The most existentially terrifying thing about it is that it’s not about education or overall intelligence, but personality. And even then, there’s an emotional edge to it that may catch people in particularly vulnerable states.

Like a virus is a load of DNA being driven by a questionably alive entity, AI is a load of emotional signal being driven by a questionably conscience one (though I still argue not, I think the analogy stands). Education and intelligence can help ward it some, but people are complex and there’s no telling what subsystems or random strings it manages to hook onto.

I have a background in CS and AI (from the early 00’s, don’t be too impressed) and have friends in linguistics. ML and more specifically LLMs have been on my radar for a long while and I am aware of their possible uses, but I’m tired of having to hedge every conversation around it. What we need to do is cultivate a strong social and cultural boundary for ourselves.

I heard someone say that the only thing AI should be used for is stuff people never should have been doing in the first place, things like catching spam/phishing out of your email. GenAI is just pure abomination.

Isn’t this one of Zitron’s oft-cited horsemen?

Hah, lustful longing.

Terry Pratchett is a classic of course. I was making my way through publication order, but can’t remember where I stopped at this point.

As for the lesbian smut, definitely give The Starving Saints a look. Not spicy, but more the painful aching, if that’s your thing.

Oh yes! I’ve read Perdido Street Station and The Scar and greatly enjoyed them. I should get back to checking out more of his stuff, I know Iron Council is also in that setting but I’m not sure of much else. I tried Un Lun Dun back in the day and while it was fun, it was a little too YA for me.

I read a lot of fantasy when I was younger but gradually fell out of love with the genre. It started to feel really trope heavy and I got tired of everything feeling like it needed to be a 3-5+ novel epic series that was so enamored with its own world-building it felt more like a history lesson. Perhaps my choices on reading material were to blame, but still. I moved onto sci-fi and fiction for a good while.

I’ve been trying to rekindle my passion for it with one off “weird” fiction. Standalone stories that are just interested in doing weird stuff, whatever that may entail. It’s not well-defined and if anyone has any recommendations I’d be happy to hear them but so far some of my best discovies,

• The West Passage, Jared Pechaček. A palace the size of a city ruled over by giant, eldritch ladies and mired in ancient bureaucracies is threatened by a forgotten prophecy. I like it because it doesn’t overexplain its world, it just throws a bunch of interesting events and scenery at you while gesturing at the architecture of the world that holds it up, leading you to speculate on the mystery of it all.
• The Starving Saints, Caitlin Starling. Claustrophobic, horrifying, vaguely sapphic. It follows the storylines of a knight, a nun, and a peasant girl trapped in a castle under siege. As supplies diminish and things are looking grim, their saints miraculously appear to save them but not all is at it appears etc. etc. Just a good read, I liked this one a lot
• Currently reading: Mad Sisters of Esi, Tashan Mehta. This one got off to a bit of an uneven start but it’s an interesting mashup of myth and sci-fi where the universe is referred to as the black sea, planets are islands, and spaceship may be literally ships with sails. Not done with it yet, but enjoying it as it has strong characters and a good emotional core.

I’m constantly struck by the imagery of the giant warrior from Nausicaa. There is a timeline or a reality where this worked, but they couldn’t help themselves. They woke the beast up the second it was even halfway possible and now it’s tearing itself apart in self-destructive blasts because the whole thing was under-cooked (and probably the completely wrong direction to begin with).

If there’s any consolation here it’s that hopefully this has soured enough people on the idea that a second effort won’t even get off the ground. I hope …

There’s never going to be a “Year of the Linux Desktop” where there’s some critical inflection point like a lot of people think. But Microsoft has fucked up here in assuming that consumer trust is a linear relationship and it’s not. They broke the trust, the cracks are there, and users will keep bleeding. They’ll keep a certain percentage of users through apathy or complacency, but the momentum is flowing in reverse now.

What it takes for any one person to cross over is going to look different, whether that’s Linux getting up to speed on a feature they were looking for or Microsoft crossing yet another unacceptable threshold, but despite all my anger and personal grievances aside, I truly believe Microsoft as a company is incapable of correcting this problem.

Their goals are entirely misaligned, they believe they can dictate the market at the consumer and their revenue is dependent on that. They’re bleeding more money and talent through this AI debacle and that’s making them even less capable of facing and addressing the issues. Unfortunately I don’t think they’ll ever fully implode, but just like Chrome eventually ate IE’s market share and now won’t go away, so it will be with Linux.

