I’d just like to say congrats on making it into NYT - it took 'em long enough to recognise you were worth listening to.

AI bros keep being literally unable to tell good writing from bad writing, so they tell you that obvious slop is just fine when it really isn’t. But editors can tell. Do not write like a slop machine.

Going on a tangent, I can see English/Creative Writing degrees getting a major boost in job market value thanks to that being exposed - on top of showing you don’t need spicy autocomplete to write for you (which I predicted two weeks ago), getting such a degree also shows a basic ability to tell good writing from bad writing.

Before the bubble, employers could easily assume anyone they hire would be capable of telling good writing from bad writing by default. Now, they the possibility of a would-be hire being incapable of even that basic feat is something they have to contend with.

I was planning to mention Procreate as well, but felt like that’d be spamming the replies a bit.

On a wider note, I expect it’ll be primarily art-related software/hardware companies that will have avoided AI participation - with how utterly artists have rejected the usage of AI, and resisted its intrusion into their spaces, the companies working with them likely view rejecting AI as an easy way of earning good PR with their users, and embracing it as a business liability at best, and a one-way trip past the trust thermocline at worst.

Gonna cheat a little bit and put one-woman consultancy firm/personal blog deadSimpleTech up as an example. The sole member is Iris Meredith, whose involvement begins and ends at publicly lambasting AI’s continued shittiness.

Starting things off with a fun post I found on Bluesky:

the most productive way to do things is to do it deliberately and with good planning

Two things which coding is currently allergic to, as the rise of vibe coding has demonstrated

Public reminder that two thirds of American Jews support the Gaza genocide. ScottA is not an outlier, he’s the norm.

CIO even ends with talking up the Luddites — and how they smashed all those machines in rational self-defence.

I genuinely thought this wasn’t true at first and went to check. Its completely true, a fucking business magazine’s giving the Luddites their due:

Regardless of the fallout, fractional CMO Lars Nyman sees AI sabotage efforts as nothing new.

“This is luddite history revisited. In 1811, the Luddites smashed textile machines to keep their jobs. Today, it’s Slack sabotage and whispered prompt jailbreaking, etc. Human nature hasn’t changed, but the tools have,” Nyman says. “If your company tells people they’re your greatest asset and then replaces them with an LLM, well, don’t be shocked when they pull the plug or feed the model garbage data. If the AI transformation rollout comes with a whiff of callous ‘adapt or die’ arrogance from the C-suite, there will be rebellion.”

It may be in the context of warning capital not to anger labour too much, lest they inspire resistance, but its still wild to see.

“Would you like code with that?”

what to do with this information

If you know any sci-fi/fantasy mags, you should probably tell them about it to help them identify and reject slop more easily.

A pull request is when someone submits new code to a software project. On 21 August, NX added some configuration to look at the titles of pull requests and check they were correctly formatted.

I find it immensely hilarious that this security hole was blown open on my 25th birthday. Its almost poetic.

By my guess, its gonna take about a decade to fully clean up the mountains of slop code that this AI bubble’s gonna leave. It’ll certainly be lucrative (and soul-deadening, as you note), but as someone else has noted before, the riches are exclusively going to experienced devs and senior programmers - for anyone trying to break into the industry, they’re probably gonna have to find work somewhere else.

New Pivot to AI candidate just dropped: Taco Bell rethinks AI drive-through after man orders 18,000 waters

Found a couple articles about blunting AI’s impact on education (got them off of Audrey Watters’ blog, for the record).

The first is a New York Times guest essay by NYU vice provost Clay Shirky, which recommends “moving away from take-home assignments and essays and toward […] assessments that call on students to demonstrate knowledge in real time.”

The second is an article by Kate Manne calling for professors to prevent cheating via AI, which details her efforts in doing so:

Instead of take-home essays to write in their own time, I’ll have students complete in-class assignments that will be hand-written. I won’t allow electronic devices in my class, except for students who tell me they need them as a caregiver or first responder or due to a disability. Students who do need to use a laptop will have to complete the assignment using google docs, so I can see their revision history.

Manne does note the problems with this (outing disabled students, class time spent writing, and difficulties in editing, rewriting, and make-up work), but still believes “it is better, on balance, to take this approach rather than risk a significant proportion of students using AI to write their essays.”

Hmm, is it better or worse that they’re now officially treating SICP as a literal holy book?

I’m gonna say “worse”, because it turned the SCP writers into unwitting accomplices to a literal cult.

The deaths just keep coming: the Wall Street Journal’s just reported on a murder-suicide caused by ChatGPT.

Its probably the most reliable AI detector there is.

Even if someone’s actively misrepresenting statistics/sources to push some kind of grift, those underlying stats/sources are near-certainly going to be genuine if they aren’t using AI - not out of any moral obligation, but because made-up stats/sources will get their entire grift thrown out if they’re discovered.

(wonder how long it is before the US degrades far enough that other countries start ratcheting up border/traveller defenses, compared to the current ~free rein they have (which, y’know, was owed to years of hard and soft power that the orange man is also rapidly pissing away))

By my guess, not that long. If you have reports of American inadequacy during an outbreak (pretty likely), or horror stories of your countrymen getting persecuted (should be easy to find), you should have a solid political case for border lockdowns.

Focusing on Canada and Mexico specifically, I expect Canada will build its metaphorical walls first - the ongoing drug war in Mexico, plus the brutality of its cartels, will likely act to deter would-be American refugees from there.

Discovered a solid sneer online today, aptly titled “I Am An AI Hater”

OpenAI has stated its scanning users’ conversations (as if they weren’t already) and reporting conversations to the cops in response to the recent teen suicide I mentioned a couple days ago.

So, rather than let ChatGPT drive users to kill themselves, its just going to SWAT users and have the cops do the job.

(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)

Ethan Marcotte’s given his thoughts on the new “America by Design” web page, noting how its shittiness aligns perfectly with the Trump administration’s values.