Also, happy Pride :3

Yes, happy pride month everyone!

I've decided that this year I'm going to be more open about this and wear a pride bracelet whenever I go in public this month. Including for (remote) work meetings where nobody knows... wonder if anyone will notice.

404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered

It's a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don't have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

I really didn't think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, "an insult to life itself".

Whatever has happened there, I hope it will resolve in positive ways for her. Her amazing work on the GPU driver was actually the reason I got into Rust. In 2022 I stumbled across this twitter thread from her and it inspired me to learn Rust -- and then it ended up becoming my favourite language, my refuge from C++. Of course I already knew about Rust beforehand, but I had dismissed it, I (wrongly) thought that it's too similar to C++, and I wanted away from that... That twitter thread made me reconsider and take a closer look. So thankful for that.

drowning in signal-shaped noise

Ooh, I love that phrasing, wonderful :D

But yeah, it's an interesting point... It's weird to think that "good search" may just be permanently gone. Somehow I thought that it would come back eventually... but maybe it won't? Wouldn't be the first time a good thing just disappears from the internet...

The AI guys are really playing with the exact same cheat every time, aren't they? Thanks to pivot-to-ai for continuing to shine a light on this... I hope the wider press eventually learns about it, too.

This shows the US is falling behind China, so you gotta give OpenAI more money!

Fear of a "bullshit gap", I guess.

Oh, and: simply perfect choice of header image on that article.

PSA: the domain shown in a google search result is not necessarily the domain it will actually link you to.

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I had no idea before. What an absolutely horrible decision from google to allow this. What are they thinking?? This is great for phishing and malware, but I don't know what else. (Yeah ok, the reason has probably something to do with "line must go up".)

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.

Maybe I was naive, but I didn't expect all this to go that fast and that blatant...

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?