Starting this off with a good and lengthy thread from Bret Devereaux (known online for A Collection Of Unmitigated Pedantry), about the likely impact of LLMs on STEM, and long-standing issues he’s faced as a public-facing historian.

fuck me why did i go into computer science

That’s a question I ask myself sometimes. It usually ends with “I focused too much on trying to make easy cash”. Fuck it, I’m going to write out a sidenote:

On a wider front, part of me expects the AI bubble will inflict a serious blow to computer science/programming’s public image after it bursts.

On one front, there’s the heavy number of promptfondlers in computer science and other related fields. which will likely give birth to a stereotype of prorammers/software engineers being all promptfondlers who need a computer to think for them.

On a related front, the heavy damage this bubble’s dealt to artists, and AI’s continued and uniquely severe failures in creative fields (plus promptfondlers’ failures to recognise said failures), has all combined to produce the public perception that promptfondlers are artless at best and hostile to art/artists at worst - a perception I expect will colour public perception of programmers/software engineers as a consequence of the previous stereotype I mentioned above.

Picked up a sneer in the wild (through trawling David Gerard’s Bluesky):

You want my take, Kathryn’s on the money - future expectations on how people speak will actively shift away from anything that could be mistaken for sounding like an LLM, whether because you want to avoid being falsely accused of posting slop, or because the slop-nami has pushed your writing habits away from slop-like traits.

Forgot to save who said it, but on bsky somebody said they or their friends had come up with a slur for people who use genAI for everything: sloppers.

Finally, a slur my British ass can sling at people guilt-free

This is literally just a Tamagotchi but worse

EDIT: This was supposed to be an offhanded comment, but reading further makes me think Mustafa Suleyman has literally never heard of a Tamagotchi

I’ve already predicted that scraper activity would crash due to AI in my most recent MoreWrite essay, and seeing this only makes me confident in that assessment.

On a wider front, I suspect that web search in general’s gonna dive in popularity - even if scraper activity remains the same during the AI winter, the bubble (with plenty of help from Google) has completely broken the web ecosystem which allowed search engines (near-exclusively Google) to thrive, through triggering a slop-nami that drowned human-made art, supercharging SEO’s ability to bury quality output, and enabling AI Summary™ services which steal traffic through stealing work.

Basically. Its to explicitly prevent Xe from becoming the load-bearing peg for a massive portion of the Internet, thus ensuring this project doesn’t send her health down the shitter.

You want my prediction, I suspect future FOSS projects may decide to adopt mascots of their own, to avoid the “load-bearing maintainer” issue in a similar manner.

Xe has talked a bit about the mascot in question before - by her own testimony, its there to act as a shopping cart test to see who’s willing to support the project. Reportedly, she’s planning to exploit it to make some more elaborate checks as well.

New piece from Brian Merchant, and a new edition of AI Killed My Job just dropped

Someone I know called AI “a non-invasive procedure to lobotomise people” after I mentioned this Pivot to AI, and its stuck with me ever since

New (paywalled) 404 Media: Google’s AI Is Destroying Search, the Internet, and Your Brain

Not a sneer, but still inexplicably funny: You Can Now Venmo the Government to Help Pay Off National Debt

Long-term, I’m expecting itch to dive in popularity from this - they’ve nuked much of the trust they’ve built up over the years with this.

Found a neat mini-sneer in the wild: It’s rude to show AI output to people

Caught a particularly spectacular AI fuckup in the wild:

(Sidenote: Rest in peace Ozzy - after the long and wild life you had, you’ve earned it)

Found a banger in the comments:

Hey, remember the thing that you said would happen?

The part about condemnation and mockery? Yeah, I already thought that was guaranteed, but I didn’t expect to be vindicated so soon afterwards.

EDIT: One of the replies gives an example for my “death of value-neutral AI” prediction too, openly calling AI “a weapon of mass destruction” and calling for its abolition.

Managed to stumble across two separate attempts to protect promptfondlers’ feelings from getting hurt like they deserve, titled “Shame in the machine: affective accountability and the ethics of AI” and “AI Could Have Written This: Birth of a Classist Slur in Knowledge Work”.

I found both of them whilst trawling Bluesky, and they’re being universally mocked like they deserve on there.

I don’t keep track, I just put these together when I’ve got an interesting tangent to go on.