total guestbook overhaul + new blog post + etc

- Added /about/pronouns/ in leiu of something like
  a pronouns.cc profile
- New blog post about my new and improved AI
  opinions
- Moved Stop Using Chromium to an actual blog post
  page
- Blog posts now have previous and next buttons
- New /blog/ background
- Moved status.cafe widget from /blog/ to landing
  page
- Total overhaul of guestbook:
  - Merged guestbook and blog comment section code
  - Beefed up bot protection
  - Added a word filter
  - Added a property to entries to facilitate
    holding comments for review and approving or
    denying them manually (The interface for this
    is somewhere else)
  - IP address from which a post originates is now
    tracked in order to IP ban malicious actors
- Various new buttons
- Updated /greenhouse/
- The site is now a member of the No AI Webring
- a couple minor CSS fixes

1 files changed, 100 insertions, 0 deletions

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+It's no secret that I'm generally not very fond of the Silicon Valley tech hype cycle we currently find ourselves in — in fact I've [posted](/blog/posts/ai_art/) about my feelings on "AI" technology before, and I think that post still mostly holds up, but having had circa 15 months since to ruminate about it and watch this shitshow pan out, my opinions on the matter have gotten substantially more nuanced, and I'd like to formally express them, ideally in a more level-headed way than my first go, so here's that.
+
+## The still-bad
+
+The primary product being inescapably pushed on us, generative AI (oft shortened to GenAI, and henceforth referred to here as genai<sup id="n1r"><a href="#n1">1</a></sup>), remains pretty self-evidently worthless, surprising nobody less than me.
+
+For one, the output quality of LLM chatbots and such things in particular [doesn't seem](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/chatgpt-blows-mapmaking-101) [to have](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15840) [meaninfully changed](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/)[.](https://calcgpt.io/) In fact, in some cases it's [gotten worse](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/chatgpts-hallucination-problem-is-getting-worse-according-to-openais-own-tests-and-nobody-understands-why/). Really, I don't see how it could ever improve &mdash; these are *language models*, after all, statistical models of human speech that "AI" vendors are trying desperately to coax into being effective proxies for actual thought. It was clear then and it's even clearer now that that's never going to work, and it would honestly be kind of sad if it wasn't so infuriating watching these giant companies still burning billions of dollars to inflict<sup id="n2r"><a href="#n2">2</a></sup> this shit on everyone in the hopes that it will.
+
+<figure class="quote">
+  <blockquote>
+    LLMs aren't intelligence they're just Markov bots that take requests
+  </blockquote>
+  <figcaption>
+    &mdash; <a href="https://isopod.zone/notes/9p7fa2ulne194ndl">me</a>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+### Ethics? What? I think we fired those guys
+
+Ethical problems also continue to abound. I'm not personally aware that [labeling practices](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/06/mercy-anita-african-workers-ai-artificial-intelligence-exploitation-feeding-machine) have gotten any better, and on top of that, poorly written, badly behaved scrapers run by popular genai vendors are now [effectively](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-this-was-essentially-a-two-week-long-ddos-attack-game-ui-database-slowdown-caused-by-openai-scraping) [DDOSing](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/10/how-openais-bot-crushed-this-seven-person-companys-web-site-like-a-ddos-attack/) [random websites](https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664) in their attempts to suck down as much data as possible for training. Many website admins, especially those running git forges, which are targeted by coding assistants like GitHub Copilot, have had to resort to countermeasures like [Anubis](https://anubis.techaro.lol/) to protect their sites from this behaviour. I've had a run-in with this activity personally, when a big spender on Alibaba Cloud slammed my [Nepenthes](https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/) instance so hard I had to [set up a custom Fail2ban jail](/blog/posts/grow_spikes/) that blocked over 300 IPs inside a day just to make its statistics endpoints reachable again.
+
+Furthermore, the environmental impact of this technology [remains really bad](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/). Electricity use alone has gotten so bad that, for example, Microsoft has had to [spin a decommissioned nuclear power plant back up](https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai) to run their datacentres. Although, some amount of proliferation and normalization of nuclear energy would be a nice little upside to this whole debacle.
+
+## The actually good
+
+The class of algorithm that "AI" as a marketing term refers to, that is to say, machine learning and neural networks, actually has some compelling use cases that we've seen crystallize over the past couple years, and I think they merit mention here.
