Today’s bullshit that annoys me: Wikiwand. From what I can tell their grift is that it’s just a shitty UI wrapper for Wikipedia that sells your data to who the fuck knows to make money for some Israeli shop. Also they SEO the fuck out of their stupid site so that every time I search for something that has a Finnish wikipedia page, the search results also contain a pointless shittier duplicate result from wikiwand dot com. Has anyone done a deeper investigation into what their deal is or at least some kind of rant I could indulge in for catharsis?

When you nearly miss the submission deadline for the performative misogyny olympics (genuine opinions only edition). Alsl the problem with everything is that there exist things which are not gambling or are insufficiently unnecessarily high stakes gambling.

I feel like calling it race pseudoscience inadvertently suggests the existence of legitimate race science.

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as “content”. “Content” is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you’re designing the layout and don’t know what actually goes on the page yet. “Content” is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car’s trunk. “Content” is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

“Content”… is Whatever.

I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how “content creator” has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it’s used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck’s sake.

Also HP has so far had this kind of a reverse Midas touch where they turn every networking gear company they touch into HP.

Wendy O: Is this a generative AI collection? Not a fan of those. To me, it’s not necessarily real art.
Another whale: They’re not all the same.
Wendy O: I don’t care. It takes away from the real artist.

Wow, look at the time. It’s stopped o’clock!

The world was not ready. Or no longer ready.

HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.

Comic Book Guy energy

Between the title of the show and one of the judges being a guy called Mario Narwhal I gotta ask, are coiners trying to reclaim the word “whale”, as in a cash cow gambler/lifestyle goods consumer?

Our plagiarism machine is not a plagiarism machine. In fact, it’s so much not a plagiarism machine we added an optional feature that lets it detect when its plagiarism is too ovious and make its plagiarism less ovious.

I have a Kubernetes cluster running my AI agents for me so I don’t have to learn how to set up AI agents. The AI agents are running my Kubernetes cluster so that I don’t have to learn Kubernetes either. I’m paid $250k a year to lie to myself and others that I’m making a positive contribution to society. I don’t even know what OS I’m running and at this point I’m afraid to ask.

They quickly accelerated their way out.

Tech support workers who may or may not speak English as a second language or with a strong accent can sometimes be of actual help and sometimes not, much like people with possibly more familiar accents can. A call center AI has never been anywhere close to solving a problem I’ve had.

You’re no less fucked but instead of a human being getting underpaid for the trouble, a shitty tech corporation is overpaid.

It’s fair enough to criticize that, but the curtains are blue meme makes a really bad argument. It would be one thing if the author said “the curtains are blue because the detective is colorblind and couldn’t see the bloodstains on the green curtains” or “the curtains are blue to represent Virgin Mary”. Ha ha the teacher was wrong, what a fool, blind leading the blind.

The meme actually implies that authors typically add utterly superfluous sentences in their stories and that it’s wrong to try and interpret them as if they’re connected to the rest of the story.

The thing about colors is they’re so easy and efficient as symbols we don’t even consider them as deeper elements of storytelling. The connotations of the colors black and red are so pervasive and intuitive to an English speaker it’s hard to even imagine a version of My Immortal that doesn’t use them to convey the emo pop mall goffik sense of aethetics associated with the fic.

Nobody living in modern anglophone society, not even someone pretending to write like a concussed 12-year old, would accidentally dress their depressed vampire goth protagonist in yellow, beige and pink thinking those colors usually represent those character traits.

A tool uses an LLM, the LLM uses a tool. What a beautiful ouroboros.

I don’t want to live in the world of The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

I don’t want to live in the world of The Giving Tree.

I don’t want to live in the world of Pippi Longstocking (Sweden).

I want to live in the world of Goosebumps, The Yellow Pages, and JBL Tune Beam Quick Start Guide.

Someone ask if those fucks wanna see how much of the modern world was actually built by China? Wanna let them run it instead?

Frankly yes. In a better world art would not be commodified and the economic barriers that hinder commissioning of art from skilled human artists in our capitalist system would not exist, and thus generative AI recombining existing art would likely be much less problematic and harmful to both artists and audiences alike.

But also that is not the world where we live, so fuck GenAI and its users and promoters lmao stay mad.