#oneaday Day 875: Fuck you, Sam Altman

Speaking with YouTuber Cheeky Pint, OpenAI's CEO Sam Altman said that "from a global allocation perspective, actually, it's quite terrible to have everybody have a bunch of the world's limited supply of DRAM sitting in their own computer, and being used maybe 5% of the time. Like, you want maximum utilisation in the cloud if you're trying to deal with this very supply constrained environment. And somehow many people's intuition is the opposite of that."

In response — and I appreciate I am a nobody, and that Clammy Sammy will never see this — I say the following.

Fuck you, Sam Altman. Fuck you five ways to Sunday. Fuck you for ruining the exciting world of tech with your garbage hallucinating "AI can make mistakes" chatbots, which is all that fucking tech seems to be now. Fuck you for ruining the world of creativity with your slop-peddling six-fingered piss-filter image models. Fuck you for ruining the world of music by stealing the world's compositions and allowing people with no taste to churn out song-shaped objects and claim they are being creative. Fuck you for ruining the world of writing with your cliché-spouting text generation models. Fuck you for taking the em-dash, the rule of threes and rhetorical questions from writers, who now cannot use any of those things without being accused of "being AI".

Fuck you for making my day job harder with your cuntish technology driving up not just RAM prices, but all tech prices. Yes, that's right, fuck you for being the one who fucking created this "supply constrained environment" that no-one asked for, and which didn't need to happen. Fuck you for your greed and avarice making it a thousand times harder for us to bring simple joy to people through the things we make. Fuck you for making it so there is so much distrust in the space we work in. Fuck you for the times we have had to fend off harassment and threats because some cunt we worked with used your garbage tech without telling us.

Fuck you for ruining my hobbies. Fuck you for even suggesting that people should not own and enjoy their own computer. Fuck you for corrupting a space that was once devoted to the joy of celebrating the past and learning from it with slopped-up, barely functional projects that no-one in their right mind will ever want to maintain. Fuck you for discouraging the people who still want to do things using their brain. Fuck you for the million and one arguments that have erupted in social media replies, comments sections, Discord servers, WhatsApp groups and forums over this useless garbage, thanks to the army of sycophants queueing up to fellate your robo-cock in exchange for seemingly no discernible benefit whatsoever. Fuck you for making it so I can't be excited about a new announcement of anything any more without checking to see whether or not it's been churned out by the slop machine.

Fuck you for what you've done to the world. Fuck you for the cognitive surrender you have triggered, the AI psychosis you've nurtured and the people you've killed with your irresponsible garbage technology. Fuck you for the mistrust you've sown, the ticking time bomb you have made the economy, the wedges you've driven between groups of friends, families and those with common interests. Fuck you for making everything more expensive. Fuck you for depriving people of joy. Fuck you for your self-important arrogance in thinking you — you! a massive cunt! — are the one to lead humanity to a better tomorrow.

Fuck you, Sam Altman. I hope an entire data centre falls on your stupid face, and that everyone who has been saving old RAM sticks "just in case" takes a moment to jam them right up your fucking arse if you're so desperate for them.

Also, Wario Amodei, Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, Sundar Pichai and everyone else who has made 2020-2026 what it has been so far? Fuck you for all the above, too. History will hold you accountable for the damage you have done to our world, and to humanity as a whole.

Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.

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#oneaday Day 867: A bit of tech that actually still works

The most interesting thing that happened to me today is that I lost my phone… for about twenty minutes, then I found it again. There is a little more to it than that.

Andie and I went out to Ikea earlier, because she had a £20 voucher that is expiring on Saturday, and we're away at the weekend, so we thought we might as well go and spend it. I wanted an additional storage box for Bits And Pieces, and we figured we'd almost certainly be able to make it up to the minimum required to use the voucher. We also took the opportunity to go and have a plate of meatballs and a cake, as is tradition when one goes to Ikea.

Anyway, on the way back we stopped at the petrol station to fill up the car ahead of our trip away at the weekend, and I realised that my phone wasn't in my pocket. Moreover, my watch wasn't connected to it via Bluetooth, so I couldn't hit the handy "Find My Phone" button to make it make a noise. Mild panic set in, but given that I was using the phone on the trip to Ikea and immediately after dinner, we figured there was only a finite number of places it could be. We went home to use the Web-based Find My Phone feature from Google to confirm it was where we thought it was — after a couple of failed attempts to connect, it did indeed appear where we thought it would be — and, from there, I was able to lock it and leave a message on its lock screen asking anyone who found it to call Andie's mobile.

