- pivot-to-ai.com Proton Mail adds a bitcoin wallet. Yes, really.
We wrote last week about Proton Mail adding an AI assistant that just sent a wafer-thin slice of your email in plaintext to sit on Proton’s servers — unlike the zero plaintext that was stored there…
- pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI launches SearchGPT — and fails its own demo
OpenAI has responded to Google shooting its foot off with bad AI search by releasing SearchGPT — its own bad AI search. [OpenAI] OpenAI has even been doing deals with some publishers to include th…
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taking a peek at a subreddit for lovers of ai art
!"subreddit rules. Speak pro-ai thoughts freely."
DefendingAIArt is a subreddit run by mod "Trippy-Worlds," who also runs the debate sister subreddit AIWars. Some poking around made clear that AIWars is perfectly fine with having overt Nazis around, for example a guy with heil hitler in his name who accuses others of lying because they are "spiritually jewish." So we're off to a great start.
the first thing that drew my eye was this post from a would be employer:
not really clear what the title means, but this person seems to have had a string of encounters with the most based artists of all time.
also claims to have been called "racial and gender slurs" for using ai art and that he was "kicked out of 20 groups" and some other things. idk what to tell this guy, it legitimately does suck that wealthy people have the money to pay for lots of art and the rest of us don't
I really enjoyed browsing around this subreddit, and a big part of that was seeing how much the stigma around AI gets to people who want to use it. pouring contempt on this stuff is good for the world
the above guy would like to know what combination of buttons to press to counter the "that just sounds like stealing from artists" attack. a commenter leaps in to help and immediately impales himself:
!'just block and move on' 'these are my real life friends' 'oh...'
you hate to see it. another commenter points out that well ... maybe these people just aren't your friends
!'antis will always just stab you in the back'
to close out, an example of fearmongering:
- pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI could lose $5 billion in 2024
OpenAI is hemorrhaging cash. It could lose about $5 billion this year and may have to raise more funding. [The Information, paywalled; Data Center Dynamics] The Information report is based on OpenA…
- www.euronews.com Microsoft says EU to blame for the world's worst IT outage
Up to 8.5 million Windows devices were affected by Friday's IT outage after Crowdstrike's antivirus update went awry.
Kind of sharing this because the headline is a little sensationalist and makes it sound like MS is hard right (they are, but not like this) and anti-EU.
I mean, they probably are! Especially if it means MS is barred from monopolies and vertical integration.
- pivot-to-ai.com Data centers risk missing US climate goals, especially with AI
The real existential risk of AI is not turning people into paperclips — it’s climate change. Power wasted on AI number crunching isn’t just causing Google and Microsoft to miss their emission numbe…
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Generative AI is a climate disaster
techwontsave.us Generative AI is a Climate Disaster w/ Sasha Luccioni - Tech Won’t Save UsA left-wing podcast for better technology and a better world.
The cost of simply retrieving an answer from the Web is infinitely smaller than the cost of generating a new one.
Great interview with Sasha Luccioni from Huggingface on all the ways that using generative AI for everything is both a) hugely costly compared to existing methods, and b) insane.
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Crowdstrike takes out last remaining threat vector (the users)
infosec.exchange BrianKrebs (@[email protected])Attached: 1 image This is fitting. The top topic on Xitter right now is of course the global Crowdstrike/Windows clusterfuck. But the AI summary of the discussion is hilarious, b/c it summarizes a bunch of sarcastic posts and makes it sound like a positive (or at least can-do) story.
- pivot-to-ai.com Proton Mail goes AI, security-focused userbase goes ‘what on earth’
If an organization runs a survey in 2024 on whether it should get into AI, then they’ve already bodged an LLM into the system and they’re seeing if they can get away with it. Proton Mail is a priva…
we appear to be the first to write up the outrage coherently too. much thanks to the illustrious @self
- www.thebookseller.com Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
Authors claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment.
