2026-08-20
For reasons that are beyond me, corporations have decided to use a four-pointed star as the symbol of machine learning. Every time I see it, it triggers a Pavlovian fight-or-flight response in me.
They didn't invent the symbol, which makes it worse, because four-pointed stars occur all over the place, so I keep fucking seeing them unexpectedly, in perfectly innocent contexts, and it spikes my cortisol. This is exactly what Hitler did to the swastika.
They've done it with words, too. Critical keystones of my lexicon have been tainted. Agent. Summary. Token. Grok. Training. Datacentre. Assistant.
Decades from now, after civilisation collapses, I'll still see a slop star in the wreckage every so often and have war flashbacks to the enshittocene.