Those are my boys, Unorganized Hancock, back in the day. They’re old enough to drink now, which must make it easier to pretend to like me at family gatherings. They’re still wishing you and yours a modestly amusing generic Christmas.
Chaplin (1992) is an underrated movie. The producers lost their lobster thermidor-stained shirts on it when it bombed. Boo hoo. Robert Downey made a creditable stab at impersonating a person who was familiar to nearly everyone on the planet. Charlie Chaplin moved into that layer of the icon stratosphere where only entertainment sputniks and celebrity telstars whiz by. It must be hard to portray someone rocketing around the Van Allen belt (and suspenders) of celebrity while your name recognition is still flying at 30,000 feet.
Whatever its flaws, the movie was (is) a great encapsulation of a time and place. Movies that accomplish that reward occasional rewatching. I got to thinking the other day about Douglas Fairbanks Jr. (Kevin Kline) opining on the coming of talkies to the cinema, and what it might mean to guys like him and Chaplin. They put on greasepaint with a roller and brush, made big gestures, and relied on intertitles to deliver any dialogue.
In that scene, it’s just dawning on Fairbanks. He fears his party’s over. Chaplin poo-poos the idea. He is marinated in the milieu of the mime, and treated talkies like an internal organ someone was trying to insert in him while he was sleeping. He didn’t think he needed a second appendix full of words, and assumed his body (of work) could simply reject it.
It occurred to me that this kind of societal shift is exactly what’s happening with Chad, i.e.: Artificial Intelligence chatbots. The legions of people who have survived, and sometimes thrived in the nooks and crannies of the online world, are poo-pooing Chad in the same way Chaplin downplayed the coming of talkies. They talk endlessly online about the “slop” that Chad is gonna generate forevermore.
Merriam-Webster names ‘slop’ the word of the year
AI’s impact on our social media feeds has not gone unnoticed by one of America’s top dictionaries. Amidst the onslaught of content that has swept the web over the past 12 months, Merriam-Webster announced Sunday that its word of the year for 2025 is “slop.”
The dictionary defines the term as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.”
If you’re a low-level code monkey, or a copywriter, or any number of other textual, image, and moving picture drones, you’re whistling past the graveyard if you think Chad ain’t coming for you. Well, it’s coming for your job, anyway. It doesn’t care about you. It doesn’t care about anything. You’re not being attacked. You’re being displaced. Disappeared. It’s a shame, really. If you were really being assaulted, you could gin up a GoFundMe page and get a few dollars for your troubles. It’s hard to get the same sympathy when you’re being replaced by a Dell Optiplex on steroids. No one cares much, because they’re adapting themselves to the new reality, and you aren’t. It’s easier when it’s not your ox that’s being gored.
You see, it’s a certain type of intellectual that’s getting their ricebowl broken. They know a little javascript, or how to write an SEO-optimized 750-word piece of drivel, or photoshop the background out of a thumbnail image of a cute top for a Shopify store, or maybe look up some arcane webhosting approach on Stack Overflow. It was on their resume for some reason when they got hired, so their boss expected them to fix it, but they didn’t know how. Chad knows how.
Many of them will stamp their feet, and leave drunken Reddit comments at 2 AM about AI slop until their phones run out of charge. It’s hard to charge anything inside a van down by the river. But no matter how they complain, Chad is not going away. There is a fundamental reconfiguration of cultural and technical production going on, and who’s gonna matter from now on. The people complaining about AI slop want you to shed a tear for them, but they didn’t give a shiny shite about all the people they helped wipe out by leveraging the internet and cellphones into a living while the oldsters complained.
I got to wondering if anyone else was getting the same vibe, that a big shift is happening right in front of us, a disquieting, amorphous wave that you can either swim in or drown under, take your pick. I discovered Jean Baudrillard. Never hear of him before. I doubt I’ll hear of him much going forward. Been dead for 18 years. He was a sociologist, or philosopher, or some similar kind of big thinker. He was interested in hyperreality. Really interested in it, I gather, because he made up the term.
Hyperreality is a concept in post-structuralism that refers to the process of the evolution of notions of reality, leading to a cultural state of confusion between signs and symbols invented to stand in for reality, and direct perceptions of consensus reality. Hyperreality is seen as a condition in which, because of the compression of perceptions of reality in culture and media, what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.
