Why do they think people buy newspapers in 2025?
To be fair to WaPo, The Onion returned to print in 2024 and reportedly did pretty well from the move.
Granted, this is a bit of an apples-and-oranges situation - for one thing, the Onion is a serious journalistic outlet, whilst WaPo is not.
ETA: If you’ve had your interest piqued, you can grab the print versions through their membership program - minimum cost is a pretty hefty $99 a year, though.
Democracy dies in darkness, and WaPo’s jumping headfirst into it.
Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?
Gonna take a shot in the dark here and guess that the people behind these AI scrapers are incredibly stupid, and think Scrape More = More Data = More Growth = More GoodTM. Given this bubble’s already given us the goddamn scourge that is “vibe coding”, and is headed by growth-obsessed fuckwits and True BelieversTM, chances are I’m completely correct on this.
Found a damn-good sneering of AI art on Newgrounds recently - highly recommend checking it out.
New Blood In The Machine: The “AI jobs apocalypse” is for the bosses
Remember Stephen Elop of Nokia’s “burning platform” memo in 2011?
I was entering high school in 2011, so no.
Nokia adopted Windows Mobile as their phone operating system — which failed in the market. Nokia used to own the phone market.
The only real experience I have with Nokia is my dad’s Nokia 3310 (which he exclusively uses as an alarm clock these days) and nonstop memes about the 3310’s supposed indestructibility. Kinda wild to me that Nokia once ruled the entire goddamn phone market.
Nadella going AI is going to be Facebook going Metaverse at the best.
And at worst…well, by my guess, its gonna be “Microsoft accidentally brings forth the Year of the Linux Desktop”
Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:
The only LLM-Based Experiencetm I’ve had so far (and probably ever) was a brief session of Death by AI I had with friends, and that game boils down to “give the chatbot a prompt and your response, and maybe try to not die horribly”.
Pretty much all the fun of that game comes from giving the chatbot manmade horrors beyond its comprehension and seeing it struggle to keep up.
Novelty value is basically the only thing LLMs have going for them, and that isn’t changing any time soon.
What, I’m going to play TLoU 2 without playing 1 or GoW 4 without playing 1-3?
Part I and Part II are both on Steam, so you can get the full Last of Us experience without a console, and GoW 2018 is a soft reboot, so playing the original trilogy isn’t strictly necessary.
As for GOW 1-3…there’s no PC port, so you’ve got two options: sail the high seas and emulate them via PCSX2 and/or RPCS3, or get the games and a used PS3 off of eBay.
And, given I’ve already mentioned emulation:
My entire experience with Sony is that I loved Patapon on the PSP (I would sell my fucking soul to get it to play on a smartphone god)
If you’re looking for Patapon on your phone, the only course I know of is to grab PSP emulator PPSSPP and find the ISOs online. If you’re fine playing them on your PC, a remaster of the first two games is coming to Steam on June 10th.
(I am deep in the weeds on this shit, I’ll admit)
I unfortunately know jack shit about quantum computing, so I can’t really weigh in, but I am rooting for them to pull it off, because PsiQuantum getting all the VC money ever means AI stops getting all the VC money ever
They also needed to rapidly rein it in after gamers got it to pull a Tay AI and start spamming slurs.
New artcle from Brian Merchant: An ‘always on’ OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen
Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Devicetm, I think Merchant’s correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Devicetm and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.
headlines of Devicetm wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian’s noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Devicetm as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI’s public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley’s reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Devicetm wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.
New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:
What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible
LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev
Google is very upset that a lot of the public don’t really like AI. You might think this was because of AI slop and explicit threats to their jobs, but Google is pretty sure it’s because people saw the Terminator films.
Okay, quick sidenote: I wouldn’t be shocked if people looked at the Terminator in a different light after this bubble.
On the one hand, the basic idea of “AI turns sentient and kills us all” is pretty laughable in a cultural zeitgeist where “AI” means “plagiarism-fueled lying machine” or “plagiarism-fueled mediocrity generator” or “plagiarism-fueled atrocity machine” (okay, maybe not that last one). The general themes of “man vs machine” will likely shine through all the brighter, though - especially given how the AI systems involved in this bubble function explicitly through stealing the work of human authors, artists, and other such creatives, and exclusively through stealing said human creatives’ work (ingesting AI slop slowly destroys AI systems, and everyone who works in AI rejects giving artists a fair shake out of principle).
On the other hand, the fact that AI has nonetheless still caused unimaginable damage to humanity (the environmental damage, the slop-nami, the fully-automatic worker abuse and enshittification, et cetera) might make the films feel oddly prescient, as it (plus the last 20-ish years of corporate malevolence) have made it clear that there are a lot of businessmen out there who would actively and willingly ruin the entire fucking world and potentially kill all of humanity if the alternative was “I, and I specifically, don’t make all of the money ever”.
And on the gripping hand, the likes of OpenAI and friends actively pushing AI Doomtm to criti-hype their way into raising more money could paint Cyberdyne’s existence in a much different light - with the breathless hype about AGI/superintelligence that Altman and Friends have put out, the general message they’ve been putting out is basically “We are actively trying to create the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus, because, uh, reasons. Please give us all of the money and ruin the world for our benefit and our benefit alone, otherwise we won’t be able to make the Torment Nexus from the hit sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”.
Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:
Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he’s a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed’s just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.
Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:
ED ZITRON
FROM THE TOP ROPE
New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them
If you get the call, charge as much as you can. Then charge more.
Words to live by.
New piece which caught my attention: Against AI literacy: have we actually found a way to reverse learning?