So I was looking into the history of battery naming conventions. this is imo the absolute best thing about the internet, quickly finding information on very niche topics. I was really excited that somebody actually made a video about the exact weird question I had just asked myself and couldn’t find out enough about on wikipedia! I was however quickly disappointed to realize that it’s basically just shitty AI slop designed to play the youtube algorithm and generate watch time. at 1:24 the way the sentence is phrased is not only a dead giveaway, it’s also detrimental to the understandability of the content, not that there is really any meaningful information being conveyed in this video beyond the immediately obvious. then at 3:01 the battery shown is so totally not an A battery!! that’s an ignition dry cell, the precursor to the LR40, the thing is 15 cm tall and can hold 40 fucking amp-hours! just look at those huge fucking screw contacts on the top!!! that’s where I realized what was going on. these guys are spreading worthless, misleading falsehoods, poisoning the well of information we call the internet, and at the very least they’re parasites, leaching away our time on this earth just so they can make a couple of pennies worth of profit. it breaks my heart 💔
Wait.
It just dawned on me.
That’s the whole fucking point of LLMs. They can’t change truthful sources of information, they can only change what information is presented to the User.
By massively pumping in billions and billions of dollars into the LLM Slop machine, it’s not investing in a useless technology, it’s investing in anti-intellectualism. It’s entirely on purpose.
They’re trying to poison the minds of people.
They’re not trying to. They’re mostly trying to replace the need for wages and salaries.
The fact that they’re doing it with effectively “we have wage slaves at home” leads to your point.
AI can be a great tool. As an assistant. As a fancy search engine. And sometimes to do the most menial parts of jobs. But it doesn’t directly replace people. Even in the case of taking fast food orders, first that’s not a whole job, and second, it still needs supervision. It’s a tool.
There may be some involved that see this as useful for their purposes. Let’s not fool ourselves though, the main reason has always been the money. Once it was realized this could be a huge profit scheme, that was the purpose. Anything else, good or bad, is a side effect of the money grab. Regulations should have stepped in long, long ago, but laws are always way behind technology.
Yeah, there are sites/tools that will generate these videos from a prompt. Hell, NotebookLM will do it for free. As long as there’s money to be made from clicks, these will flood the content channels.
Yeah, NotebookLM is kind of an abomination.
I’m pretty pro local ML (don’t kill me), and even I don’t see much utility beyond accessible SEO slop or cheap memes.
I’m a video producer. AI is already baked into all my tools and has made itself indispensable (from an ROI perspective). Watching the industry change from the 90’s has been a trip. I feel herded into increasingly toxic digital gardens. That’s not even an AI-specific thing. I have so much experience with Adobe products, and every employer has them. But they don’t support Linux at all, and I can’t justify running Windows or Mac at home anymore. So I just… don’t have access to my tools outside of work.
I mean, “AI” is immensely useful for video and image processing. It was well before anyone knew what an LLM was, and it goes far beyond just generating a clip from a text prompt.
And… As much as it pains me to admit it, Adobe is taking a better path, licensing training data and trying to integrate it into focused niches in workflows instead of lazy “type in box to get clip” kind of setups like Google offers.
But that does nothing to excuse the wave of slop eating the internet. The tech CEOs in charge have the power to curb this, for their own selfish benefit, and are not doing it.
Also, I will add that you can do pretty serious video processing on Linux with Vapoursynth and some Python/Pytorch.
It’s not GUI video editing, but in its niche, it can be way more powerful than Adobe.
I think I could get by with the video editing options available. I’ve already moved from Avid to FCP to Premiere, and editors are pretty comparable. But the thought of learning to replace After Effects, I just don’t know if I have it left in me. Might be time to change professions. I appreciate the recommendation, though, and agree that at least Adobe trained Firefly with artist IP somewhat in mind. It just feels like waiting for the other shoe to drop working with any of these companies.
It just feels like waiting for the other shoe to drop working with any of these companies.
You absolutely are.
There are “professional” way out though. For instance, now companies can self host diffusion models though SGLang, to service image/video editing to a whole bunch of staff in-house. And then you aren’t locked into any vendor for the “AI” serving, you can finetune them for your own workflows, and so on.
Good luck convincing your employer to take that route, though…
What’s wild is the comments.
Even if 95% are bots, or human sweatshop commenters, tons of people legitimately engaged with this. Humanity is just not equipped to deal with this yet.
We’ve been dealing with real flesh and blood robots for a long time. They became the owners of humanity.
Also, I will add that it’s hugely ironic that Google is letting this happen.
They like to tout their access to data for training models, yet their are willingly allowing one of the best “sources” on the planet (YouTube) and their own search to get utterly polluted, for a quick buck next quarter.
They can stop it now. They have the capability to do it. But it can’t be undone/filtered later, and this variety of slop absolutely poisons training data. See: Facebook’s Llama 4.
Read this, if you haven’t: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
This video is so deep into uncanny valley for me. Who tf pronounces AA batteries as /eɪ/ /eɪ/ batteries, then at the same time calls AAA batteries, “triple /eɪ/ batteries”?
Everyone I’ve ever known has said “Double /eɪ/” and “Triple /eɪ/”. The weirdness of the voiceover is so distracting.
haven’t watched the vid but I always pronounce AA as ay ay and AAA as ay ay ay. maybe because im not a native english speaker tho.
That’s okay as long as you are consistent. Doing “ay ay batteries” and “triple ay” in the same sentence is weird.
Well now I’m curious and don’t trust myself to find the correct answer. Why do we have this naming scheme?
Let me know if you find anything 😅
Early editions of the ANSI standard used a letter code to identify the dimensions of the cell. Since at the time there were only carbon-zinc cells, no suffix letters or other notation were required. The letter system was introduced in the 1924 edition of the standard, with letters A through J assigned approximately in order of increasing cell volume, for cells typically manufactured at that time
Thanks Buddy! I got so wrapped up in the ai debacle that I didn’t look into my question any further 😅 I was actually initially trying to find out where the German designations of “baby”, “lady”, “mono”, and “mignon” come from. Haven’t gotten very far on that end either 🤔
You misspelled “Well of garbage”