So instead of droning on and on, like I do, Jean summed it up pithily:
“Intellectuals are doomed to disappear when artificial intelligence bursts on the scene, just as the heroes of silent cinema disappeared with the coming of the talkies. We are all Buster Keatons.”
— Jean Baudrillard (Cool Memories II, 1987-1990)
So Jean’s better at it than I am. He understood artificial intelligence before there was such a thing. But I’ve outlasted him, and can check up on his supposition. I’m still desolating the internet and various restaurant menus. I’m in a better position to judge what happens when “…what is generally regarded as real and what is understood as fiction are seamlessly blended together in experiences so that there is no longer any clear distinction between where one ends and the other begins.”
Where one ends and where one begins? I look at it the other way around. It begins with slop, and it’s going to end in tears.
Reader and commenter Gringo is a national treasure. At least in Sippicanville, surely. He’s reminded us that Tom Lehrer, another national treasure, at least once composed a Christmas Song. There may be others, I dunno. I’m not sure that Spending Hannukah in Santa Monica would count, but I guess it’s jubilee-related.
Tom had a great 97-year run, but his bones, if not the funny ones, ran out of gas this year. God rest ye, merry gentleman.
Mrs. Cottage went to the grocery store today. It’s one week until Christmas Eve. She said the ambient music was all 80s vintage hair bands and metal like Slayer and the Scorpions.
Sometimes, I think people have all lost their minds. Then I remembered, “Hey, I made my own people.” And they can make music. It won’t rock you like a hurricane or anything, but it’s still pretty good.
Merry Christmas, everyone.
Well, it’s Tuesday. Time to either read those bookmarks, or nuke them from orbit, just to be sure. If you’re like me (I meant no insult), you put things aside to read later. When later comes, it’s sometimes much later. For instance, I wonder if reading this newspaper clipping of a third-quarter GDP chart from 1993 I’ve got here is going to change my investment strategy at this point. Of course I’ve always been convinced that the conservative, sandwich-heavy portfolio pays off for the hungry investor, and I didn’t diversify much, so I doubt it. But let’s see what’s doing around these here intertunnels, shall we? If you like, you can press print, cut out the parts you like, and keep them in a desk drawer for future reference to kick it old skool.
How to break free from smart TV ads and tracking
Dumb TVs sold today have serious image and sound quality tradeoffs, simply because companies don’t make dumb versions of their high-end models. On the image side, you can expect lower resolutions, sizes, and brightness levels and poorer viewing angles. You also won’t find premium panel technologies like OLED. If you want premium image quality or sound, you’re better off using a smart TV offline. Dumb TVs also usually have shorter (one-year) warranties.
Everything wants to phone home, not just your TV. The solution is simple. Don’t say “yes” to anything on the startup screen. I never got tired of seeing “WiFi Failure!” on my smart thermostat, for instance. Get a Roku TV, Jellyfin or Plex, and stream everything from a hardrive with your media on it. Ads? Whatchoo talkin’ about Willis?
“Those kinds of loans [portable and assumable mortgages] exist in other countries where they don’t have mortgage-backed securities, where the loan stays on the balance sheet of the lender. “We’re trying to figure out with the industry, can we keep the MBS market, which is a very robust market, but maybe find ways of facilitating some of this other activity.”
No, not that ICE. These guys are banking pirates. And yes, Mr. CEO, the Mortgage Backed Security market is very robust. Until it ain’t. See 2008. BTW, you can already have a portable loan. Just don’t put the house up as collateral. I’m sure your good looks and charm will be enough to get a half-mil from a bank manager.
8 Million Users’ AI Conversations Sold for Profit by “Privacy” Extensions
Midway through the conversation, I paused. I realized how much I’d shared: not just this decision, but months of conversations-personal dilemmas, health questions, financial details, work frustrations, things I hadn’t told anyone else. I’d developed a level of candor with my AI assistant that I don’t have with most people in my life. And then an uncomfortable thought: what if someone was reading all of this?
Oh great. I thought I only had to lie to girls, and now I have to lie to chatbots, too.