Then, we got back in the car and drove back to Ikea. On the way, we got a phone call from my phone from a chap called "Logan" who had found my phone and was handing it in to the customer services desk. It had, as I suspected, fallen out of my pocket without me noticing when I got out of the car to pay for the parking ticket. After a quick bit of convincing a near-indecipherable woman on Ikea's customer service desk that I was, in fact, the owner of this phone, I was able to retrieve it and we were home again by 9pm. Hurrah.

Not exactly the way I wanted to spend my evening, no, but it does go to show that some things in tech do, in fact, still work the way they are supposed to in this desperately stupid age we live in. I was able to confirm my phone's location, lock it to prevent unauthorised access (including remotely signing it out of my Google account and removing my cards from the Wallet app), leave a message for anyone who found it and provide a number for people to call if they found it — and when I did recover it, I was able to quickly and easily sign back in without losing anything.

So much in tech is complete shit these days that I feel like we should celebrate these small little instances of Shit Doing What It's Supposed To Do when they do happen. So consider this my mark of appreciation for those few little bits of tech I had cause to use this evening — and which you hope you do not have cause to use frequently — that have not (yet) been completely enshittified.

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#oneaday Day 863: Where to even begin

One of the things that I've wanted to do for many years is get to grips with really being able to program the Atari 8-bit. This will be a completely useless and unmarketable skill for me to learn, but with the Atari 8-bit in particular having always been so important to me, it feels like a natural step in my enjoyment of the hobby. Only trouble is: I don't really know where to begin!

I still have a vague knowledge of Atari BASIC from my days typing in listings as a kid and inventing my own programs way back when, but I suspect a lot of the intricacies may have fallen out of my head at some point, as I haven't really done anything substantial in Atari BASIC since… well, since it was current and relevant. Beyond that, though, there are a wide variety of things that are a complete mystery to me. And I think the sheer wealth of things it's possible to learn, even on an old computer like an Atari 8-bit, is what makes it so daunting.

Do you get in-depth about how to handle variables and strings? Do you figure out the mathematical functions? Do you learn what all the different default graphics modes do, and what they are best used for? Do you tinker with the sound capabilities of the POKEY sound chip? Do you learn how to display, move and otherwise use player/missile graphics, aka hardware sprites? Do you learn about the display list, and how a display list interrupt is a different thing from manipulating the display list? Do you learn what a vertical blank interrupt is, and how to use it? And at what point in all of this do you "graduate" from BASIC to machine code?

This constant string of questions, which I could have extended to at least five times that length, is probably the big thing that holds me back from actually dipping into "learning how to program the Atari 8-bit" as a serious hobby. I'm sure there isn't really a "bad" place to start — and having an idea of what I would like to be able to program is probably a good way of determining what things I should focus on looking at first — but it's that old Analysis Paralysis thing again; when confronted with seemingly infinite options, you end up choosing none of them.

So I think the answer is probably just to pick a book — of which there are many available on the subject of Atari 8-bit programming, coming at it from myriad angles — and work my way through it. All of it. Then, from there, I can learn where I might want to head next, or figure out where the gaps in my knowledge are. Ultimately, then, I can develop a solid understanding of all the things I might "need" to know in order to be able to program the system effectively.

The reason why this is all on my mind right now is, of course, because of the increasing number of AI slop projects I've been seeing in retro gaming. Over on the website Atarimania today, two out of the four new additions to the database have "developed using AI" disclaimers on them. And one might ask: why don't I just "get the AI to do it for me"? Surely it is easier than ever to shit out a program-shaped object using Claude (they had to pick the cuntiest name possible for it, didn't they?) and then convince everyone that "I made this"?

Well, no. If you've spent any time reading this blog over the last few years, you'll know that this would provide me with absolutely no satisfaction whatsoever. Just because "an easy option" exists now doesn't mean I want or need to take it. In fact, I feel like with how likely it is that the AI bubble is going to burst and all of this crap is just going to go away one day — and God, I long for that day — it is all the more valuable to learn how to do something like this properly.

