#oneaday Day 677: Understaffed and overpriced

"It's so cool that literally every job now is understaffed by 30-50%. It's great because I didn't want whatever it was done well or with any care at all. But please keep raising prices anyway."

– @headfallsoff.com, via Bluesky

I saw this post earlier and it resonated. I'm sure that right now, wherever you are in the world, you are feeling some variation of this thought. You are probably also feeling as bewildered as I am at why this is all the case. Yes, the economy is fucked due to the AI bubble, private equity dominating everything and the stock market continually doing weird things (a shoe company "pivoted to AI" recently and their stock value exploded!), but surely some things are constant. Like, say, the need for groceries.

Our local big Sainsbury's is a prime example. It's a decently sized supermarket that serves a wide area in the town; it's conveniently located, as it's somewhat on the outskirts of the general urban area, and it's also near a number of local amenities, such as a doctor's surgery and bingo hall. It does plenty of business, as the car park is always pretty full and there are always people in it.

So why have I only ever seen one person actually on the checkouts at a time? There are like five or six conventional checkout lanes (plus a large self-checkout area for trolleys, and another separate large self-checkout area for baskets, inevitably with at least one person using a trolley in it) and there only ever seem to be about three people on hand at any time: one person begrudgingly staffing the conventional checkout, and two people milling around the self-checkout areas, occasionally noticing that yes, you are, in fact, old enough to purchase a can of Monster and gracing you with their woefully insecure three-digit user ID and password combo to confirm this fact in the eyes of the law.

"Just use the self-checkouts," you'll probably say. And that's sometimes fine. Except when you run into the inevitable Unexpected Item in Bagging Area incidents, or the aforementioned need to prove your legal worthiness to consume drinks that don't taste like anything Nature has ever produced, or you're buying a shirt with a security tag on it, or you're buying alcohol, or you have two packets of paracetamol in your basket, or… you get the idea.

A good example from my own experience is a rather middle-class problem, but it shows how these checkouts being inexplicably left fallow can be a genuine issue if you need to speak to an actual person in order to achieve something during your shopping trip. We have a SodaStream, and SodaStream does a thing where if you return your old gas cylinder at the same time as getting a new one, you get ten quid off the new one. It's worth doing, as it means you don't have to worry about disposing of bulky gas cylinders, and it's cheaper. Yet, as far as I'm aware, there is no means of carrying out this process yourself at the self-checkouts, meaning you need to go to a staffed checkout. If there's only one person working the staffed checkouts at any given time, this can mean you'll be in for a long wait. If you go in at the wrong time of day, when there are no people on the staffed checkouts, then you're fucked.

Like I say, it's a very middle-class example. But I'm sure there are other instances where you need (or just prefer) to interact with an actual human being, and there are times of day where that's literally impossible at this Sainsbury's. Why do they even have that many checkout aisles if they're never, ever going to use all of them?

Is it because they don't have the money to pay enough staff to man those checkouts? I doubt it, particularly since prices are through the roof. I can pop to the shop to get a few snacky bits and household bits and pieces — i.e. not a "big shop" — and easily spend £50 these days. That's more expensive than a video game! (For now, anyway.) I feel like if you spend more than it costs to get a new PlayStation game, you should come away with more than a few bags of crisps, bottles of drink and packets of cat food.

To be clear, I don't blame any of the workers staffing either the conventional checkouts or the self-checkout aisles for this. It is not their fault, and they probably wish they had more people helping out, too. It is, almost certainly, a failing of management, presumably initiated on the grounds that they want to "do more with less" or some other such LinkedIn platitude at their corporate overlords' behest. In that sense, it's probably not even the managers' fault, but instead, as with everything else, the blame can, without a doubt, be laid at the feet of the out-of-touch executive class and/or private equity.

One day we'll be free of all this. I don't know that. But I have to believe it. Because things don't seem to be getting a whole lot better right now, and the prospect of continuing to endure the world being such a shitty place is becoming increasingly intolerable.

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 533: Enshittified parking

The wife and I made the silly error of deciding to go into town today. We thought we'd go get a Currywurst from the German market, plus she wanted to enquire at a music shop about some various bits and pieces.

We were having second thoughts when we got up, because it was dark, miserable and raining outside, but we thought "ah, no, we should go out, it'll do us good to get out of the house".

Reader, it was not good. Apart from the Currywurst, that was good. Although £9 for it was absolute daylight robbery, but I guess that is Just What Things Cost Now. And my wife did at least get the information she wanted from the music shop.

The rest of the trip was a miserable, rain-soaked experience, but probably the most irritating thing about the whole experience was what they've done to WestQuay parking. Instead of taking the tried-and-true approach of giving you a ticket, then you popping said ticket into a machine and paying for how long you spent in the car park, they have decided to make it all "technological", now requiring you to have your number plate scanned by ANPR when you enter, then before you leave, you have to remember to scan a QR code from a poster and pay on a website. Because that is somehow much better.

