Excrubulent
@excrubulent.bsky.social
140 followers 210 following 550 posts
sometimes i: play games on my television make games for your television make objects with my hand fingers make voices with my breathe holes any/all https://linktr.ee/excrubulent
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excrubulent.bsky.social
Seriously if you're not aware of the fediverse you should take a look around, it is fully functional. The thing that really sold me on it is that it's largely a nazi-free space. It turns out that with decentralised moderation we would very quickly ban Jesse Singal and Link would be fine.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Breaking down long chains into easily digestible parts, I think that works, yeah. Plus fermented food is basically always better. (for anyone else like me who didn't really get the metaphor at first)
excrubulent.bsky.social
Email is a success story, there isn't a monopoly on the space, people self-host it all the time. Mastodon works just fine too. Sorry, but I think this is simply a solved problem. Bluesky adds a barrier by forcing all hosters to carry all traffic. That's an engineered problem, not an inherent one.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Now there are a lot of people who will be disenfranchised with the concept but only because they were conned. I would love to see an adversarial take on the ATProtocol concept that finds a way to disaggregate the feed and turn it into a decentralised system. Maybe a selective import of the feed, idk
excrubulent.bsky.social
If you look at how they went about it, it's clear they built something that was technically Decentralised️TM but practically too expensive to host, so they traded in the currency of the concept in order to, effectively, build another walled garden.
excrubulent.bsky.social
And in both cases the answer is the power of the false dichotomy and the immense propaganda value of All The Weirdos Who Disagree With Us.
excrubulent.bsky.social
A friend having her 4th kid said the nurses thought she looked too calm to be ready to deliver, so she was put in an observation room, and she was like EXCUSE ME I WILL HAVE A BABY ALL OVER THIS ROOM. Once they saw her dilation they agreed and moved her to an actual delivery room.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Also, if anyone read the alt text, that's a real thing I experience. AI images give me the acrid smell of cheap soft-plastic mcdonalds toys, or that one time we blew up a 110v CRT by plugging it into 240v mains power. That magic smoke smell. It's such an awful taste in my mouth.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Like it's almost disappointing that they're not riding this bandwagon off the cliff. They're literally trying to keep the profits from the AI bubble going but they themselves are quietly stepping off and distancing themselves from it.
excrubulent.bsky.social
This one looked like it could have been AI at first glance, but if you inspect the page source and drill down to the image, it's a city photo mirrored and colour-shifted to look more abstract. Even for something this basic they didn't use AI.
An image of a book about a marketing and sales platform with a photo of a city that has been mirrored and overlaid on itself to create an abstract skyline. It's really generic, but hey, if someone paid me probably too much money to sell the idea of generic business product I don't think I could come up with better slop, myself.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Humble Bundle's latest AI-based bundle has ditched the generated promo images of their previous bundle and has instead gone with the most generic tech book covers in history. These people wrote the book on AI for marketing and they know they can't use it in their marketing.
Several incredibly bland tech book covers, most notably "Machine Learning and Generative AI for Marketing" and "The AI Value Playbook". The "art" is not worth describing. It's mostly incredibly boring abstract lines, one or two are suggestive of the idea of architecture and one is just a photo of cable cars, I suppose to invoke the idea of "ascent". It is slop, probably made by humans, but slop nontheless. At least none of these images immediately make me smell cheap 80s mcdonalds toy plastic offgassing or burning circuitboards, which is the best way I can describe the experience of looking at AI slop images.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Similar to when the boss at a startup I worked at bitched to us about the consultant they fired for questioning their partner's behaviour.

I quit over their partners's behaviour a couple of months later, followed shortly by their business partner. Some people can't be helped.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Safety. I can visually clear the spot and ensure there aren't children hiding anywhere just before I reverse. When I back out, I've been sitting in the car for several seconds at least, and the cars either side form blind corners. I formed this habit before I installed a backup camera.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Images of levelled cities and children living in tents terrified and starving don't prompt these people to sympathise or god-forbid empathise. They foster more contempt the more they see the suffering, because they believe in a just world. If someone looks bad to them, they must be bad.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Actually look at Ben Shapiro's racist anti-Palestinian tweets talking about living in open sewage. I think those vibes are a large part of it. It's easy for him to hate them because he imagines them as stinky.
excrubulent.bsky.social
I don't know much about US conservatives specifically, but my experience with these things is that there isn't a coherent ideology or clear A to B, it's vibes. It's pro-rich-white-military anti-poor-brown-people vibes. It's easy for them to identify their side.
excrubulent.bsky.social
I mean the fact that you can anticipate it and make it look like you're casting a spell on them is actually hilarious.

Like even with that context they still look like a bunch of fucking robots.
excrubulent.bsky.social
I know it's a typo but I prefer to imagine that an elevator company implemented necromancy for accessibility reasons.
excrubulent.bsky.social
I'm definitely not saying that anti-robot slurs are hate crimes, but I will say that when someone in a marginalised group sees you saying "clanker" or "wireback", some of them will wonder how easy those words fit in your mouth, and you might want to think about that.
excrubulent.bsky.social
Fascists are recruited through that exact combination of anger & fear. They're frustrated and powerless, and they're quick to turn those feelings on the most vulnerable because that's a hell of a lot easier than confronting the powerful people who are actually to blame.
excrubulent.bsky.social
That is a whole new level of "justice delayed is justice denied".
excrubulent.bsky.social
I've not heard anyone talk about how this happened, but my personal theory is that LLMs have only learned to trick people into thinking they're helpful, because that's a lot easier than actually being helpful.

arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/s...
Study finds AI tools made open source software developers 19 percent slower
Coders spent more time prompting and reviewing AI generations than they saved on coding.
arstechnica.com