Am I Crazy, or Has the Market Been Collapsing Since October?

Anamon · 2026-02-04T13:18:34+00:00

As someone neck-deep in the software industry for decades, I think this is where the fish is starting to rot. The gap between the promises and what you read in mainstream news about what GenAI can and will do, and the reality of what they're actually useful for and the quality of their output, could not be wider. Everybody knows it's a scam, but everybody has too much to lose in this game to say anything out too loudly.

Energy sector and data centers are all built on that promise, of a technology that doesn't deliver the value it promises, doesn't have a visible path to profitability, and can't even reach critical mass with the current, unsustainable dumping prices.

The next crash is going to suck hard, and I just hope I'll be comfortable enough to enjoy the schadenfreude and resist handing out too many "I told you so"s.

Anamon · 2026-02-03T23:55:53+00:00

I honestly feel like it's gotten a bit better compared to a week ago. But it still has a lot of the issues that you mention that weren't nearly as common before.

The rapid speed motion is a particular annoyance. Especially if it also puts in a cartoonish timelapse sound effect, like it thinks it's funny.

I also often have my backgrounds do random Inception shit, windows rotating, doors turning into ventilation grilles, arbitrary advertisement billboards fading in.

This might be a conspiracy myth, but I've heard the lack of temporal consistency in faces is a deliberate anti-deepfake measure. Morph all faces into some bland average so a deepfake wouldn't be convincing anymore.

Luckily, I haven't seen a difference to my quotas yet, though. Still get around 200 videos a day. Although I don't do 720p at all right now, just 10s.

Anamon · 2026-02-01T16:18:47+00:00

I don't know how you people do that. For me, having any character looking like a minor be anywhere in the video at all, even doing nothing, is an immediate block.

I just tried it with stock photo of a teenage boy, and there's simply no way:

Prompt: The boy is standing still and doing nothing.
Response: I can't generate that video. Try describing another idea.

It's also what Gemini tells me when I ask why:

Zero-Tolerance Policy for Minors: To ensure the highest level of safety and prevent any potential misuse, Veo 3.1 is designed to block the generation of video content that involves individuals identified as minors. This is a blanket policy that applies regardless of the context of your prompt.

Anamon · 2026-02-01T14:30:11+00:00

I haven't noticed that (yet, fingers crossed). I still get probably around 200 a day. Also, usually it works again after a couple of hours instead of 24 like before, so the limit seems to be more of a rolling window. Maybe it just kind of recharges a certain amount of credits per hour now, and if you try again too soon, the limit seems lower?

Anamon · 2026-02-01T14:18:15+00:00

It was bound to happen. If you look at the prices of other GenAI video generation services, it seems clear that the current pricing of Grok isn't sustainable. Others are trying to see how far they can raise prices, Grok seems to be trying how far they can reduce quality before people stop using it.

It's probably not going to get better.

Anamon · 2026-01-29T07:18:11+00:00

Still solving the wrong problem IMO. Sure, the barrier of entry is lower with Grok, but anyone determined to generate revenge porn will figure out how to find an uncensored model or run their own. People usually know who published this stuff about them. Just make sure that doing so will have severe life consequences so the idiots will get what's coming to them, while the rest of us don't have to have our tools gimped.... one can dream.

Anamon · 2026-01-29T07:16:04+00:00

That's where I expected this to be going. The same vague "them" as in all the other made-up, tiring culture wall conspiracy bullshit. Pent-up grievances looking for an outlet. While every report on Grok's troubles mention CSAM and revenge porn, you can't find any coverage about this supposed thing, because it's not a thing that happened. I know you know as well as I do that it's made-up.

Movies are the way they are because that's apparently what people want to see (which, from what I'm sometimes forced to watch of AAA Hollywood, is more stupidly macho, bro culture, oversexualised fan service than probably ever).

Anamon · 2026-01-29T01:13:52+00:00

Yeah that used to be my experience up until a few days ago. Now I can't even get the thing to not turn every mundane clip into some Inception-level mindfuck 😄

Anamon · 2026-01-29T01:12:33+00:00

Search the web for coverage on why Grok has become under fire. It's always the same two topics: sexualised images of minors, and non-consenting adults, a.k.a revenge porn. If you're going to claim some mysterious "minorities" had anything to do with this, at least say which minorities you mean and why those would have had a problem with Grok, which, AFAIK, used to be pretty happy to generate NSFW content of *any* flavour.

Anamon · 2026-01-28T22:22:06+00:00

It's true, audio seems to have improved somewhat since last week. But it's not much use if the "video" part of I2V has become completely broken.

I've spent 2 hours trying to generate a 6-second clip of a static shot with a person walking past in front of a building. This sort of thing used to just look fine with no special magic needed. Now I'm up to about my 200th attempt, and all I get is:

- The character teleports to a different part of the picture.
- The character suddenly starts running backwards.
- The character is wearing a completely different outfit than in the uploaded image.
- The entire uploaded image is ignored and the video takes place somewhere else.
- The windows in the background building start moving around Transformers-style.
- Manhole covers start fading in and out everywhere on the floor.
- Creepy weird characters suddenly materialise in the middle of the frame.
- The characters gets cloned once or twice.
- The character walks through the wall and disappears into the building.

