Rusty the cat

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.

Limping Park

I managed to do 3K steps today. My knee is better, only hurts when walking. The pain at rest is gone. However, I think I won’t be able to do the daily steps challenge for another week or so.

Meanwhile, the winter decided that it’s not over yet and surprised us with snow. The weather forecast says it will be summer within 3-4 days. Not sure who to trust on that. Sofia has this tendency to stay cold when the nearby mountains are covered with snow, and they will be for another month.

Why so serious

I had a health scare today. Bumped my knee into a concrete trash can right outside a playground. I suspect making steps won’t be possible for some time but at least nothing is broken, other than my plans.

I moved the damn trash can out of the way. Whoever put it right at the exit of the playground was evil.

Here’s a cat photo from my only walk for the day. This is a mighty fluff, species unknown.