Disclaimer: I know enough about astronomy to know that I know pretty much nothing.

As dark energy was explained to me, it is a placeholder in the equation(s) for measuring the expansion of the universe. Rephrasing, we know the universe is expanding but we can't account for some amount of the force involved.

I hope I am making sense and I am not too far out in the weeds.

To my question: all of the stars are blasting out not just photons but also substantial amounts of physical matter in various states (gas, plasma, solid) that also includes material from the various objects in the solar system (eg atoms of water from mars). Wouldn't that mixture of massless photons and physical material have some significant influence on everything else?

I watched a deep dive video into the weird and wonderful world of AI slop memes which revealed a plot/campaign to legitimize AI "art"

Video source but I am going to summarize to the best of my ability:
"The Bizarre Rise of Tung Tung Tung Sahur (And the Lawsuit Nobody Expected)" https://youtu.be/6BdRjuaGlJ0 (~22 minutes). Side note: I think Frankie Fey does an amazing job with researching and presenting these bizarre insight into what the "kids" are up to these days.

tl;dw
Gen Alpha and Gen Z use AI to make what they thought are public domain memes.

A RoBlox game called "Steal a brainrot" created by "SpyderSammy" used these memes in a Roblox game that prints money for the developer (Millions of USD per Month).

September 2025, SpyderSammy removed a very popular AI slop meme character called TTT (initials, name is much bigger) because of "Mementum Lab" demanding compensation. Mementum lab is trying to seize control of public domain memes - https://www.mementumlab.com/

Lots of drama ensues along with an escalating legal battle.

April 2026 the the AI slop meme character TTT shows up in Fortnite as an skin (think of it like an aesthetic costume for you player character) with a one time approximate purchase cost of 10~12 USD.

https://fortnite.gg/cosmetics?id=22470

Fortnite is a game created by Epic Games which is a massive money printing machine masquerading as a game. To be fair it has an almost cult like following and is supposedly a lot of fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortnite

Epic Games is owned by Tim Sweeney - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Sweeney

In my opinion, Tim Sweeney is a greedy and disingenuous asshole billionaire.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/epic-boss-tim-sweeney-blasts-steam-for-putting-ai-tags-on-games-says-move-is-irresponsible-of-valve

Tim Sweeney also owns the Unreal Engine (a massively popular and ubiquitous tool for making games that is also a money printer).

Put it all together. MemetumLabs is trying to turn AI slop into property with a monetary value. They failed to extract money from the Roblox meme game made by SypderSammy LLC. Tim Sweeney via his game Fortnite has swooped in to help try and make MemetumLab's more legitimate.

Additionally there are substantial rumors that the next version of Unreal Engine (version 6) is going to be packed with AI slop generating "features".

Not relevant to this post, Fortnite is why Wall Street has murdered a big chunk of the games industry as they try to make their own perpetual money printing machine.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk, please exit through the Gift shop.

Closest I've seen to this being done was the movie Black Hawk Down. Meanwhile can you imagine everyone screaming at each other in the John Wick films? Other movies like Aliens would have been a whole different level of horrifying as the sound fades away until its just the sound of the actor's muffled heart beat and their cluelessness that the xenomorph is crawling up behind them.

disclaimer: This isn't an issue specific to the company involved, more than likely they were fooled into believing AI assisted customer service would work, just like everyone else.

A centaur is the idea of a human directing the AI horse. A reverse centaur is the AI being carried by the human, telling them where to go.

tl;dr It doesn't work and even if it could, everyone is definitely using it wrong. AI has created an even worse bad solution to a difficult problem. LLM's and chatbots are replacing critical thought and empowered employees (if there were any) with Douglas Adam idiots boxes directing people unable to point out the machine isn't right. Yeah.....

I wanted to change my email address with a prepared meal service called CookUnity. Going to settings I didn't find any option to do so.

After emailing support, "To change your email address you need to cancel your account and create a new one."

Replying back "Are you absolutely sure? Also does anyone over there realize how unhinged (this is)?"

AI responds back in the affirmative that I need to cancel my account and create a new one.

One last question "Before I do this, I just want to be sure I won't be punished for doing this."

This time a human proceeded to phone bomb me with repeated call after call until I could answer. Their accent and command of the English language suggested they were some unfortunate soul in a call center somewhere in god knows where. My brief conversation gave me some idea of how the "Customer Experience" is implemented.

Unfortunately it turns out later, with no surprise, I was indeed punished for creating a new account.

To be clear, this is not some Greek tragedy solely inflicted upon me but is definitely happening everywhere with everything and it has been like this for sometime, but now these AI companies have added themselves (and their service fees) to an already broken system.

I speculate the process is like: Alice has a problem, she contacts customer support. An LLM processes her message, generates a response as per the policy (or lack thereof) in the system prompt, and then Maria the reverse-centaur located who knows where on Earth does a quick QA and maybe some minor adjustments. Maria's income is very likely weighted by some inane metric like closed tickets which actually doesn't work for promoting quality and instead just pushes quantity.

The response Alice gets back may or may not be helpful. If the issue was Alice not understanding how to use or not knowing how to achieve something with the service, maybe the LLM was able to rephrase things so it makes sense. Alternatively if the problem is a policy conflict or an edge case problem, the LLM is going to give a beautifully written, magnificently marked up, ultimately useless response. In this case Maria may not be able to escalate the issue because perhaps that is another inane metric? How many tickets did she escalate? This feels a little insidious as this unfortunate reverse centaur can't actually do anything but get in trouble with their metrics or click Approve.

Beyond my lament that AI sucks, it is worth noting that all of these companies are probably infected with these AI services so deeply that when the prices go up, the companies won't be able to escape because it will cost real money now for the possibility of saving money later. That's way too risky!

I really like these studios and their games, Keen and CD Projekt, but both have blanket bans in their licensing. I mention them only because I am familiar with them and they are not unique.

From CDPR

[No technical misuse] Don’t modify, merge, distribute, translate, reverse engineer, or attempt to obtain or use source code of, decompile, or disassemble our Games and/or Services, unless we expressly allow that in this Agreement or it is allowed by the applicable law.

[No hacking or cheating] Don’t create, use, make available and/or distribute cheats. By cheats we mean things like exploits, automation software, robots, bots, hacks, spiders, spyware, scripts, trainers, extraction tools, or other software that interact with or affect our Games and/or Services in any way (including any unauthorised third party programs that collect information about our Games and/or Services by reading areas of memory used by our Games and/or Services to store information).

As a modder, I have to partially decompile the executable to see what is going on and how to make adjustments. Often its a tree among the forest, laser focus thing where I am stepping along in an attached debugger. Alternatively Cyberpunk 2077 has mods designed to support other mods (eg CyberEngine) which is hooked into at least a third of the game logic.

While I am not afraid of being financially ruined by the current operators of these studios, things change and sometimes not for the best.

There has to be a better alternative where Game studios don't hold the legal sword of diamocles over a modder.

Whenever you see the in page popup "Login to Some Website with Google" that is an iframe back to Google servers. The less Google knows about me, the happier I am.

Is there a reliable mechanism similar to UBlock where I can just block them?

Web search's have led to "guides" by Google on how to request they stop making it obvious they are tracking you.