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Boosted by baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason"):
tante@tldr.nettime.org wrote:

A few quick thoughts on why "AI Labs" love having their LLMs do math https://tante.cc/2026/09/07/the-function-of-llm-based-math-proofs/

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“Handwritten code | Katherine Yang”

https://kayserifserif.place/posts/2026/handwritten-code/

> Turn off version history annotations and I could still tell you from the shape of it who might have originated that line.

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

I'm not sure which is worse, phone trees that take 5 minutes to get to the point (by which I've inevitably zoned out) or those "AI" systems that try to guess what you're saying and inevitably guess wrong

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

“Heat kills 5 times more people than official stats show : NPR”

https://www.npr.org/2026/08/31/nx-s1-5724225/heat-wave-death-toll-tracker

> Thousands of Americans die every year from a chronically underreported cause: heat.

baldur@toot.cafe ("Baldur Bjarnason") wrote:

Anybody else seeing more online chatter hinting at a schism between software devs and UX designers? Been seeing an uptick of articles in my UX feeds arguing that devs were unfairly gate-keeping code and general talk of UX designers bypassing engineering completely to ship generated code themselves

(Not judging anybody involved. Just curious whether this is accurate and might end up being the likeliest path towards deskilling and commodifying the dev industry)

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

i suppose i should post about the set of games i have played that i saw while watching r/vibecoding because this might not be an obvious pattern if you have not played a lot of "games generated by an LLM with a playerbase of 0"

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

I guess what i'm saying is that people are too focused on whether or not chatgpt can create a spreadsheet. the fact that it can't make a fun game is a better tell that there is nothing that you would call intelligence involved here.

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

whatever in the fuck an "artificial general intelligence" is, it would have looked at the thing it just made and been like "this does not engage with the embodied experience of enjoyment" or maybe just like "damn that shit sucks"

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

for posterity, here is what a scam game that is neither a game nor a scam, i mean AGI, looks like. (3x speed)

nobody, not even openai, looks at the fucking model output, not even when it is their fucking "we did AGI" press release.

thanks a lot, wittgenstein, there is no way to define a game so there's no way to benchmark for being a game.

Attachments:

• video: ["tidal rush", a knockoff mariokart game. all the buttons and labels overlap each other badly. random text and numbers. press "start your engines." countdown. then you are a cartoon fox or cat or whatever driving a go-kart. the touch input is overlaid on the video - the "go" button is held down the entire time, the thumb only moving once to show it's still there. the kart bumps off other computer racers, gets penalties, speed ups, items. none of it matters. the kart just drifts along the left edge of the racetrack. eventually we are just so far ahead of all the other racers it doesnt matter, and keeps growing.]

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

I met a bunch of cool people at DEFCON and Megaplex last month.

Unfortunately, I've been too exhausted from travel and work and nothing else at all...

looks at clock

...okay fine maybe a lil insomnia...

...to really keep up with most folks.

soatok@furry.engineer ("Soatok Dreamseeker") wrote:

I haven't had the energy to write anything long and permanent in a couple of months.

I also haven't really been doing much maintenance for my open source projects. Fortunately, nobody has reported bugs that I'm aware of.

jscalzi@threads.net ("John Scalzi") wrote:

I have an answer to this but it involves learning more about me than most folks care to know

brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:") wrote:

Dressed, medicated, breakfasted, all before 9am and the only reason why I haven't brushed my teeth yet is because the bathroom's occupied... I am on a roll this morning

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

Most scam games are scams but not games. There are some scam games that are both scams and games. There are no scam games that are games but not scams, because then they are just games. LLM games are the otherwise unoccupied member of the quartet: scam games that are neither games nor scams.

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

It appears like a game because the game is actually a scam, and the scam is the driver of play.

I don't have as clear of a scam test, but its something like:

• is limiting the amount of play the primary challenge of the game?
• are there geometrically scaling quantities, like a crafting or item ranking mechanism, that produces a Shepard's tone treadmill: a feeling of constantly accelerating progression
• are there multiple counters that function like currencies, and can they be exchanged for one another?
• if multiple, there is at least one currency whose means of gaining it is regulated by a) real world time, and b) play time
• are any of the above remedied by paying real money?
• is there a leaderboard/social element? If so, is the multiplayer gameplay implausible? Are the social mechanisms indistinguishable from if all the other players were fictional and there was simply no means of connecting multiple players ?

