Thinking about it a bit, I suspect you’re not alone - whilst the '00s were pretty great for me (I was born in 2000, remember), the '10s were a complicated mess (for a long list of reasons), and the '20s have been one wash after another - and thanks to the 'Net, I’m aware how much hot garbage the '00s and earlier decades had.

I do also have individual bits of media which I’ve got fond memories of, but that’s about it. Thinking about it, my general soft spot for Y2K stuff is probably a lot less rooted in nostalgia than I thought.

No idea. Best guess is that its some attempt to sell fascism under a thin veneer of '80s nostalgia, mainly because this one full minute of Oops! All White People, and fascists are the biggest boosters of AI bar fucking none.

When it comes to falling for nostalgia, its generally Y2K-tinged stuff that gets me - I’m much closer to that era (again, I was born in 2000), and I’ve got a soft spot for the general visual style of that era (that its facing against Corporate Memphis/AI slop definitely helps).

This is a shot in the dark on my part, but I get the suspicion the quantum hype is gonna face direct resistance, in a similar manner to LLMs/AI.

Quantum’s supposed encryption-breaking abilities are currently a hypothetical, but hype about such abilities could prompt fears that governments/corporations would abuse quantum to supercharge currently existing mass surveillance, enabling governments to invade people’s privacy without needing a backdoor or corporate cooperation.

High energy consumption will likely prompt resistance as well - the current crop of quantum computers consume a lot of power to keep their chips within spitting distance of absolute zero, and after seeing AI corps do everything in their power to consume as much energy as possible, I can see the public expecting similar behaviour in the upcoming quantum bubble, and reacting accordingly.

On a wider front, I expect machine learning as a whole will see its funding go down the shitter once the AI bubble bursts - useful ML applications are losing funding in favour of magical chatbots, and the stench of AI is definitely wafting all over it as well.

For an off-the-cuff prediction, I expect the number of AI/ML researchers to steeply drop in the coming years, from funding for AI/ML drying up post bubble, and from researchers viewing the field as too tainted to touch.

The flag was the most obvious one I could think of, given how many eyes were already on HWNDU and how swiftly they found it. In retrospect, I should’ve chosen 1d4chan/1d6chan as my example, given how large and robust it is as a wiki.

The SCP Foundation arguably qualifies as well - it began on /x/ as a random post, before morphing into the ongoing collaborative writing project we all know and love.

Even 4chan can trade/coordinate/and have functional outcomes, sure often for evil.

To give a rather notorious example, there’s the He Will Not Divide Us flag in 2017, which the 'channers tracked down after only 38 hours, despite Shia LeBouf’s attempts to keep the location hidden.

The death penalty of not just you but your whole family if you copy that floppy.

The future media conglomerates want. (okay maybe not the “death penalty” part - dead people don’t make money)

In other news, I’ve stumbled across some AI slop trying to sell a faux-nostalgic image of the 1980s:

Unsurprisingly, its getting walloped in the quotes - there’s people noting how it misrepresents the '80s, people noting much the '80s sucked and how its worst aspects are getting repeated today, people noting the video’s whiter than titanium dioxide, people suggesting there’s suicidal undertones to it, and a few comparisons to San Junipero from Black Mirror here and there.

Personally, this whole thing has negative nostalgic value to me - I was born in 2000, well after the decade ended (temporally and culturally), and the faux-nostalgic uncanny-valley vibe this slop has reminds me more of analog horror than anything else.

Here’s my idea to increase the birth rate:

Make the world less of an all-consuming dystopian hellscape, so people can actually start and raise a family without ruining themselves, and can feel confident their children won’t have horrible lives.

Ran across a viral post on Bluesky:

Unsurprisingly, the replies and quotes are universally outraged at the news.

It feels like the rise of LLMs has set back cybersecurity by a good decade or so, and by my guess it probably has.

Agents are throwing away decades of hard-learned lessons in input sanitization (providing cybercriminals a Greatest Hits compilation of vulnerabilities), “vibe coding” is introducing vulnerabilities aplenty to codebases and hiding them under mountains of technical debt/unmaintainable code, LLM usage is damaging coding ability in coders both junior and senior, the entire tech field is haemorrhaging talent from burnout and layoffs, and that’s just the things that are immediately coming to mind.

As I see it, cybersec may find itself practically back to square one once the dust settles.

New article on AI scraping just hit The Register, with some choice quotes from Anubis dev Xe Iaso. Xe herself has given some additional thoughts.

he has the superpower of making people sympathize with a cop

He’s second only to the average sovereign citizen in that field.

Ultra-rare NIMBY W

LLMs are designed to make plausible-looking text, so whatever bullshit statistics they extrude will be more convincing to the untrained eye.

New edition of AI Killed My Job, focusing on how translators got fucked over by the AI bubble.

I looked through the quotes, and found someone openly hoping human-made work will be more highly valued in the bubble’s wake:

You want my suspicion, I suspect she’s gonna get her wish - with the slop-nami flooding the Internet, human-made work in general is gonna be valued all the more.

A story in two Skeets - one from a TV writer, one from a software dev:

On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects the AI bubble is gonna turn tech as a whole into a pop-culture punchline - the bubble’s all-consuming nature and wide-ranging harms, plus the industry’s relentless hype campaign, have already built a heavy amount of resentment against the industry, and the general public is gonna experience a colossal amount of schadenfreude once it bursts,

Hucksters can and will reinvent themselves as quantum-computing consultants on LinkedIn, but is the raw material for the grift really there? I’m doubtful.

By my guess, no. AI earned its investor/VC dollars by providing bosses and CEOs alike a cudgel to use against labour, either by deskilling workers, degrading their work conditions, or killing their jobs outright.

Quantum doesn’t really have that - the only Big Claim™ I know it has going for it is its supposed ability to break pre-existing encryption clean in half, but that’s near-certainly gonna be useless for hypebuilding.

On top of that, there’s clear signs that we’ve grown quite an audience from dunking on AI. Ed Zitron reached 70k subscribers just a couple weeks ago, and Pivot to AI is at nearly 9k on YouTube.

If and when the next Big Dumb Thing comes along, chances are we’re gonna have a headstart against the hucksters.

Y’know, I was predicting at least a few years without a tech bubble, but I guess I was dead wrong on that. Part of me suspects the hucksters are gonna fail to inflate a quantum bubble this time around, though.