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Cake day: March 8th, 2024

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  • I did not remember that and I still remember “Los pollos hermanos”, so that tells you how weird that one is.

    Also, this dogpile works better if you understand what you’re reading. The comedic effect bit was about the title of the thread, not about my own typo. Now you made it weird by trying to outpedant a pedant but not having the reading comprehension to pedant properly.



  • I mean… no, mine’s a typo (fixed now, thanks for the poke), the other one is a deliberate spelling for comedic effect that accidentally uncovers an endless loop of abject multilingual terror.

    This is a Gus Frink meme type of situation.

    He also, incidentally, couldn’t speak Spanish for shit. That whole show was a nightmare. “Los Pollos Hermanos” as a phrase haunts me. I genuinely, and I’m not joking about this, sometimes find myself having intrusive thoughts about it after all this time.




  • Yeah, but… this isn’t that.

    You’re literally saying “well, anecdotal impressions say this, so I refute this study that says something else”.

    We don’t like that. That’s not a thing we like to do.

    And for the record, as these things go, the article linked here is pretty good. I’ve seen more than one worse example of a study being reported in the press today.

    They provide a neutral headline that conveys the takeaway of the study, they provide context about companies mentioning AIs on layoffs, they provide a link to the full study and they provide a separate study that yields different, seemingly contradicting results.

    I mean, this is as close to best case scenario for reporting on a study as you can get in mainstream press. If nothing else, kudos to The Register. The bar was low but they went for personal best anyway.

    Man, the problem with giving up all the wonky fashy social media is that when you’re in an echo chamber all the weird misinformation and emotion-driven politics are coming from inside the house. It’s been a particularly rough day for politically-adjacent but epistemologically depressing posts today.


  • So the report itself argues there is a need for better data, and it seems fairly level headed, but…

    …what’s with people being mad about it?

    I say this a lot, but there seems to be a lot of weird anti-hype where people want this AI stuff to work better than it does so it can be worse than it is, and I’m often confused by it. The takeaway here is that most jobs don’t seem to be behaving that differently so far if you look at the labor market in aggregate. Which is… fine? It’s not that unexpected? The AI shills were selling that entire industries would be replaced by AI overnight, and most sensible people didn’t think so or argued that the jobs would get replaced with AI wrangler tasks because this thing wouldn’t completely automate most tasks in ways that weren’t already available.

    Which seems to be most of what’s going on. AI art is 100% not production-ready out of the gate, AI text seems to be a bit of a wash in terms of saving time for programmers and even in more obvious industries like customer service we already had a bunch of bots and automation in place.

    So what’s all the anger? Did people want this to be worse? Do they just want to vibe with the economy being bad in a way they can pin on something they already don’t like and maybe politics is too heavy now? What’s going on there?




  • This is a weird pattern in that presumably mass abandonment of the em dashes due to the memes around it looking like AI content would quickly lead to newer LLMs based on newer data sets also abandoning em dashes when it tries to seem modern and hip and just punt the ball down the road to the next set of AI markers. I assume as long as book and press editors keep stikcing to their guns that would go pretty slow, but it’d eventually get there. And that’s assuming AI companies don’t add instructions about this to their system prompts at any point. It’s just going to be an endless arms race.

    Which is expected. I’m on record very early on saying that “not looking like AI art” was going to be a quality marker for art and the metagame will be to keep chasing that moving target around for the foreseeable future and I’m here to brag about it.



  • Well, I’m still waiting for Twitter to “need a replacement”. It seems to be doing just about fine on its new normal. Ditto for any of the other Meta places, which have only consistently grown over time. Yes, Facebook, too.

    To be clear, I don’t particularly mean too little, too late for me. I’m not on Twitter or Facebook or any of those platforms, Bluesky and Fedi aside. And again, I was not on board with the Masto quote tweet thing. I did stop using it frequently, but not for that reason.

    I mean too little, too late to make an impact of any kind. Masto has been stuck where it is for a while, and so has Bluesky. I don’t think either are going back to growing anytime soon, but if either does it probably won’t be because Masto added quotes. I’m fairly comfy talking to the same dozen people out here like I’m in a 90s IRC channel, but ultimately it’d be nice if the gross places didn’t keep driving the global conversation forever. And on that front… yeah, too little, too late.


  • I used to be inverted until controller FPSs started to be a thing. I don’t think people realize how long PC FPSs were mostly a keyboard-only thing. By the time WASD+Mouse standardized, quite late into the Quake 1 era I had hundreds of hours on Tie Fighter/X-Wing and a bunch of other first person flight games.

    Hell, Descent predates Quake, and I’d argue it figured out full 3D controls way before Quake did.

    Now that I’m on board this train of thought, do kids these days think Doom played with full mouseview and just distorted all over the place? Is it well known for people not born at the time that Doom was mechanically closer to a twin stick shooter than an FPS or have all the source ports erased that from history?


  • That was a shockingly long turnaround for these, considering. I’ve come and gone from Mastodon like three times since this was an argument and at least twice since they said they would do this.

    Oh, well. I originally thought this was a bad call, and I did hate the old Twitter snippy bullshit this enabled, but Bluesky sorta proved to me this was a cultural issue more than a feature set issue. And while we’re at it, while I don’t particularly like the implementation of Bluesky’s custom subject feeds I’m fairly convinced that some alternative to chronological-only feeds would be beneficial. This seems like too little, too late, honestly.


  • I’d argue I’m doing the opposite.

    I was turning this stuff off when my Google and Samsung phones kept suggesting that they could do searches based on the content of my phone screen or my camera feed. It’s only “normalization” in that it’s… you know, actually normal and widespread. I don’t think people are too alarmed now, I think they weren’t alarmed enough when the first wave of “smart assistants” started doing this like a decade ago.


  • Right, so when you said “forced it on everyone” you meant “the feature existing at all even if it’s optional or disabled”.

    See, I don’t have a problem with the latter, that’s legitimate. But you implied the former, and the former is false.

    Now, I don’t like the feature and I absolutely turned it off the moment it (finally) got patched into my supported PCs. But it’s worth noting that similar features are present on Android phones (from all the way back on Google Assistant to the upcoming Magic Cue), Apple phones (via Visual Intelligence and Siri) and other PC and phone manufacturers. I recommend turning them all off, but with the caveats you original omitted this isn’t a Windows-specific thing, it’s a pretty widespread fad.

    Of course the reason people are latching on to the MS version is their initial implementation was hot garbage and entirely unaware of its own context, so now it’s a meme, particularly in tech-savvy, Linux-friendly circles. The biggest lesson we’ve all learned is that Microsoft is bad at PR and marketing, which I feel we already knew.



  • I’m so exhausted of social media nonsense latching onto meme crap to push preconceived narratives and flipping over to ignoring reality altogether the moment any facts at all don’t fit their dumb little package of memes.

    You know what, I hope it’s not actually off and anybody with the trivial means to check what their Windows PC is sending to the mothership notices so we can get the EU to GDPR the crap out of them and build some nice hospital somewhere with the fine money.

    In the meantime, go do conspiracy theories over on Twitter. There’s plenty of real stuff to be mad about at Microsoft without having to make shit up.