I will grant you that during busy periods, it could be frustrating to have to queue up for a ticket machine when you wanted to leave. It was frustrating when the ticket machine broke, too, or it ate your ticket, or any other shenanigans that might have occurred. But that's why they had the little man on the end of the "help" button to help you out.

The main issue with the "pay by phone" option they have chosen to go with is that there is no fucking phone signal inside the car park. Nor is there any Wi-Fi. So if you forget to scan one of the posters that is outside on the way back to the car park — or, indeed, if you took a route back to the car park that did not pass by one of these posters — it's an incredible pain in the arse to do something as simple as paying for parking, something which we have all been begrudgingly doing for many years at this point.

Of course, the whole thing has almost certainly been done in the name of collecting data on people who use the car park — they take your number plate when you enter and your name when you pay, so that's fun. They will probably try and spin this as somehow being "more convenient" when in fact it's several orders of magnitude more annoying than the old way of doing things.

But hey. We've made everything else worse with technology. Why should parking be left out of the party?

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#oneaday Day 504: Enshittification comes for TV Tropes

Like it or loathe it — and there's an increasing number of people in the latter camp in more recent years, for reasons I'll get onto — but TV Tropes is an Internet institution.

At least it was, until today, when they decided that enough was enough with all those pesky users who didn't want their privacy invaded and their data sold and thus were running adblockers. Now, when attempting to view a page on TV Tropes, you get this screen:

This will probably be familiar to anyone who has viewed any number of websites in recent years. It's a step back from being a complete paywall, in that they'll allow you in if you just disable your adblocker a little bit, pweeeze, we'll only share some of your data with unknown third parties. But it's still a shitty move — particularly for a site like TV Tropes, which has always been a community-driven site. In fact, without the community, TV Tropes wouldn't exist.

As writer Aidan Moher put it earlier on Bluesky:

Aidan Moher
@aidanmoher.com
(Games Journalist)

TROPE: Popular website built entirely on unpaid community labour dies after blocking content from community unwilling to submit to exploitative data collection monetization methods.

That's right. Part of the reason why TV Tropes was so beloved, even with its problems — we're getting to those, I promise — was because it was built by the people. Much like Wikipedia, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale, TV Tropes was absolutely dependent on its enthusiast, volunteer authors and editors. Without those people tirelessly cataloguing examples of tropes used in all manner of media to a frighteningly comprehensive degree, there would be no TV Tropes.

But… now what? People are not going to pay for TV Tropes, and an adblocker is pretty much essential for browsing the modern Internet if you want an experience that is in any way tolerable. So now someone who might otherwise have wanted to contribute to the community effort that is TV Tropes is now locked out from doing so, with their only choices being to pay up or open the floodgates to God knows whatever advertisers are doing these days. (No, I'm not opening up a non-adblocked browser just to see what it's like now.)

Not only that, but this is essentially TV Tropes saying that it wants to profit from the unpaid labour all those volunteer contributors and editors have put in over the years. Because you can bet your sweet bippy none of that $5 a month/$25 a year subscription fee is going anywhere near the pockets of the people who have really made the site what it is today.

This, obviously, sucks, and is just another example of enshittification. Specifically, it's almost a textbook example of what Cory Doctorow was referring to in one of his first pieces he wrote on the subject, The Enshittification of TikTok:

Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.

I call this enshittification, and it is a seemingly inevitable consequence arising from the combination of the ease of changing how a platform allocates value, combined with the nature of a "two-sided market", where a platform sites between buyers and sellers, holding each hostage to the other, raking off an ever-larger share of the value that passes between them.

In the case of TV Tropes, you have your "users", who are the people who browse the site for fun, entertainment or in the hope of learning something; then you have your "business customers", who are the volunteer contributors, without whom the site wouldn't exist; the abuse of those "business customers" through locking them out unless they subscribe or open the adblock gates is the stage we're at now. I'd argue in this instance we skipped the usual "abusing users" part and jumped straight to "abusing business customers and users".

As I say, this clearly sucks, and it seems like a sure-fire way for TV Tropes to almost immediately make itself completely irrelevant to the rest of the Internet.

But! That might not be the worst thing in the world. Hear me out.

This is not to put down the incredible amount of time and effort TV Tropes contributors have spent cataloguing myriad tropes and even more countless uses across many, many different forms of media. I absolutely do not have an issue with the people who have taken the time to do that, because those people are creatives; they have made something.

No, the problem with TV Tropes is that, over time, it became a resource for the lazy. This is not TV Tropes' fault itself, but rather it's an extension of a general sense of dwindling media literacy across society. Why think for yourself about something you've just seen, played or heard, when there's a 3 hour YouTube video essay waiting to "explain" it to you in what appears to be authoritative detail? Why ponder the specific way a movie, TV show, video game or book chose to present its narrative, when you can just look it up on TV Tropes and get a ready-made list of "discussion points" that you can "borrow" and use for yourself? (Certain members of the "3 hour YouTube video essay maker" group are definitely prone to this, with some pretty much quoting TV Tropes pages verbatim in the name of "analysis".)

