DamnInteresting

> It won’t work to put the genie back in the bottle

It's not about putting the genie back in the bottle, it's about helping folks realize that the vague smell of farts in the air IS the genie--and this particular genie only grants costly monkey paw wishes that ultimately do more harm to the world than good.

Scott Adams did me a considerable and unsolicited kindness almost 20 years ago, back in 2007. One day my site traffic logs showed an unexpected uptick in traffic, and recent referrals overwhelmingly pointed to his blog. Of course I recognized him from Dilbert fame, both the comic strip and The Dilbert Principle.

I sent him a thank you email for the link, and he replied graciously. This began a conversation where he referred me to his literary agent, and this ultimately led to a real-world, dead-tree-and-ink book publishing deal[1]. He even provided a nice blurb for the book cover.

I can't say that I agreed a lot with the person Scott Adams later became--I only knew him vaguely, from a distance. But he brought humor into many people's lives for a lot of years, and he was generous to me when he didn't have to be. Today I'll just think about the good times.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/the-damn-interesting-book/

Edit: I found the relevant Dilbert Blog link via the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20071011024008/http://dilbertblo...

> Nothing I've seen from the AI labs appears to indicate that they are worried about model collapse in the slightest.

AI labs are insufferable hype machines, they are unlikely to sow doubt about their own business models.

> they can detect that and take steps to fix it.

Each model will need an endless diet of new content to remain relevant, and over time, avoiding ingestion of LLM output (and the accompanying inbreeding depression) will likely be a tricky proposition. Not impossible, but expensive and error-prone.

This has been my suspicion since LLMs began eating the Internet. Whether it's code or writing, now that LLMs are consuming their own output, the Habsburg Jaw[1] is going to quickly become evident. It is very difficult--sometimes impossible--to know whether a given chunk of input is wholly or partially generated by an LLM. Nevertheless, filtering input may become a critical task. That expense will be passed to the consumer, and LLM prices will necessarily rise as their quality diminishes. It could become a death spiral.

If so, I, for one, will be relieved. I'm tired of LLMs trying to take over the enjoyable parts of writing and coding, and leaving the menial tasks to us humans.

[1] https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/distinctive-habsbu...

> I hope everyone realizes that the current LLMs are subsidized, like your Seamless and Uber was in the early days.

A.I. == Artificially Inexpensive

I personally enjoy changes of scenery, but my parents struggle to relearn how to use their computer every time there is a major OS update that revamps the UI. It's seldom better, it's just change for change's sake, resulting in a lot of time lost to relearning. Sticking to the old OS is only viable as long as security updates continue.

I wish that OS developers would provide the option to retain the bulk of the old UI when a new one comes out, implementing the UI like a swappable "theme." People who prefer consistency could keep most of their old UI, and those who prefer the newer UI can have it.

I made a similar effect a few years back using layered transparent PNGs[1]. It's not quite as dynamic, but it's probably a lot more efficient.

[1] https://www.damninteresting.com/ghoulish-acts-dastardly-deed...

When it's more than one company working together in a monopoly-like fashion, the term is "oligopoly".

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/oligopoly

He makes a pretty good case that partnering with Electrify has not damaged the quality of the channel's videos so far. They've made multiple videos now under this arrangement, and they've maintained a high standard. I am not confident that it will remain that way indefinitely--capitalism will come for its pound of flesh--but for now it is holding on.

Among my circle of friends, many have a tradition of playing multiplayer games after the kiddos are asleep and the presents are prepared. It makes me wonder whether this has increasingly become a common tradition, and as a consequence the hug this year is more than even Steam could bear. This is pure speculation, of course.

Since I'm indulging in luxurious speculation: maybe Valve has taken Steam down to prepare to announce Half Life 3 tomorrow.

Oh, you can't reach the items on the higher grocery shelves no matter how hard you stretch? That's just a deficit of tall-power. I also experience items on high shelves. No, you shouldn't use a stepping stool to grab those items; just stretch more, and grow taller, like me! Look how good I am at being a bit taller than you! Your failure to be slightly taller is a character flaw, feel bad.

Some of us actually enjoy writing code, and wish to preserve the skill, so we have no motivation to offload the task to an LLM. Do LLM coding evangelists also badger illustrators, asking why they don't just embrace machine learning image generation? Do they tell people they shouldn't have human friends because chatbots exist? Do they insist that musicians slough off their creativity like a molting snake, and just let a computer generate their songs?

There is also a big, uncomfortable truth regarding "AI" coding tools: They are trained on open-source code, yet they ignore the licenses attached to that code. If it's unethical for me to copy-and-paste MIT licensed code without including the license text, then it's unethical to let an LLM do it on my behalf.

LLMs are paving the way to a dystopia where there's no motivation for humans to create, and that world sounds miserable.

