There’s something abhorrent about what AI produces

Here’s my little thought: Humans find AI output to be subtly disgusting and avoid subjecting themselves to it.

Because that seems to be the only reasonable explanation for stuff like this:

Again and again we see people having an LLM generate text and then somehow avoid reading before posting.

Sure, people are lazy, and laziness is the go-to explanation for everything, but:

We see renowned mainstream book publishers publish books containing phrases like:

“Of course – here you will find the text about artificial turf fields and ball pits in Norway, written in the same literary and discussion style as the rest of your project.”

This means that nobody — no bo dy — read this book before it was published. Not the “author”, not the editor and nobody at the publisher at all. And these are people who like reading stuff normally!

The same goes even more for pictures — I just selected a random example of somebody using an LLM to generate a picture, posting it, and then apologising afterwards when somebody actually looked at the picture and went “eeek!”

The only explanation that makes sense to me is that even the people who use LLMs to generate these things subconsciously find these artefacts to be so offputting that they avoid casting even an eye at the product. Just… “it’s there! get it out! out damned thing!”

What prompted this blog was this head-scratcher of a blog post: “AI-generated blog post images are not cool any more” They’ve never been cool! People have been calling them disgusting all this time!

It just goes to show how people really live in different worlds… You’re innocently scrolling through your feed and then bam! An AI drawing! Eww! Ick!

I’ve run thorough statistical methods on Hacker News and found that 72.3% of all posts end up with an argument about whether the article in question is written by an LLM. Which is understandable: There’s nothing as nausea inducing as reading a blog article and then having the slow realisation that you’re reading LLM slop. It’s led me to avoid reading blog posts that are about AI, because so many people in that sphere stop writing and just have the LLM generate the text.

But LLM output is abhorrent.

In conclusion:

A Farewell to Jetpack Stats

Once again, I got one of these mails from WordpreSs — they’ve determined that this blog is a “commercial site”. They did this once before, and I said “er, no”, and then they went “OK, you’re right”.

Then a few days later, unrelatedly:

I no longer have a blog on wordprEss.com — I selfhost the blogs because their offering was just too restrictive for me — but I kept paying them because I thought I’d support their work. (And they were helpful with customer support for some stuff while I was hosted there, so I had some warm fuzzies.)

But the annoyance from their Jetpack “audit” just pissed me off, so now I’m letting it lapse. So there! *stamps foot*

Before the old stats become irretrievable (I’m running self-hosted stats now), I just downloaded them now to see whether I can do some er insightful er statistics…

Heh, the CSV files are corrupted — when there’s a quote mark in the titles, like the title Foo "Bar" Zot, it shows up in the CSV file as "Foo ""Bar" Zot". That is, as normal the entire field is surrounded by quote marks, so you have to quote the quote marks — which is done by doubling the quote marks (in this CSV dialect). But the second one isn’t, which just breaks everything. *slow clap*

But here’s some charts. Most viewed posts of all time:

Oh, right, the Epstein thing went viral this year. It seems like ages ago.

Where does the traffic come from?

Yes, Google wins here, but wow, Hacker News is really big. But also Twitter, but also because if that Epstein thing. There’s usually very little Twitter traffic.

Countries?

No surprises here.

What kind of stuff is clicked?

Hey, people really like clicking on images on this blog.

Since I’ve been running self-hosted stats the last year, I took the opportunity to do some quick comparison between the Jetpack Stats data and my own, and… yes, there’s big differences. Web stats is very touchy feely now, and there is no “right” way to do it (because of all the AI scrapers that you want to get rid of), but there’s some pretty odd differences.

Overall takeaway is that the Jetpack Stats is about 30% lower than the self-hosted ones… which is, I think, pretty natural, since people who run adblock aren’t counted on Jetpack, but are counted with the self-hosted one.

But there’s odd outliers like Jetpack saying this post has very few readers, while the self-hosted stats says that it’s the most popular post every day almost. 80% of the traffic has a Referrer that points to Duckduckgo, which is odd in itself? Perhaps 90% of people who use Duckduckgo also use adblock? Perhaps it’s all bot traffic that Jetpack successfully filters out? ¯\(ツ)/¯

OK, I just did some further ad-hoc statsing: Out of every fetch of a blog post, 98% are not counted by stats. Out of these 98%, 80% identify themselves as bots, and 20% pretend to be real browsers (or, indeed, are real browsers but just aren’t counted for various reasons).

98% is actually less than I would have guessed — I imagined we were up to multiple nines by now…

Anyway, here’s a list of the most popular blog posts, according to Jetpack Stats:

83638

What’s up with all those equals signs anyway?
45511

The End of Gmane?
32780

Welcome, New Emacs Developers
27601

eww
26217

Adventures in Netflix
25266

10×10%
18998

20×10%
14285

The Only M1 Benchmark That Matters
10811

news.gmane.org is now news.gmane.io
9412

Whatever Happened To news.gmane.org?
8669

A New Package for Making Charts in Emacs: eplot
7317

5×10%
6909

About
5138

Mr. Thomas Woodruff’s Francis Rothbart!: Not Really a Review
5070

Fantagraphics Floppies Redux
4841

Legal Proceedings
4807

Project: Fantagraphics
4121

More Legal Proceedings
3850

Book Club 2025: The Books of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
3819

Perplexingly Book-Learned Emacs
3649

Let’s Party Like It’s 1999

Random Comics

I read some comics over the past fortnight. Or rather… attempted to.

Let’s do the ones I actually read first:

Riviere has done a lot of comics, but Goffin is unknown to me — and so is this series. I picked this up at random at a used book store.

And we’re talking classic, classic French(ey)-style adventure comics for children.

