ceroxylon

> The most efficient way for an indie website to gain an audience is to be briefly featured on one of these bad, terrifying behemoths of the current Web

This is what the article / indieweb mean with POSSE

https://indieweb.org/POSSE

I put all of my apps into category folders at the top row, so I can see my background photo that I really enjoy. Once you do this for long enough, it is jarring to see the chaotic placement of app icons all over the screen on most people's devices.

Also I never use the camera app icon, I swipe left from the lock screen 99% of the time, and the remaining 1% is from things like auth apps opening it to scan QR codes for new accounts, etc.

I left Facebook over a decade ago, and it was painful to realize how many people simply forgot that I exist, and how many events I missed because many people exclusively use it to invite people.

Similar experience where I met someone in 2017 and was enraptured with them, and we eventually drifted apart because they only communicated through Snapchat and Instagram.

I often wonder if abstaining from the platforms that I dislike was worth the increase in loneliness and detachment from society, but I don't have access to the alternative universe where I decided to grit my teeth and accept the data hoarding companies and dark patterns as a tradeoff for being able to interact with people who couldn't care less about the technicalities.

It obviously leans more into the theories around how things can go horribly wrong if "AGI" is actually a thing (which can get existentially exhausting), but is still worth contemplating.

Hank Green had an interesting discussion with one of the authors, Nate Soares: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CKuiuc5cJM

side-note: i wager that the engagement bait title of the video was generated by AI, which is humorous to me in this context

It gets the visuals accurate, but the experience includes a lot of physical sensation that is very difficult to convey, e.g. the 'wind' that pushes you back and the discomfort of going into a chaotic dissociated state. You see those things but it feels very 'real'.

You changed my life with considerate moderation like this, so thank you for all that you do, thank you for keeping the ship on course.

It was everything... after reviewing my original statement and the reaction to it, I think a better message is "be careful who you promote to admin"; we will need a human to review what is going on, but it is the classic spiderman tale of "with great power comes great responsibility".

As someone who has witnessed a malicious Matrix admin, it has become glaringly obvious that operating on a platform that hinges on any sort of trust in a human who can oversee metadata (even those who you consider to be good friends) is not viable.

I wanted to believe, but sadly privacy must be hard-coded or the people with a large set of technical skill, access to AI agents who will restlessly pursue their mission, and a dysfunctional moral compass will attempt to technologically dominate users.

What are you referring to? I see the 'reasoning' in OpenRouter for GPT-5.2, I was under the impression that is the CoT.

> The friction isn’t just about quality—it’s about what the ubiquity of these tools signals.

Unless they are being ironic, using an AI accent with a statement like that for an article talking about the backlash to lazy AI use is an interesting choice.

It could have been human written (I have noticed that people that use them all the time start to talk like them), but the "its not just x — its y" format is the hallmark of mediocre articles being written / edited by AI.

That also stuck out for me, I was wondering if it was video games using openrouter for uptime / inference switching, video games would use a lot of tokens generating dialogue for a few programmer's villages.

As someone who appreciates machine learning, the main dissonance I have with interacting with Microsoft's implementation of AI feels like "don't worry, we will do the thinking for you".

This appears everywhere, with every tool trying to autocomplete every sentence and action, creating a very clunky ecosystem where I am constantly pressing 'escape' and 'backspace' to undo some action that is trying to rewrite what I am doing to something I don't want or didn't intend.

It is wasting time and none of the things I want are optimized, their tools feel like they are helping people write "good morning team, today we are going to do a Business, but first we must discuss the dinner reservations" emails.

Kagi reminds me of the original search engines of yore, when I could type what I want and it would appear, and I could go on with my work/life.

As for the people who claim this will create/introduce slop, Kagi is one of the few platforms where they are actively fighting against low quality AI generated content with their community fueled "SlopStop" campaign.[0]

Not sponsored, just a fan. Looking forward to trying this out.

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/slopstop.html

It wasn't there when I first went to Gemini after the announcement, but upon revisiting it gave me the prompt to try Nano Banana Pro. It failed at my niche (rare palm trees).

Incredible technology, don't get me wrong, but still shocked at the cumbersome payment interface and annoyed that enabling Drive is the only way to save.

Google has been stomping around like Godzilla this week, and this is the first time I decided to link my card to their AI studio.

I had seen people saying that they gave up and went to another platform because it was "impossible to pay". I thought this was strange, but after trying to get a working API key for the past half hour, I see what they mean.

Everything is set up, I see a message that says "You're using Paid API key [NanoBanano] as part of [NanoBanano]. All requests sent in this session will be charged." Go to prompt, and I get a "permission denied" error.

There is no point in having impressive models if you make it a chore for me to -give you my money-

"Espressif devices" = ESP32

I have had an issue using Claude for research; it will often cite certain sources, and when I ask why the data it is using is not in the source it will apologize, do some more processing, and then realize that the claim is in a different source (or doesn't exist at all).

Still useful, but hopefully this gets ironed out in the future so I don't have to spend so much time vetting every claim and its associated source.

The top 10% is already propping up half of consumer spending[0]. People will have money to throw around, but the amount of people doing so is shrinking until we figure out a way to balance the income disparity and reverse that trend.

[0]https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/wealthy-americans-accoun...

Found this demo with two views that was uploaded 18min ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8wEC6A5HQY

The author claims that they tried to avoid that: "[. . .] we had to choose them carefully and experiment to ensure that these documents were not already in the LLM training data (full disclosure: we can’t know for sure, but we took every reasonable precaution)."

I had my suspicions about the GPT-5 routing as well. When I first looked at it, the clock was by far the best; after the minute went by and everything refreshed, the next three were some of the worst of the group. I was wondering if it just hit a lucky path in routing the first time.

They have it available on the site under the (?) button:

"Create HTML/CSS of an analog clock showing ${time}. Include numbers (or numerals) if you wish, and have a CSS animated second hand. Make it responsive and use a white background. Return ONLY the HTML/CSS code with no markdown formatting."

Surely there can be a workflow created to "fight fire with fire" and have an AI that reads reports, trained on the code base with explicit instructions to verify all of the telltale signs of slop...? If AI services can handle the nightmare of parsing emails and understanding the psychology of phishing, I am optimistic it can be done for OSS reports.

It doesn't have to make the final judgement, just some sort of filter that automatically flags things like function calls that don't exist in the code.

It is good to be skeptical, but there is a large amount of detail in the paper itself that would have taken quite a bit of effort to fabricate (for no good reason): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S235198942...

There is enough detail there to book a trip to Germany and set up infrared cameras if we are so inclined, repeatability is a large part of science.

I can't prove it, but from interacting with 'support' teams who are clearly middle-people working with a clunky AI and accepting its output as absolute, that would be my first guess.

The demo looks like holding a robot's hand while they do something that would normally take me 15 seconds anyway. I have mostly found AI to be useful for search/research, not creating a middle-man between my friends and myself who has the "feature" of knowing what the star ratings on Google Maps imply.

In the last hour, I have seen the number of impacted services go from 90 to 92, currently sitting at 97.

This makes sense, but what happens when they stop burning cash on training runs and any of their competitors releases a better model that raises the ceiling?

They will have to train one that is comparable (or better), or the word will spread and users will move to the better model.

It has always annoyed me that a huge online mega-mart (that starts with the letter A) will advertise things in the same category as ones that have been recently bought, even though they are definitely not frequent purchases.

It feels like the algorithm is saying "oh, they bought a mattress... they must really love mattresses and want more!", when much better ads could be suggested with the wealth of data they have on shopping habits.

Is this not cognitive offload on steroids?