GenAI is Our Polyester, Frills on the Indie Web, 32-Bit Cafe, Cassidy on AI Usage, Bootstrapping installs on HTTP-Only systems.

The best way to understand generative AI art and aesthetics is to consider how previous “synthetics” lost value in the long-run

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I rehash the rise and fall of polyester because I believe it presages what will happen to generative AI art. At the moment, computer scientists are creating software that reduces time-consuming inefficiencies in creating new designs, sounds, and other aesthetic products. Companies are already beginning to use AI-art in their advertising and product design, especially small businesses without design teams. Larger firms are planning to layoff employees or curb hiring in the belief that they can do more with GenAI.

While polyester took a few decades to lose its appeal, GenAI is already feeling a bit cheesy. We’re only a few years into the AI Revolution, and Facebook and X are filled to the brim with “AI slop.” Everyone around the world has near-equal access to these tools, and low-skilled South and Southeast Asian content farmers are the most active creators because their wages are low enough for the platforms’ economic incentives to be attractive.

I quite like this comparison, while I’m frustrated at the ‘rise’ of slop, it does make sense companies view it as the ‘cheap’ way to do things which previously were simply not cheap at all… and that hopefully quickly will leave sour tastes in consumers minds, such that it’ll be seen as something to be avoided rather than oh yeah lets just gippity this promotional art.

Favourites, highlights and the evolution of this website

Progression from Frills, from (April 2023):

To (March 2024):

I run into these really lovely ‘busy’ neocities / indieweb websites, seeing the early simplistic days to much more bold styles is fun.

I still feel like my current website, while not intending to be dragged fully into the neocities vibe, could do with some more paint.

New crypto trading and wallet application, created in partnership with Magic Eden, invites fans of President Trump to buy his memecoin

Another day another Trump crypto scam.

A web space community that focuses on building websites for self-expression and creativity, made up of professionals, hobbyists, and enthusiasts of the personal web.

Another day another mention of cute indieweb things.

I especially like the cookbook.

Everything on this website is written by me, personally, not an AI.

I do think that LLMs and AI are valuable tools for learning (and fun), and I have used tools like GitHub Copilot or Claude to help me write some code, but this website is very hand-crafted, on purpose, because I like being the human behind it.

Ditto, it is strange though that this does feel sensible to post in the modern day, that you don’t use LLMs to help you author content.

I like writing (currently in Logseq) and not having an LLM rushing to autocomplete my sentences, or an AI pane I could reach for to just write these blurbs for me.

Could… I let LLMs look at previous linkblog entries (of which there is now likely enough to go off of), to understand my style, and ‘automate’ said entries, still having my ‘taste’ of choice be shown, but my words less so?

I could.

I’d never do that.

I hadn’t actually seen what Soar was until I started writing this entry, its a modern package manager for Static Binaries, Portable Formats (AppImage|AppBundle|FlatImage|Runimage) & More, very nice, I always found AppImages to be my fav. option of the bunch with the worst UX, and sorry, AppImageLauncher does not spark joy, Soar being an all in one does seem quite nice though.

Anyways, Ajam shows how one can download Soar over HTTPS on systems that you’d usually struggle to handle, given this blurb of scenarios:

# Fresh Debian container
$ docker run -it debian:latest
# No curl, no wget, no ca-certificates

# Legacy system
$ uname -a
# SunOS legacy 5.10 Generic_147441-01 i86pc i386 i86pc
$ which curl wget
# command not found

# No Privileges
$ apt install curl
Error: Could not open lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend - open (13: Permission denied)
Error: Unable to acquire the dpkg frontend lock (/var/lib/dpkg/lock-frontend), are you root?

The trick, is to make use of a lesser known bash feature…

Every system with bash has /dev/tcp - a built-in feature for raw TCP connections.

Amazing! with a bit of magic, the author defines a function in bash burl which can be used as so:

burl "http://http.pkgforge.dev/https://ip.pkgforge.dev/json"

And is indeed, basically Bash Curl, sick.

The non-HTTPs part is basically then just using a service to proxy HTTP requests to HTTPS, which has security icks obviously… but not bad for being in a weirdly constrained state.