I have had conversations with people who will not even consider starting to watch a new TV show if there isn't a "companion" podcast (official or otherwise) ready and waiting to explain each and every episode to them. This is both frightening and baffling to me! Particularly when it comes to media that is designed to be fairly undemanding, mainstream entertainment!

TV Tropes isn't solely to blame for this, of course — blame can also be laid at the feet of reactionary, short-form video content on platforms like TikTok and YouTube Shorts as well as the generally dwindling attention span of people online these days — but it is a symptom of a broader problem. And one of those sources of that problem going away might not be a terrible thing in the long term, as callous as that might sound to those who have poured hours of time and effort into researching things for that site.

Regardless of your feelings on TV Tropes — on the whole, I've always been fond of it, but then I've always used it more as entertainment than a source of "serious" research or analysis — this is an unfortunate day for an Internet institution, and I suspect it absolutely will not be the last longstanding website to take this direction.

Once Wikipedia and the Internet Archive go that way — and no, them occasionally badgering you for donations doesn't count — that's when you know we're really fucked. Let's hope that never happens.

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#oneaday Day 502: Another reminder that traditional games journalism is all but dead

It emerged today that the entire Features team of the gaming website TheGamer has been laid off, after owner Valnet decided that it likes money more than having actual employees who are capable of writing.

I'll admit that I was never a particular fan of TheGamer for a variety of reasons, but regardless of my own personal feelings about the site, this sucks. It's the latest instance of something that has continued to suck for a while now, with even big names of the games journalism industry — if such a thing even exists any more — suffering widespread layoffs, cutbacks and significant worsening of what they offer for their audiences. Enshittification, if you will. And yes, even longstanding behemoths like IGN and Eurogamer have been subject to this. According to VideoGamesChronicle and PressEngine, more than 1,200 journalists have left the business entirely in just the last two years — and that's not taking freelancers into account. (That puts the figure nearer 4,000.)

Honestly, seeing this happen to TheGamer isn't a surprise, though. This is just what the site's owner, Valnet, does. They buy up sites that were once successful, rip out everything that made them distinctive and unique — i.e. the people who worked hard on establishing the site's identity — then proceed to replace everything with slop. I would not be surprised at all if in short order we start seeing casino advertorials and AI-generated garbage on what remains of TheGamer.

Valnet and their big rival, Gamurs, are a scourge on what was once a thriving sector. They both take this model: they buy "verticals" (ugh) that they want to add to their portfolio, and then think that just because they now own, say, Polygon, that they have unlocked an infinite money glitch. But they have not — for a variety of reasons, not which is the model on which ad-supported commercial games journalism has been forced to operate for years now.

This article by Luke Plunkett of Aftermath sums it up nicely: these sites had been stuck in operating in the same way as 2000s-era Kotaku, which is to post as much as possible, as often as possible, and it didn't matter too much if nothing of any real substance was being said. It was all about the content.

I've been through this, too. During my time on both GamePro and USgamer, I was specifically hired to be someone who operated on a different time zone to the rest of the staff, with my responsibility being to ensure that there were things ready to read on the site by the time North America woke up. These typically end up being "news" posts, which, in the churn of having to produce so much content every day, often end up being little more than you could learn from just following a company's social media account or signing up to their mailing list.

"Guide content", that odious practice where every single site has to have 5,000 articles explaining every minutiae of every hot new game (and often badly, to boot), is also at play here, with the entire Internet gradually being flooded by "what is today's Wordle solution?" posts, individual articles explaining each and every shrine in The Legend of Zelda (often badly) and inconclusive, vapid answers to questions no-one was really asking with any great seriousness. It's all about the pursuit of endless, relentless content, and it doesn't matter if it's any good or not, it just has to be fresh, constantly updated and now.

And it sucks! It's not doing anyone any good! It's not making the writers on these sites look good, it doesn't make the games they're covering look good, it doesn't make the site look good, and it doesn't inform the readership of anything worthwhile. It just means those readers have something new to scroll through every time they refresh the page while they're staring, glassy-eyed, at their phone for the 14th consecutive hour that day.

It sucks that it has to be this way, too, because the presence of a specialist press is important. The idea that we might, one day, be completely without a games press altogether is absolutely baffling, but with every round of layoffs like the one we've seen today, we get closer to that dystopia.

