RetroFedBlueMonday1984, bluemonday1984@awful.systems
Instance: awful.systems
Joined: 2 years ago
Posts: 69
Comments: 77
he/they
Posts and Comments by BlueMonday1984, bluemonday1984@awful.systems
techtakes
notawfultech
Comments by BlueMonday1984, bluemonday1984@awful.systems
(from the youtube comments)
shot:
One of the lesser discussed issues with the generative AI hype is that it put every single deep learning application under scrutiny. They tend to hide behind the positive uses of deep learning whenever generative AI is criticized, as if medicine research and the misinformation generator cannot be separated. “Nuclear power is impossible unless we are allowed to use nukes” type of argument
chaser:
Alphafold was a really interest project. It was not magic but had some utility. Now all remaining AI projects are lying plagiarism machines.
AI is officially a pseudoscience now.
LLM bros actively force themselves everywhere, part infinity:
Newgrounds moderation had to deal with someone (probably a scammer) posting slop “art advice” recently - exactly why, nobody fuckin’ knows:
Transcript/desciption
I’ve already passed it off to folks that could nuke the account from orbit, but I guess as a public service announcement, be on the lookout for replies in the forums that sound a little too LLM-y.
An account (unsure if a bot or just a weirdo) recently attempted to infiltrate the art forum, giving plausible-sounding AI-generated list-based advice, complete with preambles and summations, exactly the kind of syntax and format one would expect if they’ve dealt with enough clanker slop text. It fooled a small handful of people, but it was extremely easy to confirm my suspicions as soon as I smelled the clanker stank on it. One click made it clear that they had a generated PFP and profile linking to some image slopification scam.
It raises the question, what would anyone possibly have to gain from posting slop on the forums? It seems like a really stupid thing to do, but I guess braindead behavior tracks, given who we’re dealing with. Make sure “helpful” new users aren’t just trying to Dead Internet us or whatever.
A lot of annoying people in technical areas view the world in terms of an intelligence hierarchy: the smartest people do math and physics, the slightly less smart people do coding, and the dumb people do everything else. So if AI can do math then it can do anything else. But, as an example, it is abundantly obvious now that AI is not replacing filmmaking.
Going by those annoying peoples’ logic, filmmakers are smarter than coders, because LLMs can (allegedly) program, but they can’t make a good film. I have no wider point to this, I just find this really, really funny
I tested this with the Navy Seal Copypasta (well, the first 400 letters of it, the demo’s got a limit) - using just Cryllic characters got me a 3.01x increase, and turning on all four control types got a 4.53x increase.
Testing your own recent comment, Cryllic only got 3.38x, and all four controls got 5.11x.
Going from those two, the boost from homoglyphs alone is likely higher than you think - 3x to 3.5x, by my guess - pretty good for human readable text.
Tarpits like Iocaine and Nepenthes can easily sacrifice readability for token burn, so they can easily go higher.
Adversarial tokenmaxxing could probably be done by using non-English character sets in lieu of English letters (e.g. faux Cryllic) - for two examples from the Greek alphabet, alpha and omicron alone can easily substitute for A and O, respectively.
As a bonus, this would likely make the text look like complete gibberish to LLMs, potentially leaving them unable to process the document altogether. This would probably shaft anyone using screen readers, though.
EDIT: Turns out the demonstration’s already caught on to this idea, didn’t notice beforehand:
The Butlerian Jihad grows closer and closer by the day. Maybe its already arrived.
Oh, boy, Rapist Glasses
There’s a UK Parliament petition to “Introduce an immediate ban on the sale and promotion of smart glasses”. If you’re in the UK, you might want to sign it. [UK Parliament]
Given Parliament’s track record, they’ll probably respond by banning glasses that don’t have cameras, but I still endorse this
Another “AI fucked compsci grads” post has hit my eyeballs - this time, it got recommended to me by LinkedIn’s algorithm) (because I’m still on that site for some fucking reason):
Full Text
study philosophy, not computer science
data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York shows that philosophy students have a lower unemployment rate (about 5.1%) than computer science students (7%)
why?
unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning are becoming premium assets, and better tech means companies increasingly DON’T need to ask “can we build this?”, and increasingly DO need to ask “should we build this, and what are the consequences?”
If there has ever been a time to build those soft, truly human, skills, it is now.
p.s. what do you think is the BEST skill to have right now - my thoughts are in the comments
This one’s attributing the decline to “unique human judgment, logic, and ethical reasoning becoming premium assets”, and her graph comes from The Economist’s Instagram page AFAICT. That one of the Economist’s sources is Anthropic is giving me some hope this is bullshit, but its not much.
The main thing I knew him for is his failed attempt to hijack the Hugo Awards back in 2015.
(There’s a r/HobbyDrama post about the whole debacle, which I recommend checking out)
“Okay, so it starts with a doomsday cult which formed around GameStop…”
Your qualifications predate the LLM rot by fucking ages, and your position against them is crystal clear. Given both of those, bypassing that filter should be easy enough.
new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.
