that's what happens if your computer is a von Meowmann architecture machine

affecting less than 5% of users based on current usage patterns.

This seems crazy high??? I don't use LLMs, but whenever SaaS usage is brought up, there's usually a giant long tail of casual users, if its a 5% thing then either Copilot has way more power users than I expect, or way less users total than I expect.

Ed Zitron right now:

You will be allotted your weekly ration of tokens, comrade, and you will be grateful

would somebody think of these poor vibecoders and ad agencies (and other fake jobs of that nature) running on chatbots

Being outraged that a notable composer of anodyne placeholder music has made use of the anodyne placeholder music generator is frankly a bit bizarre to me.

Here are his own words on the matter. From what I can find, it doesn't seem he acknowledges/understands the issue of the training data being stolen from non-consenting musicians.

Some related personal thoughts (and feel free to disregard them, they're probably ignorant): As someone without much of an ear for music, this stuff sounds like the same generic instrumental songs that computers were generating even before the current hype bubble.

I remember watching the CGP Grey video Humans Need Not Apply back in the day, and it was using AI background music even then (2015), albeit only to prove a point. The only real differences between then and now is that 1) modern models can generate songs in more genres and also generate (bad) vocals, and only because it's been fed the entirety of humanity's musical history rather than being trained only on licensed data, and 2) the hype bubble is releasing countless music generators and getting tons of non-musical people posting their generated stuff online, often with the intention of making a quick buck.

Would I have been able to tell that these songs were made my a machine? Probably not. But as I said, I don't have an ear for music and would've just figured they were made by a mediocre composer. I'd say that's the biggest difference for all creative things nowadays. Back before LLMs, I would've assumed it was a sloppy writer, artist, musician, etc. rather than a slop machine.

It's also funny how, given enough generations, slop machines can sometimes churn out something passable or even half-decent. Gives major infinite monkey typewriter energy. It would've been an interesting phenomenon to study if it wasn't so energy-wasteful, trained on stolen data, and used by executives to oppress workers. Alas, in a better timeline.

Oh, and just in case anyone was wondering, the CGP Grey video ain't great, though it is interesting to look back at and see how AI hype looked in the mid-2010s compared to now.

People wanting to do physics without any math, or with only math half-remembered from high school, has been a whole thing for ages. See item 15 on the Crackpot Index, for example. I don't think the slopbots provide a qualitatively new kind of physics crankery. I think they supercharge what already existed. Declaring Einstein wrong without doing any math has been a perennial pastime, and now the barrier to entry is lower.

When Devereaux writes,

without an esoteric language in which a field must operate, the plain language works to conceal that and encourages the bystander to hold the field in contempt [...] But because there's no giant 'history formula,' no tables of strange symbols (well, amusingly, there are but you don't work with them until you are much deeper in the field), folks assume that history is easy, does not require special skills and so contemptible.

I think he misses an angle. Yes, physics is armored with jargon and equations and tables of symbols. But for a certain audience, these themselves provoke contempt. They prefer an "explanation" which uses none of that. They see equations as fancy, highfalutin, somehow morally degenerate.

That long review of HMPoR identified a Type of Guy who would later be very into slopbot physics:

I used to teach undergraduates, and I would often have some enterprising college freshman (who coincidentally was not doing well in basic mechanics) approach me to talk about why string theory was wrong. It always felt like talking to a physics madlibs book. This chapter let me relive those awkward moments.

this is great, but now I'm sad