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

A whole cateory of mobile games actually don't condition the win on player input at all. Like most of the gate-based games like "advancing army approaching, move side to side to shoot different guys" don't require you to do anything except hold down your thumb to win more often than you lose. If it does matter, the cap on how much improved player input improves the outcome is remarkably shallow - if you are attempting the game, you have reached the skill cap.

Boosted by brib@bribstodon.xyz ("brib :neofox_floof:​ :Nonbinary:"):
ergative@wandering.shop ("Ergative Absolutive") wrote:

Behold, she is done! This is, without a doubt, the most complex project I've ever undertaken, and I'm very proud of myself for seeing it through to the end.

#humanArt #noAI #artistsofMastodon #IslamicGeometricart

jonny@neuromatch.social ("jonny (nonvenomous)") wrote:

RE: https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/117219507611629659

while surveying scam mobile games I arrived at a two step test for whether something qualified as a game:

• does player input meaningfully affect the outcome of the game
• if yes, does improved player input result in improved game outcomes

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

in hindsight buying a Synology NAS was a mistake, it's on its last legs and there is no escape 😓

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

@jwz I have somehow turned myself from a programmer into a full time AI poster. the economic theory of revealed preference indicates that I actively value making my life materially worse

Boosted by jwz:
medieval_illuminations ("Medieval Illumination") wrote:

Hot bath. Cité de Dieu (French translation of St Augustine’s De Civitate Dei), Paris ca. 1475. Paris, Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève, ms. 246, fol. 389r.
#medieval #MedievalArt

jwz wrote:

@glyph I assure you that your online life will be materially worse once you make it to 10k

slightlyoff@toot.cafe ("Alex Russell") wrote:

Very glad @pluralistic covers this sort of research; important work:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/06/hotels-california/#the-eagles-were-optimists

db@social.lol ("David Bushell 🪿") wrote:

GOOD MORNING

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

But as a certified hater there is basically _nothing_ new I have seen where I thought, oh no, I like this, and it seems good, but I don't want to use it because it's AI. The way I find out things are AI is that they suck shit and I think "wait does this suck shit because it's AI?" and yes it does every single time

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

There are lots of apps and libraries and tools that I already liked, that are getting infested with AI and either staying the same or getting worse. I would be lying if I said that everything was decaying into obvious slop, some quite high-quality projects are staying high-quality as far as I can tell. But there's no big leaps in functionality, no cool new features or better docs. Best case scenario is things kinda keep bumping along, with the maintainers *claiming* some efficiency I can't see.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

If the technology is, in fact, so self-evidently great, then you could go off and build cool shit with it, prove us all wrong, and demonstrate the net utility argument you're trying to make all in one. Log the fuck off! Stop diddling with your giant pile of markdown files that beg the robot to please stop making mistakes and BUILD SOMETHING GOOD!

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

I am arguing against AI because I think it's actively bad if you use it. It's making my life worse. It's probably making _your_ life worse. I have specific, concrete, enumerated harms which I which to reduce in the world. But I cannot understand the desire to argue _back_ against this so forcefully and so sneeringly.

glyph ("Glyph") wrote:

okay I have successfully avoided responding to any of these directly but after having seen like the TENTH post today saying something like "we don't need to convince you to like AI, the revolution is coming whether you like it or not" I just have to reply, generally, to this whole sentiment: OKAY THEN. IF WE ARE GETTING LEFT BEHIND THEN LEAVE US BEHIND, ALREADY

Boosted by glyph ("Glyph"):
glyf.bsky.social@bsky.brid.gy ("Glyph") wrote:

truly, spoken like a man who doesn't know what trains or bicycles are

RE: https://bsky.app/profile/did:plc:ragtjsm2j2vknwkz3zp4oxrd/post/3muu7gtsryc2a