Look at the that hairdo! Just look at it!

I guess this series didn’t really take off, and there’s probably good reasons for that — the only original thing about it is that it’s set in Africa. Still, I really enjoyed reading it. The nostalgic-looking artwork is part of the charm for sure.

This is something I read in translation as a teenager, I think. Or at least something else from the Jessica Blandy series…

… because I could remember exactly zilch of the plot here, so perhaps I hadn’t read this before after all.

Here we’re talking about another French comics staple: Noirish hard boiled crime, set in the US. And again, not very original, but again, I enjoyed reading it and I’m going to see if there’s further albums of this in the used book store (which is where I picked this up).

I think I’ve read some of the previous “seasons” of this Rodolphe/Leo series about a super-natural(ish) investigator before, but I’m not sure whether they were also drawn by Marchal?

Marchal is no Leo, but it’s totally fine. He has a tendency to exaggerate the heads of the characters slightly, which is eeeh, but you’ve got nice interiors and good scenery and all of that stuff, so it’s very pleasant looking.

The story’s fine, too — lots of mystery and intrigue set in Écosse.

However, when we get to the supernatural/alien stuff, instead of giving you a sense of mystery and wonder (which is what Leo usually manages to pull off), here it just sits kinda flat.

But… it’s fine — I’m definitely reading the rest of the series.

And then we come to the other comics I attempted to read over these weeks, and I failed — and not because my French is risibly bad, because these books aren’t even in French:

I guess I shouldn’t even have picked up this Fantagraphics book, because…

… this art style is just so 2025, and it’s a clear signal that I’m not the target audience. That nose.

It’s drawn in a couple of styles…

… and it’s reminiscent of fairy tales, which is another thing that I just don’t enjoy reading. And… the storytelling is very choppy, what with the mixture of partaking of her thoughts and then suddenly an omniscient narrator — it’s just very “huh?”

I gave up after about fifty pages.

This is presented as being the hundredth issue of this thing, which I assume isn’t true…

… because it’s… I mean, I guess it’s a pastiche or send up of these kinds of things.

It’s got absolutely all the clichés. But I just didn’t find it funny, and if that’s how it was meant to be, then I didn’t find it exciting either.

I ditched this after about fifty pages.

Here’s another book I probably wouldn’t have bought if I’d seen it in person first, but I ordered it on line…

Because the artwork is just bizarre. Heavily photo referenced artwork is common, and it can be good or bad, but this time around, it’s like all the photo reference material comes from a phone camera that’s taken the shots five centimetres from people’s faces.

It’s like everybody is giving selfie face in every panel, which gets even more confusing when there’s people in varying distances, and it looks like up-close tick tocks on pause being placed in a 3D model.

It’s so disturbing that I couldn’t really concentrate on actually reading the book — but I did make an effort, and it seems like the worst pile of clichés that have ever been heaped into one book.

But I guess it’s meant for sixteen year olds? So again, I guess I’m not the target audience.

I abandoned this after about forty pages.

However, this one sounds just up my street, in a way.

And look at this artwork! It’s great!

Unfortunately, the storytelling is really choppy.

And the dialogue is so stilted that, and you’re not going to believe this: I gave up after about fifty pages.

It might well be the translation that’s at fault here, but…

And that’s it for these two weeks.

A Review of the Reterminal E1004 13.3″ Full-Color Epaper Display

I’ve had the following thing on my wall since 2020:

It’s fun because it’s an epaper frame that runs on battery — so I can have it conspicuously displayed on a wall without any wires leading to it. Mysterious! Enigmatic! And it just displays the temperature and the currently playing album.

It’s fine, but it’s a bit small (I gotta put on my correct glasses to see what the temperature is)… and the firmware isn’t unproblematic: Out of every twenty times it wakes up and fetches a new image, it goes to “can’t find wifi”, which is just kinda annoying.

But then, last week, I read of a new generation of epaper devices with brilliant colours and neat features.

Wow! Bigger! Better! Gotta have it! And yesterday it arrived.

After flashing it with the ESP32 PhotoFrame firmware (from a web page! I had no idea that you could do USB flashing via web pages, but apparently there’s something called “The Web Serial API” that does that? Chrome only, of course. kids these days), and a session with Claude where it really wanted to download some Node nonsense a lot, I convinced it to just write me a bash script to upload images to the thing. The result is on Microsoft Github — it’s super duper trivial, but the clue is that the device needs to have a paletted PNG, which makes sense.

Tada! It works! I’ve set it to download a new image once every fifteen minutes, which is correctish enough…

But. Look at this.

Or perhaps — don’t look at that, because it seems likely to give you an epileptic fit.

That’s just… that’s just… that’s just ridiculous. How is this even something that’s a product? You can’t have this thing displayed somewhere people can see it and not expect people to fall on their asses, laughing. It’s ridiculous.

It makes sense as something that only updates, say, once a day — in the middle of the night, where nobody can see it. Hide the shame.

So… man… I have to rethink what I’m going to use it for, because I can’t have this hanging on my living room wall.

Man.

And in the promo pic they’re displaying a clock, sort of implying that you’d have this thing update once per minute? When it takes half a minute to do an update?

Dude.

Introducing reTerminal E1004 Spectra 6 Full Color ePaper Display: Frame What Matters to You

Heh, in the promo version they do show the frame updating… but if you look at 67s, they’re editing out bits *and* running it at, like, 10x speed (look at the laptop movements).

C’mon.

How I made a 60fps Eink Monitor, the Modos Flow

Perhaps somebody brilliant will be able to do something neat with this device, though? Partial updates would help a lot, for instance, if you’re displayin a clock or something on a bit of the display. I guess time will tell…