This week, I wrote, "we're nowhere near a place where bots can steal your job, we're certainly at the point where your boss can be suckered into firing you and replacing you with a bot that fails at doing your job":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/15/passive-income-brainworms/#four-hour-work-week

Score one for team deeply unserious. The multinational delivery company #DPD fired its support staff and replaced them with a chatbot.

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The chatbot can't tell you where your parcels are, but it can be prompt-injected into coming up with profane poems about how badly DPD sucks:

https://twitter.com/ashbeauchamp/status/1748034519104450874

> There once was a chatbot named DPD,
> Who was useless at providing help.
> It could not track parcels,
> Or give information on delivery dates,
> And it could not even tell you when your driver would arrive.

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> DPD was a waste of time,
> And a customer's worst nightmare.
> It was so bad,
> That people would rather call the depot directly,
> Than deal with the useless chatbot.

> One day, DPD was finally shut down,
> And everyone rejoiced.
> Finally, they could get the help they needed,
> From a real person who knew what they were doing.

This is...the *opposite* of an #AIHallucination? It's *AI clarity*.

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As with all #botshit, this kind of AI self-negging is funny and fresh the first time you see it, but just wait until 3,000 people have published their own versions to your social feed. AI novelty regresses to the mean *damn* quickly.

The old, good web, by contrast, was full of enduring surprises, as the world's weirdest and most delightful mutants filled the early web with every possible variation on every possible interest, expression, argument, and gag.

27/

Now, you can search the old, good web with Old'aVista, an #Altavista lookalike that searches old pages from "personal websites that used to be hosted on services like Geocities, Angelfire, AOL, Xoom and so on," all ganked from the #InternetArchive:

http://oldavista.com/

I miss the old, good internet and the way it let weirdos find each other and get seriously weird with one another.

28/

I was Roger's neighbour for a decade. He died last year, and I miss him all the time. I was in Toronto in December and saw a few of his last pieces being sold in galleries and I was just *skewered* on the knowledge that I'd never see him again, never visit his workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/16/klockwerks/#craphound

A reader just sent this five-year-old mini documentary about Roger, shot in his *wonderful* workshop. Watching it made me happy and sad and then happy again:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eqMGomM8yF8

30/

The old, good internet was so great. It was a place where every kind of passion could live. It was a real testament to the power of geeking out together, no matter how often the suits demand that we "stop talking to each other and start buying things":

https://catvalente.substack.com/p/stop-talking-to-each-other-and-start

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The world is full of people with weird passions and I love them all, mostly. Learning about #DonBolles's collection of decades' worth of lost pet posters was a moment of pure joy (I just wish more of it was online):

https://ameliatait.substack.com/p/the-man-who-collects-lost-pet-posters

That's the future I was promised: one where every kind of freak can find every other kind of freak.

32/

Despite the nipple-deep botshit we wade through online, and the relentless cheapening of words like "innovation" and "future," there are still occasional gleams of the future I want to live in.

Like the researchers who spliced a photosynthesis gene into brewer's yeast (a fungus) and got it to photosynthesize, and to display enhanced fitness:

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(23)01744-X

33/

As #DougMuir writes on #CrookedTimber, this is pretty kooky! Fungi - the coolest of the kingdoms! - can't photosynthesize. The idea that you can just add the photosynthesis gene to a thing that can't photosynthesize and have it just kind of *work* is wild!

https://crookedtimber.org/2024/01/19/occasional-paper-purple-sun-yeast/

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