VAIHTO · VIRTA · BE

🦄 ⤑ AI: highly artificial..

begun ✍️ by Frits on 2024-08-28

..and of questionable intelligence – the mere word here is absurd and inappropriate. There is literally nothing intelligent about AI, it generates. 🤷 Regurgitates what it's been fed.

Its generated regurgitations arguably are quite something – it can be asked for beautiful pictures, say, and the LLMs make for impressive haikus (), possibly great programming advice, email drafts, gift ideas for your dad who loves fishing, you name it. Impressive antics and magic tricks 🎉 but often, without warning, oblivious and shamelessly it will “hallucinate”. Really, “hallucinate”? More improper antro.. anthropom.. – humanisation. It almost sounds pardonable – poor overloaded ChatGPT, just couldn't handle it anymore, someone find it some benzo and a pillow.

Sadly its quirkiness may be the manifestation of an inherent inclination toward shittiness. Making matters even/far worse, like the sad crypto craze, AI gobbles up obscene amounts of energy. Someplace I read one Midgard-generated image makes for a fully charged phone. 😞

So what good will it bring us, and at what price? Speaking of price, since silly amounts of money are involved, we are made to embrace (potentially highly disruptive) technology. Microsoft would even have it dabbling in your computer. 😀 (Fortunately “everything is designed to remain local and private on-device”, what could will possibly go be wrong. 💵🍹)

So much resources that could have been devoted to matters more pressing, like world hunger or nuclear fusion. Once again homo ecophagus doubles down on frivolous destruction without too much consideration, reckless with his future, reassured by hubris.


() Great haikus – except, of course, when ChatGPT totally confidently miscounts syllables. 😶 Please note that counting is something computers are good at by their very nature, it's in the name; and that haikus by their very definition consist of a precise number of syllables.
  And then this supposedly intelligent piece of software unflappably offers you a broken haiku! Eh.. 6 syllables? You tell it it's wrong – get 8 instead on another line. Again you tell it it's wrong.. It will merrily acknowledge its mistake, apologize for good measure – and, unruffled, continue! to produce broken and proper haikus alike.
  To be sure, it will also keep apologizing and promising not to make the (rather grave) mistake again, but won't stop making it! over and over again. Rubbing faux- and proper haikus in your face.. Downright farcical; and what does it imply for its output in general? How can you ever trust this thing..

🎼 ⤑ music & the internet have come a long way

begun ✍️ by Frits on 2024-08-26

RED — WCD après le Deluge

..and le ${deezloader} statt ripping CDs, never mind vinyl. Not as it used to be, for not better, just worse – in that regard like many things, come to think of it.

Soulseek — Napster après la lettre

All souls aboard! 🫡

🎵 The patient 🇦🇺 Australian,
the greedy 🇬🇷 Greek,
the 🇲🇽  mesoamerican black metal fan,
the 🇪🇪 Estonian treasure chest..

Save our souls! 🎶

In earnest, Soulseek is quite something. Surviving all the way back from yonder days – Wikipedia tells us its initial release was April 2001 :l – till today.. A feat as remarkable as are some of the people on it. They just may be a reasonable reliable.. eh, cross section of online humankind? Sure need to find me better words to describe how SLSK's userbase does indeed reflect, paint a picture of the many faces.. ehmhuman.. soulkind.. 🤷

But! since "today" (Thursday July 10th 2025 if you must know) has officially ended about an hour ago, I'll have to postpone coming up with the bit more context. Meantime, even if with the aforementioned a-changin' times I've learnt to be less irkable, I often get irked by bad manners. Therefore, henceforth..


Some longgg overdue naming & shaming!

Someone has to be the first asshat to be named & shamed; in this case it was..

🇪🇸 u/Domly

Quite a haughty asshat! Enters a file sharing network without sharing a single file. Then, when a plugin kindly automatically informs him of it, says he's new ❲even though later some quickly grepped logs show the fucker having been around at least once before, in October 2024❳ and “i will be soon with more music”.

And, with the silly abundance of ellipses presumably reflecting his fiery Mediterranean temperament, that “.............yo tengo el original” 🙂 – referring to the original vinyl, as opposed to this shabby mp3 which he has me downloaded “de una pagina rusa”, and is downloading himself right now. Sanctimonious chauvinist pendejo writing in unsolicited Spanish..

Too bad his download wasn't even particularly particular, 356 people "have" it on Discogs ffs. Means there's probably nothing he'd ever want to find that isn't shared plentifold by others already, so I'll never have the ephemeral pleasure of saying “great, go listen to your /oɾixiˈnal/ vinyl then, I'll share these my inferior rusty kilobytes with a Russian friend in need”. Nor will I ever be gently explaining this confused fellow human soul there could be more between heaven and earth than «/Mpt̪ɾes/», and making puffy promises never to keep.

Then again, this cross-section of online souls of course shan't consist of bad vibes only. Quite the contrary! Like IRL, most people are fine people. Some of them..


Odd, or mysteriously confusing..