The appropriate amount of effort is zero
There is an appropriate amount of energy required for each activity. Holding a cup, turning a steering wheel, or writing a blog post all need exactly the amount of energy that they need. This may sound like a truism, but if it were so obvious, why do many drivers often realise they are driving with a vice-like grip, with tension running up into their shoulders and jaws?
When I first read the headline, I figured the article would be about the post office. But it has advice for everybody, I guess. I notice the author put zero effort into spelling “vise” correctly.
The work that client firms are settling for is not better when it’s produced by AI, but it’s cheaper, and deemed “good enough.” Copywriting work has not vanished completely, but has often been degraded to gigs editing client-generated AI output. Wages and rates are in free fall, though some hold out hope that business will realize that a human touch will help them stand out from the avalanche of AI homogeneity.
Um, I hate to break it to these drivel merchants, but “AI homogeneity” just means that “vise” is always spelled correctly. Copywriting on the internet has always been bad. When it wasn’t fraudulent and bad, I mean. AI isn’t making it worse.
Meet the biggest heat pumps in the world
Work on the Mannheim project is due to start next year. The heat pumps – with a combined capacity of 162MW – are set to become fully operational in the winter of 2028-29. Mr Hack adds that a multi-step filter system will prevent the heat pumps sucking up fish from the river, and that modelling suggests the system will affect the average temperature of the river by less than 0.1C.
Installations such as this are not cheap. The Mannheim heat pump setup will cost €200m ($235m; £176m). Mr de Rougemont at Everllence says that, at his company, heat-pump equipment costs roughly €500,000 per megawatt of installed capacity – this does not include the additional cost of buildings, associated infrastructure and so on.
The article is all over the place. I’m a fan of heat pumps, but not an acolyte. I know something about construction. I got out the calculator. The equipment is probably only 40 percent of the cost of the project. And it’s a public project, so it will be a shitshow. It’ll cost $600 million before it’s done. That’s just to heat 40,000 homes, and you’ll need electricity to run it. Maybe boycotting Russian natural gas wasn’t the smart move, Germany.
FRAUDULENT REMOTE IT WORKERS FROM DPRK
Kim Kwang Jin, Kang Tae Bok, Jong Pong Ju, and Chang Nam Il, are wanted for their alleged involvement with a scheme to steal virtual currency from two companies, valued at over $900,000 at the time of the theft, and to launder the proceeds of those thefts in 2022. Using fraudulent names and identification documents, the men allegedly gained employment at two companies as Remote IT Workers. With these roles, these individuals allegedly abused their access at the companies to steal virtual currency.
Say what you want about fraudulent remote IT workers from North Korea, but they never take the last donut in the breakroom.
Did cats really disappear from North America for 7 million years?
Domestic cats sometimes disappear for days at a time before, generally speaking, turning up safe and sound. But this relatively short vanishing act is nothing compared with the “cat gap” — a period in the fossil record from approximately 25 million to 18.5 million years ago when cats and cat-like species seem to have “disappeared” from North America for almost 7 million years.
I wonder if the Cat Gap coincided with the Great Box Wine Lagniappe during the Cenozoic.
Gut bacteria from amphibians and reptiles achieve complete tumor elimination in preclinical model
The research team isolated a total of 45 bacterial strains from the intestines of Japanese tree frogs, Japanese fire belly newts (Cynops pyrrhogaster), and Japanese grass lizards (Takydromus tachydromoides). Through systematic screening, nine strains demonstrated antitumor effects, with E. americana exhibiting the most exceptional therapeutic efficacy.
Interestingly, the Japanese Fire Belly Newts is the name of my Vapors tribute band. But I digress.
What Is the Nicest Thing A Stranger Has Ever Done for You?
He was exceptionally calm. He didn’t ask me if I was OK, since I clearly wasn’t. It was obvious that he knew what he was doing. He made certain I could breathe, paused long enough to dial 911, and then started pulling stuff out of a medical bag (WTF?) to clean the extensive road rash I had. In a minute, he asked for my home phone number so he could call my wife to let her know I was going to be riding in an ambulance to the hospital. He told her he was an emergency room doctor who just happened to be right behind me when I crashed.
What’s the nicest thing a stranger has ever done for me? Married me, I guess. How about you?
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