Ariarule

No byline, acknowledging that it's part of series that usually doesn't have them. Google trends has nothing for the phrase right now. UD, as of this writing, never heard of the expression (although don't be too surprised if someone swoops in to "correct" that later). Even for a generation that's ostensibly not going to have a huge social media footprint yet, that's rather remarkable for a supposed "biggest insult".

https://trends.google.com/explore?q=%22That%27s%20so%20AI%22... https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=That%27s+so+...

Ok, if they're meant to be marketed for food service, like a bakery regardless of who actually purchases them, then that does makes sense.

Huh? Processed ingredients don't generally get a pass on nutritional labeling requirements in the US. A bag of flour in a grocery store should have a label.

That is also the title I see clicking through into the page, although it seems to be 24 characters over the limit, so that _some_ change to OP would have have been required to submit it.

Not just these three. OP mentions also Cloudflare, and additionally Downdetector also has AWS, Azure, and Google (both search and Gemini) listed as having spikes about the same time: https://downdetector.com/

A sidenote, but that is not a typical Amish opinion of technology:

"Amish do not view technology as evil, and individuals may petition for acceptance of a particular technology in the local community" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amish_way_of_life#Use_of_moder...

See also https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-the-amish-let-technol... about some Amish use of cell phones with adapters to be more payphone/landline-like and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21349989 was a discussion about the use of pneumatic machinery by the Amish.

Joel Spolsky wrote that about "large scale commercial applications", which Monica definitely is not.

Surprised there's not a specific mention of learning by doing, which means probability of success is not static, when this is _just_ under the surface of the content of this post. They did kind of hint at this with the "Each attempt... a little better than the last."

While I know "if they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic", I feel this is especially unusual due to the gap between the level of coverage (mostly regional at this point, like WGN) and the impact. Currently, poweroutage.us is showing 234459 customers out in Indiana, with elevated outages in Illinois and Ohio as well.

How is "Fix the WAL-reset database corruption bug" downplaying this? https://www.sqlite.org/changes.html

Very cool. If I can point out an alternative use and audience for this: there are quite a few game marketing data websites for sussing out which games are similar to each other and how they've performed within their genre. This is, AFAIK, a unique approach to the first part.

Release notes are at https://download.samba.org/pub/rsync/NEWS#3.5.0

Steam Achievements are trivially to cheat at for most games, especially single-player like Ecco, for example via SAM.

Odd not to highlight the sentence where they answer the obvious question "Why Tailscale in particular?":

> They also explained why we were more likely to hit the bug than other SQLite users: we take manual control of the checkpointing process, and we checkpoint very aggressively. Even a bug triggered by a rare condition was bound to hit us eventually.

I'm guessing you meant to link https://www.economist.com/leaders/2026/08/06/how-ai-is-break... ?

Can you name three reasonable-quality games out there like this that were definitely made in such a way? It costs only $100 to publish a game on Steam, recoupable if you meet a fairly low revenue threshold. You can publish elsewhere with no money up front (e.g. Itch). If this were actually true, and even if 90% of players would just pass based on the AI disclosure (doubtful, and also doubtful that _all_ games made this way would actually disclose it), you'd expect there to be lots of Myst quality games out there; hundred to thousands already, at least a handful of which should _already_ be successful.

Not entirely a rhetorical question. I've found any images need serious review and touch-up at a minimum and usually multiple rounds of revision. The topology on any generated 3D models is generally atrocious. TTS is not tuned for voice acting to an extent it's absolutely no good for that purpose as far I can tell, and that would be a cornerstone of any serious modern "Myst-class" adventure game. I can't comment on music and SFX in particular and have heard secondhand that current models are "all right", but imagine it's probably the same situation: no care taken, you get uselessly mid results. If it's really that easy and that cheap, I'd like to see it.

_Dimhaven_, released just a few months ago, looks fairly Myst-like from the videos I've seen. While I haven't played it, Zadbox, the developer, also made the very Myst-like _Quern_; released 2016 and which I have played.

I can't help but think the article is a story about _Cyan's_ woes conflated with industry woes. Which isn't to say that the industry doesn't have problems! But Cyan really underperformed with _Firmament_. Look at the Kickstarter comments:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyanworlds/firmament/co...

They did a rug pull on whether they would ship DVDs with the Firmament collector's boxes _after_ they had complaints about the quality of the equivalent Obduction backer reward. While they did ship a DVD for Obduction, from personal experience the box itself it came in was a bit underwhelming. I didn't care so much about packaging, but I could see how someone would, and the whole situation on this point with Firmament was a very eye-rolling "again?" scenario. The first time with Obduction that they weren't able to ship what they planned in this way was bad luck; the second time was, generously, bad planning about something that was entirely foreseeable on their part.

More details here: https://steamcommunity.com/app/754890/discussions/0/38264157...

They made a bad bet on how well VR would take off, with Firmament very obviously created with VR play in mind.

