alexjplant

Media companies sell ads. Advertisers pay by impressions. Slopulist clickbait drives impressions.

At this point the term "AI" has been so diluted that it doesn't refer to generative image models or LLMs or traditional machine learning so much as it acts as a memetic sonic screwdriver, i.e. whatever journalists, pundits, founders, etc. need it to be. You can see how each party is wielding it in this specific instance quite clearly.

The following might sound like pop culture Mad Libs but it's 100% true.

The Jurassic Park guy [1] directed an 80s sci-fi film [2] about malfunctioning domestic robots. I saw a few minutes of it on cable in the late 90s. There's a scene [3] where Magnum PI does battle with an overhead projector on wheels that has a .38 duck-taped to it in the distantly-future year 1991. The movie was about as good as the robot was menacing, which is to say it wasn't. The critics didn't think so either.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runaway_(1984_American_film)

[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q493OCr0piY

I have a Twitch account that I can't log into due. They'll send me an e-mail with my username in it but won't send me the password reset e-mail. Their support will acknowledge that I clearly have access to the inbox and will refuse to help or do anything for me to recover my account. They are beyond worthless.

Takes 11 seconds to load on Firefox on Linux with 3G-level throttling enabled in Dev Tools.

This. The Beatles happened upon the right things at the right time and therefore cemented their place in the zeitgeist as the progenitors of a lot of stuff that they themselves probably wouldn't even take credit for. Taking psychedelic rock as an example: "Pet Sounds" predates "Sergeant Pepper's" but only one of these albums gets the graphic t-shirt and VH1/NPR/Rolling Stone retrospective treatment. This happens all the time and is largely a product of critics coalescing on narratives simple enough for them and their audience to reason about. It's easier to say, for instance, that Black Sabbath invented heavy metal because their name sounds a lot spookier than "Sir Lord Baltimore" or "Blue Cheer", not because they actually did it.

NAM is groundbreaking and very useful. Unfortunately the people most annoyingly hyping it on gear forums are the usual crop of bedroom "tone hunters" who cosplay as musicians on the internet by pontificating about their pet gear preferences and suffering from degenerate GAS. They want a free Kemper because they're afraid of pressing buttons on a modeler and don't have the executive function to simply ignore the advanced parameters in an amp simulator ("I spend more time tweaking than I do playing!").

Regardless of the discourse around it I'd love a small, affordable NAM pedal that I could use as an emergency backup for my Fractal. I've entered my old man phase of playing and only use one amp setting because I roll back my volume for cleans; a profile of my SLO patch would be mint.

I seem to recall people "claiming" GameFAQs message boards for obscure games for this same purpose back in the day.

I had to look this up [1]:

> C. T. Studd, (1860-1931) the famed English missionary who served God in China, India, and Africa, once remarked: "Remember the miller's donkey. The miller, son and donkey went to the market. The miller rode the donkey all the way and people exclaimed, 'Cruel man, riding himself and making his son walk.' So he got down and his son rode; then people slanged, 'What a lazy son for riding while poor old father walks.' Then both father and son rode, and people then said, 'Cruelty to animals, poor donkey.' So they got down and carried the donkey on a pole, but folks said, 'Here are two asses carrying another ass.' Then all three walked and people said, 'What fools to have a donkey and not ride it.' So let's go ahead with our work for God and not care what folks say."

Secular wisdom for the ages! 150 years ago we would have been taking a donkey to market wrong. Now with the advent of YouTube and Reddit and Twitter we've charted vast new swaths of incorrect behavior that we can leverage to make ourselves feel superior to others.

[1] https://www.actsweb.org/articles/article.php?i=295&d=2&c=6

California spends an insane amount on combating homelessness with nothing to show for it. This is a difficult problem to solve for sure; I'm not an expert in this field and would be speaking out of turn were I to suggest preferable alternatives. Suffice it to say that billions of dollars are being flushed down the toilet doing whatever is being done right now.

These aren't preferences so much as they are facts. I am very much not messing around. You can tell how serious I am by how I equated the decline of western civilization to a lack of sandwich vegetables.