Reader-supported sites such as Aftermath, 404 Media (not games, but relevant) and Giant Bomb are doing great work, but it remains to be seen how sustainable that model is — particularly as so many of the bloody things are starting to pop up that it is no longer possible or affordable for anyone to be "widely read" when it comes to good-quality games coverage. That's not necessarily a bad thing, given that back in the '80s and '90s we tended to be loyal to individual magazines rather than reading all of them, but it's a big shift in how the Internet has traditionally worked.

I don't even know what to think any more. It's bleak out there. And I wonder if it's ever going to get better again. I just want to have some fun websites to read again, by people who know their craft and are passionate about it. We used to have that — why can't we have that again? Why can't we have 1up.com again?

Those are rhetorical questions.

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#oneaday Day 392: Never forgive them for what they have done to the computer

[Recommended reading: Ed Zitron's "Never Forgive Them", from which the title of this post is taken.]

This evening, my computer inexplicably ground to a halt while I was doing… nothing in particular. Browsing a few webpages, doing a bit of research in preparation for some videos I'd like to make, if I'm being specific, but it really wasn't anything the slightest bit demanding. For whatever reason, though, everything just stopped, nothing was responsive, and the only thing I could do was force the power off and restart.

When the computer restarted, it took 10 solid minutes to become responsive because a piece of software for a controller that isn't connected decided to spontaneously uninstall and reinstall itself, while at the same time popular chat app Discord decided to install 18 updates that were apparently essential, despite the fact I'd updated it yesterday, Steam updated itself (which, all credit to it, it did without complaining or holding anything else up) and, of course, Windows is bugging me to "upgrade" to Windows 11.

At the same time, my phone has been repeatedly sending me notifications telling me it "needs optimising" and "must restart", despite everything working absolutely fine, and despite it never having insisted on this process before. (It does, however, insist on "Optimising Apps" every time you turn it on or restart it, though, which makes what should be a very simple, quick process — turning it off and on again — take a good few minutes.)

This is what people mean when they say "enshittification". All of the above is unnecessary. All of the above are examples of tech deliberately making itself worse, for reasons that are not apparent to the end user, but which I'm sure are "providing shareholder value" via some means or another. This is what Ed Zitron means when he says "never forgive them for what they have done to the computer".

I love that description. I feel like people don't say "going on the computer" any more, because most of us spend pretty much our entire waking life joined at the hip to one form of computer or another, be it a PC, phone or tablet. When I was a kid, "going on the computer" was a discrete activity. You'd come home from school, do your homework, have some dinner, then go on the computer. And the computer would oblige. You'd turn it on, and there it was. If something went wrong, you turned it off, waited a moment, then turned it back on again, and nine times out of ten, the problem would be gone.

Now, granted, "the computer" that I'm talking about here is several orders of magnitude less sophisticated, powerful and, arguably, useful than the PC I'm typing this post on. But it still feels like we've lost something. Things have been taken out of our control. I could literally do nothing while those stupid update processes were running on my PC, because they were so badly programmed that they monopolised the system to such a degree that I couldn't even bring up Task Manager to stop them. And, as I discovered, turning the PC off and on again wouldn't have helped, because they'd have just started again — or, perhaps worse, fallen over because of the half-finished job I switched them off in the middle of.

I appreciate that updates are sometimes necessary to add new features, fix bugs and, in the case of operating systems, plug security holes that could be exploited by malicious actors. But man, do I ever miss turning on the Atari 8-bit, booting right into BASIC and being able to just get on with things. Those "things" may have been considerably less elaborate than what I can do on "the computer" today, but was that really so bad…?

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#oneaday Day 290: Foxit? More like Fuckit

Good one, I know.

As I alluded to yesterday, I've been spending a bit of time collecting together scans of old computer and video games (and Computer & Video Games) magazines with a mind to sticking them on an old Kindle Fire tablet to use as a portable "magazine reader". As part of that process, today I found myself looking for PDF readers, both for Windows and for Android.

I wanted one for Windows so that I could potentially use it to make some videos about the magazines I don't have hard copies of, and neither Chrome nor Firefox's built-in PDF handling quite does what I wanted. (Chrome, notably, still lacks the ability to display two-page spreads but assume there is a "cover page", meaning it fucks up magazine and book layouts and there's nothing you can do about it.) So I did what any normal person does, and I Googled it, even knowing that Google itself has been gradually going down the toilet.

After skipping past the fucking useless AI summary and sponsored links, I clicked on an article that was absolutely bullshit SEO bait ("The best free PDF readers for Windows!") but was at least from a vaguely reputable outlet, TechRadar. This article informed me that Foxit was the best PDF reader for Windows.

Great, I thought. I've used Foxit before in the past. I doubt it's changed that much.

EH. WRONG.

Foxit has enshittified itself beyond all recognition. Not only has it made the inexplicable decision to model its UI on Microsoft's odious "Ribbon" interface, it also boots up with a floating "AI" button that you can't get rid of without some tinkering deep in the options and then quitting and restarting the program.

Let's take each of these in turn. First, the Ribbon.