What I'd love to be able to do is create a game for the Atari 8-bit. That feels like a very far-off goal right now — but one way of looking at it is that back in the '80s, people had a fraction of the reference resources we have today (and no, I don't count AI in that) and were still able to learn how to do these things in their own time relatively quickly. So with a bit of determination, dedication and actually setting a bit of time aside to do this, I feel like I might be able to learn something.

As I say, it'll be something that is mostly useless and not really marketable, but who cares? Remember a time when hobbies were just things you did because they were fun, and you didn't feel the need to monetise them or even share them with others? I'm thinking that's what this has to be. Something that is just for me; something that I want to learn for myself. Not because I want to make and sell a game, but just because it's something I've always wanted to learn, and to be able to make something for my own satisfaction.

So I think maybe for the rest of this evening I might go spend some time tinkering in Atari BASIC on the ol' MiSTer…

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#oneaday Day 838: A shitty new trend

One of the most irritating new developments in the world of generative AI is the use of "agents" to spam you. This can take numerous forms; earlier today, Luke Plunkett of Aftermath shared an AI "pitch" he had received via email, Frank Cifaldi of the Video Game History Foundation shared something similar, and of late I've seen a marked uptick in blog comments that are obviously (but, of course, undisclosed) AI-generated spam.

The reason I can tell they are AI-generated spam is because they don't come from a person. Inevitably, they come from a "company", with the email address and website you can optionally include when leaving a comment linking to some sketchy website or other that wants you to download their new AI-powered tool to, I don't know, delete all the shit on your hard drive or some such shit.

The reason why these are infinitely more frustrating than good old-fashioned spam (and man, at this point I really miss the surreal narrative spam from 2009) is because, using the magic of AI, they might initially appear to be a genuine comment. In other words, the "agent" (spit) has taken a blog post as input, been tasked with composing a comment that might initially appear to be engaging directly with the subject matter, but which is actually just stating what you wrote back to you with slightly different wording, then attached a sketchy link and email address to it. The hope, presumably, is twofold: firstly, that the blog's owner will fall for the spam by clicking on the link or sending a message to the email address; and secondly, that the blog's owner will publish the comment, making the link public and thereby, potentially, tricking others into inadvertently clicking on it.

This is fucking scummy behaviour! Moreover, this is not convincing me that "agents" are in any way a net good for humanity! Not to the absurd degree that I think they're going to "destroy humanity" or any of that utter nonsense, but slowly but surely, generative AI in general is making the Internet harder and harder to use effectively — and, moreover, it's destroying our trust in one another.

Earlier today on Bluesky, I saw someone share a post from an "Atari news" account that looked interesting. Supposedly there's a project out there that is attempting (and starting to succeed) to get Sierra's Adventure Game Interpreter (AGI, but not that one) games working on Atari 8-bit. They've supposedly already got King's Quest up and running, and the parallel C64 project is, it seems, a little further along.

However, I was immediately inclined to distrust everything about this news, firstly because of the amount of vibecoded bullshit that is out there at the moment — and apologies to the creators of the project in question if it has all been done by hand; you might want to put that very fucking prominently on your website — and secondly, because the Atari news Bluesky account that shared it in the first place is absolutely fucking infested with garbage AI-generated artwork, leading me to believe that the account is automated. An automated news-aggregating account isn't necessarily a bad thing in its own right, but when combined with the amount of AI imagery that account shares, every single one of my bullshit sensors starts going off.

Want another example? Time Extension, the retro gaming website, has recently been dealing with AI-powered plagiarism and harassment from an account calling itself "Generation Amiga", ostensibly a news site about… well, the Amiga. And yet if you ever accidentally have the misfortune to end up on Generation Amiga's website, you will discover that not one of the articles there (very few of which are actually Amiga-related) is written by a person. Their "exclusive reviews" consist of LLM-generated slop derived from marketing material. And they even had the gall to accuse Time Extension of being "Big Media" harassing a poor, innocent little independent creator who was just using an ickle-wickle bit of planet-destroying AI to construct a vibecoded website that has a net negative value to humanity — all because Time Extension's editor, Damien McFerran, quite rightly called this absolute bullshit out, for the benefit of anyone in retro gaming who had never had the misfortune of stumbling across these fucknuts.