+
+For one, machine learning-based upscaling in videogames (for example, Nvidia's DLSS, AMD's FSR, and Intel's XeSS) seems like a pretty uncomplicatedly good thing. It's stupid as hell that it's necessary, but from what I can tell this tech kind of just makes games run better with no significant downsides outside of maybe some minor visual artifacting, so I see no issue here.
+
+Genai is also kind of just the best way to make good-sounding text-to-speech and accurate speech-to-text, and it's legitimately exciting for accessibility that we've reached a point where these things can be run fully locally and offline on your device. This could be huge for things like screen readers and [auto-generated captions](https://www.pcmag.com/news/vlc-media-player-to-use-ai-to-generate-subtitles-for-videos). From what I've seen, this is the primary benefit to the incessant push for integrated "NPUs" in every new CPU.
+
+Of course, tech like this isn't the *point* of the hype cycle. Nvidia didn't become the first trillion dollar company by inventing a niche technology to make new GeForce video cards perform better in demanding games, and Microsoft isn't desperate to make "AI PCs" a thing because of the potential for better screen readers. The "AI" hype cycle is about genai supposedly having the potential to revolutionize *everything*. In five more years. And please don't ask how.
+
+## The it's-complicated
+
+LLMs are, by nature, endless fountains of grammatically-fluent drivel utterly devoid of real meaning. This makes it anywhere from unsettling to infuritating to see them used in contexts such as education, journalism, or software development<sup id="n3r"><a href="#n3">3</a></sup>, but it makes them uniquely suited to two use cases: spam, and the sort of high-verbosity, low-meaning communication that's expected of you in a professional setting &mdash; in other words, the LLM has democratized the least valuable forms of written communication in existence.
+
+Naturally the addition of more spam to the world is never a good thing, but I can't honestly begrudge anyone using an LLM to expand a sticky note's worth of information into an appropriately vacuous cover letter or work email or whatever. I might just be autistic, but I frankly believe that this kind of writing deserves to be delegated to the verbose bullshit machine if it doesn't come naturally to you, especially if employers are going to, well, employ these tools themselves to field your job application. Of course, a just world would provide no incentive to create either of these types of writing anyway.
+
+To be honest, I also struggle to find it in myself to blame students of the public school system who are using genai to cheat on essays. I could fill a full A4 sheet of paper, maybe two, in <span style="font-size: 12pt; font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;">single-spaced 12-point Calibri</span> with a rant about this, but suffice it to say that this isn't a new problem &mdash; the American style of public education has always prioritized number go up with genuine learning as a fortunate side effect, and it's not the kids' fault there's every incentive to game that system to make a fundamentally broken and hostile environment more bearable<sup id="n4r"><a href="#n4">4</a></sup>.
+
+This is a pattern I've noticed with a lot of the more infamous uses of genai products: As much as this new, horrible technology is creating new, horrible problems, it's getting just as much bad press for giving new form to existing ones: High school students were already cheating on their essays, the internet was already flooded with useless spam crowding out valuable information, and media companies of all stripes were always eager for new ways to throw their employees under the bus to reduce costs at the expense of quality.
+
+Even if completely ridding the world of genai technology was possible at this point, it wouldn't be the solution to these sorts of problems. The solution is to destroy the incentive structures that motivate this behaviour in the first place &mdash; create a school system where students don't feel the need to cheat on schoolwork, remove the profit incentive to generate spam and replace human workers with cheap, unreliable machines, etc. In other words, the real problem is capitalism.
+
+### The AI art thing
+
+Then there's the issue of "AI art". I stand by the it's-not-art-on-a-technicality argument I made before &mdash; I still don't think typing a prompt into Stable Diffusion and then taking the output and pretending you "made" something constitutes any kind of real artistic contribution, and frankly the only worthwhile artistic statements I've seen made using these tools have been statements *about* genai. I also tend to find the aesthetics of the output of genai thoroughly repulsive in general. The silver lining here is that blatant use of genai to make, say, game assets or promotional art is usually a pretty damn good indicator that whatever the slop is being poured on was never worth your time to begin with.
+
+That said, I'm unsure at this point how to feel about the whole "art theft" business. I don't begrudge artists using tools like [Glaze](https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/) to try to prevent genai models from using their art or replicating their styles without permission &mdash; I certainly wouldn't be thrilled if someone did that with my work &mdash; but also, like, I'm generally very anti-copyright, and I struggle to come up with an internally consistent ethical framework that excludes genai from that sentiment. Certainly tightening copyright law to restrict what genai vendors who already violate it can do is a bad idea. This is one dilemma that I'll admit I don't have a good answer for.
