Was a surprisingly fun way to tank my productivity on Monday.

Honestly, the fact that you mentioned it having a definite end was a huge factor in making me click on that link.

They have deployed an AI reply system into the comments, probably to make up for the decrease in traffic that could hurt their IPO.

I don’t think it even needs to be them for it to be a huge problem. People have been automating the process of gaining karma to sell accounts for years and years, I would imagine this process is accelerating with the rise of LLMs and the bottom falling out from under all the mod tools.

Lord forgive me for what I’m about to do

The weird part for me isn’t that the corrections are online. It’s that the whole book isn’t a searchable help page with all the errata patched away.

I actually found this because I was following a guide that needed Process Explorer to find out which damn program was catching my controller before DS4Windows was.

It was Firefox, specifically the Stable Diffusion WebUI for some reason.

Might be a bit on the Zoomery side of cultural conversation compared to the rest of this thread, but the duo Her’s were tragically killed in a road accident while on tour in the US. They made songs that were cheesy but still emotionally resonant, which is a hard balance to hit.

Their music would blow up even more online in the years following their death, I know there was a lot of of TikTok buzz around them during the pandemic, when a bunch of bedroom pop artists were gaining a ton of traction. While I hate that platform, it can be pretty good for promoting music naturally when people aren’t gaming the system (which they’re doing all the time - fuck TikTok). I think some of their famous songs are still considered TikTok clichés, but I wouldn’t really know.

I didn’t even know they were dead until this year.

There’s always this conspiracy of labels preferring to promote artists who are dead because they can pocket more money from dead artists, and I think about that when one of their songs pop up.

I just hate how “toxic cesspool” is the default. I was just watching a short video on YouTube about the US city of Baltimore, a place I heard about from an old family friend who studied at Hopkins many years ago.

The video was about the city’s decline, with the primary cause (according to the video) being the hollowing out of the manufacturing and logistics industries. The channel, Forgotten Places, doesn’t strike me as one that toxic people would be flooding to (those channels exist).

Can you guess what every other comment is about? Hint: it’s not the abandonment of productive industry. A small number of comments name more historical industrial employers that have left the city, but by far the comments with the most upvotes are “we all know we can’t discuss what happened to Baltimore 😉😉😉😉😉”

The only gesture it still needs is swiping a comment right to left to collapse the entire comment thread