lesser daemon: brent bailey's personal weblog

08

May

The ChatGPT Cheating Crisis Was Inevitable

Once again I find myself writing about the latest AI outrage cycle, this one sparked by an NYMag article about the rampant abuse of ChatGPT in higher education. It should surprise no one that kids are using AI to cheat constantly and we are about to see a generation of functionally illiterate college graduates hit the workforce. Seems bad!

I feel obligated to point out that the article is a more than a little sensationalist and references a study claiming that 90% of students are using ChatGPT that isn't particularly rigorous. Its narrative also nicely cherry-picks a truly despicable guy

6 min read

06

May

Maybe this is enough

Lately I have been feeling what I think might be contentment. This is a bit of a weird thing to be feeling given the general state of affairs outside of my little slice of the world and I find myself second-guessing it pretty often but for the most part the ambient sense of crushing guilt and dissatisfaction that has accompanied me for most of my life appears to be significantly reduced.

About a year ago I set out to try and stop being so stressed out all the time. I stopped saying yes to so many things, quit a job

2 min read

05

May

Reading/Playing/Watching, 5/5/25

Stuff I'm Reading

I'd rather read the prompt - great blog post about LLMs in a university environment. Nicely sums up a lot of my thoughts about LLM-aided writing, which is that using an LLM defeats the point! "If it's worth doing, it's worth doing poorly." Write bad essays! That's how you learn!

Bizarro World - a 2007 essay on the competitive retro gaming scene, in which the author discovers his wife is the best Gameboy Tetris player in the world. Really wild to revisit a time before Twitch when esports weren't really a thing and competitive gaming was relegated

3 min read

04

May

Surely the Second Coming is at hand

I decided to revisit Yeats last night. I guess this is what you do on a Saturday night when you're in your 30s. It's getting more relatable as the gyre widens.

The strange thing about being alive at this time in human history is that I feel like I've been waiting a decade for things to start getting bad for me personally. Things have been getting worse for a while now. I am very aware that as the meme going around puts it we are already about three lines deep into the Niemoller poem and it's not that long of

2 min read

02

May

Why Do Ads Make Websites So Slow?

Yesterday was a tough day for good websites. Multiple Giant Bomb employees left after their parent company, Fandom, decided to do a "strategic reset", which traditionally means "getting rid of anything good or human in a media brand and selling off its corpse". Shortly thereafter, Polygon was sold to Valnet, a content farming business best known for their ownership of Collider and Comic Book Research (as well as their terrible labor practices, scummy SEO, and general behavior ranging from the upsetting to the criminal).

I think it's fairly illuminating that it took me significantly longer than it should have to

4 min read