Got a hilarious story for today: ChatGPT Lost a Chess Game to an Atari 2600

Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?

Gonna take a shot in the dark here and guess that the people behind these AI scrapers are incredibly stupid, and think Scrape More = More Data = More Growth = More Good^TM^. Given this bubble's already given us the goddamn scourge that is "vibe coding", and is headed by growth-obsessed fuckwits and True Believers^TM^, chances are I'm completely correct on this.

Google is very upset that a lot of the public don’t really like AI. You might think this was because of AI slop and explicit threats to their jobs, but Google is pretty sure it’s because people saw the Terminator films.

Okay, quick sidenote: I wouldn't be shocked if people looked at the Terminator in a different light after this bubble.

On the one hand, the basic idea of "AI turns sentient and kills us all" is pretty laughable in a cultural zeitgeist where "AI" means "plagiarism-fueled lying machine" or "plagiarism-fueled mediocrity generator" or "plagiarism-fueled atrocity machine" (okay, maybe not that last one). The general themes of "man vs machine" will likely shine through all the brighter, though - especially given how the AI systems involved in this bubble function explicitly through stealing the work of human authors, artists, and other such creatives, and exclusively through stealing said human creatives' work (ingesting AI slop slowly destroys AI systems, and everyone who works in AI rejects giving artists a fair shake out of principle).

On the other hand, the fact that AI has nonetheless still caused unimaginable damage to humanity (the environmental damage, the slop-nami, the fully-automatic worker abuse and enshittification, et cetera) might make the films feel oddly prescient, as it (plus the last 20-ish years of corporate malevolence) have made it clear that there are a lot of businessmen out there who would actively and willingly ruin the entire fucking world and potentially kill all of humanity if the alternative was "I, and I specifically, don't make all of the money ever".

And on the gripping hand, the likes of OpenAI and friends actively pushing AI Doom^tm^ to criti-hype their way into raising more money could paint Cyberdyne's existence in a much different light - with the breathless hype about AGI/superintelligence that Altman and Friends have put out, the general message they've been putting out is basically "We are actively trying to create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus, because, uh, reasons. Please give us all of the money and ruin the world for our benefit and our benefit alone, otherwise we won't be able to make the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus".

Solid, high-quality sneer from Adactio - the end is a particular highlight:

The worst of the internet is continuously attacking the best of the internet. This is a distributed denial of service attack on the good parts of the World Wide Web.

If you’re using the products powered by these attacks, you’re part of the problem. Don’t pretend it’s cute to ask ChatGPT for something. Don’t pretend it’s somehow being technologically open-minded to continuously search for nails to hit with the latest “AI” hammers.

Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI

They can be, but they can also be a social and recreational space.

Your mum's a social and recreational space, but I don't see you going to bat for her despite being more useful

My pet theory is that Robert Downey Jr is the reason Elon musk is as successful as he is.

Considering RDJ's role as Tony Stark seems to have given Musk the template he used for his public rise to fame, you may be on to something.

In other news, Elon actually did it

He actually went and crippled blocking

Don't do drugs, they'll turn you into Sam Altman and everyone will hate you

Not a sneer, but another cool piece from Baldur Bjarnason: The slow evaporation of the free/open source surplus.

Gonna skip straight to near the end, where Baldur lays out a potential apocalypse scenario for FOSS as we know it:

Best case scenario, seems to me, is that Free and Open Source Software enters a period of decline. After all, that’s generally what happens to complex systems with less investment. Worst case scenario is a vicious cycle leading to a collapse:

1. Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.

2. Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they can’t relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.

3. OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.

4. That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.

Linking this to a related sneer, another major problem that I can see befalling FOSS is earning a reputation as a Nazi bar. How high that risk is I'm not sure, but between the AI bubble shredding tech's public image and our very good friends increasingly catching the public's attention, I suspect those chances are pretty high.

Awful people facing justice

You love to see it

" Nowhere is cultural acceleration more evident than in the movies. As Andrej Karpathy says, movies from before 1995 are slow, boring and naive."

(Well, this goes some way to explaining "AI" "art")