Kremor's recent activity

  1. Comment on Eventually you'll get pretend cancer: the bizarre world of candy cigarettes in ~design

    Kremor
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    I'm from México, but now that you mention it. I recently came across Chocolate en Polvo Morelia, and the taste kind of reminds me of the chocolate cigars.

    I'm from México, but now that you mention it. I recently came across Chocolate en Polvo Morelia, and the taste kind of reminds me of the chocolate cigars.

    1 vote

  2. Comment on A newbie's guide to self-hosting: GoToSocial part 1 (installation and set-up) in ~tech

    Kremor
    Link
    A while ago, I decided to give the Fediverse another try. But instead of joining the Nth instance, I chose to host a personal one. Partly to get around the decision paralysis of choosing an...

    A while ago, I decided to give the Fediverse another try. But instead of joining the Nth instance, I chose to host a personal one. Partly to get around the decision paralysis of choosing an instance, and partly to avoid any instance drama.

    Now I think this is the best way to interact with the Fediverse. You won’t accidentally get exposed to drama you don’t care about, and you won’t end up in the awkward position of having to leave because your instance is getting mass-blocked over a moderator’s opinion. It’s really just you and the people you choose to follow. You still get a glimpse of some drama from time to time, but at a distance where it can’t bother you. As for engagement, I think around 30 followers is the sweet spot, when it stops feeling like you’re just talking into the void.

    I decided to use GoToSocial. At the time, people were somewhat skeptical of the project, and I’m glad it’s starting to get more attention. It makes me happy whenever I come across a personal GTS instance, and it seems like more people are doing it. With the latest release, you can also decide how long to store external statuses, which gives you more control over how much storage you want to dedicate to your slice of the Fediverse.

    6 votes

  3. Comment on Eventually you'll get pretend cancer: the bizarre world of candy cigarettes in ~design

    Kremor
    Link Parent
    Yes! You can see that most of the images in the non-US gallery have the word chocolate on them.

    Yes! You can see that most of the images in the non-US gallery have the word chocolate on them.

    2 votes

  4. Comment on Eventually you'll get pretend cancer: the bizarre world of candy cigarettes in ~design

    Kremor
    Link
    I loved this when I was a child, not because I wanted to look cool or like a grown-up, but because I genuinely loved the cheap sugary chocolate they were made of. They are banned now but it's...

    I loved this when I was a child, not because I wanted to look cool or like a grown-up, but because I genuinely loved the cheap sugary chocolate they were made of. They are banned now but it's still possible to buy them online. I just assume they won't be the same, like most things these days.

    And in case you're curious, my lips haven't touched a cigarette since I was 9 years old.

    13 votes

  7. Comment on The AI design aesthetic that is taking over the internet in ~comp

    Kremor
    (edited )
    Link Parent
    I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't see it as the real solution. I'm not a designer, I basically did the equivalent of copying snippets from Stackoverflow to come with an original design,...

    I appreciate the suggestion, but I don't see it as the real solution.

    I'm not a designer, I basically did the equivalent of copying snippets from Stackoverflow to come with an original design, without a proper understanding of why they worked together. I was worried the result looked amateurish so I used AI to improve it, and now I'm worried it looks AI generated. The solution it not to continue using AI to fumble my way into something that looks good, but to develop my own design skills and refine the ideas in my original concept.

    2 votes

  8. Comment on Is there a way to filter out everything posted by a user? in ~tildes

  9. Comment on The AI design aesthetic that is taking over the internet in ~comp

    Kremor
    (edited )
    Link
    I used Claude to improve the look of my site and I now regret it. At the time I was impressed with the results, but now I see patterns repeating across multiple sites. I worry that somebody will...

    I used Claude to improve the look of my site and I now regret it. At the time I was impressed with the results, but now I see patterns repeating across multiple sites. I worry that somebody will come across my site and disregard it as AI slop even though I still manually wrote it from scratch.

    I could go back to the old design, but the ironic thing is that my old design, with several hours of decision making, is not to far off from the current one. It had rounded corners, and simple line dividers. Most of what Claude did was help me find a better font pairing and generate a better color palette. I've decided to keep it as it is for now, try to improve my own design skills, and create something better in the future.

