Snarky Crafters

So today was Meh.

I got up on time, no idea what I was going to work on when I met with my Field Engineer at 8:30 this morning. But he had to cancel due to [miscellaneous dumpster fire], so that means I have two more weeks to figure out what we’re going to work on next.

I sniffed the milk when I was getting my breakfast together, and it smelled OK. But when I put the first spoon of cereal into my mouth, it had clearly gone bad. Blech! So no cereal for you! And I was out of yogurt. So breakfast was a No Go because I really didn't have any other breakfast foods in the house. =(

My one meeting of the day, we didn’t have anything on the agenda, so it was just chatting with two of my coworkers for a half hour. That was nice, we don’t get to just chat very often. And then me running out for groceries, because when I told my tale of breakfast woe, Taylor seemed upset that I was out of milk. So milk and other comestibles were procured on my lunch hour.

Once I’d been fed, I managed to be reasonably productive in the afternoon. Got some stuff checked off the To Do list. Submitted four small docs updates. Go me!

After work I discovered that the spinner ring that I’d ordered had supposedly arrived. Checked the mail box and there it was. It fits perfectly. But doesn’t spin. At all. I can see that one of the raised flowers on the design is smashed (it’s a cheap ring from India, so I wasn’t really expecting perfection). But there’s also a tiny nodule of silver on the border between the ring and the part that’s supposed to spin, so I suspect the inner and outer rings have been accidentally welded together. Thus the not spinning. Now I have to decide if it’s worth complaining about, because India.

I’m riding the Struggle Bus right now. My sleep has been erratic, I haven’t been taking care of myself, and even with my anti-depressants, there have been days when I can barely motivate myself to get out of bed.

Monday I pretty much played hookie from work. I’d slept like shit, so I took a nap for most of the afternoon and unsuccessfully attempted to do some work when I woke up.

Tuesday I decided I needed to do something. So I pulled up the Everything is Awful and I’m Not OK (PDF) checklist and did the first three things on the list:
I drank some water.
I ate something.
I took a shower and washed my hair.

Then I washed some dishes, because the pile of dirty dishes seems to be the thing that’s been bumming me out lately (besides Trump and *waves hands*).

And that helped a little bit. But not much. I really wish that I had a little bit more vacation time this year, because I could use a vacation right now. But all of my PTO this year is either already spent or already booked. Although I suppose if I really needed the time off, I could use a day and then work Black Friday. 🤔

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/internet/ai-backlash-brewing-clanker-says-growing-frustrations-emerging-tech-rcna222231

The use of “clanker” is rising as people are more often encountering AI and robots in their daily lives, something that is only expected to continue in the coming years.

The anti-machine backlash has long been simmering but is now seemingly breaking to the surface. A global report by Gartner research group found that 64% of customers would prefer that companies didn’t use AI for customer service — with another 53% stating they would consider switching to a competitor if they found out a company was doing so. People are becoming more worried about AI taking their jobs, even though evidence of actual AI-related job losses is relatively scant.

“Clanker” is also not the first pejorative term for something related to AI to have spread across the internet. “Slop” as a catchall term for AI-generated content that is of low quality or obviously created by AI — such as “shrimp Jesus” — entered internet parlance last year and has since become widely used. Other anti-AI terms that have emerged include “tin skin” and “toaster,” a term that traces back to the science fiction show Battlestar Galactica.

Honestly, we’ve got AI enabled all over the place at work. And it’s starting to feel more than a bit like Clippy. “Hi, I see you’re doing [A Thing]! Would you like help?”

(Click to embiggen)

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But there is a little bit of good news to report here as well.

https://www.404media.co/wikipedia-editors-adopt-speedy-deletion-policy-for-ai-slop-articles/

Wikipedia editors just adopted a new policy to help them deal with the slew of AI-generated articles flooding the online encyclopedia. The new policy, which gives an administrator the authority to quickly delete an AI-generated article that meets a certain criteria, isn’t only important to Wikipedia, but also an important example for how to deal with the growing AI slop problem from a platform that has so far managed to withstand various forms of enshittification that have plagued the rest of the internet.

For example, articles composed entirely of gibberish, meaningless text, or what Wikipedia calls “patent nonsense,” can be flagged for speedy deletion. The same is true for articles that are just advertisements with no encyclopedic value.

Also, I just love the word “enshittification”.

It's 78 degrees out (25.5C) and I just loaded up the car with a bunch of empty cardboard boxes and drove them to the dumpster. Mostly because I wanted to be efficient and get the darned things out of the house (the two boxes for the new vacuum cleaner were huge and taking up a lot of space).

When I was outside I was thinking about how lovely the weather was, not humid at all. Quite pleasant.

So why is it that as soon as I sat back down in my air conditioned condo, that is several degrees cooler than the great outdoors, do I break out in a sweat?

My body is so weird sometimes.