You know, contrary to how it might appear, I don't like ranting and raving and complaining about this all the time! (All right, maybe a little bit.) I would much rather live in a world where it wasn't happening at all! But when I'm in a situation where I can no longer trust that comments on my fucking personal blog are written by actual people, I think I am more than justified in losing my patience. When I am in a situation where my first response to a potentially cool piece of retro gaming-related news is not "wow, that's cool!" but instead "is this AI bullshit…?" I think I am very fucking justified in losing my patience.

I'm so, so tired of this all. None of this is making the Internet better. None of this is making the world better. All it's doing is, at best, sowing division and mistrust, and at worst, completely obliterating what was once the world's most valuable repository of information, knowledge and human creativity. That's the "AIpocalypse" we should be concerned about.

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#oneaday Day 836: Torrent of slop

It feels like pretty much every day for the last few months we've seen a story that claims some game or other has been translated for the first time ever, or ported to PC for the first time ever… and I feel like a good nine times out of every ten of these projects that show up, the project ends up being vibecoded slop.

I'm afraid I don't give any credence to the theory that AI development tools "democratise" development of stuff like this. The biggest problem — besides the fact that AI models are all built on stolen data, of course… and the environmental impacts — is, without a doubt, the fact that people using them end up shitting out something that they have absolutely no understanding of. Thus, when a problem arises — and you can bet a problem will arise with something shat out by AI — they have no idea how to fix it.

"Well, just hand it over to someone who knows what they're doing!" you might say. And to that I say, any developer worth their salt will not accept such a project. No-one wants to debug the spaghetti code shat out by a plagiarism robot. Not only will that be a lot of work, much of which wouldn't have needed to happen if the project had been done properly in the first place, but the person fixing the job will end up with their reputation tarnished purely by virtue of having worked on an AI project.

Unfair? Perhaps. But at this point, people have to know that using generative AI is going to attract backlash. People fucking hate it! People would rather not have a thing than have a thing that was pumped out using generative AI tools! And any short-lived kudos you might attain for being the "first" person to do something (except you didn't actually do the thing yourself) will, in short order, absolutely torpedo your reputation. At this point, with all the high-profile cases there have been of backlash against projects that involve generative AI, you would have to be either wilfully ignorant or just outright sticking your fingers in your ears to be unaware of the resistance to all this.

And the thing that sucks is that, for me and numerous others like me, the torrent of vibecoded slop projects has completely destroyed any interest or excitement we might have had for things that should be interesting and exciting. The decomp/recomp scene should be fascinating, and the non-vibecoded examples of these games put out amazing results that can potentially breathe new life into all manner of different games. But I've seen so many announcements that conclude with "…and this was made with Claude" that I'm afraid I just don't give a shit any more. I just do not care. I do not have the time, energy or inclination to sort through everything just to find the few things that have been made with genuine human knowledge and craft. And so I just can't be arsed to keep up with any of this sort of project any more, be they fan translations or decomp/recomp efforts. It's enough of a pain having to resist generative AI bullshit in full-price commercial titles already.

I know pushback against generative AI is repetitive and tedious and annoying, but, frankly, the signs are very much apparent that we haven't been pushing back hard enough. We need to get to a point where even thinking about using generative AI for something like this makes these dorks flush their own heads down the toilet. I'm sick of it. And, if you're reading this, you probably are too.

Still, with any luck the bubble will burst soon, and all of this garbage will go the way of NFTs. I cannot wait. Cannot wait.

Advance notice to any AI boosters already composing an indignant comment: I think I have made my stance on this abundantly clear at this point. If you come in here with any of the usual garbage about "just a tool" and "what about the motor car" or "Amazon Web Services" or "Luddites", you will be banished to the pit of I Never Have To Hear From You Ever Again. You have been warned. Go cry to your precious Claude about it. And it will not care, because it can't. You are going to die alone. And you deserve it.

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#oneaday Day 830: Home at last

Well, as predicted that was a massive waste of time. Six hour round trip for a one-hour meeting that was of very little value whatsoever. Never mind, it's done with now, and I can start getting back to normality.

