sp3ctr4l

We have had missles that you can lob from a high altitude aircraft, and hit a satellite, since the 80s.

I see you have not yet recieved your welcome gift!

You may redeem this beans at the hugbox/echochamber of your choice for beans of equal or greater value.

In this essay, I will demonstrate that I am very smart.

… i wonder if there is an archive of Tay, somewhere… ?

For those unaware:

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-35902104

MSFT let a chat bot onto twitter.

4chan found it instantly, and uh, “trained” it.

You’re gonna need this.

… when the time comes, you’ll know what to do.

I did used to be a copy editor, but thats the first time I’ve ever had anyone suggest I sell my writing.

Thanks? I … I realize that is a compliment, but one of the reasons I didn’t go further into anything resembling journalism… is that it is filled with lying sharks.

I… would genuienly feel extremely uncomfortable literally making money as a Valve fanboy, lol.

I am mostly just annoyed with particularly ‘games journalists’ very often being laughably disingenous and crafting narratives that are … basically hysterical, when you look at the actual facts they are starting from.

Its not hard to find the actual factual context here. Helps the ‘news’ feel less fake, when you have that.

Ok I’m sorry but I’m gonna be the ‘Valve fanboy’.

tl;dr There are a whole bunch of falsehoods and misleading statements and claims here.

What the blog author describes as “Valve says its not our problem and have you tried smiling more?”

Their own source:

https://kotaku.com/valve-steam-ai-clone-rip-offs-next-fest-slop-developers-demos-2000750496

Describes as “Valve Knows Steam Has An AI Slop Problem And Has A ‘Significant Number Of People’ Working On It”.

There are 2 problems here.

One is that a game demo, that isn’t encrypted of obfuscated when its compiled into a binary file… can be fairly easily reverse engineered by throwing enough money at OpenAI or Anthropic.

The author of this Kotaku article I guess expects Valve to… do… what? Prevent this from being possible?

Yeah the advice Valve gave isn’t exactly guaranteed to prevent an indie dev from getting fucked… but… what could they actually do?

Does the Kotaku author want … Valve … to … LLM-Reverse-Engineer-Proof all games that get uploaded to them?

This is… not currently known to be possible… from a defensive position… so… what are we mad about here?

Why are the bad guys not… the people who own and operate the reverse-engineering machines?

Why are we instead victim blaming?

The other problem is that a lot of AI slop gets uploaded to Steam. The Kotaku author thinks its a lackluster response for Valve to say ‘Well, Next Fest just started’.

The Kotaku author apparently does not understand anything about how Steam works.

Reviews, descriptions of games, associations with certain game features or genres or styles or what not… these are largely crowd sourced, beyond certain disclosures the devs are required to make.

If a bunch of AI slop hits the system, the way the system works is that the crowd, Steam users, will flag these things as they are exposed to it, report undisclosed AI slop, and then Steam’s sorting and recommendation systems get better at doing their recommending and categorizing, over time.

If a bunch of people report undisclosed AI use in a game, Valve checks and if, yep its true, those devs/publishers get restricted, fined, banned from being able to use Steam.

So the Kotaku author is basically mad that every single Next Fest game was not rigorously pre-screened, and is not satisfied with the crowd sourced screening process taking some time to work.

And finally, no, its just straight up false to claim Valve said “Its not [our] job to curtail AI slop in Steam.”

They did not say that.

What Valve actually said was:

“We are fully aware of the situation, and a significant number of people are thinking about how to solve this problem.”

Steam is designed in a way that it already filters and sorts games, in a way that is not perfect, but tries to be fair and not make false bans, and do this at a massive scale… and Valve has stated they are currently working to make that process more efficient and accurate, specifically in regards to AI slop.

As a side note, the Kotaku author also… did not directly state, but implies that Steam makes an outsized amount of its overall profit off of Indie games. This is a misleading insinuation.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Indie-games-accounted-for-25-of-Steam-s-revenue-in-2025.1189429.0.html

Its 25%, 25% of Steam’s 2025 revenue came from Indie games. The vast majority of that 25% from Indie games that blow out to over a million sales.

Its also rather misleading to just drop ‘Gabe donated $20 million to OpenAI’ right alongside a bunch of recent, current things.

Yeah. He did do that.

In 2018, when OpenAI was still a non-profit, back when the explicit goal was to develop this kind of tech in a safe and sane way, before Sam Altman turned it into a private company and began lying his ass off to investors and just everyone in general.

https://gamerant.com/valve-gabe-newell-openai-donation/

This is blog author’s own source. I guess blog author didn’t… read their own source?

Or is just intentionally leaving out highly relevant details so that their narrative works better.

Have you ever had to wait your turn to use the one computer in the library thats the only one that has the specific program you need to use, to finish an assignment, thats due in 30 minutes?

But little Timmy really wants to play the color version of Number Munchers?