    As somebody else said in this thread, it's not too different from when Bootstrap was popular and every other site had the default Bootstrap look. But the same way LLMs are more effective when a seasoned programmer writes a guide that directs them toward the correct output. They're also more effective when a seasoned designer sits down to write the style guide. And on the other end of the spectrum, the same way it's not enough to tell an LLM to just build an app without proper guidance or oversight, it's not enough to tell it to come up with an original design. It'll still make mistakes, some things will look odd. I can definitely tell when a developer didn't even try to fix a Claude generated UI, because —at least for me— all those small visual oddities accumulate the same way bad code does.

    11 votes

  12. Comment on What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all in ~tech

    Kremor
    Link

    The Numbers felt this shift in two distinct waves. The first started around 2024:

    We saw a big increase in crawls as AI training joined the search engine crawlers. The AI crawlers are generally less well-behaved than the search engines, which increased the management tasks for us to keep the site running smoothly.

    And the second wave was stronger and more damaging:

    Around December 2025, we saw another big spike in traffic which I attribute to agentic AI: a combination of AI agents that scrape sites in response to prompts, and people being able to write agents that scrape sites.

    Bruce says that only 10% of their traffic is from humans browsing the site, with the rest coming from AI bots and automated traffic.

    Around 90% of our time was spent keeping the existing site running while we spent our spare moments working on a new and improved system.

    16 votes

  14. Comment on The machines are fine. I'm worried about us. in ~science

    Kremor
    (edited )
    Link
    It's funny, as someone from a third world country, I worry about the exact opposite. LLMs will only exacerbate the current global inequality. Someone who can comfortably spend 300 USD on tokens...

    if anyone can write papers and proposals and code as fluently as he could, then people like him lose their competitive edge.

    It's funny, as someone from a third world country, I worry about the exact opposite. LLMs will only exacerbate the current global inequality. Someone who can comfortably spend 300 USD on tokens will always have an advantage over someone for whom 20 USD is a tenth or even a twentieth of their income, even if their level of understanding is the same.

    Edit: I realized that I did the math wrong and didn’t mean to use such low numbers. I recently met a developer who makes 500 USD a month and is subscribed to the 100 USD ChatGPT tier. Somehow, in my mind, “spending a substantial amount of your income” automatically translated to the cheapest subscriptions. Regardless, my original point still stands.

    13 votes

  16. Comment on Gamer Homer shares his top six favorite Odysseys in ~books

    Kremor
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    Super BunnyHop is well known for his video game essays and critical analyses, hence the ironic "Gamer" in the title. In the video, he shares his favorite adaptations of the Odyssey while also...

    Super BunnyHop is well known for his video game essays and critical analyses, hence the ironic "Gamer" in the title. In the video, he shares his favorite adaptations of the Odyssey while also taking a deeper dive into how it was written and what gets lost in translation.

    3 votes

  18. Comment on I got slopped: someone used AI to write my biography in ~tech

    Kremor
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    I just remembered that in 2021 I met a technical writer who was planning to change careers by writing romance novels. Not because it was her dream, but because, as we would say now, it was easier...

    I just remembered that in 2021 I met a technical writer who was planning to change careers by writing romance novels. Not because it was her dream, but because, as we would say now, it was easier to write formulaic slop. I wonder if she was successful, and if she’s using AI now to streamline the process.

    13 votes

  19. Comment on I got slopped: someone used AI to write my biography in ~tech

    Kremor
    Link
    Archive

    Archive

    Recently, I received a strange text from a new acquaintance. “You have your own biography???” it read. [...] This was news to me. I went to Amazon to investigate. There it was. A biography of Kashmir Hill [...] My life story had a mottled brown cover and a publisher I’d never heard of before. It had no reviews until I wrote one, asking, as the subject of this work, if I could please speak to the author.

    “Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”
    It is hard to disagree with that, though I can’t say I agree with Mr. Johns’s solution: Have an A.I. chatbot do it instead.

    9 votes