After a seven game series, one where both teams were tied in series points scored after six and a half games, the Cleveland Cavaliers made a run in the third quarter and closed off the Toronto Raptors. The Raptors, which some didn’t expect to make the playoffs this year, and which were unanimously expected to lose the series by USA media (often predicting sweeps), fought tough through 7 games. They finished the series missing two starters, they had a team average age of about 2.5 years lower than the Cavaliers (probably closer to 3 considering the missing starters are older than team average), played against a team that had the league’s highest payroll and brought on a future Hall of Famer (albeit, one known as a playoff choker) late this season, and almost won.

It’s disappointing but if the team builds on the lessons – which is a big if when you’re dealing with Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment – it has a bright future.

What stood out for me in that second half, though, was the Cleveland Cavalier fans cheering “U S A. U S A.” At a first-round NBA game. It’s a dumb little microcosm of the current state of cross-border relations, particularly in sports. Then they started singing Kendrick Lamar’s “Not Like Us” like it’s 2024, like they’re Los Angeles or New York, and not still in Cleveland. Maybe pick your battles better Clevelanders, living in the city known for its river catching fire and a popular video joke in 2009:

The second one in particular has aged poorly.

My favourite bit from Nirvana The Show The Band The Movie was when one of the guys realizes he’s in 2009 by virtue of being at a screening of The Hangover and seeing everyone laughing at the F slur. The very early Nirvana The Show The Band webisodes drop it too. Here the hastily made Cleveland tourism video drops the hard R. It’s only been 17 years. Language evolves faster than entitled minds can grow. 

The second video ends with “At least we’re not Detroit.” Coincidentally, the Cleveland Cavaliers are playing the Detroit Pistons in the second round (and just lost their first two games.) Two teams that, I feel, are overrated and two teams that are not beating the New York Knicks, which themselves are not beating any one of three different teams from the West. In that context chanting “U S A” feels extra pointless.

I was looking for a specific The Simpsons image the other day and loaded Frinkiac as I have done for ten years straight. Frinkiac has its issues, mostly with search and not prioritizing golden era episodes in any results, but it’s worked fine for ten years with a simple interface. So I was surprised to see that it has changed! And not for the better!

There are some improvements, like a better season overview and season (era) specific search, but the interface is clunkier and more complicated. Sure you could argue it’s “more powerful” but for what end? It’s a site to generate jokey meme images quickly, it’s not an animation tool. The Frinkiac homepage links to a developer’s blog post and: yup, it was heavily assisted by AI.

D’oh!

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language: a google sites report about how LLMs distort human language, even when used as editor.

The ease of use, combined with the potential to accelerate individual careers, is likely to continue to incentivize people to produce AI-generated text, and even to attempt to pass it off as their own in professional contexts, as the ICLR data shows.

Not sure about methodology of the above but if you are reading this, and you’ve read this far, I want to assure you that every word, and every word sequence, and every punctuation mark, and every oxford comma and every contradictory non oxford comma is typed by hand from a human brain. Every mistake is my own and every awkward structure is mine. I’ll use a spell check, but fuck grammar checkers and anything AI. 

You definitely won’t find AI apologia here, like this shit: AI Slop is Killing Online Communities, which starts with the prologue “I <heart emoji> AI” and then goes and lists a number of ways AI is making things worse. Congratulations, you love the tool that makes everything worse.

Thoughts and bits: Losing Skills. I spent hours yesterday going back and forth on a 3D animation in CSS, for fun. I hadn’t done anything like that for a while so it was about getting that muscle memory working again. The struggle was the point. I have those skills and want to flex them. 

In my line of work we have the idiom “pixel pushing” to signify a very specific precision bridging the gap between design and code. From intent to application. This was often done, seemingly in a different era now, in collaboration with a creative. Like pair programming but for design intent. AI can’t pixel push. It doesn’t have the intent. The creative eye. Statistical approximations will never achieve pixel perfect precision.

So while I generally agree with The New Yorker’s A Lo-Fi Rebellion Against A.I., going back to that hand-made aesthetic, and the suspicion of things looking “too smooth”, I vehemently disagree with the line “Visual perfection is easy to come by these days”. That still takes a lot of human effort.

Listen to this

AmbassadeWe Are All Guilty

Hand assembled, always, and

sometimes.