TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
things genai is good at:
- spam
- deepfakes
- misinformation
- inventing new forms of racism
The GMO melons attached to that high school girl nearly took me out, but the boderline race-porn title is what killed me.
/r/AnimeCircleJerk
Always a coin flip on if circlejerk subs are fascist or not. But this one looks pretty alright at first glance! Lots of making fun of transphobia and creepy people.
So...a yacht named "Bayesian" just sank off the coast of Sicily. It was owned by British billionaire Mike Lynch, former CEO of Autonomy. Lynch just barely managed to stay out of trouble with US authorities over fraud charges and will likely owe HP Enterprise a hefty bag for misrepresentations before their multi-billion dollar acquisition. My heart goes out to the innocents and crew who are lost. (Edit: Lynch appears to still be missing)
Hell of a metaphor, isn't it?
Trust me when I say there’s nothing worth reading in the article beyond the headline:
He would be right if he meant in the sense that Bruce Wayne ineffectively leads a personal crusade motivated by unresolved childhood angst, and that the world would be much better off if his money was just spent on basics needs for the people and he went to therapy.
modern-day
Wait what, don't they normally say 'real life' unless ... they think batman is a documentary?
Mr. Wonderful (O’Leary’s alias) is leaking the natural billionaire desire to go out and beat up people living in poverty
suggests goverment role
Imagining Batman sitting in Congress as an elected representative
In other news, https://creative.ai/ was put up for purchase because the original owner considers AI's reputation a lost cause.
(In other other news, its my 24th birthday.)
Unforeseen issues with training AIs using the internet: every LLM has been taught to Rickroll
In other news, Procreate put out a damn good sneer aimed at AI art:
Creativity is made, not generated.
Generative AI is ripping the humanity out of things. Built on a foundation of theft, the technology is steering us toward a barren future. We think machine learning is a compelling technology with a lot of merit, but the path generative AI is on is wrong for us.
We're here for the humans. We're not chasing a technology that is a moral threat to our greatest jewel: human creativity. In this technological rush, this might make us an exception or seem at risk of being left behind. But we see this road less travelled as the more exciting and fruitful one for our community.
Unsurprisingly, they're getting a standing ovation from artists for doing the right thing.
Ran across an impressively strong sneer whilst looking through Baldur Bjarnason's link list for the week:
A JUST TRANSITION MEANS RESISTING A.I. (from Scottish Left Review)
Gonna copy-paste the quote Baldur used because god damn:
AI isn’t simply a problematic technology but an apparatus that is shaped by the injustices of our existing social relations and which, in turn, reshapes and intensifies them.
Also got an interesting Tweet from Ed Zitron:
This is entirely my gut instinct, but there is boiling resentment against big tech. Something is shifting, and it's shifting violently, both in the general public and the media. Blood in the water. People are ready for a change.
I've had that same gut instinct before - I've kinda had it since Baldur noted tech's disconnect from the public a month ago. Feels like we're entering an era where working in tech is treated as a red flag, a sign you're a money-hungry asshole willing to hurt innocent people to make a quick buck.
:( I just wanted to see how many electrons I could make dance on the head of a wafer, I didn't mean to hurt anyone :(
Problematic developer with AI crush realizes she's just dust under the wheels of progress
You know those polls that say fewer than 20% of Americans trust AI scientists? It shouldn't be the case, because no group is doing more right now to elevate the universe to a higher state of complexity. You know who the public does trust? Open source developers.
Justine, LOL indeed.
Problematic developer with AI crush
I thought this was gonna go in a completely different direction.
Setting: romantic sunset beach, without a crowd in sight. There is no sound but that of a gentle breeze, waves lapping at the shore, and seagulls in the distance. Ryan turns to his girlfriend Tiffany. He gets down on his knees, the sand muddying his pants. Tiffany clasps her hands over her mouth in disbelief. Ryan says: "Tiffany you are the light of my life. You have made me a better man. I can't see me living with anyone else but you. Will... will you marry m-- bzzt. Thank you for using Virtua-Boyfriend, unfortunately we ran out of VC money so are shutting down.".
This is the girl who went off the rails and started posting about neoreaction, right?
Not really a sneer but James Gosling (one of the creators of Java) has discovered and enjoys pivot to ai https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/pivot-ai-james-gosling-l06gc
Thank god I misread your comment and thought he had pivoted to AI.
