Worst hypothesis, even if counting just to 8, you’re still using a single hand, so it’s an improvement over counting to 5 with fingers. Couple it with the other hand and you’re counting up to 64.

There’s also the Chisanbop method @hesh@quokk.au mentioned, for that your unbending joint shouldn’t be an issue, and it allows you to count to 9 with a single hand (99 with both).

This is cute but not practical.

Memorising all 2^n for 0≥n≥10 (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1024) is reasonable, but you’ll need to add a lot of them at the same time to convert the counting in your hands to a base 10 number (that’ll use elsewhere). Stuff like 256+128+64+8+2+1; it isn’t difficult but laborious, you know?

Plus the gestures can be sometimes awkward, depending on how flexible your hand is. For example, at least for me it’s a bit tricky to lift the ring finger up without either the middle or the pink.

I have a different strategy to count large numbers by hand. It’s up to 12 with one hand, 144 with both. But it feels comfortable, and rather intuitive:

Put the tip of your thumb on the indicated places to count 1, 2, 3… 12. With one hand; if you want to count past 12, use the other hand to count dozens (12, 24, 36… 144).

Provided you memorised the multiplication table for 12, for any given number you’ll perform at most a single addition, like 84+7 or similar.

(I have a suspicion the Sumerians counted this way with one hand, and one finger per dozen with the other. That’s why a lot of their units 5*12=60 as a basis.)

I wonder if this isn’t the result of natural selection. As in: mosquitoes that are better at detecting humans have better odds of reproduction than the ones focusing on different prey. Perhaps it’s attraction towards some molecules humans release into the air, or even to night lights.

Besides flat out refusing their “cloud” services, what else can we [in the short term, without too much co-ordination being necessary; unlike, you know, a revolution] do to foil their plans?

…actually screw that. We need a revolution. Now. Seize the means of computation.

Call me paranoid, but:

What if all this babble about AI is a way to force hardware demand thus prices up, so the average person cannot pay for a half-decent machine?

If I got this right, what most people call “slop” is mass-produced and low quality. Following that definition you could have human-made slop, but it’s less like a low quality meme and more like corporate “art”. Some however seem to be using it exclusively for AI generated content, so for those “human-made slop” would be an oxymoron.

Human reviewing is not directly related to that. Only as far as a human to be expected to remove really junky output, and only let decent stuff in.

Vibe coding actually implies the opposite: you don’t check the output. You tell the bot what you want, it outputs some code, you test that code without checking it, then you ask the bot for further modifications. IMO it’s really bad, worse than what a non-programmer (like me) outputs.

so then is responsibly-trained output of AI, like using DeepSeek on a personal machine where someone pays for their own electricity, okay?

That’ll depend on the person. In my opinion, AI usage is mostly okay if:

• you don’t do it willy-nilly. Even if you pay for the energy, it still contributes with global warming and resources consumption. Plus supply x demand effects.
• you’re manually reviewing the output, or its accuracy isn’t a concern. For example: it’s prolly OK to ask it to give you a summary of a text you wouldn’t otherwise, but if you’re doing using it to decide if someone is[n’t] allowed in a community then it’s probably not OK.
• you’re taking responsibility for the output. No “I didn’t do it, the AI did it!”.
• the model was responsibly trained and weighted, in a way that takes artist/author consent into account and there’s at least some effort into avoiding harmful output.

conversely, what about stealing memes on the internet and sharing those without attribution as to the source

Key differences: a meme is typically made to be shared, without too many expectations of recognition, people sharing it will likely do it for free, and memes in general take relatively low effort to generate. While the content typically fed into those models is often important for the author/artist, takes a lot more effort to generate, and the people feeding those models typically expect to be paid for them.

Even then note a lot of people hate memes for a reason rather similar to AI output, “it takes space of more interesting stuff”. That’s related to your point #6, labelling makes it a non-issue for people who’d rather avoid consuming AI output as content.

piracy

It’s less about intent and more about effect. A pirated copy typically benefits the pirate by a lot, while it only harms the author by a wee bit.

Note I don’t consider piracy as “theft” or “stealing”, but something else. It’s illegal, but not always immoral.

Even for the one just in YT, people automatically say “eeew” if it’s AI-generated, even if not slop.

This now makes me curious: does the term “slop” apply beyond text, images, and videos? I thought “ai” coding was called “vibe-coding” rather than slop?

I think it could. I only recall seeing it for media, but the meaning fits AI code well. Specially dysfunctional code outputted in large quantities.

“Vibe coding” simply lacks that negative connotation, it’s what the people making it call it.

I think the negative reaction is composed of multiple factors coming together:

• slop (as you said),
• people using the slop to add noise to the internet,
• harmful output (not talking about the paperclip problem; think on Grok sexualising minors, or ChatGPT fuelling mental issues)
• businesses shoving those models everywhere and being extra pushy about them,
• environmental and geopolitical issues,
• authorship and intellectual property issues,
• “training” being made with no regards to consent of the creators,
• all that “you’re now obsolete garbage! Soon we’ll be able to trash you and replace you with AI!” bzzz-bzzz-bzzz,
• supply and demand of hardware parts…

…phew. All of that while disingenuous people — like Huang, Altman or Nadella — feign ignorance on why people complain about it and pretend it’s a bunch of primitives backslashing against “the future”.

