I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541

The self-fulfilling prophecy machine will ensure that engorgement will become a household term

It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.

Here’s a pretty good sneer at the writing out of LLMs, with a focus on meaning https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters.

Also, on people:

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

Ah yes, three of the worst people alive today talking about how objects are indistinguishable from women.

Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/

Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.

I’m sure whoever put money into that venture will see dramatically amazing returns, now there’s a founder that will not take the money and run.

It’s kind of a distinction without much discriminatory power: LLMs are a tool created to ease the task of bullshitting; used to produce bullshit by bullshitters.

Rødes of unusual size? I don’t think they exist.

My favorite meme message board on the internet keeps putting out bangers, but this one is extra good and relevant http://www.b3ta.com/board/11416629

Would you believe this prescient vibe coding manual came out in 2015! https://mowillemsworkshop.com/catalog/books/item/i-really-like-slop

Also he wrote borderline anti-woke stuff back when doing that could still appear edgy and icky.

So many projects and small websites I’m aware of are being overtaxed by shitty LLM scrapers these days, it feels like an intentional attack. I guess the idea of ai can’t fail, it can only be failed; and so its profiteers must sabotage anything that indicates it’s not beneficial/necessary.

This “insight” tool gives a very incisive critique of the opinion-page journalism we’ve been seeing lately. Oddly enough, not the kind of critique you’d see printed on an opinion page.

Just a couple more GPUs bro, I’m sure it’s around the corner

Thanks. I simply switched to Fastmail over this bullshit. (“Simply” mileage may vary)

They’ll react to it … by swerving further right.

Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/

Right, sure he picked the most glorified fantasy race out there, “but evil”. When in reality he’s a Duergar at best:

Personality Tyrannical, grim, industrious and pessimistic,[11][20] the lives of the gray dwarves were bleak and brutal. Rather than a flaw, however, they viewed their lack of happiness as their greatest strength, the defining feature of duergar pride.

Sounds about right for the joyless world he imagines his ideal society would represent.

Apparently there are two GitHub repos up with strongly conflicting information on what happened, this is gonna be a three-buckets-of-popcorn incident.