Like earlier today, being this Friday August 22nd of 2025:

🇸🇮 u/dizrabonna

Offered me some .wav's without rhyme or reason? 🤔

12:45:46 [hyptonoad] Hi - this is just an automated message. It seems you don't
                     share much, be better if you did. o/
12:46:18 [dizrabonna] minimal ways, hehe
12:50:53 [hyptonoad] 🤔🙂🙋
12:53:16 [dizrabonna] 😋
12:54:10 [hyptonoad] 🤔🙂 (:
12:54:25 [dizrabonna] there's something in the Fire folder for you
12:55:58 [hyptonoad] And why, perhaps, for me? :l
12:58:48 [dizrabonna] you seem like a nice guy
12:59:03 [dizrabonna] i have a hunch about online communication
12:59:59 [hyptonoad] Govorite v ugankah. (:
13:00:47 [hyptonoad] And I need to go do stuff though. :/
13:00:58 [hyptonoad] Weird comms here. May catch you later! o/
13:03:17 [dizrabonna] maybe, take care
13:03:46 [hyptonoad] 🤔

Or they just genuinely..


..just didn't get the settings all set

..like later that, and the next day, Saturday morning..

🇪🇬 u/AhmedBN

17:35:54 [hyptonoad] Hi - this is just an automated message. It seems you don't
                     share much, be better if you did. o/
09:35:27 [AhmedBN] I want to, I still need to understand how to do it. Sorry for
                   the incompetance and thank you for the message
09:36:30 [hyptonoad] No big deal!
09:43:32 [AhmedBN] I tried to put all my floders in the shared section of the
                   prefrences, I thought I succeded but it doesn't seem like I
                   did. If you have any advices I would be very glad to hear
                   them
09:46:18 [hyptonoad] Eh.. Right now it shows 0 shared, so a setting must be off. :/
09:47:05 [hyptonoad] Maybe you need to find some button to "rescan" shares, or
                     some such.
09:53:42 [AhmedBN] waybe if I could show you a screenshot
09:53:55 [AhmedBN] do you think it's possible on Soulseek?
09:55:14 [AhmedBN] Now I get it 
09:55:34 [AhmedBN] I moved all my library from C: To B: 
09:55:50 [AhmedBN] but I can't get to change it 
09:55:54 [AhmedBN] I'll keep trying
09:55:58 [AhmedBN] thanks again
09:56:18 [hyptonoad] No thanks needed; no big deal, as I said! Let's see.
09:56:47 [hyptonoad] I now see a folder called MODMUSIC, but it's empty.
09:57:16 [AhmedBN] I think I just did it !
09:57:28 [AhmedBN] how about now?
09:57:55 [hyptonoad] Yeh works! (:
09:58:51 [AhmedBN] great ! Thanks a lot, it means a lot, I'm quit a disaster
                   with informatics and I'd hate to appear greedy 
09:59:01 [AhmedBN] you've been very helpfull
09:59:09 [hyptonoad] You're an exception to care. (: Take care!

..and some of them truly confusing..

🇧🇪 u/kezkondizko

An actual conversation was had, but left unfinished. 🤷 Be like 📣 in the 🌫️ or of course mere 😶‍🌫️

20:05:57 [kezkondizko] Hoi, ik wou je een vraag stellen
<...>
20:13:23 [hyptonoad] Maar dat was 4 dagen geleden
<...>
12:30:16 [kezkondizko] c u next time
<...>
14:16:52 [hyptonoad] Maar hmh, internet text comms
<...>

All souls aboard! 🫡

🇺🇸 ⤑ well have I ever

begun ✍️ by Frits on 2024-07-14

For crying out loud! 😐 One Thomas Matthew Crooks took it upon himself to try and change the course of history, would indeed have been a direly needed latter-day Lee Harvey Oswald. He went out with a presumably noble goal, and an AR-15, and only just missed the ugly mug of the exceptionally obscene human being known as Donald f* Trump.

Just look at the guy.

Ohh my, oh man. 😒 And ohh how certainly am I not the only one thinking the same thing.

What would Donald himself say, if it were the other way.. “Hunting season's open”? would be rather crude even for him, but he dam well mighthunk so. And in earnest, I for one sure hope so!🤞 Because in the face of 2020's madness, there is no having it any other way than wholly inappropriate.

For ask yourself: what future would await humanity with that abrasive dimwit at the helm of the ship of fools? The wise Zapp Brannigan would concur: Donald Trump may die, but that's a sacrifice we're willing to make. Aren't we!

F`f*ck's sake.. It just took.. A slight gust of wind? To be rid of this nasty windbag of a human.. Dammit, dammit, \%krrR\..


2/8/24 addendum: 🙌 KAMALA HARRIS! though. Oh how American she be; but suddenly, a jolt of hope, a glimpse of common sense entering the bipolar gerrymandered and supremely courted clown shit show that is US politics.

Fix the world order already!


20/11/24 addendum: Well the nasty pathetic windbag got took the votes 😶 so what's left to say. “May American democracy rest in peace...”? Madness. “And unlike his first term there will be no guardrails.
 Maybe let's ask the ever so oblivious AI for some vapid words that fail us: “And all the hopes that brightened up our past // Lie in the murky shroud of darkness cast.
 A haiku, you prefer? If it is one (for shrivelled in autumn I can't right now be bothered to count syllables): “Dreams drowned in numbers, // chaos veils what once was clear, // hope fades, yet still stirs.” 🦄