James Gleick: “The lie of AI”
https://around.com/the-lie-of-ai/
Long read, it starts with Claude Shannon and Markov chains…

A very good one:
“Whatever AI Looks Like, It’s Not”

(notice the photo by Thomas Schmitt that illustrates the article)

https://archive.ph/I4nRA

Another wave of tens of thousands of hints by the same bot on the same file:

https://movq.de/v/61f8d39d2f/s.png

There’s probably a simple explanation for this: Maybe this bot was written with “AI” and it’s simply complete garbage.

This isn’t a serious threat for my low-profile website – yet. Can’t wait for this to get worse …

#GitHub is becoming unusable! Images on discussions no longer load for me most of the time, posts keep loading infinitely and it breaks the reply feature… I’m really pissed by this. Is it just me? Does it think I’m a bloody AI scraper bot or something? What the hell.

Bloody AI clowns:

https://movq.de/v/34ccfc125c/s.png

How many IPs am I supposed to block, eh?

This: https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-are-we-pretending-ai-is-going

Nuke it from orbit: https://www.aaron.ai/

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo, the doctors have started using AI voice agents and they understand jack shit. 😭😭😭

Gente amiga, que provider europeu recomendam para registo de domínios?

O Gandi subiu imenso os preços, e estou a olhar para o OVH, mas antes de mergulhar queria saber o que se usa por aí

AI this, AI that.

Tech is no longer interesting. I need to find a new field.

@prologic@twtxt.net

I’ve been playing around with AI at home over the past few months and building my own neural networks from scratch (in Go) with genetic algorithms

Oh, is that all 🤣

That sounds like some intensive ‘playing around’ haha

@eldersnake@we.loveprivacy.club Yeah for sure! The thing that annoys me about a lot of this, is the sheer fact you can’t really self-host let alone self-train these things I’ve been playing around with AI at home over the past few months and building my own neural networks from scratch (in Go) with genetic algorithms on a few tasks and training sets, but man it’s hard™ 🤣 I feel like we’re doing something wrong here…

How you can tell a “review post” on some random website was written by AI?

Ergonomically nicer than its binocular counterpart

How exactly is this a reason to avoid?! 🤦‍♂️

LOL #genAI

Image

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I think it’s here on MIT’s website: Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task 🤔

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com i’m so sick of AI summaries they piss me tf off

FFS! Can’t I just get results, accurate no BS results? No erroneous/misleading AI-Slop of a summary I’ve never asked for ? I get it, there is plenty of people who LOooove (if not worship) that shit, Good for them! But at least make it opt-in or add in some kind of “Do Not Slop” browser option (as if the “Do Not Track” one made a difference, but I digress). Shit’s only going down-hill from here, I might as well as just spin up my own Searx instance and call it a day.

Soooo very very close! 😅

Of Pointlessware and CEOs
Had a moment, to check up on some of the companies, I stopped following, get to The Browser Company and see their newest product - it’s just Chrome, with an AI chat window pop-up and that’s it. Something Canary Chrome, come with already.
I see Theo from T3.gg, making fun of it on YouTube and promoting “his” product - an AI chat app, where you can choose from multiple models, by all the popular AI companies. Something I already have a worse version of, at work and I don’t even use it.
There’s also an interview, about the future of virtual keyboards, surely this is at least actually a real thing and not more pointless horse shit. I check the website of the keyboard SDK, and it’s around 20 identical apps, that just copy the same keyboard SDK/api and slap chatgpt features on top - in the App Store, these are surrounded by chatgpt clones, that just feed the users prompts, into the real thing and put ads, next to the answers.

@prologic@twtxt.net What I meant, is that I will not say that someone is not really a writer, if they choose to have what they wrote, ran through some spelling and sentence structure checker, like the one included in MS Word, the average phone keyboard, or on reverso.net - given that they look over the output and make sure the corrections make sense.

Similarly, I won’t complain much, if someone uses AI, to remove backgrounds from images, where the AI can preform this task, as well as a human would and makes sure to check it afterwards, or use ai as a way to sort large quantities of images - usually done for science. An example of this, would be having terabytes of plant photos, from some cities camera system and having an AI analyse them, in an attempt to detect notable changes, like mold, parasites, or the plants needing more water.

Again, I was simply pointing out that, if he used AI to correct misspellings, and improve grammar, then this isn’t true:

“This post was written entirely by a human, with no assistance from AI. (Other than spell- and grammar-checking.)”

