Notices by Ben Zanin (gnomon@mastodon.social), page 4

@andros psst, hey catboss @cwebber 👀↑↑ (😻)

If you thought that hiring managers were hostile to having cryptocurrency or NFTs on a resume now, that will be as nothing compared to the hostility towards mentions of LLMs or chatbots once a profound market contraction causes unrelated businesses and likely entire small industries to wither.

Annoying users with shitty slop and annoying admins with scrapers will fade as a match to the sun compared with destroying people's hard-built livelihoods.

It is some kind of poetic tragedy that an industry based around hoovering up any web accessible information with extreme aggression is failing to learn the core lessons of the prior two major AI winters¹ while galloping full tilt towards the third.

Namely, that massively overselling and under-delivering will cause the actual benefits and advances of the tech to be irrelevant. Public sentiment will curdle to angry incredulity at best, blind hatred at worst.

¹: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter

@Gargron alas, you've hit on an awfully likely hypothesis there.

Didn't denim jeans last more than two years, once upon a time? I feel like they did, and that I used them harder when I was younger too.

(I strongly dislike clothes shopping. I suppose I could generalize that to "I strongly dislike clothes".)

@Gargron thank you! I'll check em out!

@Gargron hey, what new music has been on your radar recently? Not necessarily what's good, just what's interesting.

@Gargron no no, don't apologize, it's all good! I understand. Thanks for the info.

@Gargron I want to frame this only as a question and not a request, because I understand that managing sales and logistics in foreign countries across multiple currencies can be a nightmare, but: do you happen to know if shipping to Canada might become an option in the future?

The greasy, thoughtless mediocrity of slop billboard images is offensively bland, to pick an overused phrase. It's like whipped saltless vegetable oil smeared across a stale slice of wonderbread with a dollar store garden trowel, tossed half off a dinner plate by a server allergic to eye contact holding a leaking trash bag in their other hand.

That is, the offense comes not just from the garbage immediately in front of me, but rather every aspect of the entire experience.

Distilled contempt.

@phire it was never that annoying. I read my feed in batches, querying my local feed reader database for specific groups of topics. It's really quite delightfully asynchronous, so temporal bunching of posts never caused issues.

Sample size of one, of course, and I'm sure this definitely is an improvement for a much larger swath of your readership.

@phire eep, good point, that's not something I'd considered!!

(For unrelated reasons I was reading about the RFCs for RSS pagination and for HTTP dictionary compression the other week, and that's when I learned that (1) paginating back into RSS history has only been technically been solved relatively recently and (2) support on the server side and in reader clients is awfully thin on the ground in 2025.)

@Gargron excellent gourd! Excellent gourd inspectors!!

@Gargron @ConnyDuck aka one milli-Odin

@Gargron yaaaaaay excellent catting (except for the food stealing, even though it is very much on brand for cat)

@Gargron hey, how are Jiji and Peaches doing these days? Do they still reflect light in the visible spectrum?

@whitequark errata catta

@samhenrigold cc: @mhoye 👀↑↓

@dalias you're describing freedoms that are very nice to have but which in my lifetime I have never enjoyed. The housing crisis has forced me to rent: I have never had a door which someone else's key could not open, for example.

I'm not saying these freedoms are bad, or undesirable, or frivolous, or are ones that people pushing to diminish cultural reliance on cars shouldn't consider, only pointing out that they are not universals that everyone is being asked to give up.

@evan not primarily, but definitely tangentially.