Clown car Archive

Now let’s go live to Amazon for the latest updates about this developing story. Amazon’s ecommerce business has summoned a large group of engineers to a meeting on Tuesday for a “deep dive” into a spate of outages, including incidents tied to the use of AI coding tools. The online retail giant said there had been a “trend of incidents” in recent months, characterized by a “high blast radius” and “Gen-AI assisted changes” among other factors, according to a briefing note for the meeting seen by the FT. Under “contributing factors” the note included “novel GenAI usage for which best practices and safeguards are not yet fully established.” ↫ Rafe Rosner-Uddin at Ars Technica Oh boy.

Back in 2023, John Earnest created a fun drawing application called WigglyPaint. The thing that makes WigglyPaint unique is that it automatically applies what artists call the line boil effect to anything you draw, making it seem as if everything is wiggling (hence the name). Even if you’re not aware of the line boil effect, you’ve surely encountered it several times in your life. The tool may seem simple at first glance, but as Earnest details, he’s put quite a lot of thought into the little tool. WigglyPaint was well-received, but mostly remained a curiosity – that is, until artists in Asia picked up on it, and the popularity of WigglyPaint positively exploded from a few hundred into the millions. The problem, though, is that basically nobody is actually using WigglyPaint: they’re all using slopcoded copycats. The sites are slop; slapdash imitations pieced together with the help of so-called “Large Language Models” (LLMs). The closer you look at them, the stranger they appear, full of vague, repetitive claims, outright false information, and plenty of unattributed (stolen) art. This is what LLMs are best at: quickly fabricating plausible simulacra of real objects to mislead the unwary. It is no surprise that the same people who have total contempt for authorship find LLMs useful; every LLM and generative model today is constructed by consuming almost unimaginably massive quantities of human creative work- writing, drawings, code, music- and then regurgitating them piecemeal without attribution, just different enough to hide where it came from (usually). LLMs are sharp tools in the hands of plagiarists, con-men, spammers, and everyone who believes that creative expression is worthless. People who extract from the world instead of contributing to it. It is humiliating and infuriating to see my work stolen by slop enthusiasts, and worse, used to mislead artists into paying scammers for something that ought to be free. ↫ John Earnest There’s a huge amount of slopcoded WrigglyPaint ripoffs out there, and it goes far beyond websites, too. People are putting slopcoded ripoffs in basic webviews, and uploading them en masse to the Play Store and App Store. None of these slopcoded ripoffs actually build upon WrigglyPaint with new ideas or approaches, there’s no creativity or innovation; it’s just trash barfed up by glorified autocomplete built upon mass plagiarism and theft, “made” by bottom feeders who despise creativity, art, and originality. You know how when you go to IKEA or whatever other similar store to buy picture frames, they have these stock photos of random people in them? I wonder if “AI” enthusiasts understand you’re supposed to replace those with pictures that actually have meaning to you.

Encryption backdoors, social media bans for children, creepy age verification for applications – what will they think of next? The latest brilliant idea by US lawmakers sure is a hell of a doozy: legally mandated age verification in every single operating system. Colorado’s SB26-051, introduced last month, would require operating systems to register the owner’s age, which third-party apps can then leverage to determine if the user is an adult. The bill calls for the device owner to register their birthdate or age, but for the purposes of creating an “age bracket,” which can then be shared to an app developer through an API to learn their age range, according to BiometricUpdate.com. Ball also said the legislation was based on California’s bill AB 1043, which was passed last year. It too requires OS makers to create a way for the device owner to register their age bracket, which can then be shared to app developers over an API. The California law starts to take effect January 1, 2027. ↫ Michael Kan at PCMag Age verification to protect children sounds innocent enough, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together it’s crystal clear that what we’re really looking at is the true end of privacy and online anonymity. If age verification is only used by certain applications, it’s easy enough to avoid them, but if it becomes part of Windows, desktop Linux, Android, it’s truly game over. Nobody will be anonymous online ever again, and nobody will have any sense of privacy left when opening up their computer. Worse yet, if you do end up using an operating system that doesn’t adhere to this law, or you hack out or circumvent the age verification nonsense, you’ll automatically become an easy target for law enforcement. Clearly, if you circumvent age verification, you must be up to no good, right? Of course, as we’ve seen in countries with heavily deteriorating democracies and freedoms, like the US or Hungary, even merely opposing the government will be classified as “up to no good”, and let’s not even get started about the various minorities these countries are actively trying to eradicate. If something like this is enshrined in law in your country, you’re fucked.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department’s official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a “wasteful” sop to diversity. While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio’s directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed “radical” diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork. ↫ Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz at The New York Times

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one — but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I’m a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out!