Yes there is. There are a lot people have no idea what makes a good sandwich. They will happily put turkey, Miracle Whip, and two Kraft singles on 11-grain honey wheat Wonderbread and go about their day fully convinced that they made something delicious and healthy.

The fact that >50% of Italian sub shops default to not putting onions on their torpedoes is a testament to how far we've fallen as a culture.

> And when things go south, you blame AI?

This seems to work well enough for people who deploy cloud instances without redundancy to us-east-1 then blame AWS when there's an outage. I say this somewhat unironically because if one pushes the "move fast and break things" slider all the way to the right then they're necessarily assuming that type of risk. Of course some people will try to have their cake and eat it too [1] as regards velocity and quality but that's a separate discussion.

[1] I've never understood this idiom because if one isn't in possession of their cake before eating it then they're eating stolen cake which is a decidedly anti-social activity and orthogonal to the point of the saying. It should be "eat their cake and keep it too" or something.

benheck built a luggable computer into an MGD beer case around the early 00s as well. The build log and pictures seem to be lost to time but I recall it having a flip-open disc door that was cut out of the side of it. I didn't appreciate the humor as a kid but having had a beer or two in my day it's a lot funnier in retrospect.

Trinity cracked the IRS dBase, not the FBI one.

I seem to recall Anthropic going on record saying that they don't do anything to model performance to stretch their compute capacity. I've anecdotally noticed massive peaks and troughs in performance week to week (albeit with Opus, not Fable).

I wonder what their official explanation for this behavior is.

I'm happy that this hardware exists but an easier solution is to quit social media, viciously curate your notifications and apps, and install an ad blocker. My phone only alerts me if somebody calls me, asks me a question specifically in a group chat, or DMs me. I never see any ads or any FOMO nags. Life is pretty good.

I sincerely wonder how this is going to work given the large divergence in lifestyle preferences between these generations. Real estate especially will be an interesting one - lots of young people either cannot (due to employment situations) or actively choose not to live in the areas that their parents did. What will happen when these houses hit the market? How will this huge supply increase affect the people who do live there? Nobody I know is moving to Pennsyltucky to live in their parents' house even if it's free... will it crater property values for all of the hard-working townies who sunk their money into their own homes?

Just use GLM-5.3 Flash via OpenRouter. It's dirt cheap especially relative to how capable it is. While the Z.ai coding plan was a decent deal in the past I always ran into limiting with it and since I use it intermittently for personal projects my usage wasn't always enough to make the math work - the a la carte pricing via OpenRouter makes this a non-issue.

There's also a new free stealth model available that's more likely than not in the GLM family. This seems to happen every few months for a week or two and represents a good savings opportunity.

I bother because Claude Code does wacky nonsense unless I use OpenSpec (or something similar) to explicitly research, scope, persist, then implement in a brand-new context. Even Opus will do ridiculous nonsense like throw its hands up when asked to start a Docker container, ignore explicit architectural instructions, write verbose make-work documentation riddled with inaccuracies, etc. Using OpenSpec keeps things as constrained as possible with the side effect of recording what your system does.

OpenCode and various open models do not exhibit this tendency nearly as much in my experience. My recent experiences with GPT-5.6 were also very positive in this regard. Alas for regulatory reasons this stack is a non-starter at $DAYJOB so I'm stuck working around Anthropic's capacity optimizing shenanigans.

> I might be showing a lot of unc energy here, but if you can't afford a raspberry pi or something to play with linux, or a used pc, gaming and having a playstation 5 should be de prioritized for a bit while you get your life together.

Your comment is framed as though Linux usage and what you deem an unstable lifestyle (lack of monetary means in your judgment) are mutually exclusive. Open-source software is for everybody, including the messy or disenfranchised. Would you frame a kid who got a PS5 for Christmas who doesn't have an allowance or job as a failure because they don't have $100 to spend on a Pi? It sounds like you just look down on people playing video games even when they want to use the very thing you're implicitly deriding to do the thing that you think they should be doing... doesn't seem to make a lot of sense.

