Oh, and the Earthworm Jim cartoon was really funny! It kind of rests these days in the shadow of the much more popular Freakazoid and The Tick, but it deserves to be rewatched now.

The Adventures of Teddy Ruxpin had surprisingly good animation and writing.

In the early 80s there was a weird cartoon called Pandamonium, about three pandas who could merge together to make some kind of superpanda. They traveled the world with a couple of humans trying to protect it from an evil alien called Montragor. It was an early production of Marvel Animation and little of it survives online now.

Saturday Supercade adapted arcade games (and also Pitfall) into short cartoon episodes. It featured the first cartoon version of Mario and Donkey Kong, long before any others. Pitfall’s supporting characters Rhonda and Quickclaw made appearances in the Pitfall II: Lost Caverns game.

The Real Ghostbusters wasn’t really obscure, but J. Michael Straczynski wrote for it, and he wrote an episode involving Cthulhu. (He also was story editor on He-Man, and penned the episode it was revealed that Teela was The Sorceress’s daughter.)

There are a number of cartoons that Cartoon Network hyped up then just kind of forgot about: Mike, Lu and Og, Sheep in the Big City and Whatever Happened to Robot Jones are three in particular.

Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings

A rule of thumb I use is how desperate the software is to tell you the weather even when you never asked for it or even set it up to report it.

I have an acquaintance (not sure if qualifies as a friend) who made news for getting fired for, when they were ill, asking an AI to get a quote out of an article for them, which it just out-and-out made up and got them fired. They aren’t stupid, but maybe a bit too trusting. The world lambasted them, which is a huge shame because they do really good work. One strike, you’re out.

So I am not unsympathetic to people who get, in essence, betrayed by AI. (not literally so, because AI is not a person) But yes I think people should be very careful, more careful they they’re being now certainly.

They also should be ready for if it all falls apart, as training costs increase and becomes harder. Already websites like IMDB are putting CAPTCHAs on their site just to browse it. It used to be an accommodating site to scripts that used it to gather information automatically, but those days seem to be over now. Expect to see that more and more, and in the process, the web becomes that much more annoying to use for plain old human readers too.

I could be really cruel right now, I could point out to people how this is chickens coming home to roost, how it’s always been grossly subsidized and underpriced, how the game was always getting users, companies, the country, the whole damn world hooked on these slop machines and then once they’re reliant on them to jack up the price hugely. I could be really mean about this, I could lord it over people, I could point out how they’ve been dupes this whole time and in the process traitors to all of humanity.

I could. i think I will.

Project Gutenberg predates the internet. I still remember how their goal was to give away one trillion ebooks.

Project Gutenberg is still around, so I won’t say this is an example of the internet getting worse. But I loathe how it’s come to focus on damnable social media like there’s nothing else of worth out there. Social media, among other things, filled the air with noise that starved many worthwhile projects of attention.

On of Eyezmaze made the Grow games, which are currently still playable here: https://www.eyezmaze.com/

Ferry Halim made Orisinal, a website full of simple and relaxing Flash games that lives again now through various means, I think a combination of HTML5 conversion and Ruffle: https://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/

26-year-old image blog Everlasting Blort: https://blort.meepzorp.com/

The venerable and unexplainable Superbad: https://www.superbad.com/

Ancient wiki-style writing site Everything, older than Wikipedia: https://everything2.com/

The “Earth Edition” of the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: https://h2g2.com/

Could also try OpenTabletDriver in case it’ll get it to work: https://opentabletdriver.net/

Find everyone in my life who has money issues and give them each a million.

Thank you!

Don’t I feel like a fool for trying to give you the benefit of the doubt.

“Ever heard of skills,” wow thanks for beginning with a dismissive statement that implies all of this you’re saying is not only true but obvious. This is not the way to respond to people with strong objections.

Your response is really unimpressive. My point is that LLM training, as it now stands, doesn’t seem like it can possibly adapt to an internet that isn’t full of free information ripe for the taking. If people come to rely on LLMs, how will they get the information to keep up with further advancements in, well, anything?

Because it’s nice, and if you ate it first you wouldn’t want to have as much of the healthy stuff that came before. Not everything has to have an objective purpose. Nice things are nice.

Assuming that’s true, and that’s a BIG assumption… What makes you think that would matter? AI has no interiority; it isn’t a thinking blob, it’s a text generator. Think of it as a fancy Markov chain.

Even if it were true, where in the chain do new principles, new techniques, new concepts enter into it? All these forms of generative AI can do is regurgitate what’s been fed into it. The worst thing you can train an AI from is AI-generated output.

It varies.

I often give the example of HP Lovecraft. I’m a big fan of his stories and the Cthulhu Mythos. But it remains that he was a huge racist. How do I reconcile the two?

First, an author’s works are separate from the author themselves. Second, in Lovecraft’s case, he was a product of his time and upbringing. And third, and importantly in his case: he’s dead. He has no ability to change beyond his passing in the 1930s. People can and do change all the time. If Lovecraft were around today he might have become to most left-leaning person in the world, but he never had that chance. There were indications, late in life, that he might well have changed.

But, he didn’t. It remains that he was a racist in life, that will never change, and because of it there will always be people uncomfortable with his work. That is understandable, and I won’t try to convince anyone that they should ignore it.