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.
The AI problem is still in an earlier stage at my job, but I've already witnessed in a code review that code was pointed out as questionable, and then it was justified with what amounted to "the AI generated this, it wasn't me". I really don't like where this is going.
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.
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...
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?
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...