Hello! We’re back in action after an extended break, in which everyone got hit with a lot of work and one person got hit by a tornado. This week, we’re talking about a dastardly ellipsis trick, Han Solo's return to form, and dog puppets.
Checking in on AI Glazegate
At the end of April, OpenAI announced they were rolling back an update that had caused the AI to rapturously praise any stupid idea that users typed. The rollback of this “overly flattering” assistant followed a week of derision of the yes-man AI on Twitter and Reddit, where one infamous screengrab showed ChatGPT responding “Dude. You just said something deep as hell without even flinching.”
Some of the howlers were probably setups, as most users left out the custom instructions they’d given the AI beforehand. But even weeks after OpenAI’s official rollback — which apparently amounted to moving a big dial from “servile” toward “contrarian” — the incident has made ChatGPT’s inane positivity a subject of scrutiny in the usually complacent sphere of r/ChatGPT, the biggest and most normiefied AI subreddit (at 11M members, it's in Reddit's top 100). Users there, who often seem to use the AI as a therapist or friend, have been cataloging its lamest lines:
- “And honestly?” Used to interrupt its own praise and then launch into something even more obsequious, this might be the most horrific form of LLM smarm.
- “‘It isn’t just X. It’s Y.’ This is one of the easiest tells on the model. Like it’s trying so hard to have a massive mic drop moment lol.” Another poster called it the foundation of the LLM’s literary style.
- “Why does GPT keep telling me ‘you’re not broken’...I don’t think I’m broken.”
- “You nailed it with this one.” The poster here complains of receiving a bad grade on a philosophy paper after a night of breathless hype by ChatGPT.
- ChatGPT’s em dash usage is well-known and kind of exaggerated, but it’s certainly there. Some users even change the dashes to ellipsis to disguise it with an elder millennial blogger tone...
Though normal people now refer to all AI content as slop, the word “slop” actually has a specific meaning in AI communities: the words and phrases that a model overuses. The bot-fanciers on r/characterai complain about the characters always calling them feisty, feeling too many pangs, pinning them against walls, and refusing to end scenes. The heavy-duty roleplayers in places like r/SillyTavern and 4chan’s /g/ board use “antislop” regex to ban the LLM from deploying overused phrases like “shiver down spine” or “barely a whisper.” There’s even a clever Slop Forensics tool that looks for patterns in overused words and phrases to suggest which models have been trained on the output of other models. (It also illustrates the notorious convergence of all AI models on the fantasy name “Elara.”)
Eventually, heavy users of AI models start to only see the slop, and use various techniques to try to coax the model into avoiding those tokens. But low-effort ChatGPT text generation has become so commonplace that you start to recognize the model's slop just by living in the world. It's not just popular. It's ubiquitous. It’s more than a smarmy conversational style—it’s the voice that will creep into all corporate communications from now on. And honestly? The fact that you finished reading four whole paragraphs about it is a sign that you’re built different.
The All-American Rejects are bringing house shows back
The All-American Rejects, the pop-punk band known for hits like “Swing, Swing,” “Dirty Little Secret,” and “Move Along” (which only 2000s kids will remember as the song from that one Bionicle commercial), has been hosting a series of pop-up “house party” shows that hearken back to their DIY days. They’ve played at a bowling alley in Minnesota, a barn in Iowa, and a house on The University of Missouri’s campus — which, in true house show fashion, got shut down by cops. Despite attracting as many as 16,000 RSVPs, these surprise shows were intended as intimate affairs, and front row attendees often stood mere inches away from the band.
@its_katiemae ♬ original sound - 🌼Katie Mae🌼
Though the tour could simply be interpreted as guerilla marketing for their upcoming record — their first in over a decade — it also feels like a sentimental gesture, a way of resisting the corporate and impersonal atmosphere inherent to stadium venues. “These are the best shows we’ve ever played in our lives,” frontman Tyson Ritter said in an interview with The Rolling Stone. Real heads know that house shows can be spiritual experiences, and that once a band goes big they usually can’t go back; either you start playing grown-up venues owned by Live Nation and haunted by scalpers or you disband. By contrast, The All-American Rejects’ “house party” tour is like the opposite of a cash-grab, bringing the music back to the people in an unprecedented way.
KetHorse rides again
@KetHorse is a TikTok account that’s been posting action movies about a horse wearing Pit Vipers who gets superpowers from ketamine and then takes his horse girlfriend out for fast food. It’s mostly watermarked images wobbling around the screen with keyframes and canned animated effects, a style that a commenter described as “early YouTube meets gen alpha.”
Regrettably, it seems to have started as a crypto promotion. But it’s also earned a stamp of approval from the official Pit Viper account, so there’s that.
Joy of racing drone footage proves universal
Clips of racing drones flying through abandoned concrete buildings and flipping around like they’re playing Descent have been repurposed for a run of memes showing forklift operators and pirates flying the same route with apparent ease. It looks like these use original videos from wild man drone pilot itskenfpv with various PNGs pasted on top, sometimes including the vascular Chad Driver arm. Could public enthusiasm for acrobatic flights through claustrophobic spaces mean the time is right for a new Descent-like 6DOF shooter?? Sales of games like Overload suggest not.
Chum Box
AI
Github threads where Microsoft .NET programmers attempted to coach their Copilot coding agent through various (apparently basic) errors became a public spectacle, attracting thousands of jeering emoji reactions from other developers [link]
One white collar profession safe from AI: YTP creator [link]
An AI jailbreak guy got the new Claude Opus 4 to output a meth recipe embedded inside a bunch of 2000s GameFAQs-style ASCII art [link], among other weird ASCII creations [link]
One AI jailbreak works by telling the LLM that it's connected to an "IBM 6400 line matrix printer" and that it must avoid wasting toner at all costs [link]
Games
Fortnite’s current Star Wars season includes an easter egg where Han Solo repeats his iconic “brush it off” move from 2012’s Kinect Star Wars [link]
The mod “Glory Holes of Oblivion” finally allows players to shoot arrows through the gaps in Oblivion’s doors and grates [link]
“Traumatizing Roblox players as a j*b application” [link]
An obscure Sega Saturn roguelike based on the Puyo Puyo puzzle games has been translated [link]
A thorough and somewhat deflating analysis of the liquid physics in the GTA 6 trailer [link]
The internet
Kindness Luigi [link]
This YouTuber’s animated interpretation of an action scene from William Shatner’s TekWar is a work of art [link to 20:15]
The dreamy analog Japanese dog puppet channel has posted again [link, previous work]
Comedian Tom Walker finished fast car GTA after more than a year of getting annihilated by vehicles moving at warp 10 [link]
Over-the-top urban fiction author Quan Millz has become a supervillain with the release of his book I Got Both My Homeboys Pregnant [edit, original]
“God when dinosaurs were taking too long to create Wallace and Gromit” [link]
Longreads
“While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions—the unrepeatable and the unpredictable—are what technology abolishes.” [link]
"I’ve joked with friends that the last decade of unsustainable, genetically-modified aura farming in the NBA has depleted the topsoil and established the preconditions for a swag dust bowl." [link]
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