Criticism

~ Veselin ~ 7 Comments

In How to Win Friends & Influence People, Dale Carnegie argues that criticism is futile. Criticism opens the gates to hell, little devils fly back, criticize, gossip, and destroy morale.

Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement.

And yet, walking around all day with your zipper open while your friends politely say nothing isn’t kindness either. So while we search for the middle were kindness wins without criticism, remember this cat.

This is the most critical cat in my recent catblogging history. I tried to blog about her several times and didn’t know what to say. I tried different crops, and neither worked.

I know she’s not really criticizing me for taking photos of her but she looks that way 🙂 and eventually inspired me to write a brief essay about criticism.

Rusty the cat

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments

A story about the 33-year-old cat Rusty took Reddit by storm. Rusty passed away at the age of 33, making him into top 10 of the oldest cats in the recorder cat history. The poster submitted proof to the mods of r/cats that Rusty was real. People rushed to update Wikipedia’s list of oldest cats, expressed condolences, sent love and wishes. The post generated 134K likes and was probably viewed by most of the non-bot Redditors.

Unfortunately, Rusty was AI slop. Rusty:

The post and the bot that submitted it got deleted.

I think my attempt to restrict Reddit to a few essential subreddits like r/cats is not very successful and I still have exposure to something that I wouldn’t even call AI slop. More like farming for free human-generated text for the purpose of training LLMs. Rusty helps me understand why the sudden rush to gather personal IDs and verify humans on social media. All the social networks are vulnerable to slop and risk losing engagement if they don’t put it under some level of control.

Here’s a real orange cat for you, blissfully unaware about the decay of r/cats.

UPDATE: this is a male cat named Pesho, also known as The Son of a Mother. Likes cuddles and bites for no reason.

Fleet of the Damned by Chris Bunch and Allan Cole

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

The resourceful captain Sten joins the navy and leads a small group of spaceships in the battle against the Tahn. The genre is a retro space opera with dumb computers and ships that need hundreds of people to be operated.

The story takes a sharp turn from what we saw in the previous three. It is not light anymore, not fun. It’s also not clear where we are heading. Things get from bad to worse with no improvement possible in sight. The problems presented are interesting, relevant, and engaging. The level of action reminds of Ender’s Game but unlike that book, the characters are not juvenile or cringe. It is very intense.

On a philosophical note, the Empire is ruled by an immortal emperor who controls the space fuel, an antimatter molecule that powers the spaceships. This leads to all kinds of bizarre negative consequences that we can see around us in areas where one person or a small group of people keeps monopoly over something. Emperor’s behavior is in a sense similar to what se see from the aging dictators of the modern age, like Xi or Putin, caught discussing plans to live forever, while also slowly losing their minds.

The book was written before the personal computer era really took off. It aged well. It’s not too realistic because Sten shouldn’t have survived half of the action but it got me. Clear 5*/5 and probably the best of the series until this moment.

Muted Reddit’s auto-subscription after it became intolerable

~ Veselin ~ 6 Comments

Reddit somehow detected that I’m interested in AI and Data and auto-subscribed me to several hundred AI and Data subreddits. This turned their feed to an endless slop machine. Every single pre-IPO hype post or or doom prophecy would pop on my feed multiple times per subreddit, 5 if it was Sam Altman’s. Multiply that by at least 100 AI subreddits and you get the idea. You are scrolling and scrolling without seeing a single cat. Claude this, Sam Altman that, Anthropic this, I vibe coded this genius thing, and then Sam Altman again.

Rather than adding Reddit to the list of sites I ignore, I followed the subreddits where I’ve recently posted comments, and then disabled the following setting:

I greatly recommend this approach. Cats, rockets, and cars showed up again. The apocalypse is muted.