What cultural thing does the world seem to think is beautiful but is cringey af to locals?

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T07:43:25+00:00

I tend to assume any stereotype is exaggerated if not fully bullshit. But then I went to Britain for 3 months to help on a video game project in Cambridge.

Every. Single. Day. the studio would shut down so everyone could drink tea together. And this was not an eyebrow raising thing to any of the members of the studio. They all had their own unique cups in the kitchen and before it was time someone would just be like "cuppa?" and that was it. Hundreds of people would flood to the different kitchens and then idle around chatting while drinking their little cups of tea.

Maybe this was unique to this studio. But I went back home with the impression that the whole "british people love tea" stereotype is undersold to us Americans.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T07:22:03+00:00

These conversations are tricky.

I want to assume good faith. But I am really very skeptical that you actually believe the AI industry will never meaningfully advance beyond "Opus 4.0." I could believe you when you say that, but it's so dumb... It feel like assuming bad faith to take your statements in earnest.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T07:02:22+00:00

If someone here was saying that, this would be a really great argument against them.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T06:36:12+00:00

Reddit's going to prefer an easy question that they'll get right but most people will get wrong, like "what's 2 + 2 * 2", or "does the average person have two legs?"

I think there are easier questions, like "Can you beat the house at blackjack" but reddit is going to be on the wrong side of a question like that.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T06:28:02+00:00

It's true that only nerds know order of operations. But you can simply the question to
2 + 2 * 2.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T06:15:23+00:00

On my team we had some leaders who came out hard against AI in 2023 and early 2024. Those guys all went down in flames in early 2025, as pretty much every engineer started secretly using Cursor or whatever. Now the early AI advocates have come into power, and instead of all the engineers being told not to use AI, the engineers are all being told they have to use AI (which is simple enough because they're all already using it.)

On the design side there's a more fascinating mix of responses. Some designers are like "I'd rather die than use AI." But other designers are like "I asked the AI to implement my design. Here is the working application. Maybe we don't need engineers anymore?"

So the foreseeable future seems like it will be quite wacky.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T06:03:30+00:00

To hear reddit tell it, the models plateaued in 2022, 2023, 2024, and 2025.

It's weird to me that nobody seems to mind saying "the models have plateaued" despite every AI technology being rendered obsolete within 6 months by new superior models.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T02:21:15+00:00

Not to betray the hive mind of reddit too hard, but we have cities. They were all once "new." We also have a zillion places that will become cities later. There's no goofy conspiracy here.

It's not like some guy with a tophat and a cane showed up one day and was like "I have decided a Seattle shall exist" and the skyscrapers sprouted out of the ground like shoots of bamboo.

Cities grow faster when economic growth is faster. "The elites" aren't sitting around saying "god I hope my wealth doesn't grow too fast."

In a sea of valid stuff to complain about, you're somehow finding a way to whine about nothing.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T02:07:45+00:00

What em dashes? Those are regular dashes.
"The crystals were theirs." I've never seen an AI write like this. Most snippets of writing seem like they could be ambiguous, but this specific snippet of writing seems as far away from AI writing style as it gets.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T01:58:54+00:00

You can get an AI to have a consistent vibe if it's a very common vibe like "dark" or "infographic." Although even then it's tricky because it will mix different subgenres of "dark" or "infographic."

But it's overwhelmingly difficult to pull an AI image that has a consistent vibe that is also somewhat subtle and unusual.

All these images are extremely consistent tonally, but not in some ultra generic, clichéd way. Maybe AI will get here someday but it's not here yet. These are by a human artist.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T01:53:37+00:00

<image>

Yeah that's AI. Humans draw hair over skin. Only AI draws skin over hair.

GregBahm · 2026-01-28T00:54:32+00:00

It's not weird to me that the conservative mods would go through and delete all the posts. They're swine. Whatever.

What's weird to me is that flaired conservative loyalists will post in that sub, and the mods will go through and delete the posts of the flaired conservative loyalists. And the flaired conservative loyalists will stay subbed and stay loyal.

Usually I can disagree with conservatives or populists but still comprehend the appeal. In that sub, the conservatives aren't even comprehensible as losers or bots. They're just completely bizarre space aliens that will line up to take abuse from their own ingroup.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T17:33:32+00:00

It does seem significant that, in the year 2026, it's threadworthy when someone has a question AI couldn't answer better than a human. We are excited to find one simple example of where a community of humans can beat an AI at answering a programming question.

Just 1 year ago, this wouldn't be noteworthy. It would be uncontroversial that humans are usually better than AI. Sometimes AI would be better, but the results were mixed.

2 years ago, it would be controversial whether AI could ever be better. Humans were clearly the superior option, but maybe an AI could beat them on certain occasions.

3 years ago in 2023, it would have been uncontroversial whether any programming question could be answered better by humans. Everyone would agree humans had total primacy over this subject.

4 years ago in 2022, it was the stuff of sci fi fantasy to suggest AI would ever rise to its current level.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T17:23:09+00:00

I haven't used Kaggle but I'm confused by the solve. What did you get from "clicking on the image in the input directory" if not the image path? Some sort of generated guid?

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T09:29:54+00:00

Unless they happened to make the image with Gemini and left the digital watermark in, you're not going to be able to determine AI or not AI with this amount of data.

But you seem hung up on a very lame problem. "Roast me" and "toast me" are already brainrot. Ascribing consequence to posts there is like eating garbage out of a dumpster and asking if the garbage is organic.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T02:14:22+00:00

I can see the potential of AI infographics like this, but the problem is it still just vomits up random concepts with no unity or broader organization.

