The absolute epitome of non-AI slop has got to be these creepy videos that were on YouTube back in ~2017:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsagate

Its exactly the kind of thing you’d expect would be the product of AI, but it actually came before AI. I think a lot of it was procedurally generated though, using scripts to control 3D software and editing software, so different character models could be used in the same scenes and different scenes could be strung together to make each video.

I think a similar thing happens with those shovelware Android games. There’s so many that are just the same game with (incredibly poorly done) asset swaps that I think they must just make a game once and then automatically generate a thousand+ variations on it.

That’s good to hear. It continuously amazes me how often search bars in some pieces of software manage to be worse than ctrl-f in a plaintext document.

Both Gnome and KDE also include a web search.

Is it on be default? Because if so I’m glad I don’t use that garbage.

I like Kazakhstan’s flag because I think its a nice combination of colors:

Its not very low entropy though, at least not compared to ones like Germany’s or Ukraine’s.

So for you I guess the proper comparison would be that the Xbox 360 is now as old as the IBM System/360 mainframe was when the NES released in NA.

The NES released in North America in 1985, this means that the 360 is now roughly as old as the NES was when the 360 came out.

Hallucinations are an intrinsic part of how LLMs work. OpenAI, literally the people with the most to lose if LLMs aren’t useful, has admitted that hallucinations are a mathematical inevitability, not something that can be engineered around. On top of that, its been shown that for things like mathematical proof finding switching to more sophisticated models doesn’t make them more accurate, it just makes their arguments more convincing.

Now, you might say “oh but you can have a human in the loop to check the AIs work”, but for programming tasks its already been found that using LLMs makes programmers less productive. If a human needs to go over everything an AI generates, and reason about it anyway, that’s not really saving time or effort. Now consider that as you make the LLM more complex, having it generate longer and more complicated blocks of text, its errors also become harder to detect. Is that not just shuffling around the necessary human brainpower for a task instead of reducing it?

So, in what field is this sort of thing useful? At one point I was hopeful that LLMs could be used in text summarization, but if I have to read the original text anyway to make sure that I haven’t been fed some highly convincing falsehood then what is the point?

Currently I’m of the opinion that we might be able to use specialized LLMs as a heuristic to narrow the search tree for things like SAT solvers and answer set generators, but I don’t have much optimism for other use cases.

Would it be possible that CEOs have people employed to take some of their tasks? Some CEOs, all their tasks?

Is a CEOs job the same when theres 50 people under him/her or 5000? Which do you think could run itself the best?

If other people are doing your work for you then it sounds like you’re not working full time.

I remember a blog post about about how WYSIWYG editors should be called “what you see doesn’t prepare you for the eldritch horrors that lurk below the surface” editors.

In my opinion a single weird person doesn’t warrant an entire complaint post with 100+ comments of discussion (which, yes, I know I am adding to).

Its not just SEO, they intentionally made Search worse.

Isn’t this an interesting property of market economies?

Software and silicon chip manufacturing has literally nothing to do with food production and yet a ‘disaster’ (I.E. going back to the status quo as of a few years ago) in that industry will affect your ability to eat. Nothing has happened to the farmers or their fields, or to the logistics system that moves food from one place to another, and yet somehow things suddenly can’t find their way from where they are produced to where they are needed.

Remember, this is supposed to be the most efficient way to allocate resources.

The Neverhood literally consists of photographs, it is as photorealistic as it is possible to be, and yet it has a very strong art direction. More modern titles like The Midnight Walk, Keeper, and Felt That Boxing are similar, though they are actually rendered rather than consisting of photographs and video. On the other side of the coin there are some visual effects that are quite abstracted from real life, but are also very GPU intensive, showing that just because an image doesn’t look like a photo doesn’t mean that its necessarily easy to render (note, that video is a human authored algorithm, not AI, though they do compare it to AI video generation).

I used to have the same opinion that you express, but I think this was only ever really true in practice during the brown era, and not before or after. In fact some games like Thief 1&2, Half Life 1&2, and the Chronicles of Riddick were trying to be as photorealistic as possible at the time of their release, but are now pretty commonly praised for their “stylization” today. For example, the deep blacks and stark contrast of stencil shadows vs what you get with more modern lighting. I am reminded of a Brian Eno quote:

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided.

We are even seeing some nostalgia now for the pissfilter era, though that’s not an enthusiasm that I share. I suspect that we will eventually see TAA ghosting and ray tracing artifacts, that are currently much hated, be recreated in a controlled way as a stylistic choice. In particular I think that Control will eventually be praised for the way that it basically incorporated ray tracing artifacts into its art style, by using sparkly mineral walls and a dreamlike atmosphere.

The Soviets tried something similar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Znamya_(satellite)

Fixed

I don’t like the notion that if “being yourself” means people don’t like you, you must be acting like an asshole.

A lot of autistic people, for example, have to put on a mask just to function at all in society. Which is something that can be mentally and emotionally exhausting. When someone like that hears “just be yourself” it can be really frustrating, and the conflation of social skill with mortality I think causes a lot of harm.

As an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure I recommend those tiny rubber stoppers you see in the photo. They have a peel and stick part that goes under your case which retains the plug on a strip of rubber. That strip might wear out in a few years and rip, but they cost almost nothing to replace (and in fact come in packs).

Phones used to have these things built in, then they stopped in the smartphone era because they didn’t look as sleek and futuristic I guess. Now, if you have a case, it once again makes hardly any difference to the appearance.

Car engines, for probably the past 100 years, have always been advertised based on their peak power rating, not what they can produce continuously. Cars are not designed to have their accelerator pedals floored for hours on end, nor is this even possible to do, as you’d eventually hit a curve and need to slow down.

This is especially the case for high performance vehicles, which usually have more demanding maintenance requirements just from normal operation, let alone from being abused like that.

I see

I don’t know how Micro works, and I don’t actually use emacs day to day, but as I understand it emacs works a bit like:

• When you press a key in emacs it invokes a Lisp function that takes as arguments the text buffer that has focus, the parameters of the ‘window’ into that buffer, and the cursor position in that window.
• This is the case for any key you press in any context, even for typing normal letters.
• A ‘mode’ in emacs is a set of bindings which associate specific keys with specific functions.
• ‘modes’ can be stacked on top of each other, with higher modes being able to intercept key presses before they reach lower modes, and changes / manipulate lower modes (I think?)
• All of the editor’s functionality, such as ‘search’ or ‘undo’, is implemented in that way.
• All of this is completely customizable, so pressing a key combo can be made to do virtually anything or manipulate the rest of the editor’s systems in any way.

Does Micro work anything like that?