I hate the Ribbon. I've despised the Ribbon ever since Microsoft introduced it in Microsoft Office 2007, and every time I use a program that uses this obnoxious piece of crap instead of normal toolbars and drop-down menus, I make a specific effort to find something else to use instead.

The Ribbon is an eyesore. The Ribbon takes up far too much space on the screen. The Ribbon's myriad tabs and huge buttons make it a massive chore to find simple functionality, since each tab is organised with no real care or attention. It doesn't conform to any standard functionality, so you'll find the same functions in different places in different applications, and it feels the need to take over the entire fucking window when you want to do something as simple as open, save or close a file, or look at the program's settings page.

In Foxit's specific case, I am honestly struggling to think of why a supposedly "lightweight" PDF reader has enough functions in it to warrant having a multi-tab Ribbon. I need a PDF reader to do one thing: read PDFs. Occasionally I might need to copy and paste images and text from a PDF, and the ability to take a snapshot of a section of a PDF and save it as an image is always nice. But I do not need multiple tabs worth of disorganised functionality, making it a chore to do something as simple as display two pages side by side and let me flip through the entire document like… well, like a magazine or book.

This is what people are talking about when they say "the computer" is constantly being enshittified. Things that worked perfectly well are being "updated" for no other reason than to say that they have been updated. Simple, straightforward, intuitive interfaces that remained standard conventions for decades are being uprooted in favour of borderline abusive design that forces you to click through page after page of crap in order to find the one thing you're looking for. And for what? To say that the company is "growing"? To say that the company is "innovating"? Fuck that. Just make me a fucking PDF reader that lets me read PDFs.

Which brings me to the "AI" button. I do not need a fucking AI button in my PDF reader. If I have opened something in a PDF reader, I intend to read it or print it. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "summarise" the thing that I'm trying to read either for information or pleasure. I am not going to ask a fucking chatbot that gets things wrong an average of a third of the time you ask it things to "analyse" the document or figure out "trends". I am a human being. I have a brain. I can do these things myself. I do not need "AI" to "do it more quickly". Believe it or not, I enjoy reading. I enjoy researching. I'm not so fucking lazy that I need a fucking chatbot (&c. &c.) to take the human part out of the equation. Because that's just depressing.

Things weren't much better on the Android front. I tried Foxit on Android as well, just out of curiosity, and sure enough, while it lacked the Ribbon (the one benefit of a phone screen is that it's too small for such a shitty interface) it still had the odious little AI bubble. So I uninstalled it immediately.

If you've been in a similar situation at any point, may I recommend Sumatra PDF for your desktop PDF reading needs, and PDF viewer lite for Android. Both of those seem to fit my needs perfectly well right now: no ads, no subscriptions, no Ribbon, no AI, no bullshit. Just a thing to read PDFs with. Which should not be a hard thing to find in 2025. But apparently this is the world we've built for ourselves.

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#oneaday Day 283: We should probably be resisting generative AI more than we are

There was a good piece by 404 Media on "AI slop" today. Author Jason Koebler described the issue as AI slop being a "brute force attack on the algorithms that control reality", and goes on to explain how those taking advantage of AI are exploiting social media algorithms to such a degree that platforms are now flooded with this garbage, making it hard to find 1) anything made by a real person and 2) anything made by someone you might actually want to connect with.

There is zero value to this stuff, other than self-fulfilling engagement. Presumably the long game is to build up "the numbers" with this shit, then sell the accounts, or make bank off impressions-based ad revenue. And the platform holders don't give a shit; as Koebler points out in his piece, it seems like Mark Zuckerberg actively wants the experience on Facebook to be real humans arguing over AI-generated slop rather than anything real and meaningful.

And I don't understand why we're letting this happen. Not only on social media, but in more "traditional" industries, too. It's happening to a frightening degree in publishing, with myriad "get rich quick" schemes fundamentally being based on churning out multiple AI-generated books every week (or even day) and then profiting off, let's face it, vulnerable people who aren't able to tell the difference between garbage churned out by a robot and something written by an actual human being.

As Koebler puts it, "there is a dual problem with this: it not only floods the Internet with shit, crowding out human-created content that real people spend time making, but the very nature of AI slop means it evolves faster than human-created content can, so any time an algorithm is tweaked, the AI spammers can find the weakness in that algorithm and exploit it."

At the moment, there are a few common responses to generative AI:

"I love generative AI! The genie is out of the bottle, so if you're resisting it you're a Luddite who isn't embracing the latest technological innovations!"
"Generative AI is just a tool that people can add to their arsenal, like digital art packages. I can't really tell you how or why that's a good thing, but I heard someone else say it so I'm saying it too."
"Generative AI might be useful in certain circumstances, but I can't really tell you what they are because no-one really knows or can offer specific, concrete examples that aren't prone to hallucinations to such a degree to make them worthless."
"Generative AI sucks balls and I hate it."