+
+Let's get one thing straight, however: If you use genai to generate memes or, like, bespoke profile pictures or whatever, I think you are a coward and a fool who will not survive the winter.
+
+<figure class="quote">
+  <blockquote>
+    mass art theft and environmental destruction are one thing but i draw the line at using ai image generators to trick me into thinking the world contains slightly more whimsy than it actually does
+  </blockquote>
+  <figcaption>
+    &mdash; <a href="https://isopod.zone/notes/a00ro9k8hv">me</a>
+  </figcaption>
+</figure>
+
+## They did a conclusion on this one
+
+Here's hoping this one comes off as less of an unhinged rant than the last time I posted about this. This is by no means a complete compendium of every thought I've had about genai, but it is everything I think I have something substantial to say about. For example, the whole concept of deepfakes is pretty horrifying, but I don't have anything to add to that conversation beyond gesturing vaguely at it and going like "wow, that's pretty fucked up, huh?".
+
+It's clear at this point that genai is here to stay in at least *some* capacity, but I'd be shocked if the push for unsolicited LLM chatbots and image generators in everything was able to sustain itself for much longer. I personally can't wait for a year or two from now when someone finds yet another novel way to make their Nvidia GPU draw 500 watts for hours on end and it gets marketed as Quantum Computing&trade; or some shit.
+
+---
+
+## Further reading
+
+Linked above:
+
+- [My previous writing on this topic](/blog/posts/ai_art/)
+- [ChatGPU Blows Mapmaking 101](https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/chatgpt-blows-mapmaking-101)
+- [Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2502.15840)
+- [My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane](https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1krttqo/my_new_hobby_watching_ai_slowly_drive_microsoft/)
+- [ChatGPT's hallucination problem is getting worse according to OpenAI's own tests and nobody understands why](https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/chatgpts-hallucination-problem-is-getting-worse-according-to-openais-own-tests-and-nobody-understands-why/)
+- [We did the math on AI’s energy footprint. Here’s the story you haven’t heard.](https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-footprint-big-tech/)
+- [Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers](https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai)
+- [Meet Mercy and Anita – the African workers driving the AI revolution, for just over a dollar an hour](https://www.theguardian.com/technology/article/2024/jul/06/mercy-anita-african-workers-ai-artificial-intelligence-exploitation-feeding-machine)
+- ['This was essentially a two-week long DDoS attack': Game UI Database slowdown caused by relentless OpenAI scraping](https://www.gamedeveloper.com/business/-this-was-essentially-a-two-week-long-ddos-attack-game-ui-database-slowdown-caused-by-openai-scraping)
+- [How OpenAI’s bot crushed this seven-person company’s website ‘like a DDoS attack’](https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/10/how-openais-bot-crushed-this-seven-person-companys-web-site-like-a-ddos-attack/)
+- [LWN maintainer attributing recent slowdowns to "beyond unsustainable" levels of AI traffic](https://social.kernel.org/notice/AqJkUigsjad3gQc664)
+- [Anubis](https://anubis.techaro.lol/)
+- [Nepenthes](https://zadzmo.org/code/nepenthes/)
+- [Fighting LLM Scrapers With Nepenthes And Fail2Ban](https://isopod.cool/blog/posts/grow_spikes/)
+- [VLC Media Player to Use AI to Generate Subtitles for Videos](https://www.pcmag.com/news/vlc-media-player-to-use-ai-to-generate-subtitles-for-videos)
+- [Glaze](https://glaze.cs.uchicago.edu/)
+
+---
+
+<p id="n1"><a href="#n1r">1</a>. Pronounced "gen-eye", with the "G" sound from "graphics". This is to annoy people who think genai is cool.</p>
+
+<p id="n2"><a href="#n2r">2</a>. In particular, Microsoft's insistence on this garbage is <span style="color: yellow;">Pissing</span> me off. I'm genuinely considering getting a Macbook for some upcoming Adobe-requiring classes just to avoid Copilot/Recall/whatever nonsense they come up with next.</p>
+
+<p id="n3"><a href="#n3r">3</a>. If you unironically self-identify as a "vibe coder" I'm coming to your house and confiscating every internet-capable device you own. Hand over the MacBook, dipshit, you've lost your computer priveleges until you're ready to develop a working understanding of how the technology you're working with professionally actually functions.</p>
+
+<p id="n4"><a href="#n4r">4</a>. That said, this doesn't excuse <em>post-secondary</em> students who do this. You're paying ungodly money to be here and you're outsourcing the learning you're paying to do to a machine? What's wrong with you? Are you stupid?</p>
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