After my mini PC unceremoniously died on me on the first day of our holiday, I was waiting to get home in the hope that hooking it back up to its usual setup would sort things out. It did not, sadly, so I ended up ordering another one. Andie and I suspect that some loose screws inside had just shorted something out — likely on the video circuit — and thus it was just bad luck, really. I had heard something rattling around inside the case for ages and had never gotten around to checking it because it hadn't been a problem; I guess it finally was a problem. Whoops. Oh well.

I was hoping that setting up the new one would be a simple case of whipping out the SSD from the old one and putting it in the new one, but nothing involving computers is ever that simple. Doing this booted to Windows seemingly correctly, but with the computer completely refusing to acknowledge the existence of Wi-Fi and Bluetooth hardware. After several attempts to fix the problem, I just resigned myself to putting the "new" SSD back in and doing a completely fresh start, then transferring my stuff over from the old SSD as required. It's a minor inconvenience, but easy enough to sort out. After the lengthy process that is setting up a fresh install of Windows 11 (and then "debloating" it) I copied my stuff over, installed the important applications and now the thing is — hopefully, anyway — ready to go for work tomorrow.

Computers are really fucking annoying these days. During the setup process for the new machine, I had to go through multiple two-factor authentication steps, several of which completely refused to work using the most convenient methods. The system continually bugs me for a "passkey", which I cannot be arsed with because I fail to see how it is more secure than the existing security measures. (This is not an invitation to "educate" me.) Then I had to download Office, tell it not to register itself automatically using my Hotmail account and instead use my work account… then sign in to my multiple work accounts, each of which asked me for two-factor authentication multiple times for no apparent reason, and finally we were up and running again.

While I acknowledge that some of the above is due to the cloud-based world we live in these days, and all this nonsense allows us to be able to recover our Stuff much more easily when something happens like the situation I've been dealing with… man, it really makes me miss the days of the Atari 8-bit and ST, when you just turn the thing on and load the software you need from a disk. I'm sure attempting to function normally with a setup like that would present its own pain points today, but with the increasingly inhospitable environment of the modern Internet and the far-ranging splattering of sewage that generative AI has covered everything with, I find myself longing for a somewhat simpler implementation of technology.

Unfortunately, with the work I do — and to a lesser extent, with the life I lead — going back to a life where I could run everything from a computer with one megabyte of RAM and no hard drive is an impossibility.

Technology today is more advanced. But is it really better?

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#oneaday Day 817: Pages from Ceefax

Okay. I mentioned it yesterday, so I may as well talk about it today, since apparently I'm on an "old TV" kick at the minute. Pages from Ceefax, right? It's something that I sometimes find hard to believe was actually broadcast on television, but the evidence is out there.

For the unfamiliar, Ceefax is the name for the teletext service that was available on the terrestrial BBC TV channels, BBC1 and BBC2. Over time the distinction between the two channels' service developed in such a way that you looked on BBC1 if you wanted to find something out quickly (they eventually managed to make the "page seek" on BBC1 work faster) while on BBC2 you'd get more in-depth material. This was in keeping with the channels' main remit; BBC1 had all the mainstream, primetime programming on it, while BBC2 had more niche-interest, specialist or cult favourite shows. And lots of Star Trek repeats, like, all the time.

I realise there may be a few of you reading this who don't even know what teletext was, since it's not been A Thing for most of the world for a while now, but basically it was an information service you could access through your television using your remote control. You'd press a button to switch from live TV to teletext mode, and the programme would continue in the background as just audio while you entered a world of coloured text and, occasionally, extremely low-resolution pixel art. Some TVs provided the ability to "mix" the teletext and TV programme, so anything that was blank, black space normally would allow the programme to show through. It wasn't a terribly practical means of either watching a TV programme or accessing teletext, but it was nice that the option was there.

Anyway, the interesting thing about the various forms of teletext, including Ceefax, was that you could type in a number on your TV remote and it would take you to that page, allowing you to browse through information in a non-linear manner many years ahead of domestic Internet access becoming commonplace. Okay, there were limitations, probably chief among which was how most "pages" on teletext services were actually made up of multiple sub-pages, and you had to wait for them to cycle around rather than be able to browse them completely freely. For a practical example, if you were looking at what's on TV this evening and when the page came up it was only showing things late at night, you'd have to wait for it to cycle back around to showing what is on currently and up next, rather than just being able to immediately call up that information.