Bonus points: I’m calling it, I truly do believe that in ~5 years or so Windows will cease to be its own operating system and start shifting towards a Linux distro with a bespoke DE (again, see Chrome/Edge). They don’t want to have to keep maintaining an OS like this and one of the biggest arguments for doing so has been the backwards compatibility, but everything is cloud and SaaS now and they want to push more business customers in that direction anyway. Server will be a thorn in their side for awhile, but consumer facing Windows distro will be the perfect testing ground. Mark it, ~5 years … EEE

Benn Jordan is a gem, do yourself a favor and just go watch all his stuff.

His latest on robot dogs is amazingly well-executed and researched with terrifying conclusions.

Yeah, nothing will help attract players like diluting any weak identity it already had with an open deluge of metaverse slop. Everything will be everything. It’s not enough to have a product anymore, it has to be a whole ecosystem. God forbid a single bloody dollar slip through your grasp.

What does end-to-end encryption even accomplish when you’re just feeding the information into an obscured, blackbox AI on the other end?

Like yes, I understand the importance of E2EE, I’m just making a point, it’s all rather ridiculous.

Commercial for AI: Now you can order a cake while planning your child’s birthday and sending an email to your boss while printing the tickets for your trip to Italy!

My unemployed ass, sitting around in boxers eating cereal at 10PM watching cartoons from the 90’s: Sweet, this is gonna change my life!

The thing about this though, is that it’s not a new problem at all. LLMs didn’t start to get good enough in the early 20’s and only then did they come up with this idea. I worked for a company out near Seattle back in ~2014 that was already well into trying to tackle this problem.

They ran callcenters with a variety of contracts for different companies and took calls, chats, and emails. The main business model wasn’t the centers themselves but the information gathered by the ticketing system to help build tools like this.

Personally, with that insight and assuming surely there must’ve been other companies moving along that path, I find it quite telling that they still haven’t sufficiently stepped up to the role. There are some hard limits on cost and hallucinations that I think will ultimately fail to deliver a truly long-term, viable product. When you see they can’t maintain the veneer on even that use case, you’ll know the bubble has to be close to popping.

Of course no one can really say for sure, we’ve all been predicting it for some time and when there’s this much money invested they’ll protect that reality ferociously, so who really fucking knows. But still …

AI slop is the output of all generative AI, full stop.

Slop itself is anything produced for the sake of being produced. Something without feeling or soul, just more content for the content machine.

Like, yes it does take some level of skill to “prompt engineer” the AI and get it to show you the thing you want, but it’s still not a distinctive style, it’s still not your style. If you say, “sloth astronaut” I can imagine that in my head in my own way, there’s no value in producing an AI image. As far as I’m concerned, an AI image narrows down all the possibilities of my own imagination into the specific piece of slop from the slop machine. If I wanted to see it, the point would be to see an interpretation in someone’s style.

I can’t remember where I saw this argument recently, it was something coming out of Capcom saying they’d use AI for background details and people citing specific examples from Pragmata maybe? Things like vending machines and environmental details that could be streamlined with the help of AI. But even these small details are places for environmental artists to shine. Show off their skills, hide small details and world building, and little in jokes. It may not be much but it adds to the overall texture and flavor of the product. It does matter.

AI is slop, is slop, is slop. There’s absolutely no reforming it and if I detect even a whiff of it, I’m out.

On the other hand, those opposed to AI also have a subgroup that wants anything and everything with AI in the name dead, without any regard to what it is or what it does.

This might be a bit of a hot take, but I don’t really see anything inherently wrong with this. The scientists and engineers will continue doing their serious work regardless of public opinion, and while some of them may have tangentially benefited from from increased interest and funding in the field, most of it is going to these corporate LLM models which are taking up all the oxygen in the room.

That’s a bubble that needs to burst. I think it’s more important to keep public sentiment rightfully focused in that direction. Let’s face it, you’re really not going to be able to educate the general public on these nuances. The field at large will persist regardless.

I don’t have any sort of synesthesia, but tried to engage with the question. Was utterly unable to summon an opinion of my own, but reading through other answers yellow seems to “click” the most.

I appreciate your cynicism, shit sucks.

But I do choose to see this as a good sign; that they were pressured into taking even this much action when they could’ve just continued doing nothing and it would’ve been easier and probably less controversial. I hope it amounts to something, but tides are shifting even on the business end.

Without reading into this a single bit further I’m just going to assume it’s because you have an incredibly flat ass. My condolences

Not sure how well it counts for being about trains, but the first one that leapt to mind for me was Jethro Tull - Locomotive Breath

It’s at least got a lot of train allegory.

Seager explained in this morning’s update while there won’t be a “global kill switch” for AI features on Ubuntu, their plan is to deliver all the AI features via Snap packages. So removing AI features on Ubuntu will come down to removing Snaps.

IMHO opt-in means the snaps wouldn’t even be on the system unless you had already opted in, but I was never going to use Ubuntu anyways so what does it matter.