You may have noticed that due to “AI” companies buying up all literally all the RAM in the world, prices for consumer RAM and SSDs have gone completely batshit insane. Well, it’s only going to get worse, since Micron has announced it’s going to exit the market for consumer RAM and is, therefore, retiring its Crucial brand. The reason? You know the reason. “The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments,” said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. ↫ Micron’s press release First it was the crypto pyramid scheme, and now it’s the “AI” pyramid scheme. These MLMs for unimpressive white males who couldn’t imagine themselves out of a wet paper bag are ruining not just the environment, software, and soon the world’s economy when the bubble pops, but are now also making it extraordinarily expensive to buy some RAM or a bit of storage. Literally nothing good is coming from these techbro equivalents of Harlequin romance novels, and yet, we’re forced to pretend they’re the next coming of the railroads every time some guy who was voted most likely to die a middle manager at Albertsons in Casper, Wyoming, farts his idea out on a napkin. I am so tired.

An extensive study by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC highlights just how deeply inaccurate and untrustworthy “AI” news results really are. “AI” sucks even at its most basic function. It’s incredible how much money is being pumped into this scam, and how many people are wholeheartedly defending these bullshit generators as if their lives depended on it. If these tools can’t even summarise a text – something you learn in early primary school as a basic skill – how on earth are they supposed to perform more complex tasks like coding, making medical assessments, distinguish between a chips bag and a gun? Maybe we deserve it.

If you’re eating a bag of chips in an area where “AI” software is being used to monitor people’s behaviour, you might want to reconsider. Some high school kid in the US was hanging out with his friends, when all of a sudden, he was being swarmed by police officers with with guns drawn. Held at gunpoint, he was told to lie down, after which he was detained. Obviously, this is a rather unpleasant experience, so say the least, especially considering the kid in question is a person of colour. In the US. Anyway, the “AI” software used by the police department to monitor citizens’ behaviour mistook an empty chips bag in his pocket for a gun. US police officers, who only receive a few weeks of training, didn’t question what the computer told them and pointed guns at a teenager. In a statement, Omnilert expressed regret over the incident, acknowledging that the image “closely resembled a gun being held.” The company called it a “false positive,” but defended the system’s response, stating it “functioned as intended: to prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.” ↫ Alexa Dikos and Rebecca Pryor at FOX45 News I’ve been warning that the implementation of “AI” was going to lead to people dying, and while this poor kid got lucky this time, you know it’s only a matter of time before people start getting shot by US police because they’re too stupid to question their computer overlords. Add in the fact that “AI” is well-known to be deeply racist, and we have a very deadly cocktail of failures.

Open AI has recently announced deals worth $600 Billion with Nvidia, AMD, and Oracle. OpenAI is able to spend hundreds of billions of dollars they do not have because those companies are paying that same money back to OpenAI via investment. The infinite money glitch means that stocks keep going higher as more circular revenue cycles between the same players. ↫ Sasha Yanshin The scam is so brazen, so public, so obvious. The foxes aren’t just in the hen house – they bought the whole goddamn hen house.

Framework, the maker of repairable laptops, is embroiled in a controversy, as the company and its CEO are openly supporting people with, well, questionable views. If you know a little bit about PR in social media space, you might note that, right out of the gate, a project by a vocal white nationalist known for splitting communities by their mere presence, is not a great highlight choice for an overtly non-left-right-political company like Framework. Does it get worse from here? Sadly, it does. ↫ Arya Bread Crumbs The questionable views we’re talking about here are… Let’s just say we’re not talking about milquetoast stuff like “we should be a bit stricter with immigration” or “lower taxes on the rich”, but views that are far, far outside of the mainstream in most places in the world. Framework has stated in no uncertain terms that it is supporting and embracing people like this. That’s a choice they are entirely free to make, but I, and many with me, then, are entirely free to choose not to buy and/or promote products by Framework. I still sincerely hope that all of this is just a massive breakdown of PR and common sense at Framework and its CEO, but since they’ve already doubled-down, I’m not holding my breath. This whole thing is going to haunt them, especially since I’m fairly sure a huge chunk of their community and users – who are buying into hardware that is, in truth, overpriced – are not even remotely aligned with such extremist views. I care deeply about Framework’s mission, but I don’t give a single rat’s ass about Framework itself. There are countless alternatives to Framework, some of which I’ve even reviewed here (like the MNT Reform or the NovaCustom V54), and if you, too, feel a deep sense of the ick when it comes to supporting extremist views like the above, I urge you to take them into consideration.

