What ever happend to the classic "reticulating splines"?
this post was submitted on 11 Oct 2025
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There a progress bar in an application I wrote that has a one in twenty chance of saying "Reticulating Splines" instead of its usual label.
I have a few hundred users so there are definitely people who have seen it, but so far no one has mentioned it.
Most users don’t care and those who do know chuckle and move along. :-)
We don't reticulate splines any more.
I don't want free earbuds
Are you a mermaid?
🗯️‽#*&
source?
The Sims 1
I thought I saw it as far back as simcopter
Oh man, I fear that this is genuinely what lots of people take as their clue as to what's AI and what is not. I've seen plenty people refer to algorithms as AI. They're probably wondering why this AI is so reliable compared to the others...
I wonder, what do you call the script controlling enemies in Wolfenstein 3D?
Yeah, I'm not saying that the term is well-defined or that some usages of the word don't typically refer to classical algorithms after all.
And yes, obviously even the currently trending meaning of what "AI" might mean, i.e. generative AI, still involves lots of algorithms, for training, for executing the model, and tons of auxilliary scripts that ideally take over all tasks as soon as the statistical model has decided what to do.
And yes, maybe non-techies really just don't care. My post wasn't supposed to be snide commentary on that. It was more just an "oh fuck, there's folks that hand out bags of money solely based on whether a program uses a butthole as a logo and says that it's thinking for its loading times".
We have always had some widgets in our page that take a second to load data from an API, so they have a loader (think weather widget). Recently a couple people left feedback shaming us for using "AI" to do things like getting the weather. The link between loaders and AI is already setting in.
and the more we vibe code, the more it thinks
The less I think, the more it thinks
And the more it thinks, the more it stinks.
Dreamcast: the first AI console.
It really was ahead on everything!