Thanks! We do indeed have a sort of e-book monetization; donating above certain thresholds gives one access to download an e-book version of our entire catalog.

And true enough that RSS traffic is largely uncounted, but there are many other indications of reduced visitor count--server-side logs, comment count on original content, number of email subscribers, and that sort of thing.

Thanks! We had our 20th birthday earlier this year, so we've certainly been around for some vintage devices. Over the years our primary audience moved from desktop web browsers to mostly mobile readers, and now our largest audience is podcast listeners.

Site traffic is indeed down in recent years. The largest decline was when Facebook introduced "boosting," and stopped showing our posts to 90%+ of our Facebook followers overnight. I despise advertising, so I was unwilling to cave to their demand to "boost" our posts into ads. I'd have been happy to pay a reasonable monthly fee to reach our audience there, but that option was never available.

That big dip in traffic came with a big dip in donations, and as a consequence I eventually had to move from a part-time day job to full-time. The sharp reduction in free my time led to a sharp reduction in original content on Damn Interesting, which further shrunk the pool of people willing to donate.

This is a spiral that some would classify as "death," if I were willing to let it die. But it settled into an equilibrium where it pays for itself, makes a modest profit, and remains rewarding. Frankly I'd probably still do it even if donations dried up entirely, the research and writing give me a sense of purpose that would be difficult to replace.

I used to hope that a wealthy benefactor would discover us, and decide to fully fund our project for a few years, giving us space to realize more of the project's potential. But such offers come with strings attached, and I don't have the stomach for most of those. Perhaps I am broken.

My long-running website damninteresting.com and its affiliated projects (e.g., omiword.com) earn me a combined ~$700/month profit on average. Donations have been declining, however, so I don't know if I'll be piping up in next year's thread.

> Dumb question: who’s Firefox target user?

These days, it seems to be people who:

* Don't want to be using a browser owned by an ethically dubious corporation

* Want a fully functional ad blocker

* Prefer vertical tabs

This was the main thread about Snowden on the day his identity was revealed:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5850590

The iPhone keyboard is a living he'll.

A couple of years ago I deleted reddit and other social media and news apps from my phone. The only remaining distractions it offers are email and books. It's been wonderful, I've been reading about 2 novels per month. Highly recommended.

I remember buying The Sims when it came out originally. I started a gaming session that evening, and after a little while I noticed the sun coming in the window. I'd played all night without noticing. Since then, I've given that kind of open-ended game a wide berth. It's a bit disconcerting for a gaming session to achieve flow state.

That's too bad, Atlas Obscura is (was?) one of the good ones. It must be heartbreaking to watch capitalism eat your baby.

The author does mention:

> The reason for all this, of course, is AI datacenter buildouts.

This bubble can't pop fast enough. I'm curious to see which actually useful AIs remain after the burst, and how expensive they are once the cash-burning subsides.

> The market wants a lot more high quality AI slop

"High quality AI slop" is a contradiction in terms. The relevant definitions[1] are "food waste (such as garbage) fed to animals", "a product of little or no value."

By definition, the best slop is only a little terrible.

[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/slop

Plagiarism is also "another set of tooling." Likewise slavery, and organized crime. Tools can be immoral.

Video explanation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bu7PJoxaMZg

They did try adding variations to the amount (+0.50-1.00) late in the game, but by then it was ineffective, I could still quickly detect them and turn on the randomized data poisoning. I expect that they want to keep the amount small so most cardholders won't bother to look into the unfamiliar charge.

I do wonder whether these people sold their list of "verified" credit card numbers to any criminal enterprises before they realized the data was poisoned. That would be potentially awkward for them.

I did something similar with someone who was using my site’s donation form to test huge batches of credit cards numbers. I would see hundreds of attempted (and mostly declined) $1 donations start pouring in, and I’d block the IP. A little while later it would restart from another IP. When it became clear they were not giving up easily, I changed tack: instead of blocking them, I would return random success/failure messages at the same rate they were seeing success on previous attempts. I didn’t really try to charge those cards, of course.

I like how this kind of response is very difficult for them to detect when I turn it on, and as a bonus, it pollutes their data. They stopped trying a few days after that.

I remember buying NOLF--it was at retail, in a big box off the shelf at Media Play. I knew nothing about it, it just caught my eye, and the description on the back sounded interesting. I miss that kind of media discovery, our modern always-online world tends to smother serendipity.

It was an excellent game. The idea of a continuation of the series is appealing, but a lot of modern adaptations really stink, so maybe it's better off in the amber of nostalgia.

Unless you are republishing my work, using it to earn yourself a livelihood while depriving me of the same, then you are not part of the problem that I describe.

I can only speak for myself, but mostly the opposite has been true for me. I am a 'peasant' creating original works, and occasionally I must wield copyright to salt the giant thirsty leeches appropriating my work. If it were not for the protection offered by copyright, I would be a desiccated husk.