You’d need to fix a lot of those to make people like AI. Not just the slop.

(subtitle) Won’t somebody think of the CEOs?
(ending sentence) It’s unlikely that the negativity is going to go away because it hurts a few executives’ feelings.

I bloody love the mockery sandwich. Also:

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently complained that the conversation around AI needs to move beyond “slop.”
As a reminder, it’s now estimated that more than 20% of YouTube’s feed can be defined as slop,

Kind of a damn good way to convey “yeah, just ignore Nadella”.

… …then I ruined your joke. Sorry.

The tablet to Ea-nāṣir, right? That’s from Ur (modern Iraq), and at least a century older, perhaps four.

(The tablet to Ea-nāṣir was dated from 1750 BCE. I’m not sure on the exact date of the tablet in the OP, but the site ranges from 1200 to 1650 BCE.)

As Drusas said, it’s an Indo-European language. From a rather distant branch of the family, called Anatolian:

The main language of the tablet (Hittite) is also Anatolian.

I have a better idea: asking medical advice from 4chan. It’s typically “you got AIDS, chop your dick off”.

…of course I’m joking. Serious now, even if everything goes well (and you don’t die because of the medical “advice” from the bot output), this is still a shitty idea. Medical records are private matter, “Open” “A” “I” gives no fucks about your privacy, they will sell your data to advertisers and governments.

The name shall be C.I.C.A.D.A.; it’s an acronym for “C.I.C.A.D.A. Is Cicadas, Aggregated Doing Art”. Then you put a number for the tier of C.I.C.A.D.A. you got: 0 is an empty organic shell, 1 is what the artist did just now, 2 is what I proposed, 3+ is madness.

He should make 2k of those, and then glue them together into an even bigger cicada.

Serious now, this is fucking cool.

If she is/was alive, what if she was the one vibe coding the AI? Then you’d get Ai Ai AI AI Ai Ai.

…this is quickly becoming buffalo⁸ tiers of silly.

You’re hired!

I think UnfortunateShort phrased it well; what’s bugging me is not the present assessment, but the “doomsaying”.

Fairly certain we will be just fine in the long run.

I do think so, too. I’m way more worried about Latin America in this regard, because 1) it’s my turf, and 2) we’ve been consistently backwards, and local governments love to play along the three stooges, the only difference is which one.

You know what, I got a brilliant idea:

See, the chimp in my avatar is called Ai Ai. Was? I don’t know if she’s still alive; last news I could find about her are from 2005, when she stopped smoking. Anyway, what if I had artificial intelligence to create a bunch of her pictures, and sold them as NFT? The “AI Ai Ai collection”, or Ai³ for short. I wouldn’t do this to scam a bunch of suckers, noooooo; I’d do it because you can get rich, if you “invest” into my collection: buy an Ai³ NFT now, for just 100 euros. Then resell it for a thousand euros, for mad profitz!!!

[…I’m obviously joking. C’mon, this summer is easily getting past 30°C, in a city where it used to snow once in a blue moon. I definitively don’t want to feed the global warming further with dumb crap like this.]

Disclaimer: I’m neither from the EU nor USA. I’m commenting on this as a random observer.

Europe is so far behind the US in digital infrastructure it has “lost the internet”, a top European cyber enforcer has warned. // […] it was “currently impossible” to store data fully in Europe […] // “We’ve lost the whole cloud. We have lost the internet, let’s be honest,” De Bruycker said. “If I want my information 100 per cent in the EU . . . keep on dreaming,” he added. “You’re setting an objective that is not realistic.”

There’s an implicit nirvana fallacy there: that you either need to keep the data 100% within the EU, or it’s pointless to even try (“we’ve lost”). That’s far from true; the more of your data is kept locally, the safer you are against rogue states (like China, USA, or Russia). A small victory might not be enough, but it’s certainly not a loss.

Also note “currently impossible” does not mean “impossible forever”.

The Belgian official warned that Europe’s cyber defences depended on the co-operation of private companies, most of which are American. “In cyber space, everything is commercial. Everything is privately owned,” he said.

I genuinely do not see why this couldn’t change; in other words, why EU-based cybersec organisations could not be founded and funded by the local governments.

But Europe was missing out on crucial new technologies, which are being spearheaded in the US and elsewhere, he said. These include cloud computing and artificial intelligence — both vital for defending European countries against cyber attacks.

This argument is so shitty that I’m now wondering if Bruycker has vested interests. (Or alternatively, that the article is butchering what Bruycker said so bad that it’s putting words in his mouth. I don’t know.)

I’d really, really like to see him exploring 1) why those two things are vital, and 2) why the EU countries could not develop them at home.

Europe needed to build its own capabilities to strengthen innovation and security, said De Bruycker, adding that legislation such as the EU’s AI Act, which regulates the development of the fast-developing technology, was “blocking” innovation.

He suggested that EU governments should support private initiatives to build scale in areas such as cloud computing or digital identification technologies.

In the case there’s some vested interest going on, this is the first place to look for it. Does this guy have any connection with the American mafia?

After Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the US hyperscalers were crucial in helping salvage data from Russian attacks, he said.

That sounds a lot like whataboutism, plus trying to put a rogue state (USA) in a more favourable light because of its fights against another rogue state (the Russian Federation). A plague in both houses.