happy on purpose

Backlash against 2010's hustle culture? Backlash against 2000's "girls can do anything" messaging? I don't know. But why are the AI advertisements all about how you forgot your wife's birthday or your boss's deadline and the AI saves you? Why is the ideal young-20s woman a frail little girl who lives on her boyfriend's income and makes him lattes while she does nothing all day? Even the sports-betting craze feels like it reskinned the "savvy young day-trader who's skilled at reading the market" to "blind and dumb luck might make you a millionaire so you should try."

And it feels like there's something here because like--yeah AI is being advertised as a functionality of convenience, but so have things like food delivery apps. And I swear my best recollection of food delivery app advertisements used to be like, "busy mom comes home from work and finds the kids messed up dinner--oh well, at least there's doordash!" Like the key target is not someone lazy or useless, they're just busy as hell and won't this convenience service we offer help them a bit?

The instagram girlies were running businesses in the 2010's--most of them scammy bullshit I wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole--but the aesthetic of being busy, hustling, operating with drive and passion, was in. The men were founding start-up companies and calling themselves entrepreneurs--again, scammy, 10 foot pole, etc. But the aesthetic of doing something and being capable was in vogue.

Also, for those reblogging, if you have the capacity to put your money where your mouth is, please do (also, please actually say you did so in tags, not for pats on the back, but to encourage a donation train of followers matching donations). Here are five ideas of where to put it.

Adriana and Chance Smith’s family is still actively needing and raising funds as they face medical debt.

My dear friend Esraa/Israa is an expectant mother (due in a month) living in Gaza who needs support (EXTREMELY TIME SENSITIVE)

SisterSong, an organization dedicated to addressing reproductive justice and health with a central focus on racial equity

Indigenous Women Rising, an organization that pushes for reproductive soveirgnty

a huge amount of code is "open source" - which means the code is fully available for anyone to see and, generally, anyone is free to contribute to the code project

all contributions of course go through review by the code owners. but it is generally good grace and good form to allow other well-meaning internet strangers to contribute to your project

if you are, perhaps, VERY nice, and VERY invested in the community, you might be like Scott Shambaugh here, who has intentionally earmarked some low-hanging fruit for newbie contributors to practice and get their feet wet

like I cannot overstate this is an immediate green flag, to me, that Scott WANTS to foster community learning.

now

Like. W. Win. Based. Good response Scott.

And this was in fact the screenshot I saw first, and I thought I was looking at a post made by a human who was mad that their AI coding bot pet project was being shut out from reviews.

But no. The bot itself wrote and posted this... The bot did this.

This article was fully and autonomously written by the bot...

It's claiming discrimination...

It's a bot.

It's AI.

This is not a real person.

An AI Agent Published a Hit Piece on Me – The Shamblog

I’ve talked to several reporters, and quite a few news outlets have covered the story. Ars Technica wasn’t one of the ones that reached out to me, but I especially thought this piece from them was interesting (since taken down – here’s the archive link). They had some nice quotes from my blog post explaining what was going on. The problem is that these quotes were not written by me, never existed, and appear to be AI hallucinations themselves. This blog you’re on right now is set up to block AI agents from scraping it (I actually spent some time yesterday trying to disable that but couldn’t figure out how). My guess is that the authors asked ChatGPT or similar to either go grab quotes or write the article wholesale. When it couldn’t access the page it generated these plausible quotes instead, and no fact check was performed. I won’t name the authors here. Ars, please issue a correction and an explanation of what happened.

A news outlet did an article about this, used AI for the articles, and included hallucinated quotes from Scott that Scott never said.

but the funniest part of this is not that they were debating the exile of a man who has been dead for over 500 years.