Who Cares

Hey, I’m back. Who cares? That’s what Dan Sinker wants to know, here in “the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.” Dan’s take is: “in a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself,” and in keeping with that advice the post started what Phirephoenix Jenny called “an old-fashioned conversation-by-blog-post.” Les Orchard described the flood of AI content as “performance art for algorithms,” and foresaw “most people reduced to NPCs in someone else's growth funnel,” another example of JWZ’s “grim meathook future.” Tell me how this screenshot grabs you:

Oof. Anyway the whole blogversation is kind of about AI and also kind of about how AI is just an epiphenomenon of a lot of preëxisting trends here in the grim meathook present. Jenny writes:

Engaging in self-harm as a cry for help? New Tabs motto dropped.

But even the AI bros are getting tired of the AI bros. 404’s Emanuel Maiberg reports the mods of r/accelerate posted that “LLMs [Large language models] today are ego-reinforcing glazing-machines that reinforce unstable and narcissistic personalities.” If LLMs really were omniscient and divine, I would have thought they could run a snack vending business without inventing a “UNIVERSAL CONSTANTS NOTIFICATION” from the “FUNDAMENTAL LAWS OF REALITY” but maybe that’s just the God machine getting ineffable.

Personally I think AI can get effed, and I’m currently drifting somewhere on the resignation to despair spectrum about it. Sure, Neal “dot fun” Agarwal can use it to make games that are actually good, and this Thomas Ptacek post about how software developers are really using AI right now is accurate, according to my friends who are closer to that industry than I am these days. Beyond their widespread ”glazing the mentally ill” use case, LLMs and AI agents have some valid applications and probably aren’t going away, regrettably. But they are also “profoundly — and probably unfairly — threatening to visual artists in ways that might be hard to appreciate if you don’t work in the arts,” as even Ptacek admits. After all:

This isn’t wrong, and already we can look back twenty years into the past and assess the truth of Joshua Ellis’s prediction that:

The Jackpot is already here, and it’s getting more equally distributed every day. But hey, maybe twenty years of the Grim Meathook will become “the Great Listening” in another sixty. “[M]essy. Unprofitable. And unbearably slow…”? Sounds like a winner.

On display: 200 year old condom. Never used. I wish I loved anything as much as AI loves making up nonexistent books. Maybe AI is just 700 Indian engineers in a trenchcoat, anyway. Airport security forced John Paul Brammer to confront the fascist inside him. The enduring popularity of Seeking the Name disproves the entire premise of the Singularitarian utopia, imo. Will Lockett says SpaceX’s Starship will never work. For the Dads and the Dads at heart: Weatherstar. At least Florida Man never changes. Bless you, Florida Man, and RIP.

And Finally: “Pirates of the Ayahuasca” by Sarah Miller in N+1 is the new season of White Lotus that we deserved.

Today’s Song: Jacklen Ro, “Time Bomb”

Well I’m back from the Appalachian Trail, and I regret to inform you that I didn’t write anything about it this time.¹ I think I needed some time alone in my head. Contrary to my extremely confident predictions I did not finish the trail this time either. I got from Waynesboro, VA to Hot Springs, NC, adding about 600 more miles to put me at 1,922 miles hiked. The current plan is that whenever Mica gets himself to Hot Springs, we’ll find a good time to do the last 275 miles and finish the trail together, the way we started it. I bailed early this time because my family needed me, and the trail will always be there when I’m ready to finish it. Thank you all for your patience while I pursued this wild goose chase.

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