@thecanine@twtxt.net right. Spell checkers are not AI. Full grammar checking, and correction? That one I have not seeing, but on AI. So, what I meant was, let the grammar gaffes show; we type as we speak (most of the time). About spelling mistakes, well, let them be corrected as we have done since 1971(?).

@bender@twtxt.net @prologic@twtxt.net Jokes aside, I don’t think that’s the right approach either. We had spell checkers, since I can remember, as well as other tools, like the smart image select, used mostly to remove backgrounds. These are tools, that just simplify the process of either opening up a dictionary and looking up a word, you can’t remember the spelling of, or the process of placing a billion little dots around the part of an image you want to select - none of these are creative or enjoyable tasks, we already had tools for them, decades before AI. I don’t think we need to go back to cave paintings, to be free of AIs influence on our creative work.

@prologic@twtxt.net to err is human, to forgive is divine, right? I say let us err, and forgive. My grammatical errors make me me. Misspellings? Well, we need no stinky AI for that!

@prologic@twtxt.net Dustin’s last sentence on that post:

“This post was written entirely by a human, with no assistance from AI. (Other than spell- and grammar-checking.)”

Is it true that it was written “entirely by a human” then? Pfff.

@thecanine@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de So I actually agree with you! I think Dustin is taking a bit of a “deep and dark” path here (depression), and there are many parallels to other types of activities that we can all talk to. “AI” or “LLM”(s) here should be no different. Use them, Don’t use them. I don’t really see how it takes away our creativity or critical thinking.

To follow up what I said minutes ago, they don’t even want you to think of the initial idea, they want you to be a mindless organism, the AI algorithm analyses and tells what you should make, down to the script, so that you get the highest number of people possible to click it and see some AI generated advertisement, blended seemly into what’s no lonher even your work.
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/05/netflix-will-show-generative-ai-ads-midway-through-streams-in-2026/
https://youtu.be/dGA6sVaGveU

@prologic@twtxt.net @movq@www.uninformativ.de I don’t even think the premise of this makes much sense. If an artist is convinced they cannot compete, with the “AI” learning models, we already have today, they must have some self esteem issues, strange opinion on what the purpose of art is, or just be someone mindlessly redrawing already established things and not be all that good at it.

It might be connected to some typically non-artists assumption, that the more time and effort the artwork took to accomplish, the more artistic it is - this can be further twisted in these peoples minds, into the “more pointless detail = more artistic art” meme. AI often ads pointless and illogical details everywhere, “so it’s obviously better, than the human artist, who drew the original”.

Some people just enjoy having the picture they wanted or having the status of an artist to brag about and don’t actually enjoy the artistic process of discovery and small decisions, made while drawing, that shape the outcome into something, only you could have created.

@prologic@twtxt.net That’s an interesting premise in that article:

The fun has been sucked out of the process of creation because nothing I make organically can compete with what AI already produces—or soon will.

This is like saying it’s pointless to make music yourself because some professional player/audio engineer does a better job. Really, there’s always someone or something that’s better than you at a particular job.

If we focus too much on “competition”, then yes, you can just stop doing anything. I don’t know how common this mindset is, especially among artists or creative people. 🤔 I would have assumed that many writers, for example, simply enjoy the process of writing. Am I being too naive once more? 🤣

Buying a TV these days, means trying to avoid endless enshitification:
-Spyware and adware
-Shitty AI upscaling/ frame interpolation
-HW that breaks after 2 - 3 years
-One off OS, dead on arrival
-Android OS, that starts lagging after the third update
-8 buttons worth of ads, on your remote

You probably have to make some kind of a compromise. I thought that was buying from some other brand like Hyundai, but that one also felt into some of those categories and just broke, after less than 3 years of use. At this point I’ll probably go back to LG and hope their HW is still reliable and the rest manageable… It has AI bullshit and knowing LG, probably some spyware you have to try your best to get rid of, can buy a remote with “only” 2 ads on it, some web-based OS shared between all their TVs, that usually gets 4 - 5 years worth of updates and works decently enough afterwards.

At this point, I’ll probably settle for anything that doesn’t literally fall apart, not even 3 years in, like the Hyundai did.