I'm somewhere towards the bottom of that list, leaning towards hating it and very much wanting it to go away. At present, I am disinclined to trust the people who claim it will be "revolutionary" for things like medicine, because of the amount of times it fucks simple things up, still. I am also concerned for the field of programming, because as more and more junior coders show up who are only capable of feeding prompts into an AI, not actually doing (and checking!) the coding themselves, we're going to have a real problem on our hands with software development.

At the same time, I'm sure there are some worthwhile use cases for a means of communicating with a computer using natural language. I mean, hell, look at Star Trek; the assumption there was that you could just say "Computer" like you say "Alexa" today, then rattle off an often fairly abstract task for it to complete, and it would do it. That is, presumably, the goal.

But AI isn't there yet, not by a long shot, which is why ChatGPT costs $200 a month for a subscription and can't really tell you what it's for, let alone how to stop it making stupid mistakes, and in the meantime the companies involved in all this shit are burning through both money and the planet's natural resources in pursuit of something which might, in fact, be impossible. "Agents" are coming, apparently, but all we've seen of them so far is making things that are already pretty straightforward to do on the Web (like grocery shopping) actively more cumbersome, and OpenAI's "deep research" tool is utterly laughable at this point, pulling out citation-free forum posts and SEO-optimised slop ahead of actual, worthwhile information written (and reviewed) by humans.

You, reading this, almost certainly know all this, and perhaps you've even read or shared some articles talking about the problems with AI slop and the problems that is causing all over the Internet. But what have you done about it? Because I feel like we should be doing more about it, rather than just pointing and tutting at it, going "whoo, lad, that generative AI sure is a bit shit, isn't it? Someone should do something about it."

The trouble, of course, is that it's difficult to do anything meaningful about it, particularly when big corporate entities like Microsoft are the ones forcing it onto people through things people use every day like Windows, Office 365, and even the bloody Xbox. I mean, sure, you can find ways to disable it when it does show up, but these workarounds often end up circumvented by the corporations, meaning you need to faff around even more to get rid of the shit. And sure, you can install Linux, but that carries its own burden of needing to know how to do that. Which you and I might be comfortable doing, but what about people who use computers more casually; those who don't know how they work, but just want to be able to get on with simple tasks without intrusive AI features popping up every few seconds?

All we can do, really, is make a specific effort not to use generative AI tools when there are other alternatives available. I will never, ever use generative AI on this site, MoeGamer or my YouTube channel to produce words, scripts, images, thumbnails or videos, however tempting it might be as a "quick fix" to get something done. If that means there are things I either can't do or would have to pay a specialist to be able to do, I will either go without the thing or pay a specialist. Or perhaps even learn how to do the thing myself.

That's a crucial one, I think. Over the years, I've learned how to do a lot of things on computers simply by running into an issue I don't know how to solve, researching it myself and learning how to deal with it. Some of that knowledge I've retained, some of it fell out of my brain the moment I finished using it, but on the whole I've had a net gain on knowledge simply through running into problems and taking the initiative to learn how to fix them myself. I suspect many people who grew up with computers throughout the '80s and '90s are the same.

I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I am going to tell you what I'm doing:

I will not use ChatGPT to research anything, when perfectly good information is available through well-established, reliable, trustworthy and peer-reviewed sources both online and offline.
I will not use AI image or video generation for anything, period. If I need an image or video of something, I will produce it myself, search for a usable (and suitably licensed) stock or otherwise publicly available image or video, providing credit where appropriate, or just not use that image or video.
I will not use AI voice generation to make a "famous" voice say something it never said. Even if it's really funny. I will freely admit to having done this in the past (only among friends), but that was before we really knew or understood the numerous negative impacts that generative AI has on both the environment and on culture.
I will not use AI to create content for the sake of content. I write here because I like writing. I write on MoeGamer because I like writing about games. I make videos because I like making videos. I am not entitled to a "share" of the Internet based on the volume of stuff I churn out, nor am I entitled to be able to make a living from it. I will not pollute the Internet with meaningless slop.

Someday, there may be a valid use case for generative AI. I am open to that. Right now, I do not believe that is there, and I believe the continued proliferation of generative AI online is actively harmful to the Internet specifically, and human culture more broadly.

It needs to stop. But I'm concerned the "genie in a bottle" people are right, and that now we've started this process of enshittifying the entire Internet, we can't stop it again.

But we can make our own little corners of the Internet a safe haven away from the deluge of sewage. And that's what I'll continue to do.

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#oneaday Day 262: Just a little bit worse

I'm aware that the following is going to make me sound painfully middle-class, but I'm going to say it anyway, because it's important to the story.