We’re all being told that “AI” is revolutionizing programming. Whether the marketing is coming from Cursor, Copilot, Claude, Google, or the countless other players in this area, it’s all emphasizing the massive productivity and speed gains programmers who use “AI” tools will achieve. The relentless marketing is clearly influencing both managers and programmers alike, with the former forcing “AI” down their subordinates’ throats, and the latter claiming to see absolutely bizarre productivity gains. The impact of the marketing is real – people are being fired, programmers are expected to be ridiculously more productive without commensurate pay raises, and anyone questioning this new corporate gospel will probably end up on the chopping block next. It’s like the industry has become a nunnery, and all the nuns are meowing like cats. The reality seems to be, though, that none of these “AI” programming tools are making anyone more productive. Up until recently, Mike Judge truly believed “AI” was making him a much more productive programmer – until he ran the numbers of his own work, and realised that he was not one bit more productive at all, and his point is that if the marketing is true, and programmers are indeed becoming vastly more productive, where’s the evidence? And yet, despite the most widespread adoption one could imagine, these tools don’t work. My argument: If so many developers are so extraordinarily productive using these tools, where is the flood of shovelware? We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice. We should be in the middle of an indie software revolution. We should be seeing 10,000 Tetris clones on Steam. ↫ Mike Judge He proceeded to collect tons of data about new software releases on the iOS App Store, the Play Store, Steam, GitHub, and so on, as well as the number of domain registrations, and the numbers paint a very different picture from the exuberant marketing. Every single metric is flat. There’s no spike in new games, new applications, new repositories, new domain registrations. It’s all proceeding as if “AI” had had zero effect on productivity. This whole thing is bullshit. So if you’re a developer feeling pressured to adopt these tools — by your manager, your peers, or the general industry hysteria — trust your gut. If these tools feel clunky, if they’re slowing you down, if you’re confused how other people can be so productive, you’re not broken. The data backs up what you’re experiencing. You’re not falling behind by sticking with what you know works. If you’re feeling brave, show your manager these charts and ask them what they think about it. If you take away anything from this it should be that (A) developers aren’t shipping anything more than they were before (that’s the only metric that matters), and (B) if someone — whether it’s your CEO, your tech lead, or some Reddit dork — claims they’re now a 10xer because of AI, that’s almost assuredly untrue, demand they show receipts or shut the fuck up. ↫ Mike Judge Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and the evidence just isn’t there. The corporate world has an endless list of productivity metrics – some more reliable than others – and I have the sneaking suspicion we’re only fed marketing instead of facts because none of those metrics are showing any impact of “AI” whatsoever, because if they did, we know the “AI” pushers wouldn’t shut the fuck up about it. Show me more than meowing nuns, and I’ll believe the hype is real.

A little over a year ago, DC District Court Judge Amit Mehta ruled that Google is a monopolist and violated US antitrust law. Today, Mehta ruled that while Google violated the law, there won’t be any punishment for the search giant. They don’t have to divest Chrome or Android, they can keep paying third parties to preload their services and products, and they can keep paying Apple €20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iOS. Mehta declined to grant some of the more ambitious proposals from the Justice Department to remedy Google’s behavior and restore competition to the market. Besides letting Google keep Chrome, he’ll also let the company continue to pay distribution partners for preloading or placement of its search or AI products. But he did order Google to share some valuable search information with rivals that could help jumpstart their ability to compete, and bar the search giant from making exclusive deals to distribute its search or AI assistant products in ways that might cut off distribution for rivals. ↫ Lauren Feiner at The Verge Mehta granted Google a massive win here, further underlining that as long as you’re wealthy, a corporation, or better yet, both, you are free to break the law and engage in criminal behaviour. The only thing you’ll get is some mild negative press and a gentle pat on the wrist, and you can be on your merry way to continue your illegal behaviour. None of it is surprising, except perhaps for the brazenness of the class justice on display here. The events during and course of this antitrust case mirrors those of the antitrust case involving Microsoft, over 25 years ago. Microsoft, too, had a long, documented, and proven history of illegal behaviour, but like Google today, also got away with a similar gentle pat on the wrist. It’s likely that the antitrust cases currently running against Apple and Amazon will end in similar gentle pats on the wrist, further solidifying that you can break the law all you want, as long as you’re rich. Thank god the real criminal scum is behind bars.

We are observing stealth crawling behavior from Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine. Although Perplexity initially crawls from their declared user agent, when they are presented with a network block, they appear to obscure their crawling identity in an attempt to circumvent the website’s preferences. We see continued evidence that Perplexity is repeatedly modifying their user agent and changing their source ASNs to hide their crawling activity, as well as ignoring — or sometimes failing to even fetch — robots.txt files. The Internet as we have known it for the past three decades is rapidly changing, but one thing remains constant: it is built on trust. There are clear preferences that crawlers should be transparent, serve a clear purpose, perform a specific activity, and, most importantly, follow website directives and preferences. Based on Perplexity’s observed behavior, which is incompatible with those preferences, we have de-listed them as a verified bot and added heuristics to our managed rules that block this stealth crawling. ↫ The CloudFlare Blog Never forget they destroyed Aaron Swartz’s life – literally – for downloading a few JSTOR articles.

“Why is my burger blue?” I asked, innocently. “Oh! We’re making all of our food blue, all the best restaurants are doing it now.” the waiter explained. But I didn’t want my burger to be blue. ↫ Luna Winters “Blue” food isn’t food.