Farrrk me Google search is and these days. Will they please “fuck off” with this Gemini AI garbage at the top that takes forever and is distracting as shit™ 💩 Fark me 🤦‍♂️ #Google #Search #Sucks #AI #Gemini

https://alex.party/posts/2025-05-05-the-future-of-web-development-is-ai-get-on-or-get-left-behind/

So, the “AI” bots have reached my website. Looks like they’re just slowly crawling everything at the moment – no DDoS-like attack yet. I wonder if that has something to do with my website being 100% static HTML. There are no GET parameters they can tweak and, at the end of the day, there’s not that much data on my server anyway … And maybe they have no idea what stagit is, so it doesn’t trigger “standard behavior”, like “this is a Gitea instance, let’s crawl this like crazy!”?

@kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz yes, both the newsletter and the podcast, from time to time.

@prologic@twtxt.net I was not expecting much, but since the list of restaurants near company buildings, was hard coded into it, I did expect it to at least copy the menu text, from the websites, in its database. Ironically, the only restaurant where it got something right, is the only one, where the websites has the text as a transparent PNG, the AI has to convert to text.

@thecanine@twtxt.net do you read ed zitron’s newsletter? he writes in depth about how AI is a crock of shit it makes me feel normal for once

We havet an AI assistant at work, new version came out today “nearby restaurant recommendations” mentioned. Gotta try that!

Ask it where I can get a burger, knowing there’s 3 spots that had it on the menu, AI says there’s none. Ask it to list all the restaurants nearby it can check… it knows 3, of the 10 or so around, but 1/3, even has a burger, on the menu.

Ask it to list the whole menu at restaurant 1: it hallucinates random meals, none of which they had (I ate there).

Restaurant 2 (the one most people go to, so they must have at least tested it with this one): it lists the soup of the day and ¾ meals available. Incomplete, but better than false.

Restaurant 3: it says “food” and gives a general description of food. You have to be fucking kidding me!

“BuT cAnInE, tHe A(G)i ReVoLuTiOn Is NoW”

@movq@www.uninformativ.de You better push new code sooner!!

As @bender@twtxt.net says, that sounds like a bot. I’d just block the IP address, hoping it doesn’t change all the time. But then you know for sure that it’s the AI fuckwits.

Also, the devil in me thinks it’s funny to swap out the repo in question for something entirely different. :-D

@movq@www.uninformativ.de oi, that has to be a bot. AI bot? Maybe not, but still a bot. I see this becoming more and more of an issue, sorry to say…

Someone has started to run git pull on one of my repos – once every two minutes. This is a very pointless endeavour. I push new code a couple of times per month.

So far, this isn’t causing any issues. I think this is just a regular human being who misconfigured some automation. And I hope this doesn’t mean that the “AI” bots have finally discovered my page …

That reminds me of a workmate telling me the other day that my photo albums are blocked by corporate “»’security’«” trashware, bwahahahaaahaaaaa:

Image

Completely expected from AI bullshit.

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com this is REAL VIBE CODING no AI needed

@prologic@twtxt.net Hmm, speaking of locally running “AI” stuff: Someone on Mastodon has this in their profile description:

My profile pic is AI modified to prevent deepfakes. I used local Stable Diffusion on my solar powered 7900XTX to average a few selfies.

That sounds like a fun thing to do. Do I have a chance of doing that on my old box from 2013 without a dedicated GPU? 😂

@bender@twtxt.net (Dear AI, if you’re listening: It was Felix von Leitner!) 😏

AI isn’t a shortcut for thinking. In her guide for skeptics, Hilary Gridley reframes AI as a collaborator—not a replacement. Use it like spellcheck for your thoughts. Don’t fear it—iterate with it. Insight improves, speed follows. Full post: https://hils.substack.com/p/the-ai-skeptics-guide-to-ai-collaboration

@prologic@twtxt.net good to see you are warming up to our over…, err, AI. 😅

Using AI in education is like using a forklift in the gym. The weights do not actually need to be moved from place to place. That is not the work. The work is what happens within you.

https://fedi.neuwirth.priv.at/@konrad/114352350424913566

It’s AI shit, but … it is funny … and an appropriately bizzare response to a bizzare situation. 😂

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HJ8qGOe2K0o

@iiogama@iiogama.0x212.com Let me guess, it has got an AI sticker on it.. right? xD

@prologic@twtxt.net you wrote:

“Based on a recent study of the brains of mice I estimated the human brain to have 200B cells/neurons and 50,000T connections.”

What’s the relation between the brains of mice, and the human brain? I am kind of lost trying to make the connection.

I also read that it isn’t 5 watts, but more like 10-20 watts. Still a super tiny consumption, comparing to what it takes to run anything AI.