When I was a kid, the ultimate treat for enduring a shopping trip with my parents was not a trip to McDonald's or a big bag of sweets. It was going to the Marks and Spencer food section, getting a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich and a can of Caribbean crush, and enjoying both of those in the car park before the drive home. I'm not exaggerating when I say those sandwiches were delicious, and I'd give anything to experience them again.

"So just go to Marks and Spencers and get one," you may well say. And to that I would simply say… they're not the same. Just as so many other things are not the same as they used to be; just as so many other things have been gradually, subtly, almost imperceptibly enshittified over the years, so too have Marks and Spencer prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches.

In fact, pre-packed sandwiches in general have been on a downward spiral for many years now. When I was a little old to be dragged around Cambridge shopping with my parents, my friend Plummer and I would often go out for a drive of an evening, perhaps stopping by a nearby "old man pub" that we enjoyed, then swinging by the 24-hour Tesco petrol station to enjoy some midnight sandwiches before going home. While those sandwiches were never quite of the same quality as the mythical Marks and Spencers prawn and mayonnaise sandwiches, they were still pretty good.

Nowadays, every time I stop by a shop and think "oh, I'll get a Meal Deal" I also accompany that thought with "maybe the sandwiches will be better this time". But they never are. The bread is always soggy and too cold, the fillings are always underseasoned, nigh-flavourless in many cases, and as someone who physically retches if he can taste raw onion, my options are often a bit limited, to boot.

The possibility had occurred to me that perhaps I was nostalgically romanticising the concept of pre-packed sandwiches, and particularly the Marks and Spencers prawn mayonnaise sandwich. But then I consider all the other things which are indisputably worse than they used to be, and it's hard not to feel like everything now costs more but is also considerably worse.

Take a Kellogg's Variety pack, for example. I used to love these, because it was a bunch of little cereal packets, one portion each, that meant you could have a varied breakfast each day. Some of them were "healthy" (and I use the term loosely with regard to breakfast cereal, I'm aware), such as Corn Flakes and Rice Krispies, but there were always some "treats" in there too: Frosties, Ricicles, Coco Pops. I used to love getting a Variety pack when I went to go and visit my Nan; she'd always get them in for me because she knew I enjoyed them, and she'd always make me jelly and ice cream. I miss her and my Grandad.

A while back, Andie and I went for one of our occasional holidays at Center Parcs. While I was there, I thought "hey, I'll get a Variety pack! I haven't had one for ages." I was disappointed to discover that not only to Ricicles just flat-out not exist any more, but the balance in the Variety pack was now overwhelmingly in favour of Rice Krispies, one of the most boring cereals on the planet. Two packets of regular Rice Krispies and a packet of Rice Krispies Multigrain Shapes, whatever ungodly abomination of the breakfast table those might be. (They're not awful. But they're also not interesting.)

Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes, too, used to be my all-time favourite cereal, but the last box of them I've had has been immensely disappointing as has the box of Weetos I got alongside them. Neither of them are so bad as to make me want to throw them out completely, but they're also both considerably inferior than they once were. They just seem to lack a lot of the flavour that they once had.

I know the answer, of course: it's sugar. Everything has far less sugar in it these days, because sugar is the great sin that has made us all fat. And perhaps there's some truth to that — but then I also find myself thinking that numerous previous generations had full-sugar, full-fat diets and came through the experience without ballooning into an obesity epidemic. So what went wrong? How is it that our bland, flavourless, low-sugar, low-fat, joy-free food of today is still making us fatter than we've ever been in our lives?

Reflecting on things, I think part of the problem might be that the lack of sugar in "staples" such as the everyday breakfast cereal specifically makes me crave some actual sugar. And that's when I go out and get a chocolate bar or a cinnamon bun or whatever. And because I feel that so frequently, and so often indulge myself, I am, not to put too fine a point on it, a fat fuck.

Would I feel differently if my everyday food had more sugar, more fat, more flavour to it? I don't know. I know that I have gradually gained weight over the course of the last 25-30 years or so, but the vast majority of that weight has been in the last five years, since COVID. In those last five years, I've felt far more cravings for things that are bad for me than ever before, and I think that's a big part of the problem. When your everyday foods are leaving you feeling unsatisfied and craving more, you're tempted to binge on the things you're craving just to try and feel a little more fulfilled.

It's a more complex situation than that, of course; as I've alluded to numerous times on this blog, my relationship with food is more akin to an addiction, and is tied closely to my mental wellbeing. But I do often find myself wondering that if our everyday food and drink was a bit less artificially bland, we might all paradoxically be a bit better off.

No way to know, really, I guess. All I'm left with is the absolute certainty that if I get a prawn and mayonnaise sandwich from Marks and Spencer today, I will be left disappointed thanks to soggy bread, flavourless prawns and reduced-fat mayo. Not a patch on the real thing from 30+ years ago. And I don't think we're ever getting that back.

