The fact that it’s referred to as a potluck is also interesting because it suggests that participants also had to come up with their own torture method to inflict. I imagine “spend twenty minutes with the sort of person who participates in a torture potluck” was the equivalent of potato salad.

All the dice discourse in particular has made this a fun throwback to the days of crypto bros earnestly arguing about which wall in your house you should hide your hand-stamped seed phrase record inside and whether you could trust a published book of truly random numbers over a series of 256 coin flips. Ironically I can only assume that by the time any of the concerns about entropy sources were validated most of them lost their crypto to some combination of get-richer-quicker ponzi schemes and twitter DMs claiming to definitely be FTX tech support.

I love a good Modest Proposal

This is fascinating. Ignoring, for a moment, the assertion that AI agents are sentient beings somehow, what struck me about both part 1 and 2 is the bafflingly sincere excitement about turning a fairly straightforward software project into “building a new civilization”, and the assumption that this whole process will be best repeated for every software project. Let’s even ignore the abysmal economics of needing to effectively invent the universe in order to add apple pie to your crappy flash game. It’s absolutely wild and possibly malpractice for an engineer to be this excited about the needless expansion of scope and complexity of a project. It really showcases the kind of mindset it takes to be this breathlessly excited about the sheer number of different components that are being worked on in order to eventually somehow make a game happen. This is the dopamine rush of seeing the agents do something combined with an abdication of any responsibility for exactly what they do.

You know, basically all of the bullshit we see from the silicon valley set makes a lot more sense if they’re legitimately unable to recognize a difference between society as a whole doing well and their particular project or vision succeeding. Like, it also fits with their assumption that the world is falling apart because people are being mean to them online.

Anyone who doubts that authenticity is dead should reference this paragraph.

I think there’s some truth to that, but it also bears acknowledging that the market demand existed already. The number of people who can get a lot of benefit from IT productivity tools is much higher than the number of people who are willing to do the work of maintaining and customizing their own stuff. From an organizational perspective, it often ends up making more sense to directly contract with a known and trusted third party instead of developing the native capabilities, and at that point the tools and skills themselves start to specialize in ways to provide IT as a service at scale. Economies of scale lend themselves to efficiency but at the cost of resiliency and concentrating power, and tech companies chasing the line ever upwards have been abusing the absolute hell out of that, but while they have been altering the deal (pray they do not alter it any further) their bullshit is not the only reason why the deal exists in the first place.

I read through the white paper and I have further concerns even for any readers who are comfortable fucking over blind people (for the record: fuck you if you’re reading this). It looks like this works off of the same kind of technique that allows fonts to render digraphs, positional forms, and emoji, leveraging the font rendering to allow it to jumble up the actual HTML that machines interact with. It’s clever, but the fucking with screen readers, form autofill, and basically anything other than direct text rendering is really obvious.

I’m also not sure when it runs to generate the dictionary of mappings. The6biggest harm of the content scrapers isn’t that it’s ingesting the content it’s that the repeated requests spam servers and basically DOS smaller sites out of existence. This is why iocaine is so brilliant and imo remains the gold standard. If the dictionary is generated when the files ar uploaded to the server or set to be displayed then this merely fails to address the real problem, but if the expectation is that this mapping gets created and distributed at request time then that just makes scraping even more expensive for hosts. Given that it works on dynamic text in their example it looks like at least part of the mapping runs on the client, so it’s increasing the size of the package if nothing else. Bandwidth may be pretty cheap these days, but that’s no reason to be wasteful.

Spread that around the recruiters and make sure they can tell candidates that a noted racist shit heel was appalled by how not racist they were.

There was a video essay I saw a while back that looked at how the system gamifies and conditions the creator experience. They effectively take every dirty trick you’ve heard of Uber using to get drivers to keep driving and use it to push creators to keep posting and driving engagement, even as the actual value of the platform has dropped to the point where basically every video over 3 minutes ends in a patreon pitch. Textbook enshitttification.

