TechTakes

NASB, I had a jarring experience this morning watching Patrick Boyle's latest video "Big Tech is Going Nuclear!" (not gonna link it) where 5 mins in he introduces the sponsor and it's an AI presentation slide generator, which he said he used for the images in his video. This after he mentioned the data on generating one image using the same amount of energy as charging a smartphone. The thing is he seems careful to not mention that it is a gen ai product–he never says AI–rather a piece of software that helps making presentations.

It kinda made me panic stop the video, like an instant "well, done with you" - not sure if he continued to make a joke of it or anything. I mean, I'm sure (I hope) he was given a lot of money for the spot, but damn! Just when I thought I had a foundational understanding of people

Had a first-hand AI encounter today at the grocery store. The self-checkout now has a script that monitors an overhead video feed to make sure you're not getting tricky about what scanned and what got put into the bagging area, and if it thinks you're shady it will stop you from proceeding and summon an employee with no notification that something is wrong.

The new self-checkout process is as follows:

1. Scan your item
2. Hold the item plainly before you so the overhead camera doesn't get confused, looking like a Catholic priest about to deliver communion.
3. Place item in bagging area. Try not to have to shift things around to find a place.
4. Swear as the nom-mutable voice instructions tell you to bag "your... Item." Legitimately feels like they got as far as assembling the voice lines before anyone realised that having the compu-checker read every purchase out loud would lead to at best an unworkable cacophony if not several immediate lawsuits.
5. GOTO 1

Even as antisocial and impatient as I am I've found self-checkout to be a UX disaster, but somehow it keeps getting worse.

Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.

Two of the major donors pushing to recall the mayor of Oakland, CA are cryptocurrency "executives."

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/27/billionaires-oakland-mayor-sheng-thao-recall

Over the summer, Jesse Pollak, a cryptocurrency investor and executive at Coinbase, launched Abundant Oakland, an advocacy organization that funds “moderate” candidates running in Oakland races. The organization is explicitly linked to similarly named entities in San Francisco and Santa Monica.

Abundant Oakland has a related political action committee, Vibrant Oakland, which, campaign filings show, has received donations from Pollak ($115,000), the Oakland police officers association ($50,000), cryptocurrency executive Konstantin Richter ($60,000), the northern California carpenters regional council ($150,000) and a Pac controlled by Piedmont landlord Chris Moore ($100,000).

Alternative headline for this Washington Post opinion piece from Jeff Bezos: We're all trying to find the guy who did this!

^more^ ^US^ ^politics^ ^I^ ^know.^ ^There^ ^is^ ^sadly^ ^no^ ^escape^ ^from^ ^the^ ^fiery^ ^vortex^ ^that^ ^is^ ^the^ ^U.S.^ ^election.^

russian dude generates botslop on dating apps, makes 5000+ girls talk to bot, chooses the one that stayed with chatgpt: https://xcancel.com/biblikz/status/1752335415812501757#m

Dead internet? At this time of year, at this time of day, in this part of the country, localized entirely within the job hunting process?

Yes

(Github project supposedly for AI assisted mass job application, including using the AI to cater resume to job posting. God I'm terrified of ever having to return to the job market this is fucking insane.)

My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?

*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー

Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]

Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.

Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists' already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists' goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.

On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin's drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag's dominance is inevitable. He's not the first person I've seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he's almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid's fueling the tech industry's relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.

Bezos' open interference in the Washington Post's editorial section has pushed Walter Bright into a very funny series of public admissions that he did not have to make. See the orange site here for his ongoing libertarian meltdown.

introduced the mtg players to Ed zitron

https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gdd083/magic_the_gathering_is_an_example_of_the_rot/

Fortune magazine reports:

In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.

Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922's Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:

On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.

You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I'd say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.

I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn't some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.

in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers

today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/

can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be

FastCompany: "In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots"

It's interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need "Apple Intelligence"[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous "Crush" AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday... I find it just alienating.

Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can't find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don't think anyone can.

[1] I'd like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it "iSlop"

Olivia Squizzle followup: AI Replacement | Drawing Your Requests

google got legally beat down a fair bit in app store area https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/court-orders-google-monopolist-knock-it-monopoly-stuff