But! You might ponder at this point: what about people who do not have a television that can access teletext services, or which they have lost the remote control for? Well, never fear, for Pages from Ceefax is here! This is a chunk of time that the BBC carved out each day specifically for showing a selection of… well, pages from Ceefax, accompanied by some delightful elevator music. You'd normally get things like the news headlines, the weather, maybe the sport. Things that normal people might be interested in. It didn't tend to delve into more "magazine-esque" features or special-interest areas; if the legendary Digitiser had been on Ceefax rather than Oracle or Teletext with a capital T (which were the teletext services that were on the terrestrial TV channels ITV and Channel 4) it probably wouldn't have come up in Pages from Ceefax.

And, I mean… that's a bit weird, right? You would think that the BBC would want to fill up its timeslots with actual programming, rather than a clunky text-based interface that was designed to be interactive, but which was not, in fact, interactive at all when it was broadcast as part of the linear TV signal. But, like the "Follows Shortly" slides we saw yesterday, I guess Pages from Ceefax provided the opportunity for things to happen behind the scenes. Perhaps it's during Pages from Ceefax that continuity announcers swapped over, or had a break, or something like that.

It definitely broadcast when there was no other programming planned, such as before the first programme of the day or late at night, but I have definite memories of it coming up in the middle of the day, too. Like the "Follows Shortly" slides, I found Pages from Ceefax frustrating and boring as a child, but now I am oddly nostalgic for it.

Thankfully, as with literally everything you might be nostalgic for, you can recreate the Pages from Ceefax experience for yourself right now in various ways. Firstly, there's this delightful website, which presents today's headlines in the style of an authentic Pages from Ceefax broadcast, complete with optional music.

Then there's a whole channel devoted to the full playlists that were used for the various Pages from Ceefax broadcasts, an example of which you can enjoy right here:

Anyway. Yeah. That's that. Pages from Ceefax. Stupid. Pointless. Annoying. A waste of time that could have been used for more interesting programming. And yet I miss it. How strange.

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#oneaday Day 772: The Lovely(-Sounding) Bones

I dread to think how much money I have spent on headphones over the years. I never buy particularly pricy ones — I think the most expensive ones I've bought were some nice noise-cancelling Sony ones a while back, which I use when recording videos — but I do get through 'em. I'm annoyed that probably my favourite headphones of all time — a pair of Sennheiser on-ear headphones that cost me about £35 — went missing and I have no idea where, but no matter; I have replaced them a bajillion times over since.

My most recent acquisition in this department is a set of "bone-conducting" headphones. I have been curious to try this technology for a while, and as it was a nice day without being "can't breathe" levels of hot today, I thought I would go for a walk and try them out.

For the unfamiliar, bone-conducting headphones are exactly what they sound like. Rather than sticking them in or on your ear, they sit just in front of your ear on the bony bit that is there. They then transmit the sound through that bone and into the complicated stuff that is inside your ear. This means they bypass your eardrum, which has a number of benefits — most notably allowing those with hearing issues to hear things much better than through things you put in or on your ear — but for me their main appeal element is the fact that… well, they don't sit in or on your ear.

I don't like earbuds because I've never found a pair that are comfortable or that will stay in — and with how bloody tiny wireless ones are these days, I'd be terrified of losing them if I'd paid any sort of premium for them. I do like over-ear headphones, but they do make my head hot, so they're not especially practical for wearing out and about, particularly in the summer. And you just don't really seem to see on-ear headphones much these days. At least, I haven't. Maybe I just haven't really been looking.

These bone-conducting headphones I got were a cheapo pair from Amazon, because I wasn't about to pay through the nose for these if they were any sort of unknown quantity. They're wireless, have USB-C charging and Bluetooth, which is all I really needed. There are fancier (and much more expensive) pairs you can get that have on-board music storage, heavier waterproofing that lets you use them while swimming, and all manner of other features, but I figured just for now, just to begin with, something basic and affordable would be plenty.

And they are! I wore them out for a walk around the Common earlier today, and they definitely do the job. Music is audible and clear, and the fact they're not stuffed in your ears means that if you keep the volume down a bit you can still hear everything going on around you; if you turn the volume up, meanwhile, you can get almost as much immersion in the sound as with a regular pair of earphones.