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#oneaday Day 253: Why do I need software to make my keyboard charge

I've been having an issue with my fancy, expensive Razer keyboard for a while. I've had it plugged in to USB, but as soon as I take the USB cable out, it seems to completely forget that it's been on charge and just die. This meant that I couldn't use it wirelessly, which was one of the keyboard's main selling points: it was a rare example of a mechanical keyboard that was also wireless. It didn't used to do this.

For a while, I just thought the battery was dead. Then I remembered that I'd uninstalled the Razer software a while back, because a shonky update process had made it cause my computer to pitch a shitfit and completely lock up for ages. So, out of curiosity, today I reinstalled the Razer software, plugged in the keyboard to charge and went off to play Xenoblade Chronicles for a couple of hours.

I am now typing this with the keyboard's USB cable unplugged, and the battery reading 100%. So it was the fucking software. My keyboard officially will not charge its battery unless you have Razer's stupid software installed.

Thankfully, they seem to have fixed whatever the locking-up issue was when I uninstalled it, so it's not a huge inconvenience to have it installed again. But it's pretty annoying to have spent several months thinking that my keyboard was broken in some way, or that it needed a new battery, only to discover that a completely arbitrary piece of software was preventing my keyboard from doing something that, you'd think, it should be able to do without any software intervention whatsoever. I mean, USB charging is a fundamental part of most of our tech these days, and most pieces of tech can charge without a piece of software running. You just plug them into a wall, the device goes "ooh, there's power coming in, I should route that to the battery" and that's that.

But no. Not for Razer, apparently, and I suspect there's other manufacturers who do the same thing, too. Logitech, for example, pissed people off when they tried to install some weird AI software into people's mouse drivers a while back, and the general enshittification of tech is, at this point, extremely well documented — though the number of people actually doing something about it, or even acknowledging that it's a problem, is rather slimmer than it perhaps should be.

Now, I'm not saying that my £150 keyboard not charging when its software isn't installed is really making my life significantly worse in the same way that Facebook and Instagram's abusive practices are systematically destroying the mental wellbeing of individuals in the name of perpetual corporate growth, but it's still symptomatic of the age we're living in. 20 years ago, if I had a wireless thing with a rechargeable battery, I could just plug it in and be safe in the knowledge that it would, y'know, charge. Today, apparently, that is not the case. And that seems stupid. Really stupid.

But I guess that's the world we live in now. So, for now at least, we just have to live with the stupidity.

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#oneaday Day 226: I wish the TikTok ban was worldwide

I fucking hate TikTok, and while I know there are all sort of "considerations" about the American ban of it that is happening right now — and which people seem to think Trump will overturn when he takes office — you are never going to convince me that it was a good thing for humanity as a whole. I feel like it is an app which has actively made the world more stupid, less inclined to pay attention to things and generally quite a bit shitter.

As an autistic person, I actively despise the idea of an app where a significant number of videos are either someone shouting directly "at" me, or outright sensory overload. Hell, a whole term was coined to describe the proliferation of these sensory overload videos, and that term is "sludge content". That is not something we should be celebrating.

A common pro-TikTok argument that people make is that "some people were reliant on it for income". If your sole employable skill is yelling incoherently into a camera, you should probably spend some time working on employable skills other than yelling incoherently into a camera. If you were using TikTok as a means of selling things, you should perhaps consider selling your things via a platform you actually have control over, like people had been doing for years before TikTok, and like people will continue to do for years from hereon. And if you really want to make money from videos, there are plenty of other means of doing so.

But then there's also the fact that people place a vast overemphasis on "monetising their content" online these days anyway. It's one of the major factors in the gradual degradation of social media as an actual means of socialising over the last decade and a half. A significant proportion of users are no longer interested in having conversations — you know, being social — on social media these days. Instead, they want to "create content" for others to "consume". How about you stop seeing dollar signs in everything you do and just do something because it's enjoyable, and because you might make some friends in the process? No?

"But you can watch sexy girls dancing on TikTok!" Brother, I'm not sure how to tell you this, but there are myriad ways to watch sexy girls dancing — and doing a lot more than that — on the Internet, and there has been pretty much since its inception. If your argument for Why TikTok is Good, Actually is that you can mindlessly dribble over something that makes your peepee hard, you are not providing a convincing argument.

"But what about BookTok?" What about all the myriad book-centric blogs that have been destroyed by the collective destruction of the world's attention span via shit like TikTok and YouTube Shorts? What about the fact that your average TikTok user almost certainly doesn't have the patience or brain power to sit down and read a book if they won't read a blog post? What about the fact that authors don't want to have to waste their fucking time yelling at their phone camera when they would much rather be writing something worthwhile?

TikTok is shit, and while I see and appreciate the arguments against the US banning it, I will be shedding precisely zero tears for it. It is one of the absolute worst examples of the enshittification of the modern Internet and people in general, and nothing you can say will ever make me change my mind on that fact. I just wish the fucking thing would go away here, too.

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