Today’s links The Brave Little Toaster: Gen AI in your appliances was a warning, not a pitch deck. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2005, 2015, 2020, 2024. Upcoming appearances: Where to find me. Recent appearances: Where I’ve been. Latest books: You keep readin’ em, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Upcoming books: Like I said, I’ll keep writin’ ’em. Colophon: All the rest. The Brave Little Toaster (permalink) The AI bubble is the new crypto bubble: you can tell because the same people are behind it, and they’re doing the same thing with AI as they did with crypto – trying desperately to find a use case to cram it into, despite the yawning indifference and outright hostility of the users: https://pluralistic.net/2023/03/09/autocomplete-worshippers/#the-real-ai-was-the-corporations-that-we-fought-along-the-way This week on the excellent Trashfuture podcast, the regulars – joined by 404 Media’s Jason Koebler – have a hilarious – as in, I was wheezing with laughter! – riff on this year’s CES, where companies are demoing home appliances with LLMs built in: https://www.podbean.com/media/share/pb-hgi6c-179b908 Why would you need a chatbot in your dishwasher? As it turns out, there’s a credulous, Poe’s-law-grade Forbes article that lays out the (incredibly stupid) case for this (incredibly stupid) idea: https://www.forbes.com/sites/bernardmarr/2024/03/29/generative-ai-is-coming-to-your-home-appliances/ As the Trashfuturians mapped out this new apex of the AI hype cycle, I found myself thinking of a short story I wrote 15 years ago, satirizing the “Internet of Things” hype we were mired in. It’s called “The Brave Little Toaster”, and it was published in…Pluralistic: The Brave Little Toaster (08 Jan 2025)