J, K. Rowling, skull enthusiast:
Khelif, who went on to win Olympic gold despite the harassment, reportedly filed a lawsuit alleging cyberbullying against Rowling (Elon Musk is also named in the suit). Shortly after the lawsuit became public on August 13, Rowling went silent on X, leading to speculation from many onlookers that she had pushed her transphobic narrative too far. On August 23, though, she again appeared on the platform, spreading more false and misleading commentary on Khelif. Her first post was a quote from a transphobic hit piece against Khelif by Colin Wright, the former managing editor of the far-right website Quillette.
lol, poor helpless joanne just can’t help but run headlong into the wall
saw something drift by that she’d also deleted a bunch of tweets in the quiet time, so her coming out swinging is doubly funny
RE: the recent discussion about Robert Heinlein and the origins of the word "grok", here's an archive link about him:
TNR: A Famous Science Fiction Writer's Descent Into Libertarian Madness
This wasn’t the first love triangle in the Heinlein residence (they had earlier been in a consensual threesome with L. Ron Hubbard)
UNSEE UNSEE
well
that's going to be a fun fact to drop in the relevant niche circles
The giant bust of Elon Musk towed by a CyberTruck is real after all! https://www.artnews.com/art-news/news/large-sculpture-elon-musk-towed-cybertruck-brownsville-texas-elonrwa-nft-1234715157/
The original video I linked to looked possibly CG, because it was short and looked like the uncanny gaze of giant Elon Musk was staring directly into the camera the whole time; but turns out it is real. I'm so "happy".
And surprising exactly no one, it's an advert for an NFT.
HN shocked and appalled that a "founder" cannot make billions running a largely unmoderated social network without facing a few consequences:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41341353
edit @dgerard already posted this on the top level, I just got triggered by one of the many dupe submissions on HN
highlights include
- standard Signal-bashing
- comparison with other heroes like Kim Dotcom (lol) and Snowden
- outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn't evade justice (this is unconfirmed)
- outrage that being a citizen of a country allows that country to enforce its laws against someone
Durov is rich and accused in a country governed by the rule of law (in contrast to the other country which has issued him a passport, the UAE). He can afford the very best lawyers and will have to be content with staying in Paris while this works out, boo-hoo.
but if he’s just being held accountable for running a service where others did nefarious things, then this should be a chilling effect for all founders.
ok. chill them
outrage that the arrest order was issued while Durov was in the air, so he couldn’t evade justice (this is unconfirmed)
Clearly arrest warrants should be made like hide-and-seek where the seeker has to count to 100 days before arresting the hider and publish "ready or not here I come!" to their social media account.
turns out duckduckgo does AI search result summaries too, although at least you can turn the little bastards off
it’s unfortunate that all the Google alternatives big enough to matter are all-in on making the exact same mistakes as Google at roughly the same time, probably in hopes that one of them can swoop in and take the top dog spot when the monopoly ruling finally makes Google stumble
and if that sounds like a fucking stupid plan, you’re right, and that’s why neither of us are advertising executives
Off-the-cuff prediction: there probably won't be one dominant search engine after Google stumbles, for a few reasons:
-
All of them are making the exact same mistakes as Google, as self noted (when they aren't having their own unique dumpster fires)
-
AI has made it much easier to spam searches with SEO shite, so any attempts at algorithmic search risk being spammed to death in short order
-
Public trust in tech is utterly shot to hell - not sure how much people trust search specifically, but I suspect people are currently trusting word-of-mouth (e.g. Reddit, TikTok) over whatever any of the major search engines are providing right now
Self-identified emergency dept physician on my local subreddit just believes things that spicy autocorrect tells him about his job.
Dude here claims that Tennessee is ranked #3 for physicians looking for work, but when asked for a source...
Obviously you’ll find various resources. ChatGPT has it as #3 for whatever that’s worth. At least for my specialty Tennessee offered a top salary, moderate tort reform, no income tax, eliminated the professional privilege tax, and more. It’s certainly not a bad place to practice and I’d argue very few physicians are avoiding Tennessee.
Wish I knew where he worked so that I could avoid it.
My experience talking with people has been often this same situation; they have some specialty expertise and for whatever reason now accept ChatGPT as all knowing and use it a lot day to day. It worries me since the response to “why” is usually along the lines of humans aren’t always right but this is AI so it will keep getting better eventually.
Tools should be 100% correct. Your work has regressed because you swapped out good tools and practices for spicy autocorrect
YouTube rolled out a new dogshit AI feature and it near-immediately accused someone of being the meme behind the slaughter:
"Hey you said I maybe killed 5 children with murder drones on a mountain could you maybe not?"
"sorry to hear you're not liking it! it's currently not possible to opt out since this is just an experiment. but if you get a response that you feel is unhelpful or irrelevant, you can let us know by submitting feedback via these steps: https://goo.gle/3ySHg00"
Oh gosh that's such a corporate response.
David may have won the race, but I have the first sneer!
Parents weep because making good products is insufficiently profitable.
One of my kids is a huge Gravity Falls fan and has recently acquired The Book of Bill. For some reason, Bill's anecdote about silly straws reminded me of the grok discourse:
FUN FACT: When you use a silly straw to murder someone, it becomes a serious straw!
Etsy: an artistic one-stop chop shop where slop pops up like catch crops - and that quick shot's no hatchet-job, so keep it from pops 'fore it leaves him in a strop:
(Full disclosure: the opportunity for some quickfire rhymes may have played a role in birthing this sneer.)