I mean… I think it’s worrying that the norm is “who cares if it’s AI? It’ll fool plenty of people, spread it!” If that’s what you mean.

Social media is going to kill us all well before AI does.

It’s not so much about English as it is about writing patterns. Like others said, it has a “stilted college essay prompt” feel because that’s what instruct-finetuned LLMs are trained to do.

Another quirk of LLMs is that they overuse specific phrases, which stems from technical issues (training on their output, training on other LLM’s output, training on human SEO junk, artifacts of whole-word tokenization, inheriting style from its own previous output as it writes the prompt, just to start).

“Slop” is an overused term, but this is precisely what people in the LLM tinkerer/self hosting community mean by it. It’s also what the “temperature” setting you may see in some UIs is supposed to combat, though that crude an ineffective if you ask me.

Anyway, if you stare at these LLMs long enough, you learn to see a lot of individual model’s signatures. Some of it is… hard to convey in words. But “Embodies” “landmark achievement” and such just set off alarm bells in my head, specifically for ChatGPT/Claude. If you ask an LLM to write a story, “shivers down the spine” is another phrase so common its a meme, as are specific names they tend to choose for characters.

If you ask an LLM to write in your native language, you’d run into similar issues, though the translation should soften them some. Hence when I use Chinese open weights models, I get them to “think” in Chinese and answer in English, and get a MUCH better result.

All this is quantifiable, by the way. Check out EQBench’s slop profiles for individual models:

https://eqbench.com/creative_writing_longform.html

https://eqbench.com/creative_writing.html

And it’s best guess at inbreeding “family trees” for models:

Did y’all read the email?

embodies the elegance of simplicity - proving that

another landmark achievement

showcase your philosophy of powerful, minimal design

That is one sloppy email. Man, Claude has gotten worse at writing.

I’m not sure Rob even realizes this, but the email is from some kind of automated agent: https://agentvillage.org/

So it’s not even an actual thank you from a human, I think. It’s random spam.

To be fair, relying on OneDrive was like waiting for a bomb to go off. This was bound to happen once they got everyone stuck using it.

“let’s save today’s photos from my phone onto my machine” bullshit?

Once it’s set up, I don’t see how that’s a hassle? Especially if its just syncing over WiFi.

IDK, lots of the TW3 sidequests seem to be very good… from my time watching them on YouTube, heh.

It might be a “watch the cutscenes and scenery highlights in a YT play though” game.

Come to CachyOS!

It’s like everything I’ve ever wanted from an OS served on a silver platter.

It’s probably less for OEMs, right? Most people don’t install their own OS, much less pay full price for a license.

And yeah, consumer Windows could disappear and MS wouldn’t care, as long as office computers are still stuck with it. Which they are.

Yeah, see, that’s an “old Windows” kind of problem! “Oh, the printer works fine as long as I don’t leave it plugged in too long.” Users learn to deal with that.

Outlook + the start menu changing overnight, and ceasing to work, and the younger tech scratching their head because they haven’t gotten the update? Or a “wait, it’s screenshotting my stuff?” That’s different. It’s completely out of the user’s control.

The difference is more dramatic now. Linux isn’t so finicky, largely thanks to hard work but also to Windows’ feature stagnation, meaning Linux isn’t a “few years behind” like before. Imagine the situation if, say, Microsoft hadn’t completely screwed up UWP.

Meanwhile, users subconsciously ignored a lot of junk with 95, Vista, 8, whatever. But that’s much harder to ignore in 11.

If Windows crosses a the threshold of “major OEMs start shipping Linux,” what happens to windowscentral?

Do they split the staff/site to a linuxcentral? Winecentral?

Several. System76 (the cosmic dev) is a major one, literally making the distro just for their laptops.

They’re mostly white boxes though. I don’t any and manufacture their own hardware (except Framework possibly???)

Is it always a new laptop/computer?

I’d be suspicious of Mint on anything brand new (and hence only recently fixed in a lot of packages).

It’s not just you.

Zooming in, I feel like the “camera jpeg” lost sharpness to recompression.

It’s kind of insane that cameras either dump raw data, or do all this magic only to throw so much away to an ancient image codec that loses even more when recompressed.

Newer ones can save a HEIF or a “lossy RAW” in some circumstances (which is an infinite improvement), but still; I eagerly await the day cameras can save a JPEG-XL all by themself, and that I can post them on the Fediverse.

Modern mirrorless cameras do this too. For example, this is what my Canon kit lens looks like with/without digital barrel distortion correction:

Not my photos. From: https://dustinabbott.net/2024/05/canon-rf-s-18-45mm-f4-5-6-3-is-stm-review/

And https://dustinabbott.net/2024/04/canon-rf-24-50mm-f4-5-6-3-is-stm-review/

My own unprocessed RAWs are pretty wild. But (IMO) it’s a reasonable compromise to make lenses cheaper and better, outside of some ridiculous examples like the 24-50.

It’s not a joke, heh. After some update in the last month or two, my monitor won’t wake up unless I power cycle the monitor.

I mean. I love Linux. But low maintenance it is not.

See: https://openmodeldb.info/docs/faq

The GUIs are basically just as plug-and-play as Topaz.

deleted by creator

For upscaling, check out chaiNNer: https://github.com/chaiNNer-org/chaiNNer

And openmodeldb: https://openmodeldb.info/

It’s quite possible your PC can do it with Vulkan just fine, and if not, you can rent something online pretty cheap.

Also, for video processing, if you know any Python check out vapoursynth.

This highlights the problem: the primary obstacle to a lot of software enshittification is accessibility, and discoverability.

Once something like Topaz or Premiere gets SEO, it starves all the other cool efforts out there as they get buried under spam.

What people want often exists. They just don’t know it, or it’s too technically demanding to set up and no one is “in the middle” packaging enthusiast experiments to be accessible.

I don’t know how to solve this either. The open internet is getting worse, niches are moving to Discord, and it feels like people are losing patience to really dig for cool stuff. Heck, I see some open source efforts spin up, with thousands of man hours dumped in, without even a cursory check to see what they want already exists and is looking for contributors.

I like this take.

It seems like there are ‘victims’ caught up in the hype and sinking way too much money into SC. But if the gameplay is enjoyable, and fits your budget? Enjoy it. Hell yes.