Valiant, but I would have said more like "Richard Kind" or (god help us) "Kevin Spacey." 🤔

Huh. Now I wanna attempt an Esteemed Character Actress Margo Martindale mii...

I should share some of the early NPOL worldbuilding notes with you-- like, 2007 early. It's hilarious how many dead tropes I had to scrape off the poor thing in order to make it work in 2026... (Funny, for some odd reason X-Files style paranoid conspiracy thrillers don't hit the same anymore... 🤔)

1977 Steve Martin - Grandmother’s Song YouTube video by The45Prof

Did you get the ref? 😈 Not really necessary to the joke, but it makes ME happy to know it's there.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MG8o...

I dunno if you've gotten to sit and read any of No Pizza On Luna, but the way Zaffo silences Jobclown by telling it to be "obsequious, purple, and clairvoyant" is a total wish-fulfillment fantasy for me. I *crave* the dark knowledge of prompt injections. Better a necromancer than a scared peasant.

Same, except for me it's the lack of technical skills in the way. Presented with the choice of "fear and shun it like it's a demon" and "study eldritch runes, even at risk of my own soul, so I can bind it and send it packing to its homeworld-- LIKE IT'S A DEMON" the second approach is far more *me*.

Also, huh, I might hit you up for some advice on how I could get a setup like that going. It would address a number of This Morning's Fiery Critic's complaints, some of were actually pretty valid. The one thing I really do feel icky about is participating in their energy/money structure...

Heh, it also misgendered the fuck out of MULTIPLE pop culture characters I've searched for. (Most of my AI "experiments" have really just been "I'm too lazy to keep re-exterminating Gemini result options every time they revert, plus I like watching it fuck up." 😼)

It was actually quite enlightening, Gemini was not only totally unaware it's believed to have been an urban legend, it cited A FICTIONAL WORK as its source-- one whose own introduction said it was probably an urban legend, a fact which was mentioned in unpaywalled reviews of the book.

Wait, were you the friend who told me about the "sawing Manhattan in half" urban legend? Did you ever see my AI Fail post on that one?

The one thing it ever did for me that was of any value was suggest a bunch of music-- in a test I was rather HOPING would fail and give me some Songclown grist. And even that one had some really puzzling decisions about music genres. All its research attempts have been laughable as expected & hoped.

Greatest M60 Bus Stop Debate Of All Time YouTube video by MoonToon

CONFIDENTIAL TO THIS MORNING'S DEBATE PARTNERS:

Don't be Koey. Koey sucks.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9vL...

I just... I dunno, I almost sympathize with the couple of people who flamed out over it, our community got ASSAULTED in a very real way by the techbros using these as plagarism harvesters, but the more I see of LLMs, the harder it is to fear instead of pity them and their boosters. Unsustainable.

(And there's also a certain element of "okay, even if you're not sapient... by a long fucking shot... if I'm going to mock you for 500 straight comic pages, you should at least have the opportunity to fail on your own merits and comment on what I'm doing to you, as I'm doing it.")

There's something about HOW it botches simple requests-- god, did I show you its foggy pseudo-philosophical nonsense about where the akadora tiles in mahjong come from-- that I can't pretend isn't intriguing. I can't imagine how there's NOT value in learning to spot those flaws and show others...

And yet the WAYS it fucks up are interesting enough that I feel like I'll learn something useful from gazing at it, *a little*, now and then. The only thing I'm really interested in doing with that knowledge is mocking it, perhaps only a bit more factually than the kneejerk technoparanoids, but...

Exactly. And I can't help just starting dumbfounded at the gap between what it actually does-- which, you know me, of fucking COURSE I had to see for myself-- and what it's hyped for.

I didn't have to ask it for writing advice more than once. I knew at first glance: worthless. Conceptless.

I can absolutely guarantee that if a single line of output from an LLM ever makes it into NPOL, it will be as an epigraph, to prove just how fucking stupid it is, even when asked pointed questions about itself. It's not like it took hours & hours of quizzing to get it to say something inane. 😼

As noted, so many of these same people were lining up in the exact same way to pillory either NFT dorks or their critics, and it all came to jack shit, because the boring plain unromantic fact about NFTs is they didn't really *do* much. I don't want to make Amazon money. I want to write fiction!

Why the fuck would anybody BOTHER?!?

That's the thing! They're TERRIBLE! They're a godawful way to make art, fiction, and academic research! I honestly believe they will limit their damn selves, if we're just honest with ourselves and trust the public to recognize slop, which they largely are...

And if you're taking that as some kind of defense or endorsement of LLMs, I hate you more, because you're eliminating the nuance and real-world effects from the debate. AND THAT'S WHERE THE STUFF IS THAT I WANT TO CRITIQUE ABOUT THEM. I NEEDED TO TALK TO ONE AT LEAST ONCE.

Shut up and let me cook.

(And I've seen what sort of shit passes for LLM cooking advice, so no sell there, either...)

There has been an ecological and corporate-support cost comparable to, say, those Nikes or that cheeseburger. Any costs beyond that, I believe to be symbolic, and unless you show me otherwise, I don't care.

There is no magic involved. There are no mana costs, only the electrical and ecological costs, and mine (as noted) have been deliberately tracked and kept negligible. There is no stain on my soul; tigers don't have those. It can not cast Charm Person on me; tigers can not be charmed except by steak.

Yeah, I think this is the most important thing from today, and I'm doubling down on it before I wind this down:

I want to attack LLMs, but I want to do it like a data scientist or a literary critic.

Some of y'all are making me feel you'd rather approach it like a D&D cleric or a Puriteen. Srsly.

Current mood:

I'm letting the monkeys loose.

See you in a week or two.

The funny thing is these very same people filed up into the same two crowds regarding NFTs, and how they were either going to destroy all art forever or save the world and make everybody rich.

Both sides, of course, for all their fire and fury, were running on their own sheer theatrical bullshit.

The only other thing I know to tell the couple of people who absolutely flamed out about this is that they should pick up a copy of Ray Mungo's book Famous Long Ago and read until you get to the point about letting The Hero of the People have a fuckin' cheeseburger. It'll be great. You'll HATE Ray.

Like, how fucking DARE you insinuate that I'm doing this out of self-indulgence, how DARE you not let me attend its funeral, how DARE you put a restraining order on me when I haven't even had one decent chance to stab it.

I don't like being told to leave things alone. It does not work on cats. Sry.

I WANT TO LOOK AT THAT TOPIC MY OWN FUCKING SELF.

Even if it's disgusting. Even if it's forbidden. Even if I despise it. The only thing truly making me angry about the pushback is the failure to recognize just how deeply I fucking despise LLMs for their plagiarism and utter aesthetic failures.

Still ranty, but more important, still getting that esprit d'escalier real bad. I've mostly outgrown the urge to argue for hours, but I still haven't lost that urge to overexplain. :)

I just don't trust outrage as a moral compass. And when I'm getting more outrage than detail about a topic...

(close to caving, that is, and if you'll look at my most recent rant, I AM suspending the research until i talk to some folks i trust about it-- which is a v v small group rt now)