the one about arena shooters dying off

That extruded piece of audiovisual garbage has been bugging me massively for a couple hours now, so I’m gonna make a quick recommendation:

If you’re looking for a non-dogshit video about the arena shooter’s implosion, boomer shooter YouTuber Skeleblood made a pretty solid one a couple years ago.

Stumbled across a YouTube slop-farm calling itself The Interactive Archive recently, and the whole thing is just plain shameless:

AI slop banner, AI slop thumbnails, AI slop avatar, its all slop from top to fucking bottom.

Its getting pitiful views, too - the highest-viewed video on the damn thing (as of this writing) is the one about arena shooters dying off, sitting at just under 400 views:

Putting that into context, a random screen recording I uploaded hit nearly 700 through sheer luck.

TBF, fighter jets should have been unmanned drones

On the one hand, an autonomous fighter jet would be immune to G-LOC, letting them perform maneuvers that would incapacitate/kill a human pilot. On the other hand, air-to-air combat is a complex affair, and the enemy will be probing for any weaknesses in your drones’ programming to exploit.

Autonomous bombers seem easier to pull off - bombing missions are (relatively) straightforward compared to air-to-air combat.

I personally wouldn’t count on it - if nothing else, losing Internet access would be crippling in modern day life.

I’m not gonna completely rule it out, though - CNN wrote on Instax making a comeback and the BBC reported a general spike in retro tech sales last year.

Mozilla is actively hiding slop commits to Firefox

Jonathan Hogg gives his two cents on gen-AI, pointing to high barriers to entry causing vibe-coding to explode:

We seem to have largely stopped innovating on trying to lower barriers to programming in favour of creating endless new frameworks and libraries for a vanishingly small number of near-identical languages. It is the mid-2020s and people are wringing their hands over Rust as if it was some inexplicable new thing rather than a C-derivative that incorporates decades old type theory. You know what I consider to be genuinely ground-breaking programming tools? VisiCalc, HyperCard and Scratch.

You know what? HyperCard was a glorious moment in time that I dearly miss: an army of non-experts were bashing together and sharing weird and wonderful stacks that were part 'zine, part adventure game and part database. Instead of laughing at vibe-coders, maybe we should ask ourselves why the current state-of-the-art in beginner-friendly programming tools is a planet-boiling roulette wheel.

(Adding my two cents, Adobe Flash filled the same role as HyperCard in the '00s, providing the public an easy(ish) way to get into programming, and providing an outlet for many an aspirating animator and gamedev.)

Good to know, David.

throwing chatbots into the military

Not the first time the US gov’s pulled that shit, and it sure as hell won’t be the last.

File this shit next to the SIG M18 and the XM7 in its list of grade-A blunders.

The promptfondlers did it, they made a computer which doesn’t do what you tell it to do

Starting this Stubsack off with one programmer’s testimony on the effects of the LLM rot:

For the record, I work at a software company that employs ~10k developers.

Before LLMs, I’d encounter [software engineers that seem completely useless or lacking in basic knowledge] a couple of times a month, but I interact with a lot of engineers, specifically the ones that need help or are new at the company or industry at large, so it’s a selected sample. Even the most inexperienced ones are willing and able to learn with some guidance.

After LLMs, there’s been a significant uptick, and these new ones are grossly incompetent, incurious, impatient, and behave like addicts if their supply of tokens is at all interrupted. If they run out of prompt credits, its an emergency because they claim they can’t do any work at all. They can’t even explain the architecture of what they are making anymore, and can’t even file tickets or send emails without an LLM writing it for them, and they certainly lack in any kind of reading comprehension.

It’s bleak and depressing, and makes me want to quit the industry altogether.

Quick update: The post’s popped off in the Fediverse, and Doctorow’s actively posting through it in the replies.

EDIT: Tante’s also written a follow-up post, trying to convince people to tone down their vitriol against Cory.

edit: I mean, he tried transformer powered voice-to-text and liked it, and now he’s all in on the LLMs are a rigorous and accurate tool actually bandwagon?

This is probably just me, but that doesn’t seem particularly shocking. If this AI bubble’s taught me anything, its that tech culture (if not tech as a whole) was deeply, deeply vulnerable to the LLM rot from the start.

OT: Declan Chidlow ran across product activation codes for some old Adobe products.

The only useful one’s for Flash MX 2004 IMO, but its still cool to have them.

New and nicely made sneer caught my attention: Rely On AI And Get Left Behind

The kind of person who cannot tell the difference between blindly guessing words and conscious thought.

Quick TL;DR of my Discord Age Verification Experience™:

Using my face multiple times didn’t work due to the AV shitting itself inside out, but setting my DOB via Family Center somehow did it

Absolute fucking clown fiesta, Jesus Christ

WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives for 2026 sold out (because the AI datacentres have stolen them all)

Related thread on Bluesky:

idk if the bubble will pop or slowly deflate, but im certain that in 10 years we’ll look back at 2020s as the decade where tech stopped progressing in the way we know it - since we’re diverting all our resources to ai, there’s no longer any room left for anything else to grow

the 2010s crypto gpu shortage was the warning siren for this. it really hampered the growth of gpus because they permanently became so much more expensive - now the same is happening to memory, storage, and…well, gpus again! we’ve reached the point of reverse progress

Chatbots are a cognitive hazard, part infinity: AI Delusions Are Leading to Domestic Abuse, Harassment, and Stalking

Baldur Bjarnason gives his thoughts on the software job market, predicting a collapse regardless of how AI shakes out:

If you model the impact of working LLM coding tools (big increase in productivity, little downside) where the bottlenecks are largely outside of coding, increases in coding automation mostly just reduce the need for labour. I.e. 10x increase means you need 10x fewer coders, collapsing the job market

If you model the impact of working LLM coding tools with no bottlenecks, then the increase in productivity massively increases the supply of undifferentiated software and the prices you can charge for any software drops through the floor, collapsing the job market

If the models increase output but are flawed, as in they produce too many defects or have major quality issues, Akerlof’s market for lemons kicks in, bad products drive out good, value of software in the market heads south, collapsing the job market

If the model impact is largely fictitious, meaning this is all a scam and the perceived benefit is just a clusterfuck of cognitive hazards, then the financial bubble pop will be devastating, tech as an industry will largely be destroyed, and trust in software will be zero, collapsing the job market

I can only think of a few major offsetting forces:

• If the EU invests in replacing US software, bolstering the EU job market.
• China might have substantial unfulfilled domestic demand for software, propping up their job market
• Companies might find that declining software quality harms their bottom-line, leading to a Y2K-style investment in fixing their software stacks

But those don’t seem likely to do more than partially offset the decline. Kind of hoping I’m missing something

The phrase “ambient AI listening in our hospital” makes me hear the “Dies Irae” in my head.

I’m personally hearing “Morceaux” myself.