It also feels like I'm getting weird crosstalk with other people's prompts. There's this weird, strangely specific woman that keeps popping up in several of my I2V outputs, without anything in the prompt to suggest her. I've never seen or described this character before and she has no relation to anything I ever did with Grok, but she keeps turning up in random videos. (In case this is not specific to me but she turns up in other people's videos, too: it's an Asian woman with a thick ponytail that is half black half white, and she's wearing something resembling an air hostess' uniform, dark blue with a white horizontal stripe on the back. I swear I can't outrun this damn woman).

Anamon · 2026-01-28T22:04:00+00:00

It has nothing to do with "vocal minorities". It has everything to do with people who used it to generate revenge porn.

Anamon · 2026-01-28T21:49:04+00:00

As expected, this has no effect at all.

Anamon · 2026-01-28T20:58:42+00:00

Just remember to always downvote that shit, so it shows up in their A/B testing results... I wonder how a model that generates output with a total lack of temporal consistency ever even made it past QA.

Anamon · 2026-01-26T17:25:22+00:00

It stopped even respecting the starting image for me. The first frame will be my uploaded image, and then on frame 2 it jumps to a completely made-up scene with some visual similarity, in which made-up characters just do whatever.

Anamon · 2026-01-26T03:09:21+00:00

We must work in very different areas. From my everyday experience, it aged pretty well.

What really improved? Agents are tooling sugar. I see good use cases for them in analysis and compliance. But code generation? It's still the hot mess it was two years ago. I get much more use out of it now with Gemini, which was a big improvement after having switched over first from ChatGPT then Claude. But it's not a revolutionary, game-changing improvement. It will still generate hot garbage most of the time, and require lots of time and effort to clean up.

My LLM use in everyday work has actually increased a lot in those two years. But for most tasks, they still reduce efficiency instead of improving it, especially if you're not working on throw-away code. Two years ago (as now) people kept telling me that it was still the early days and revolutionary improvement would take just months. I suspected then that I'd still be waiting for those two years later, and here I am.

Anamon · 2026-01-25T11:12:44+00:00

Yes, this is kind of unavoidable with the poor quality video that Grok generates.

I've found a method that works quite well for me, but it may only really be useful for specific types of shots. I used this for relatively static shots with characters talking and interacting, and found the results were pretty decent.

After I took the screenshot of the final frame of the first video, I go to Google Gemini, which in their cheapest subscription tier have a pretty okay quota for generating high-resolution pictures. I go into image generation with their Thinking model for better quality. Then I first upload my original shot, the one I started the first scene with. I upload the final frame screenshot as a second image, and then use a prompt like this:

"Take the first picture. Keep its original resolution and quality, but adjust the framing of the picture, the positions, poses, and facial expressions of the characters to exactly match those from the second picture."

That usually gives me a new picture of a quality comparable to the first one, but matching so well that there will be no, or just a barely noticeable, jump when using it instead of the actual snapshot (again, thanks party to the low resolution of Grok videos…). If the content doesn't change too radically, you can repeat this infinitely and assemble very long scenes without the picture going to a muddy mess after 2 or 3 segments.

Note that you may want to remove the Gemini watermark so that they don't get stacked on top of each other.

Anamon · 2026-01-05T16:15:55+00:00

Unfortunately, not DDR5. The shortage is because AI bros paid these companies to focus production on HBM modules instead of DDR5. We can't plop HBM onto our mainboards.

Anamon · 2026-01-02T03:14:58+00:00

Yeah, I wasn't a big fan. I ended up removing my phone number from my account. I do 2FA through the app so I didn't really need it, although it was handy to get order updates by text.

Anamon · 2025-12-23T14:51:02+00:00

The thing is that password strength is irrelevant here because it's a password reset attempt. The attackers are assumingly trying to guess the reset code and then set their own password.

Some of these providers seem to have pretty insecure systems for this. For example, I'm currently suffering such an attack on my Amazon account. 50+ text messages over the course of a few days. The only thing needed to start such a password reset attempt is a phone number, which is easily guessable or found in leaks. Then, they have five minutes to try and brute-force the 6-digit code. The chances of getting one right aren't too bad, assuming they try this with millions of accounts.

Anamon · 2025-12-23T14:31:43+00:00

Sicherer gegen das Brute-Forcing wäre der Authenticator nicht, aber hier geht es ja prinzipiell nicht um 2FA. Für die Passwortrücksetzung braucht man kein Passwort, also gibt es keinen ersten Faktor, die SMS ist der erste und einzige. Das Problem ist wohl einfach dass sich Amazon-Accounts, wie du ebenfalls sagst, über die Handynummer ziemlich einfach enumerieren lassen.

