BlueMonday1984

An invaluable repository of programming knowledge ground into dust as the last tokens of good will are cashed in for stinky money. It was a unique place, where self-moderation by the community actually worked to a large extent.

That's the worst part about this situation - Joel's burning the coder's Library of Alexandria in pursuit of that cash. Whatever comes to replace StackOverflow is gonna be a pale imitation of what came before, and I suspect the entire field of programming's gonna be feeling the setbacks for a long, long time.

Mumsnet becomes the latest company to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Why AI bros are scraping TERF Island's Finest I'm not sure, but it'll be fun to watch the two of them slapfight each other.

Yeah. There probably was a fair bit of stealth-crawling up to this point, but the perps knew they needed to keep it on the down-low.

The AI bubble, on the other hand, lacks the ability to keep it subtle, making it plainly obvious people's shit was getting stolen and showcasing AI bros/techbros' utter disregard for anyone but themselves (e.g. by ignoring robots.txt).

Personally, I expect this will lead to much stronger scraping protections being developed to combat shit like this - Cloudflare's already offering to block AI scrapers for its users and Kudurru's offering a similar service, I can easily see a new market opening up here.

(Off-the-cuff prediction: anti-AI scraping measures will likely start feeding false info to AI scrapers they detect - beyond simply throwing a wrench into those models, it'd also make it less likely AI scrapers will realise "hey, our shit's getting blocked")

I wonder how long it will be until there are companies actively promoting their lack of AI.

Its already happening, to some extent, but not mainly among the big corps. Grabbing some random examples I could find:

• Cara blew up a few weeks ago off the back of Instagram going all-in on AI

• Glaze and Nightshade earned a lot of popularity by offering means to sabotage them

• Dove also made waves by directly taking shots at AI, too

• Nintendo publicly eschewed using it, stating they're focused "delivering value that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be created by technology alone".

• Newgrounds put the hammer down early on AI, but more publicly disavowed it alongside adding an option to flag something as AI-made in March this year

• Last, but not least, Beth Spencer cooked up a quick-and-dirty "Made with Human Intelligence" badge which has since blown the fuck up online

I'm probably missing some examples, but I think my point's made.

The good news is I barely use Protonmail (or email at all, for that matter).

The bad news is I have a fucking Proton account. Fuck.

Quickly added that bit, thanks for catching that.

Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.

Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.

Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase "AI" will retain that meaning well past the bubble's bursting. "AI slop", or just "slop", will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

Part of me suspects that the AI bubble's spread that "tech asshole" stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.

(Fuck, now I'm tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out...)

ChatGPT to Orphan Crushing Machine?

Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn't like the feel of Chromium.

I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went "fuck it, I'm sticking with Libre".

Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.

or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?

Gonna take a shot in the dark and say the fixation's from viewing chess more as an IQ showcase than as a game.

Tenner says we're seeing them in GTA 6 for obvious reasons