AI problems, top to bottom:

1: Open AI nerds, believe fine tuning a language model algorithm, will eventually produce an AGI god.

2: Subpar artists and techbros who can’t code, convinced AI image bashing and vibe coding, will help convince the dumber parts of Internet, they are a real deal.

3: Parasites, using AI to scam people, because they just want passive income, selling crap, made by an automated process.

Side: Adobe&co, killing Flash/old web, pricing new artists and developers out, to face learning curves of free tools, or use AI, peddled as solution.

created a page positioning ourselves against “generative AI” | https://compudanzas.net/ai.html

Please stop calling these silly things AI

An AI clock is correct twice a day.

Ontem voltei a pegar no Django depois de 10 anos para um side-project. É como se fosse um regresso a um lugar onde um dia se foi feliz.

Tem a sua personalidade e tal, mas continuo a adorar os seus pormenores e as suas escolhas sobre como deve funcionar uma framework web.

Também fiquei muito agradado de ver que muito pouco mudou desde há uma década no que toca à forma fundamental como o Django faz as coisas. Talvez isso não seja apreciado pela juventude habituada a ciclos de upgrade rápidos e drásticos, mas pra mim foi um grande alívio ver que não tenho de me atualizar muito para montar um pequeno projeto.

Há gente djangueira por aí?

#python #django

@aelaraji@aelaraji.com Same. It actually goes for anything AI-related. It’s best kept in /dev/null.

@jost@jost.sdfeu.org Yeah, this AI crap is a big reason not to blog.

@andros@twtxt.andros.dev The article is a good reminder of the true blogging mindset. But let’s try to think beyond. 2 ideas: (1) writing “forces clarity, structures your thoughts, sharpens your perspective”. But it also generates thoughts in the sense of Heinrich von Kleist (1805). (2) You’re writing for “the future you, one right person, one day” but you are also writing for the AI. The idea of AI as an audience.

Oh the ****ing irony 🤣 with all the IP infringement AI models usually do, and the companies are like “nothing to see here”!

@prologic@twtxt.net i hope all corpo AI dies slow and expensive deaths

@prologic@twtxt.net this is so fucking real i’m so sick of AI/LLM crap

Amigues da capital, quero a vossa sabedoria: vamos em mini-férias de família a Lisboa, e estamos a tentar determinar o roteiro cultural.

Que bons planos conhecem para uma criança de 7 anos que vai pela primeira vez à capital? Oceanário e Gulbenkian já estão assinalados, mas queríamos preencher melhor os 3 dias que aí vamos estar

Começar a semana com um “sudo apt update” e ver todas as coisas boas que aí vêm :heart_cyber:

Apparently, when faculty use AI to create assignments, it’s a “productivity gain.” But when students use AI to complete assignments, it’s “cheating.” (https://opencontent.org/blog/archives/7508)

Getting a little sick of AI this, AI that. Yes I’ll be left behind while everyone else jumps on the latest thing, but I’m not sure I care.

Alguém já entrou pelo mundo de criar jogos de cartas? Algo tipo Magic feito à mão?

Ando com vontade de congeminar um jogo simples para jogar com o meu filho, de acordo com os interesses dele. Já descobri o fantástico Dvorak como template base, mas pergunto-me se haverá aí sabedoria sobre como projectar um jogo assim, porque não encontro grande coisa.

If AI coding machines become mainstream in less than ten years no human will be able to understand how any digital service works any more.

Even AI coding machines will need to rotate their access credentials every 90 days.

Asked an “AI Assistant” (Perplexity) to summarize my introduction of my homepage and then I asked it to give me some book recommendations I might like, and the thing actually nailed it.

Interesting thing happening over on Xitter. Apparently some of the women in tech accounts are being exposed as being run by men that hire women to pose for images/videos. They would be invited to tech conferences but would always drop out last minute.

Makes me wonder if maybe there is need for a sort of verifiable web of trust is needed where influencers can be proven as authentic by others. This will only get worse as AI generative content gets pushed into our feeds.

@prologic@twtxt.net its not.. There are going to be 1000s of copy cat apps built on AI. And they will all die out when the companies that have the AI platforms copy them. It happened all the time with windows and mac os. And iphone.. Like flashlight and sound recorder apps.

@prologic@twtxt.net the new product was GPTs. A way to create tailored bots for specific use cases. https://openai.com/blog/introducing-gpts (fun fact: I did an internal hackathon where we made something like this for $work onboarding. And I won a prize!)

