BlueMonday1984 @ BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

Baldur Bjarnason has given his thoughts:

I mean… yeah.

Also, between this and seeing tech types link glowingly to a crazypants “colonise the light cone by exploring latent space” type of delusional bullshit and I’m staring to worry that computers, as a concept, might not be salvageable after these clowns have run the show into the ground

In other news, Kevin McLeod just received some major backlash for generating AI slop, with the track Kosmose Vaikus (which is described as made using Suno) getting the most outrage.

And just a couple paragraphs before that:

Reading HPMOR gave me a sense of crushing second-hand despair that I’ve only previously experienced when finding out things about Chris-Chan. It really is that bad.

(the real cognitohazard was the friends we made along the way)

Starting this off with a good and lengthy thread from Bret Devereaux (known online for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry), about the likely impact of LLMs on STEM, and long-standing issues he's faced as a public-facing historian.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

That's a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with "I focused too much on trying to make easy cash". Fuck it, I'm going to write out a sidenote:

On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming's public image after it bursts.

On one front, there's the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.

On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble's dealt to artists, and AI's continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers' failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.

Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard's Bluesky):

You want my take, Kathryn's on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.

Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.

Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free

This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse

EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi

I've already predicted that scraper activity would crash due to AI in my most recent MoreWrite essay, and seeing this only makes me confident in that assessment.

On a wider front, I suspect that web search in general's gonna dive in popularity - even if scraper activity remains the same during the AI winter, the bubble (with plenty of help from Google) has completely broken the web ecosystem which allowed search engines (near-exclusively Google) to thrive, through triggering a slop-nami that drowned human-made art, supercharging SEO's ability to bury quality output, and enabling AI Summary™ services which steal traffic through stealing work.

Basically. Its to explicitly prevent Xe from becoming the load-bearing peg for a massive portion of the Internet, thus ensuring this project doesn't send her health down the shitter.

You want my prediction, I suspect future FOSS projects may decide to adopt mascots of their own, to avoid the "load-bearing maintainer" issue in a similar manner.

Xe has talked a bit about the mascot in question before - by her own testimony, its there to act as a shopping cart test to see who's willing to support the project. Reportedly, she's planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.

New piece from Brian Merchant, and a new edition of AI Killed My Job just dropped

Someone I know called AI "a non-invasive procedure to lobotomise people" after I mentioned this Pivot to AI, and its stuck with me ever since

…You know, if I actually believed in the whole AGI doom scenario (and bought into Eliezer’s self-hype) I would be even more pissed at him and sneer even harder at him. He basically set himself up as a critical savior to mankind, one of the only people clear sighted enough to see the real dangers and most important question… and then he totally failed to deliver. Not only that he created the very hype that would trigger the creation of the unaligned AGI he promised to prevent!

As the cherry on top of this shit sundae, the bubble caused by said hype dealt devastating damage to the Internet and the world at large in spite of failing to create the unaligned AGI Yud was doomsaying about, and made people more vulnerable to falling for the plagiarism-fueled lying machines behind said bubble.

New (paywalled) 404 Media: Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain

Not a sneer, but still inexplicably funny: You Can Now Venmo the Government to Help Pay Off National Debt

Now we need to make a logic puzzle involving two people and one cup. Perhaps they are trying to share a drink equitably. Each time they drink one third of remaining cup’s volume.

Step one: Drink two-thirds of the cup's volume

Step two: Piss one sixth of the cup's volume

Problem solved

Long-term, I'm expecting itch to dive in popularity from this - they've nuked much of the trust they've built up over the years with this.

Found a neat mini-sneer in the wild: It's rude to show AI output to people

Two ferrymen and three boats are on the left bank of a river. Each boat holds exactly one man. How can they get both men and all three boats to the right bank?

Officially, you can't. Unofficially, just have one of the ferrymen tow a boat.