Sound quality is okay. If you had a Walkman back in the day and had a pair of those over-ear headphones with the foam ear covers, the sound quality seemed roughly equivalent to a pair like that — nothing super-remarkable, a little lacking in the bass end, but perfectly adequate for most things, particularly if "listening to music" is not the primary activity on your agenda and you just want some background noise.

I'm surprised how effectively the bone-conducting method works. I was expecting it to feel weird or be somehow "unusual", but when the music's on, it just sounds like it's being piped into your ears like with a regular pair of headphones. The only real notable difference I noticed is beyond a certain volume level, you can feel the vibrations a little bit, giving a slight tickly sensation around the temples. I found a decent balance between sound quality, not being tickled and being able to hear important noises around me to be a few steps down from max volume, whereas on a lot of other headphones I tend to find myself whacking them up to max and leaving it there.

While I'm not going to go and recommend these things as a replacement for proper audiophile gear — I suspect even the more expensive models will be somewhat limited in their sound quality by the very nature of the tech — they're absolutely a great solution for having some music on while you're out and about, and they're discreet enough that you can just leave them on all the time even while you're not actively using them.

I'm definitely going to be using these a lot more, as I'm definitely (haha) going to be getting out and having a nice walk on a more semi-regular basis than I have been. Weather-permitting, of course; I suspect with how most days have been of late, I will be having a lot of evening walks rather than going in the daytime!

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#oneaday Day 767: Why I continue to write in an age of AI

I read a good piece earlier that got me thinking: why do I continue to tap out words here, day after day, in an age where those odious "Generate with AI" buttons are ubiquitous, whether you want them or not? (Even here in my own self-hosted version of WordPress, I cannot escape the "Improve with AI" button that I have never, ever clicked, even out of curiosity.)

close up photo of a pencil — Photo by Poppy Thomas Hill on Pexels.com

It's a fair question. Over the course of the last eighteen years, I have written 3.35 million words on this site across 4,642 posts. (Okay, technically a chunk of those were originally posted on my now-defunct blog on Patreon, but since that effectively took the place of this site while it was active, I am counting them.) I could stop at any point. In fact, I have stopped on multiple occasions. And yet something keeps bringing me back. And, moreover, every time I come back, the absolute last thing on my mind is to get the lying, lake-boiling plagiarism robot to "write" something for me.

Because why would you do that? If you want to write, just fucking write. Generative AI isn't "democratising" the creative process, as some people argue, because the creative process was democratised the moment everyone could afford writing implements and things to write on. Moreover, if you get the stupid dumbass robot to regurgitate some vapid garbage on your behalf, you have not written that. You do not deserve any credit whatsoever, even for "engineering" the prompt. You are a lazy, feckless idiot who does not want to do something creative; you want to fill the world with more content that no-one actually wants. To quote a memorable Reddit post I saw once in response to someone like this: "best of luck on something literally no-one, including you, will read."

"Oh, but it helps for resear-" Shut up. Shut up. It demonstrably gets things wrong a statistically significant proportion of the time, thereby making it completely worthless for research by its very definition.

"Oh, but it helps for brainsto-" Shut up. Shut up. What you are talking about is the creative process. Brainstorming is part of it all! The creative process doesn't start the moment you start typing, writing, recording or using your tools. It starts the moment a little light goes on in your mind and you have a vague idea that you want to make something. It starts the moment you get a flash of a character you want to construct. It starts the moment you get the hint of a melody. It starts the moment you read something else that inspires you to want to write something on the same subject — as I am doing right now.

I do not want generative AI. I did not ask for generative AI. I have no use for generative AI. And I think people who rely on generative AI to conjure some shit up out of a vague prompt rather than writing things themselves are, as previously noted, lazy, feckless idiots who have no interest in genuine creativity. They do not care about the quality of their eventual output; all they care about is that they have produced content. Consistency of content is key! Churn it out like a good little drone! Doesn't matter if it's good or not, so long as it gets engagement!

(Aside: I will begrudgingly admit that generative AI does have some potential use cases, but only as part of a human-led workflow and only if it is not being used as a means of attempting to replace the skills and knowledge of a real person. Even then, I can't help but feel there are other, less damaging ways to achieve the same thing — often with better results. And, indeed, many things that are now labelled as "AI-powered" are, in fact, not generative AI-based — they are just using "AI" as a supposedly fashionable buzzword, apparently blissfully unaware of the growing distaste for anything labelled "AI", when what they actually mean is "computer-controlled" or "based on machine learning". The auto-accompaniment mode on the Yamaha keyboard I used as a child would probably be labelled "AI" today when it is nothing of the sort.)