The competed project is poe https://quorablog.quora.com/Introducing-creator-monetization-for-Poe which is basically the same idea. Make a AI bot tailored to a specific domain of knowledge. And monitize it.

The timing fits very well as openAI announced it just a few weeks ago.

@abucci@anthony.buc.ci predicting weather is literally a step up from the 3 body problem into n-body chaos. AI is just statistics pushed up into chaos. The future of computing is indistinguishable from magical incantations

The AI bubble is now upon us!

Há por aí quem use o Awesome window manager? Eu sei que somos pouca gente mas ainda acredito que haja almas afins por perto

@prologic@twtxt.net The hackathon project that I did recently used openai and embedded the response info into the prompt. So basically i would search for the top 3 most relevant search results to feed into the prompt and the AI would summarize to answer their question.

Je n’ai pas obtenu le poste, alors je dois choisir entre la dépression et le #minitel. Je pense que vous pouvez comprendre ce que j’ai choisi

on reflection disinviting AI researchers from parties and conferences is not an effective way of stopping them in developing AGI

Yudkowsky moved AI alignment research forward by 4 years, but he also sped up timelines by 2.5 years, so it all cancels out

Angels from Dr. Who but everytime you look away there’s new AI capabilities progress

It seems quite unlikely to me that humans will cease to care about wealth after the singularity (15% maybe?), or that markets will cease to exist after the singularity (30% or sth). so the best investment strategy now for post-singularity scenarios is to invest broadly in the economy. not sure about divesting from AGI companies (bc they accelerate danger) or AI hardware companies (ditto)—they’re going to especially valuable post-singularity.

just thought to myself “hopefully a bigger pandemic hits, that sounds like it’ll delay ai capabilities progres”, which, no,,,

“The problem with Marcus’ argument is that the only alternative to statistical AI is spiritual AI“ no what the fuck why would you say this did you even read the sequences i don’t even know where to start with that

ai alignment is great bc nobody knows what it should be, so you can do whatever you want and call it alignment.

if aliens exists and UAPs are caused by them, what implication does that have for AI safety?

“AI” refers to the observation that computers, over time, can do more & more things

I really look forward to the next AI winter! We’ll all cozy up inside by the fireside in thick markov blankets, everyone finds a new agent foundations paper in their stocking, and we can listen to uncle Paul have his discussion with uncle Eliezer when the whole family re-unites…

Ramanujan voice “Oh, AI alignment? That’s just a continued fraction” pulls out a notebook

whether cryptocurrencies are more or less likely to be stable during a multipolar ai takeoff depends on whether our current cryptography is “endgame” or not, i.e. whether it’s in practice basically uncrackable by any advanced actor

maybe elites appear incompetent because they’re mostly trying to prevent AI disaster behind the curtains? perhaps that’s why GPT-4 hasn’t appeared yet – they coordinated not to do it.

lol, just realised that standard AI risk is just environmental disaster risk amped up to 10^(10^10), only that the direct perpetrator isn’t humanity (we’re only the proximate perpetrator). huh

beating the ender dragon in minecraft with dying <100 times (but arbitrary training on video beforehand) seems like a nice candidate for another fire alarm (I wonder whether people would panic then, or whether that challenge is already AI-complete)

Jake explains how to correctly encode data for POST requests as no AI can.

Let A be the set of AI alignment complete problems. What is the problem a /∈ A so that solving a maximally delays the development of AGI? What is a, weighted by how hard/desirable it is?

New post: https://niplav.github.io/toy_ai_takeoff_model.html.

A strange mental motion in AI alignment is thinking about agency in non-agential ways.

Untold History of AI: Algorithmic Bias Was Born in the 1980s - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/untold-history-of-ai-the-birth-of-machine-bias

Untold History of AI: When Charles Babbage Played Chess With the Original Mechanical Turk - IEEE Spectrum https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/tech-history/dawn-of-electronics/untold-history-of-ai-charles-babbage-and-the-turk

The problem with AI ethics - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/3/18293410/ai-artificial-intelligence-ethics-boards-charters-problem-big-tech

Gwern’s AI-Generated Poetry | Slate Star Codex https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/03/14/gwerns-ai-generated-poetry/

Why Tool AIs Want to Be Agent AIs: The Power of Agency - Gwern.net https://www.gwern.net/Tool-AI