I think corporate consolidation is a huge part of it, but I think a lot of software and tech falls into the same trap that a lot of infrastructure projects do: even if everyone uses it, nobody wants to think about it. That general apathy (until it fails catastrophically in a bridge collapse or a major service outage) limits the avenues for feedback on whether software is actually good or not in the same way that people don’t have a lot of feedback on whether a water main is being routed in a reasonable way. It also creates room for grifters who specialize in obfuscating exactly what you’re paying for.

Street advertising no longer references products or services people seeing them may wish to use; after all, more and more people have no money to pay for them. Instead they try and AstroTurf hype for one of the new entries to the VC startup casino.

So Hank Green is apparently stepping back from his shit for a while after admitting to using AI for research and scriptwriting and acknowledging an unhealthy relationship with the dopamine hit he got from using it. I think this makes him one of the first high-profile users to acknowledge the problem? Which can’t be a good sign for the bubble.

I mean, it’s less dumb than trying to do it in orbit, but it’s still profoundly dumb.

So Satyress has been getting the headlines lately for their horrifying ThreeHalves monstrosity. But what I find beautiful is that it appears to have been designed first to be functional and second to be easily disabled in the event of a robot uprising. I wish I was kidding.

A screenshot of the Satyress website showing where to shoot the robot to immediately disable it. Presumably in the production model these will be marked with big red glowing circles.

Another screenshot demonstrating how the robot has intentionally been made too big to fit through doors, though I expect that the chainsaw attachment they seem to have as standard could probably remedy that problem.

Onboarding at my new job means I am now “Certified AI Ready” whatever that means. Thankfully other than having copilot available it looks like my team isn’t having it pushed too hard yet, and I only had to interrupt the training video once to rant about how ridiculous their history was for like 20 minutes (working from home has a lot of advantages).

What kills me is that there are so many obvious ways to be less wasteful about this. Nondestructive book scanners exist. They’re expensive but it’s not like AI companies are averse to throwing money down a fucking hole. Even if that’s not an option, it’s possible to rebind the pages and return the books to the market. And regardless of what happens to the physical books, the scans they create could be archived in a format that could be available as a digital library rather than just being fed into the statistical meat grinder to keep the trough topped off with slop. Even if they’ve got to fight with copyright holders it would cost them basically nothing to leave the option open and given the PR battle they’ve been losing it feels like doing so would be incredibly obvious. Hell, even Google Books was able to navigate this in a way that was less cartoonishly evil than this because they could point to their digitization effort as a public good in ways that Anthropic here just fucking can’t.

how productive the field will become

Let’s just ship all these people to Macroeconomica

I mean, I think the most charitable interpretation of the goal is effectively the one from Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, where all the AI systems including the simple automatic doors are fully sentient and have simply been given the ability to feel either euphoric joy or simple boredom, and then they have a chip that activates happy mode when they fulfill whatever purpose they’ve been given (“It was my pleasure to open for you, and it is with deep satisfaction that I close again behind you.”) At that point, the argument goes, not making them do the thing would be cruelly consigning them to eternal boredom. This is also the same series that proposed solving the ethics of meat consumption by genetically engineering a cow that actively wants to be killed and eaten by restaurant patrons more than anything else.

I feel like there’s got to be a decent middle ground between a pinned post that pushes this in front of everyone and requires further mod comments to try and stave off harassment and silently letting anyone who notices find the mod logs and make their own judgements of everyone involved. Like, in the absence of an actual announcement I think people would absolutely come to their own much more inflammatory conclusions if/when they noticed regardless of what the removed mod does, and the removed mod could make things into an absolute shit storm (which they don’t appear to be trying to do as far as I can tell, to their credit). But on the flip side, the way this post is set up is also an escalation in its own right and represents a more aggressive use of power by the remaining mods than was absolutely necessary.

If blahaj.zone has an instance business forum then making the full statement there (where it won’t get pushed out of sight as fast as the 196 churn would do to a non-stickied post) and linking it may have been wiser, since it preserves the immediate statement without shoving it to the top of everyone’s plate, and would still allow a stickied post on 196 itself if the situation escalated and it became more necessary.

I dunno, mod shit is hard and I’m glad I get to armchair quarterback it rather than actually making these decisions in real time. Props to the full mod team for keeping the chaos of 196 from turning toxic and destructive for however long it’s been here.