If you watch the video, your brain will leak out your ears. But we watched it so you don’t have to.

Thank you for the invaluable service.

Nice sneer: In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen

Wait, they're still drinking coffee, and it takes 58 minutes? Jeez, my genai quantum robot does that in 58 seconds and summarizes the gustatory experience into 3 bullet points for me. Get with the times.

Ok, maybe someone can help me here figure something out.

I've wondered for a long time about a strange adjacency which I sometimes observe between what I call (due to lack of a better term) "unix conservativism" and fascism. It's the strange phenomenon where ideas about "classic" and "pure" unix systems coincide with the worst politics. For example the "suckless" stuff. Or the ramblings of people like ESR. Criticism of systemd is sometimes infused with it (yes, there is plenty of valid criticism as well. But there's this other kind of criticism I've often seen, which is icky and weirdly personal). And I've also seen traces of this in discussions of programming languages newer than C, especially when topics like memory safety come up.

This is distinguished from retro computing and nostalgia and such, those are unrelated. If someone e.g. just likes old unix stuff, that's not what I mean.

You may already notice, I struggle a bit to come up with a clear definition and whether there really is a connection or just a loose set of examples that are not part of a definable set. So, is there really something there or am I seeing a connection that doesn't exist?

I've also so far not figured out what might create the connection. Ideas I have come up with are: appeal to times that are gone (going back to an idealized computing past that never existed), elitism (computers must not become user friendly), ideas of purity (an imaginary pure "unix philosophy").

Anyway, now with this new xlibre project, there's another one that fits into it...

If the companies wanted to produce an LLM that didn’t output toxic waste, they could just not put toxic waste into it.

The article title and that part remind me of this quote from Charles Babbage in 1864:

On two occasions I have been asked, — "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" In one case a member of the Upper, and in the other a member of the Lower, House put this question. I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.

It feels as if Babbage had already interacted with today's AI pushers.

I hate this position so much, claiming that it's because "the left" wanted "too much". That's not only morally bankrupt, it's factually wrong too. And also ignorant of historical examples. It's lazy and rotten thinking all the way through.

So much wrong with this...

In a way, it reminds me of the wave of entirely fixed/premade loop-based music making tools from years ago. Where you just drag and drop a number of pre-made loops from a library onto some tracks, and then the software automatically makes them fit together musically and that's it, no further skill or effort required. I always found that fun to play around with for an evening or two, but then it quickly got boring. Because the more you optimize away the creative process, the less interesting it becomes.

Now the AI bros have made it even more streamlined, which means it's even more boring. Great. Also, they appear to think that they are the first people to ever have the idea "let's make music making simple". Not surprising they believe that, because a fundamental tech bro belief is that history is never interesting and can never teach anything, so they never even look at it.

Another exciting one: Spicerr, the AI-powered spice dispenser. One could think it's satire, but apparently it can be seen at CES (article in german).

Oh and as a bonus, they seem to also go for a juicero-like business model where you should buy their spice capsules.

With your choice of words you are anthropomorphizing LLMs. No valid reasoning can occur when starting from a false point of origin.

Or to put it differently: to me this is similarly ridiculous as if you were arguing that bubble sort may somehow "gain new abilites" and do "horrifying things".

Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said... this description text was generated by AI.

AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.

Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!

Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...

Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.

This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?

I wonder if this signals being at peak hype soon. I mean, how much more outlandish can they get without destroying the hype bubble's foundation, i.e. the suspension of disbelief that all this would somehow become possible in the near future. We're on the level of "arrival of an alien intelligence" now, how much further can they escalate that rhetoric without popping the bubble?