I often find myself thinking about all this, considering that I write something on this site every day as the result of a self-imposed but only loosely enforced challenge — and part of that challenge is to just write something, regardless of if it ends up being any good. At no point do I feel like I am creating content, because I am not doing this for anyone other than myself, and I am certainly not doing it for "engagement". I am doing it because I enjoy it; because I find it a helpful means of expressing myself; and because, occasionally, it allows me to form a connection with another person, when something I have written resonates with them, for one reason or another.

This website has over 3.5 million words on it, but not a single one of them has come from a machine. Not a single one of them has been written out of a desire to create content. Every one of them has come out of my brain because I wanted to write them, because there was something I wanted to express, because there was something I wanted to remember or because there was something I wanted to process. This may seem like a stupid, pointless website to the casual observer, but to me, it is immeasurably valuable.

If I had sullied even the tiniest bit of it with generative AI, it would no longer be mine. And yes, I'm aware that by the very virtue of it being On The Internet, it has probably already been ingested into one or more of the AI models out there. But I'm not taking it down or giving up on this valuable means of self-expression, because fuck you, Clammy Sam Altman and Wario Amodei, that's why.

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#oneaday Day 757: Nothing works any more

One of the most common refrains of people who discuss the topic of enshittification is that so much stuff related to tech just flat-out doesn't work any more, and no-one seems in any great hurry to fix it — particularly when all the actually knowledgeable engineers have been replaced with "vibe-coding" cunts.

a person holding up a laptop with a broken screen — Photo by Beyzanur K. on Pexels.com

Here is a list of tech-related things that, through no fault of my own, have occurred in the last week:

My Windows 11 PC inexplicably took twenty minutes to start up. There does not appear to be anything actually wrong with it. It has had every scan, virus check, hardware tweak imaginable run, and has had Windows completely reinstalled multiple times. Once Windows starts, it is mostly fine, with the following exception:
When browsing the Internet, occasionally both Firefox and Chrome will just… stop doing anything, to such a degree that they prevent the rest of Windows from doing anything. Checking logs indicates that nothing is particularly happening on the CPU, memory, storage or network front whenever this happens, it just… happens. Firefox does it marginally less than Chrome did, thus I have switched to Firefox.
When using my computer to browse Nextdoor, which is a site that eventually paid off during our search for Oliver, scrolling down more than about a screen and a half will cause the entire website to completely shit the bed, moving its sidebar to the middle of the screen before snapping you back to the top of the feed you were attempting to scroll through.
When using my phone to browse Nextdoor, a post where someone said the bin men had just been and not taken their bin remained at the top of my feed for the entire three weeks that Oliver was missing.
My keyboard just told me it had "low battery" despite being plugged in. I unplugged it and replugged it in and now it claims to have 98% battery.
My keyboard doesn't charge while plugged in if I don't have the Razer software running.
My mouse can have its wireless signal blocked by a packet of crisps.
My PC game controller sometimes requires turning on three times before it's actually turned on.
The Bluetooth on my work PC refuses to turn on despite showing as being present and working.
When listening to YouTube videos while falling asleep, at least 8 times out of 10, the app will randomly close itself for no apparent reason in the middle of a video.

It's frustrating that, when you're someone who takes good care of their tech — as I always have been — stuff just… fucks up after a while for no apparent reason. My woes with Windows on my living room PC are a longstanding issue that I am at my absolute wits' end with; I am getting perilously close to installing Bazzite and being done with Windows, particularly now I no longer need to work on this machine. Oddly enough, I have had zero Windows-related issues with my work mini PC, other than the Bluetooth problem, which may well be hardware-related.

I just miss the time when you bought something that was expensive and fancy, that it worked, and it continued to work for many years after you spent lots of money on it. Still, I knew that age was long past all those years ago when I updated my iPhone 3G to the latest iOS and it became completely unusable. I still went and upgraded to an iPhone 4 like a big mug, though, didn't I? Twat.

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