So many people were disappointed with Firmament itself. "18,420 backers pledged $1,433,161 to help bring this project to life" but they can't do that again specifically because they burned a huge amount of goodwill with the people most likely to support them that way. Keep in mind that's a 2019 number and CPI adjusting would bring it up to about 1.8 million, at the lower end but solidly within the 1 to 10 million amount Wired said they were trying to raise for Anglerfish from a publisher. And _Obduction_, while beautiful, was a bit short and had its own issues.

I would also note with all the discussion of the impact of AI art on games that Cyan was an early _target_ of the anti-AI crowd over their use of AI art in Firmament. IIRC, Steam did not have a dedicated disclosure section at the time Firmament, but they did disclose it responsibly and appropriately in the credits. A more detailed statement from Cyan can still be found at https://cyan.com/2023/06/08/regarding-ai-assisted-content-in... -- on this, I agree with Cyan's 2023 post, we ought to be able to distinguish "AI Assisted" from AI-generated, although it seems many are allergic to such nuance.

I find it incredible that "modify the chosen route as little as possible" is not really a thing in any major mapping app. Just because I turned left instead of right at an intersection and had to detour a little bit before getting to a highway shouldn't switch the way I'm going by hundreds of miles on a long trip just because it's supposedly 5 minutes or some other pithy amount faster, and I have seen scenarios like this happen in both Google Maps and Here.

LLMs are ascendant partially because they do not "RTFM", "read the FAQ", or "question closed as duplicate" at you regardless of how many times they've heard a question before.

Is a painting not art because individual pigments aren't art?

Not criticizing this in particular, but I'm genuinely curious: why is everyone talking about how obvious or not the details of the poster are as AI, when they didn't take the 30 seconds in most good image editing software to remove the sepia/yellow/brown tint all over? You could put a 100px blur on the smallest thumbnail on that page of it, and I'd still recognize it as AI generated.

> Without CC, we wouldn't have Wikipedia

This was interesting overall, but since Wikipedia existed for years under GFDL, this sentence is extremely dubious. Wikipedia would probably exist in some form if it hadn't switched licencing. It's not like the Creative Commons people, as much credit as they do deserve, were the _only_ people thinking and trying to address the issues posed.

More generally, Freddie deBoer has been writing in publicly available works and published for so long that he's obviously more credible for how any previous work was put together than what appears _itself_ to be a hallucination-prone AI system. Granted only one person knows for sure, but the idea that Pangram may have actually been correct all along doesn't pass a laugh test for me.

Do people not recognize names nor search for them before making insinuations? It's not like OP is a brand-new pseudonymous essay on a default-template blog with one or two other posts in the history: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_deBoer

While human biology hasn't changed in any meaningful sense, technology and US culture have changed dramatically.

1974 was over a half-century ago; it is extremely weak evidence with everything that's changed since then, at best.

The WSJ charts at the end should be taken with a huge grain of salt: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/544508/measu...

Yes, people do that. Karpathy made a utility to monitor it better years ago: https://github.com/karpathy/arxiv-sanity-preserver

No? It's almost certainly not AI overall despite the Webflow badge; it's pretty similar now to how the site looked in 2020: https://web.archive.org/web/20200806131653/https://www.beyon...

What do you not actually like about the site? I'm not a big fan of the trope of "hero" image slideshows taking up the whole screen, but if it's justified anywhere, it seems justified here where they're trying to make a game look cool, and the cards seem reasonably informative and not just vacuous. Yes, it is a "polished" design, and I wouldn't be surprised if they started with a template. What should they do; bad design to show amateurism? Would that be more or less slop?

That might be a valid motivation for keeping the rule, but as far I can tell it can't be the original reason for this rule as it predates passive indices in retirement accounts being that popular.

> There used to be a professional layer between most people and raw information. Librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers: people whose entire job was to understand how information was organized, who produced it, what motivated them, and where the gaps were in any given source. You didn’t need to think much about any of that, because someone else already had.

> That layer has largely dissolved. Search engines replaced the card catalog, algorithms replaced the reference interview, and AI summaries are now stepping in where a librarian’s judgment about source quality used to sit. What’s been left in place of all that professional mediation is a search bar and the assumption that you’ll figure it out. - https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/i/188856309/the-skil...

An unfortunate conclusion that smuggles in unwarranted good-old-days nostalgia to an otherwise excellent overview. The previous system that they're describing had serious problems, limited access to raw data compared to now, and could not have scaled up to the level of access to information that the internet provides.

The information environment prior to the early 2000s was quite terrible. We shouldn't pretend this was a golden age of truth-oriented gatekeeping, although there were certainly gatekeepers. There were a lot of misconceptions, errors, and unchecked biases on dead trees and in late 90s databases. The idea that those librarians, researchers, editors, fact-checkers were aligned with anything you might care about is also unsupported and dubious.