In more low-key news, the New Yorker’s given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.

Its hardly anything new (the Luddites’ cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper’s decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.

With that out the way, here’s a sidenote:

When history looks back on the Luddites’ cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.

Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.

It gets worse.

The firestorm’s made it to r/SubredditDrama.

Sam Altman is touting GPT-5 as a “Ph.D level expert.” You might expect a Ph.D could count.

So let’s try the very first question: how many R’s are the in the word strawberry? GPT-5 can do the specific word “strawberry.” Cool.

But I suspect they hard-coded that question, because it fails hard on other words: [ChatGPT]

I LITERALLY SPECIAL-CASED THIS BASIC FUCKING SHIT TEN FUCKING MONTHS AGO AND I’M FUCKING DOGSHIT AS A PROGRAMMER HOW THE EVER-LOVING FUCK DID THEY COMPLETELY FUCKING FAIL TO SPECIAL-CASE THIS ONE SPECIFIC SITUATION WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK

(Seriously, this is extremely fucking basic stuff, how the fuck can you be so utterly shallow and creatively sterile to fuck this u- oh, yeah, I forgot OpenAI is full of promptfondlers and Business Idiots like Sam Altman.)

Found a good sneer recently: The LLM In The Room, about LLMs’ deeply-lacking usefulness for programming

Considering the quality of your average LLM, and the quality of the promptfondlers who use them, I expect this will result in a lot of serious security vulnerabilities and broken projects.

In other news, the mainstream press has caught on to “clanker” (originally coined for use in the Star Wars franchise) getting heavy use, with Rolling Stone, Gizmondo and Axios putting out articles on it, and NPR featuring it in Word of the Week.

You want my take, I expect it will retain heavy usage going forward - as I’ve stated before (multiple times at least), AI is no longer viewed as a “value-neutral” tool/tech, but as an enemy of humanity, whose use expresses a contempt for humanity.

On a personal note, part of me expects this will see some adoption as an anti-scraping measure - unlike tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes, this won’t take up a significant amount of resources to implement, and their ability to crash AI scraper bots both wastes the AI corps’ time by forcing them to reboot said scraper and encourages them to avoid your website entirely.

New article from Matthew Hughes, about the sheer stupidity of everyone propping up the AI bubble.

Orange site is whining about it, to Matthew’s delight:

Someone posted my newsletter to Hacker News and the comments are hilarious, insofar as they’re upset with the tone of the piece.

Which is hilarious, because it precisely explains why those dweebs love generative AI. They’re absolutely terrified of human emotion, or passion, or naughty words.

New case popped up in medical literature: A Case of Bromism Influenced by Use of Artificial Intelligence, about a near-fatal case of bromine poisoning caused by someone using AI for medical advice.

ZITRON DROPPED

Discovered new manmade horrors beyond my comprehension today (recommend reading the whole thread, it goes into a lot of depth on this shit):

They’re allegedly useful for visually impaired users, but I strongly doubt Zuckerberg’s thought of that particular untapped market, or interested in taking advantage of it.

I’ve already predicted Meta Rayban wearers would be assaulted in the street, but I wouldn’t be shocked if visually impaired peeps kept away from them as well - whatever accessibility boons they may grant, it is not worth getting called a creepshotter and/or your ass getting beaten.

(Sidenote: This is the second time I’ve seen a tech accessibility related shitshow so far - the first was some alt-text drama I ran into three days ago.)

Found an AI bro making an incoherent defense of AI slop today (fitting that he previously shilled NFTs):

Needless to say, he’s getting dunked on in the replies and QRTs, because people like him are fundamentally incapable of being punk.

(EDIT: Originally found this through Bluesky)

Wikipedia also just upped their standards in another area - they’ve updated their speedy deletion policy, enabling the admins to bypass standard Wikipedia bureaucracy and swiftly nuke AI slop articles which meet one of two conditions:

• "Communication intended for the user”, referring to sentences directly aimed at the promptfondler using the LLM (e.g. "Here is your Wikipedia article on…,” “Up to my last training update …,” and "as a large language model.”)

• Blatantly incorrect citations (examples given are external links to papers/books which don’t exist, and links which lead to something completely unrelated)

Ilyas Lebleu, who contributed to the update in policy, has described this as a “band-aid” that leaves Wikipedia in a better position than before, but not a perfect one. Personally, I expect this solution will be sufficent to permanently stop the influx of AI slop articles. Between promptfondlers’ utter inability to recognise low-quality/incorrect citations, and their severe laziness and lack of care for their “”“work”“”, the risk of an AI slop article being sufficiently subtle to avoid speedy deletion is virtually zero.

Cloudflare has publicly announced the obvious about Perplexity stealing people’s data to run their plagiarism, and responded by de-listing them as a verified bot and added heuristics specifically to block their crawling attempts.

Personally, I’m expecting this will significantly hamper Perpllexity going forward, considering Cloudflare’s just cut them off from roughly a fifth of the Internet.

Found someone trying to fire back at the widespread sneering against promptfondlers:

Emphasis on “trying” here - they’re getting cooked in the replies and QRTs. Here’s a couple highlights - one from someone running an escape room, and one which allegedly ended in someone meeting a baseballer:

I’m sure you can think of hypothetical use cases for Google Glass and Meta AI RayBans. But these alleged non-creepshot use cases already failed to keep Google Glass alive. I predict they won’t be enough to keep Meta AI RayBans alive.

Its not an intentional use case, but its an easy way to identify people who I should keep far, far away from.

It turns out normal people really do not like this stuff, and I doubt the public image of tech bros has improved between 2014 and 2025. So have fun out there with your public pariah glasses. If you just get strong words, count yourself lucky.

On a wider note, I wouldn’t be shocked if we heard of Rapist RayBan wearers getting beaten up or shot in the street - if the torching of Waymos in anti-ICE protests, the widespread vandalism of Cybertrucks, and Luigi Mangione’s status as a folk hero are anything to go by, I’d say the conditions are right for cases of outright violence against anyone viewed as supporting the techbros.

EDIT: Un-fucked the finishing sentence, and added a nod to Cybertrucks getting fucked up.

I haven’t seen STRANGE ÆONS’ video about HPMOR here, so I’d strongly recommend checking that out

Took me a second to realise this was LW.