occasionally visit Twitter, and I am subscribed to it's dear leader, I get to enjoy a lot of the boosted nazi nonsense. (His account is followed by Elon)
It must be nice not being so terminally online as myself
Don't worry, I assure you that I am suffering in different ways