I've seen all four films plus "The Animatrix" and played two of the games and don't recall this at all. Contemporarily, however, there was an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise [1] that used this as a key plot point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Stop

> It is quite absurd (but categorically true) that the quality of audio that folks were generally listening to in 2005 was better than what we are doing today.

I seem to recall most people being perfectly content with 128kbps MP3s on iPod earbuds back in the day. Only audiophiles/nerds (of which there seem to be more now) were into actual headphones and amp setups and there's never been greater market choice in this regard.

Defense contracting doesn't have an aversion to LLMs so much as it doesn't like doing anything that threatens the status quo. Many places sit comfortably 5-10 years behind the median of the rest of the industry or are stuck on proprietary tech stacks for arbitrary reasons.

I would rather deal with Claude refusing to follow instructions than be forced to write software in a proprietary framework that's been effectively EoL'd by its vendor then use Citrix to deploy software to a Windows box after a month long round of manual testing. The former is slightly annoying whereas the latter is a dire threat to your professional mobility and dignity. Your mileage may vary.

As a 12-year-old I could barely afford shared hosting let alone a license for Invision or vBulletin. I recall that phpBB also had a reputation for stability (manually-applied RPG mods excluded) that Invision sacrificed in favor of more features and faster development.

For enterprise software it's a feature. For most consumer software it's an anti-feature. Each of these crowds are on opposite ends of the same axis: the executive class coalesces around the mantra that LLMs bring automation benefits that will positively affect the org's bottom line. The populist belief is that LLMs and generative models are at best annoying and at worst anti-human.

At the risk of sounding trite there is a kernel of truth to both of these camps and things will eventually shake out. As LLM capabilities plateau and people broadly realize that they excel in domains that don't require discretion or taste the market will settle someplace in the middle.

I'm flexing my PM muscles by working on small personal projects and am constantly asking myself 1) what problem is what I'm building solving, 2) which parts of solving this problem are largely janitorial/annoying, then 3) could an LLM be leveraged (not used, leveraged) to reduce struggle. My golf app and fitness tracker telling me "lol u 3-putted too many holes" or "bro yr sleep is cooked - have you tried breathing slowly" do not fall into this category. Feeding an apartment lease into an LLM and having it enumerate the ways that my landlord is trying to push the boundaries of tenant law does.

To paraphrase the sage Jimmy McMillan: the number of people who interview on their work laptops is too damn high. I'm always flabbergasted when they admit this and not once has somebody who did so passed. IME there's a strong correlation between good judgment and technical prowess in this regard but I suppose stories like this prove me wrong.

What? You have to run Bridge on your desktop to get the functionality anyhow... if they offered it natively then it might be worth something but you have to run a binary to get it. Meanwhile Proton's mobile app has gotten buggier and buggier over the years as it refuses to load messages, loads old messages in a thread when you click on the most recent notification, forgets to remove drafts after sending, fails to sync the calendar, etc.

Lumo, which could have been a great offering, similarly breaks after every fifth message or so and is substantially behind SOTA offerings. IMHO Proton has jumped the shark and this is just the final straw.

I switched to Tuta this morning. I used to be a huge Proton advocate but multiple hour-plus downtimes in a week for e-mail is unacceptable. At this point I had better uptime running my own mail server on a VPS (or at least when the UI went down it was a simple `systemctl restart` away to fix it) and this was in the dark ages of having to manually rotate X.509 certs.

...the second in a few days.

Because Flock is the first company to so brazenly violate the post-2011 social contract: if you're going to track somebody you need to give them coupons and content as compensation. They have failed to provide the people whose privacy they are violating with internet drama and buttcheeks videos. Other companies with many times greater reach and market cap collect GPS, cell tower, and 802.11 ESSID data to observe their users' movements; they track them across web sites and apps without explicit consent to serve personalized advertisements and adjust prices for durable goods and services depending upon user behavior. They do this with impunity because people enjoy short-form videos and image macros and will readily trade their privacy for easy access to them. Flock has nothing to offer in this regard. This is why they are shunned whereas other companies that understand how this game is played are forgiven for equivalent or worse sins.