leftzero

486, SVGA CRT, Sound Blaster. Twelve years old, on vacation, playing Wing Commander.

Yeah, exactly, like the rebels!

I did it Kim! I teleported!

While the characters are based on Charlton Comics characters DC had recently acquired (Dr. Manhattan ≈ Captain Atom, Rorschach ≈ The Question, Nite Owl ≈ Blue Beetle, Silk Spectre ≈ Nightshade, and possibly also Quality Comics' Phantom Lady and DC's own Black Canary, Ozymandias ≈ Thunderbolt, The Comedian ≈ Peacemaker), Moore's story is mostly original, inasmuch as stories can be.

No, you're just overestimating where the average is.

People are vastly stupider and more useless than you give them credit for, and in a slop saturated world we'll all get even more stupid and useless due to rampant brain rot.

We'll reach human level artificial intelligence not by making LLMs intelligent (that's fundamentally impossible with their design), but by lowering humanity's average intelligence until it's below that of a slime mold.

And a significant percentage of humanity is already there.

We're using the word the cartels pushing LLMs are using for their trash.

Don't blame us for turning “AI” into a swearword, blame those bastards.

Once the bubble pops anyone working on any kind of AI will be seen as a liability and shunned by investors, setting research back for decades (not that any form of research would've been possible for long in the slop saturated world they'll leave behind), all because those scammers thought selling their malware as “AI” would cause more marks to fall for it.

Two by two, hands of blue...

Where it's always been, sitting on the Foundation trilogy's shoulders, while in turn supporting the rest of the whole genre on its own shoulders.

My first PC ran at 16MHz on turbo.

PCs today are orders of magnitude faster. Way less fun, but faster.

What's even more orders of magnitude slower and infinitely more bloated is software. Which is the point of the post.

It's almost impossible to find any piece of actually optimised software these days (with some exceptions like sqlite) to the point that 99% percent of the software currently in use can be considered unintentional (or intentional) malware.

Particularly egregious are web browsers, which seem designed to waste the maximum possible amount of resources and run as inefficiently as possible.

And the fact that most supposedly desktop software these days runs on top of one of those pieces ofintentional (it's impossible to achieve such levels of inefficiency and bloat unintentionally, it requires active effort) malware obviously doesn't help.

your friends can paint all your faces the same

No they can't!

That would be plagiarism!

One clown, one egg!

Scam. We're being sold an autocomplete tool as a search engine.

Or fraud, since some of the same companies destroyed the functionality of their search engines in order to make the autocomplete look better in comparison.

Unless it's another cat, or something they're afraid of but can't run away from.

Then it's all spiky hair, and nails, and teeth, and swung back ears, and arched back, and hissing or, even worse, yowling like a banshee.