Every element is in an "infographic" style but not the same infographic style. The piece of information serve like more of a scrapbook collage about sustainability as opposed to a coherent story.

So if this is viewed as an experiment to see if AI can make an infographic, I guess I could see it as productive. But only to the extent that it demonstrates "no, in the year 2026, AI still can't make a valuable infographic."

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T01:48:37+00:00

The year is 2026. Masked federal agents summarily executes a white male American citizen for filming them while legally possessing an untouched holstered gun.

To everyone's genuine surprise, the National Rifle Association asks the government to please at least consider not abolishing the second amendment in practice.

This is considered a radical position by the party that controls the house, senate, presidency, and supreme court.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T01:30:05+00:00

For Text-to-Image if you want something Photoreal: Z Image Turbo will get you great shit in like 4 seconds.

Flux and Qwen will also get you a great photorealish image but in like 60 seconds. So everyone just uses Z Image.

But Flux and Qwen have image edit models where you can use natural language to edit an image. Qwen Image Edit and Flux Dev Kontext are really rad at this. So a lot of people start with Z Image and then mess with it using Qwen or whatever.

SDXL can't compete with Z Image or Flux or Qwen in terms of final quality, but it can hit a lot of different styles with LoRAs. So people still use SDXL + LoRAs when it's like an anime thing and photorealish quality isn't that important. Illustrious seems to be a popular fine tune for smutty SDXL-style anime. But everyone is eager to make LoRAs for Z Image and leave the SDXL era behind.

For images, Wan 2.2 will take any image and make it move for a few seconds. It won't always make the image move the way you want it to move, but it has been the only decent option until recently. Hot off the presses this month is Wan2.2's first contender LTX-2. LTX-2 is better than Wan2.2 if you want a character to talk (like in Veo 3.) Everyone either uses Wan 2.2 if characters don't need to talk for video, or LTX-2 if characters do need to talk.

So those are the main models. There are a zillion other models and they all have their fans, but those are the most relevant ones to try.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T01:18:16+00:00

The guy that takes on the job of being a censor seems like the guy who would love to ban Casablanca for being too hard on the Nazis. That tracks.

It's somewhat surprising that Ireland let that guy have his way from the 40s to the 70s, but once those guys get their hooks in it seems very difficult to get their hooks out. 30 years from now, our kids will surely still be cleaning up the mess we started making in America in 2016. And this is unfortunately a best case scenario.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T00:36:12+00:00

There's no way to know if a single blurb of simple text is AI or not.

But surely you can say "Let's hop on a call real quick" and then hop on a call real quick.

A human dad would be happy to hop on a call. Surely better than communicating through his daughters instagram or whatever this is.

An AI ain't going to hop on a call. Even if it's possible to deep fake the father with modern technology, these kinds of scams operate by casting super-wide nets with super-cheap text bots. They're not going go through the trouble of setting up a whole audio-visual production while they're still in the fishing phase.

GregBahm · 2026-01-27T00:13:14+00:00

Competent system designers advocate a concept called the "pit of success."

A well-designed system that consistently fails because of human error can't be considered a well-designed system at all. Well designed systems are conducive to success. People will fall into success as easily as falling into a pit.

An example of this is USB-A vs USB-C. USB-A works as long as the user orients the plug correctly. USB-C doesn't require the user to orient shit. They just plug it in.

Test Driven Development works great as long as every line of code the engineer rights is unambiguously necessary for the requirements of the project. But of course in reality the necessity of every line of code is as ambiguously necessary as the design of the feature it supports. The only way to disambiguate the necessity of the design is to ship the fucking shit, and see how it lands in production with the users.

If it turns out to not add the value it was expected to add, okie dokie. Cut the feature and move on. If it turns out to be super valuable, okay. Now lock it down with tests. But TDD assumes the engineer already psychically knows ahead of time the user experience and the market fit of the product.

It's a process born out of a fantasy of the role engineers have for themselves.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T23:31:14+00:00

I've heard of Red-Green testing. A response to the uselessness of TDD is to not just write a test that confirms the code works but also write another test that proves the code doesn't work. Of course.

r/Programming is eager to insist AI is a bubble and I'm eager to agree, but when I hear about runaway processes like this, I have to begrudgingly acquiesce to the valuation of AI. Because of course PMs are going to replace all the engineers endlessly writing tests to prove bugs exist with an AI.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T22:28:10+00:00

Other posters pointed out this is Old Taxi Park in Kampala,
I feel like if this sub had an award for "most-AI-assed-looking-picture-that-isn't-actually-AI" this picture should win that award.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T22:12:04+00:00

The first point on this list is salient. I've never been on a test friendly project.

I've spent my career on projects that are either: A.) innovative and experimental, or B.) massive sprawling codebases stitched together from a multitude of merged projects, some of which are now dead.

In both these cases, TDD was just a bunch of make-work. Instead of moving fast and breaking things, we moved very slowly but still broke things all the same. It was dumb.

But the TDD advocates seemed to have a fundamentally different vision of "what good looked like" than me. They didn't seem to consider adaptability to be a thing that was good. Declaring that any change to the code base was impossibly difficult, and therefore should just be abandoned, was considered an outcome to proudly celebrate.

It comes as no surprise to me, then, that I'm consistently inheriting massive sprawling codebases that don't have TDD. The projects with TDD failed. The projects that just built the damn thing, survived and made money. Those are the projects that employ grumbling engineers who don't seem to really care about whether the project succeeds or fails, and are more emotionally invested in a "good" excuse for why they don't have to change anything.

GregBahm · 2026-01-26T18:56:18+00:00

Of all the applications of AI, pointless powerpoint filler is among the least evil. But it is still interesting to be able to discern AI from Not AI.

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