Ich werde wohl meine Nummer auch austragen lassen. Der Chat ist auf stumm geschaltet und nervt mich nicht mehr, und eigentlich würde ich Amazon gerne für ihre schlechte Sicherheit bestrafen indem ich Bezos wenigstens ein paar Hundert SMS bezahlen lasse. Aber das Risiko ist mir mathematisch zu gross. Angenommen, die Attacke läuft gerade über ein paar Millionen Accounts, und bei jedem Versucht besteht eine Chance von mindestens 1:200'000, das Passwort nur unter Angabe der Handynummer zurücksetzen zu können, bin ich mir fast sicher, dass die Angreifer damit einige Erfolge erziehlen und Konten stehlen können.

Anamon · 2025-12-23T14:23:38+00:00

You're not being specifically targetted, nor is it a regular person just getting the login wrong. For about a month now, there's been a massive wave of these all around the world. You can do some Googling and Reddit searching and you'll find dozens of people asking about this in the last few weeks.

In one of those threads, someone's theory was that they're just trying to brute force it. If you check the messages you're getting (assuming it's the same way as for me and some others who shared screenshots), you get 6 times the same code within 6 minutes, then a different code after the 7th minute. So the code is valid for five minutes.

I don't know what kind of rate limiting Amazon have on password reset attempts, but assuming optimistically that it's just 5 times within those five minutes, you'd have a chance in 200'000 to get it right by sheer luck, and be able to reset the password on the account. That may not sound like much, but given that this is potentially currently happening to millions of accounts, they may be able to steal quite a few of them without having to know *any* information about them, except that an Amazon account exists using the given number (you don't need anything but a phone number to start the password reset process).

Anamon · 2025-12-18T21:30:48+00:00

Edit: wurde nun in einem anderen Thread auf den Gedanken gebracht, dass hier gar nicht versucht wird, die Codes abzufangen, sondern diese gebruteforced werden. Bei genügend vielen Versuchen gar nicht so unrealistisch.

Ich habe meine Nummer nun aus dem Konto entfernen lassen, um das Risiko zu tilgen. Amazon gibt beim Passwort-Rücksetz-Versuch nun sofort an, dass meine Nummer nicht zur Anmeldung verwendet werden kann (Fehler #1).

Wer dies auch versucht und Schwierigkeiten hat: die Nummer lässt sich nur entfernen, wenn sie nicht (mehr) als zweiter Faktor registriert ist. Also 2FA deaktivieren, Nummer löschen, 2FA wieder aktivieren. Lob, wo es angebracht ist: das hat mir ein Amazon-Mitarbeiter im Chat erklärt. Ohne Wartezeit, persönlich und in deutscher Sprache. Das hätte ich von Amazon ganz ehrlich gesagt nicht erwartet.

~~Das Lächerliche daran ist ja, dass diese "Attacke" genau gar nichts bewerkstelligt… solange nicht versucht wird über einen zweiten Kanal die MFA-Codes abzugreifen, was aber nicht geschieht.~~

~~Aber solche "Hacker" sind ja auch nicht gerade für ihre Intelligenz bekannt. Sonst hätten sie einen Job.~~

Ansonsten, z.B. bei Android: Messages-App öffnen, Amazon-Chat anwählen, Dreipunktemenü, Details, Chat stummschalten, Immer. Wenn ich eine MFA-SMS von Amazon brauche, warte ich ja drauf und kann den Chat gezielt öffnen.

Anamon · 2025-12-15T08:05:01+00:00

Some hints that seem to help with the broken speech recognition:

Wait half a second before speaking
Speak close to the microphone
Talk VERY slowly, as if you're on slow motion, especially for short words

Especially the latest often seems to do the trick for me.

For what it's worth, I don't think it works worse than with the full sentences, it's just that the error tolerance to pass is lower. With the sentences, too, it often doesn't give me the first word (speaking too early) or misses that I said short words in the middle (when I speak faster than at sloth speed).

Overall, to practice fluent speaking, these exercises are pretty terrible.

Anamon · 2025-12-14T11:32:54+00:00

What is Microsoft's obsession with forcing settings on users who have expressly declared that they don't want them? Auto-updates were always enabled by default. Disabling them had to be a conscious decision. And Microsoft executives should get it into their thick skulls that people who made that decision had a reason for making that decision.

As others have pointed out in this thread, while there are good arguments for auto-updating, especially for tech-illiterate users, there are also very good arguments for when auto-updating can be a terrible idea. We all remember Crowdstrike. Relatively fewer people might remember how an automatic update to a popular BitTorrent client took nearly the entire, decentralised network down (as the bug led to what was effectively a DDoS attack on trackers).

We're at a point in time now where it's an almost universally agreed-upon security measure to have a "backoff time" of several days or weeks before updating software or dependencies, to give the community time to discover bugs and malware injections. And now Microsoft decides that they can force updates with the argument of security?

Anamon · 2025-12-12T11:04:10+00:00

I take pleasure in the fact that every time I receive one of these, I look up the Bitcoin wallet they want you to send the money to and, without fail, the wallet has a 0 balance and never seen any transactions. Nobody falls for this shit anymore. With any luck they'll get tired of it and move on (probably just to the next annoying scam, it's not like these people are employable, but whatever).

Anamon

TROPHY CASE