Scale that up by a few quintillion times, and you may see how catastrophically stupid it would be to have a single entity gatekeeping all computational capacity on Earth.

You think Musk shutting off Starlink for 48hrs in a active warzone, is bad?

Imagine that even a well intentioned theoretical super LLM just makes a mistake, or an intentional decision along the lines of… 3 months of the entire computational/transactional/book keeping/device regulating capacity/logistical planning and monitoring ability of the entire country and economy of I don’t know, Cameroon, Albania, New Zealand, Thailand, whatever… eh thats less important than this other thing people are doing.

This is madness, in a technologized world, for everyone to relenquish their entire ability to do anything requring RAM, to a single entity.

Do you want SkyNet? The Matrix?

Thats how you get them!

Extend it further than rooms.

How much MONEY does he have that isn’t currently being utilized for an actual useful purpose? Making himself richer isn’t useful.

How many doctor’s bills could he be paying?

How many mouths could he be feeding?

How many teachers or babysitters could he be paying?

If this ratfuck conman with a messiah complex thinks he can just casually opine that he has a disruptive, new take on property rights, oh well then by all means, lets just entirely drop the pretense and have the totality of this conversation.

He is a power mad socio and psychopath who is to a great degree personally responsible for the coming Greatest Depression.

There is no amount of suffering he can cause that would be too great for a fucked up freak like this who has no morality beyond that which makes him feel satisfied with himself.

Yeah, lets renegotiate the social contract Sam, let’s get right on that.

Do you no longer believe in private property, personal possessions, Sam?

We should all just submit our riches to the false machine god, and trust that its technopriest interpreters will guide humanity unto a new dawn?

Give me a fucking break, its like he wants to be ripped to pieces by a righteous mob.

You can trust this aircraft, cloud-powered fly-by-wire, a match made in heaven!

They just want to know which accounts are permitted to scrape them for textual LLM training material (because Reddit Inc has a contract with them) vs which ones are not permitted.

The byproduct of this is intensifying a cult like environment where its easier to gaslight people, but that’s ancillary.

Even being able to better drown the user base in more, and more specifically targetted ads, even that ain’t the main thing. Everybody in the online advertising world knows that the actual metrics that ‘describe’ how effective ads are… are largely bullshit, and theyre only going to become more bullshit as more LLM bots are spun up and the average person just has less money.

Its enshittification 101, when user base growth phase stops/plateaus, lock in the user base, squeeze harder and harder untill there just isn’t any money left.

The main thing is maximize profit, ie wealth extraction.

You can also go to

https://www.clearancejobs.com/

(You probably wanna have DoH enabled and HTTPS Always configured on your browser, uBlock, bare minimum)

FIlter security clearance by DHS, and just look at all the contracted companies that are currently hiring.

Tech backend, network admin, db admin, data analyst, cybersec type stuff…

But also HVAC, and ‘Social Worker - Relocation/Custody’.

Thats most of what I’m seeing in terms of job titles, but yeah if you want a current list of ICEstapo subcontractor companies, well there ya go!

Not as pinpoint accurate but also just literally publically available information.

There ya go!

Yeah I don’t actually use Twitter, because ick, but there are youtubers who wander those blasted and accursed wastes, in search of high grade slop, and occasionally they do find gold.

I think thats correct!

Hey if you wanna buy me a better phone or contribute to a physical therapy support fund for my shoulder that is recovering from being dislocated for 2 and half years of homelessness, lemme know and I’ll start a gofundme.

So… this story actually gets funnier.

Yes that’s right, Teeny Weeny Tim Sweeny showed up in the replies to personally immediately destroy any potential good will this story could possibly have generated for him and Epic.

Keep swingin’ Tim.

One of these days, we’ll be able to get rid of the tee ball stand… one of these days…

Pretty sure this is actually older than Keyboard Cat.

Edit:

Ok so, this whargarbl is 2008, technically, keyboard cat was first uploaded in 2007, but it didn’t “become a meme” untill somebody else used the clip at the end of another video, for comical effect, in 2009.

How to read this:

The company Roblox decided to copy the entire database of a set of 3, mostly adult nsfw 3d model hosting websites.

You know, Roblox, that game all the kids play.

Yeah basically if you’ve ever seen 3D animated porn that wasn’t made by AI, and involved a reasonably well known video game character?

Yeah the … video maker nearly certainly got the model from either SFMLab or SmutBase.

The funnier part is this:

A huge majority of these NSFW models are actually variations of models made by … companies, that sell their models and character customization software, and have liscenses that generally permit use in something like a video clip, but almost never in an actual commercial video game, not without a subscription and agreement to liscense terms.

So basically DAZ and Realusion and such now very likely have a lawsuit against Roblox they could choose to pursue… unless Roblox wants to maybe very rapidly pay the liscensing fees, knock out a contract agreement real quick.

… clearly you have not been to SmutBase before, lol.