So not only are STEM graduates (mainly compsci grads) struggling to get jobs as it is, employers are explicitly passing them over for “""useless""” humanities degrees instead. I’m not sure whether to laugh at the irony of the situation, or crash out at the fact my own compsci/cybersec degrees may have become a liability.
Wednesday’s presentation for 2026 mostly hammers on Son’s love of AI. Son said: [Reuters]
I think it’s blasphemy against AI if you say it’s a bubble.
[THIS IS WHAT AI CULTISTS ACTUALLY BELIEVE]
Also, “The Goose that Laid the Golden Eggs” is a cautionary fable about greed being bad.
Knowing that would require techbros to actually read, so I’m not shocked
Honestly, a black comedy about the rats and/or the AI bubble would probably make bank. The years of sneers people have cooked up on them would provide plenty of material for the writers, and there’d be plenty of catharsis in seeing those responsible get ripped into for 2-ish hours straight.
We got a major engine slopifying itself before GTA VI
I’m pretty sure 2027 will be hilarious for Unreal Engine with AI. And expensive.
With how much market share Unreal also has, it’ll probably cause some major shockwaves in the video game industry as well.
In the meantime, start learning the Godot engine. Which doesn’t accept AI code. [*Godot*]
Godot also released a new version yesterday, so there’s another reason to check it out
I checked Wikipedia’s history, its been fucked since last year
J-R Conlin has left Mozilla after 15 years, and has some choice words for the company.
They’ve gone bankrupt once in ’24 , I’d bet good money they’re gonna go bankrupt again.
OT: an interesting musing I found on fedi:
Starting this Stubsack off, I’ve found another FOSS project that hit the digital krokodil - ntfy.sh v2.18.0 was written by AI
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th March 2026 (awful.systems)
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
Copyright was created to protect artists from people like him, you’re not being too mean in the slightest.
A second LLM shitshow has hit vim - this time, its the lead maintainer losing his marbles:
If you wanna see the disaster for yourself, the entire thread’s still on GitHub as of this writing.
OT: A spiritual successor to Adobe Flash is in the works, and its dev already has a Patreon up and running
The HarfBuzz maintainer has drunk the slop-aid - Baldur has commented on it, warning of the potentially catastrophic consequences:
Recently discovered Donald Knuth got oneshot by Claude recently (indirectly, through fedi) - feeling the itch to write about tech’s vulnerability to LLMs because of it.
The purpose of AI is theft, part infinity: chardet steals LGPL code for profit using Claude
John Scalzi’s shitcanned any book club plans for the foreseeable future, and AI spammers are the reason why.
Skyview.social mirror so everyone can see - he’s locked out everyone who’s not signed in.
They are being issued a handgun which goes off on its own (which killed an airman in 2025), so that tracks.
The army’s shiny new service rifle from SIG Sauer (in a shiny new caliber that nobody else in NATO uses) also got slammed by Army troops and gun nerds alike for a variety of reasons, so its not just AI that the brass is being braindead on.
(Meanwhile, the USMC told SIG to fuck off and stuck with their M27 IARs, which had served them well since 2011.)
That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I’m gonna make a quick recommendation:
If you’re looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter’s implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.
Stumbled across a YouTube slop-farm calling itself The Interactive Archive recently, and the whole thing is just plain shameless:
AI slop banner, AI slop thumbnails, AI slop avatar, its all slop from top to fucking bottom.
Its getting pitiful views, too - the highest-viewed video on the damn thing (as of this writing) is the one about arena shooters dying off, sitting at just under 400 views:
Putting that into context, a random screen recording I uploaded hit nearly 700 through sheer luck.
On the one hand, an autonomous fighter jet would be immune to G-LOC, letting them perform maneuvers that would incapacitate/kill a human pilot. On the other hand, air-to-air combat is a complex affair, and the enemy will be probing for any weaknesses in your drones’ programming to exploit.
Autonomous bombers seem easier to pull off - bombing missions are (relatively) straightforward compared to air-to-air combat.
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th March 2026 (awful.systems)
Want to wade into the snowy surf of the abyss? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid.
I personally wouldn’t count on it - if nothing else, losing Internet access would be crippling in modern day life.
I’m not gonna completely rule it out, though - CNN wrote on Instax making a comeback and the BBC reported a general spike in retro tech sales last year.
Mozilla is actively hiding slop commits to Firefox
Jonathan Hogg gives his two cents on gen-AI, pointing to high barriers to entry causing vibe-coding to explode:
(Adding my two cents, Adobe Flash filled the same role as HyperCard in the ‘00s, providing the public an easy(ish) way to get into programming, and providing an outlet for many an aspirating animator and gamedev.)
Not the first time the US gov’s pulled that shit, and it sure as hell won’t be the last.
File this shit next to the SIG M18 and the XM7 in its list of grade-A blunders.