BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

In other news, I've stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:

Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - there's people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the video's whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting there's suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.

Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.

Here's my idea to increase the birth rate:

Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won't have horrible lives.

Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:

Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.

It feels like the rise of LLMs has set back cybersecurity by a good decade or so, and by my guess it probably has.

Agents are throwing away decades of hard-learned lessons in input sanitization (providing cybercriminals a Greatest Hits compilation of vulnerabilities), "vibe coding" is introducing vulnerabilities aplenty to codebases and hiding them under mountains of technical debt/unmaintainable code, LLM usage is damaging coding ability in coders both junior and senior, the entire tech field is haemorrhaging talent from burnout and layoffs, and that's just the things that are immediately coming to mind.

As I see it, cybersec may find itself practically back to square one once the dust settles.

New article on AI scraping just hit The Register, with some choice quotes from Anubis dev Xe Iaso. Xe herself has given some additional thoughts.

On the one hand, I can see your point - such advertisements could provide the hucksters some positive spin to assist their bubble with.

On the other hand, Silicon Valley's still got the heavy stench of Eau de Asshole off the AI bubble, with some Eau de Fash off of the Trump administration. If a new tech can be used for evil shit, the public's gonna (rightfully) assume it will be used for evil shit - and I doubt the hucksters can convince the public to think otherwise.

(also ew, mobile Wikipedia)

he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop

He's second only to the average sovereign citizen in that field.

Ultra-rare NIMBY W

LLMs are designed to make plausible-looking text, so whatever bullshit statistics they extrude will be more convincing to the untrained eye.

New edition of AI Killed My Job, focusing on how translators got fucked over by the AI bubble.

I looked through the quotes, and found someone openly hoping human-made work will be more highly valued in the bubble's wake:

You want my suspicion, I suspect she's gonna get her wish - with the slop-nami flooding the Internet, human-made work in general is gonna be valued all the more.

A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:

On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble's all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry's relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,

Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

By my guess, no. AI earned its investor/VC dollars by providing bosses and CEOs alike a cudgel to use against labour, either by deskilling workers, degrading their work conditions, or killing their jobs outright.

Quantum doesn't really have that - the only Big Claim™ I know it has going for it is its supposed ability to break pre-existing encryption clean in half, but that's near-certainly gonna be useless for hypebuilding.

On top of that, there's clear signs that we've grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.

If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we're gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.

Y'know, I was predicting at least a few years without a tech bubble, but I guess I was dead wrong on that. Part of me suspects the hucksters are gonna fail to inflate a quantum bubble this time around, though.

8BF’s site has been taken over by bots, and I can’t be bothered to find an alternate source.

You can find it directly on Brian Clevinger's blog, Nuklear Power. Here's a direct link to the archive.

Plus, there's the hefty amount of AI slop that's been shat onto the Internet over the years, plus active attempts to sabotage LLM datasets through tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, and media-poisoning tools like Glaze and Nightshade.

So, if and when model collapse fully sets in, its gonna hit all of them at once. Given that freshly trained LLMs are gonna be effectively stillborn, if ChatGPT et al. collapse, it'll likely kill LLMs as a tech for at least the next ten years.

In other news, bodhidave reported a case of Google AI and ChatGPT making identical citation fuck-ups:

I imagine it'll be a pretty lucrative pivot - the public's ravenous to see AI bros and hypesters get humiliated, and Zitron can provide that in spades.

Plus, he'll have a major headstart on whatever bubble the hucksters attempt to inflate next.

Ed Zitron's planning to hold AI boosters to account: