You absolutely don’t have to hand it to zuckerberg, but he at least is well aware that he runs an unethical ad company that’s bad for the world, has always expressed his total contempt for his users, and has not posted through it.
Its an extremely low bar to clear, but I’ll begrudgingly hand it to him for being one of the few tech CEOs who didn’t actively limbo under it.
I haven’t fully cut YouTube out of my life (there’s the odd non-dogshit thing on there I’m interested in (e.g. Technology Connections)), but I have cut down on that shit a fair bit.
Its times like there where I’m glad I’m not paying for YouTube. And using an adblocker.
Why don’t the boosters see how wrong the expressions are?
Its because boosters literally cannot tell good art from slop. As far as these soulless, artless husks are concerned, both are mere Units of Contenttm to be mindlessly consumed, and nothing more. The heart and soul put into an excellent story, the years of experience beaming off a masterful painting, the blood, sweat and tears put into an animated magnum opus, all of it is utterly fucking incompehensible to them. They literally lack the basic artistic insight necessary to understand it.
Its basically the same thing with the NFT fad of a few years ago - NFT “art” is just as soulless and hollow as any piece of AI slop spewed out onto the Internet nowadays, but that didn’t register to the capital-brained filth who were attracted to them like flies to shit.
That’s an unfair comparison, Dippin Dots don’t slowly ruin the world by existing (also, they’re delicious)
Is this what happens when techbros try to make art? (its AI slop, of course it is)
The Guardian shat out its latest piece of AI hype, violating Betteridge’s Law of headlines by asking “Parents are letting little kids play with AI. Are they wrong?”
``Think for at least 5 seconds before typing.‘’ - on the subject of pulling the plug on a hostile AI - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45452743
Read that last one against my better judgment, and found a particularly sneerable line:
And in this case we’re talking about a system that’s smarter than you.
Now, I’m not particularly smart, but I am capable of a lot of things AI will never achieve. Like knowing something is true, or working out a problem, or making something which isn’t slop.
Between this rat and Saltman spewing similar shit on Politico, I have seen two people try to claim text extruders are smarter than living, thinking human beings. Saltman I can understand (he is a monorail salesman who lies constantly), but seeing someone who genuinely believes this shit is just baffling. Probably a consequence of chatbots destroying their critical thinking and mental acuity.
I have a longer piece I’ll be posting tonight about this situation which I can link if there’s interest
There’s definitely interest in documenting the techfash takeover on awful, I think you should post it
News has made it to the red site, with the top comment openly ignoring the fash takeover.
Only found a single thread on the orange site about it, with someone trying to bring up Lunduke’s opinion on things (Lunduke’s a banned source on HN, hilariously enough)
If the AI industry gets bailed out (and that’s a multi-hundred billion dollar “if”), it will be because the technology they create makes shit like this possible.
To try and end this on a somewhat lighter note (source):
🎶 Butt hole sun, won’t you come
🎶 And wash the pain away
Also, fake old-celluloid-film filter for something that was supposed to be from 20 years ago? Really?
I was gonna say that was probably the slop extruder’s doing, but it looks to have been applied manually for some godforsaken reason. Best guess is whoever was behind this audiovisual extrusion thought “celluloid filter = Nostalgiatm”.
Well done to Avi on blowing a pile of venture capital cash to make his own life feel a bit better. The rest of us will probably pass this one by.
Money buys happiness, but he sure ain’t doing that right.
hallucinatory RETVRN clips about the good old days
Nostalgiabait is the slopgens’ specialty - being utterly incapable of creating anything new isn’t an issue if you’re trying to fabricate an idealis-
such as, uh, walmart 20 years ago?
Okay, stop everything, who the actual fuck would be nostalgic for going to a fucking Wal-Mart? I’ve got zero nostalgia for ASDA or any other British big-box hellscape like it, what the fuck’s so different across the pond?
(Even from a “making nostalgiabait” angle, something like, say, McDonalds would be a much better choice - unlike Wal-Mart, McD’s directly targets kids with their advertising, all-but guaranteeing you’ve got fuzzy childhood memories to take advantage of.)
New Ed Zitron to start the week off: The Case Against Generative AI
Its also gonna be an apocalypse-level event for Silicon Valley, who have incinerated hundreds of billions of dollars and every last remaining bit of goodwill they had through creating and marketing the cultural pollution engines behind this bubble.
For the artists whose life work was stolen and abused by SV to pollute human culture, for the workers forcibly deskilled by capital’s digital slop looms, for the millions of people who have had to suffer through the myriad harms of the AI cancer, the bubble’s burst will be grounds to celebrate like nothing else.
Training the kids not to trust AI at such a young age. Real forward-thinking, that Massachusets contractor! /s
Not marking with the chatbot is apparently not an option. AI might save money in the future! So kid, we’re gonna keep treating you with contempt. It’s good preparation for your future.
AI as an ideology shows contempt for humans and human-made work, so seeing believers in AI double-down is completely unsurprising
Related post, about fashtech being a supply chain issue: https://buttondown.com/dorian/archive/supply-chain-risks-in-late-2025/