> Authors have expressed their shock after the news that academic publisher Taylor & Francis, which owns Routledge, had sold access to its authors’ research as part of an Artificial Intelligence (AI) partnership with Microsoft—a deal worth almost £8m ($10m) in its first year.
On top of it all, that is such a low-ball number from Microsoft
> The agreement with Microsoft was included in a trading update by the publisher’s parent company in May this year. However, academics published by the group claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment for the use of their research by the tech company.
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The Nation: Silicon Valley is fully MAGA-Pilled
www.thenation.com It’s Official: Silicon Valley Is Fully MAGA-PilledThe tech industry is falling over itself to embrace Trump and J.D. Vance. It’s a mask-off moment.
Seeing a sudden surge in interest in the "Tech Right" as they're being dubbed. Often the focus is on business motivations like tax breaks but I think there's more to it. The narrative that silicon Valley is a bunch of tech hippies was well sown early on, particularly by Stewart Brand and his ilk but throughout that period and prior, the intersection between tech and authoritative politics that favours systems over people is well established.
- pivot-to-ai.com AI models are being blocked from fresh data — except the trash
Large language models are fed on what data can be found crawling the Internet. The more data you feed ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, the higher the quality of their outputs. But that can work in rever…
- pivot-to-ai.com ‘This website is offering to let me negotiate with an AI to buy a mattress’
George McGowan, a London software engineer, logged onto Eve Sleep looking to buy a mattress. He was boggled to find that “this website is offering to let me negotiate with an AI to buy a mattress.”…
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Devs and the Culture of Tech
unserious.substack.com Unserious Academic | James Allen-Robertson | SubstackA newsletter in which I think too much about tech culture elites, the ideologies they cling to and their gleeful aspirations to create the most tediously horrific dystopias. Click to read Unserious Academic, by James Allen-Robertson, a Substack publication. Launched 15 days ago.
Hello all,
TLDR: I've written some stuff about tech ideology via the TV show Devs. It's all free, no paid subs etc. Would love it if anyone interested wanted to take a look - link is to my blog.
Longer blurb: Firstly if this is severely poor form please tell me to do one, throw tomatoes etc.
I'm a Sociologist that focuses on tech culture. Particularly elite tech culture and the far right. I started off writing about the piracy cultures of the 2000s and their role in the switch to digital distribution back in 2013. Just by virtue of paying attention to tech ideology I've now ended up also researching far right extremism and radicalisation and do a lot of data analysis with antifacist orgs. I also used to flirt around in the Sneerclub post-rat spaces on reddit and twitter a few years back too.
Anyway, I've been researching NRx and the wider fashy nature of tech since 2016 but because of "issues" I've not yet got much out into the world. I'm working on a book that more closely examines the way that the history and ideologies in tech culture play well to far right extremism and what it might say about the process of radicalisation more generally.
However, because I'm tired of glacial academic publishing timelines I've also started a research blog called Unserious Academic and for my first project I use the Alex Garland TV show Devs to illustrate and explore some of the things I know about tech culture. I've put out three parts so far with a fourth one ready for Monday. I'm not looking for paid subs or anything, all free I just figured some people might be interested.
I also desperately need a place where people know what a neoreactionary is so I can more easily complain about them so I'd like to hang around longer term too. Thanks for your time!
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The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the public
www.baldurbjarnason.com The sentiment disconnect on 'AI' between tech and the publicI took a bit of break from work last week and tried my hardest to get away from the “tech context”. I went on photography exhibits, took walks, and gave clearing my head a good shot.
> I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience. > > Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.
babe wake up the butlerian jihad is coming
- pivot-to-ai.com ChatGPT predicts tremendous role for ChatGPT in UK government
The Tony Blair Institute is the think tank run by the former Prime Minister of the UK, Tony Blair. The TBI makes $140 million a year consulting for governments. The Guardian called the TBI “one of …
- pivot-to-ai.com AI Go bots not so superhuman after all
Chinese board game Go has become a popular testing ground for AI because of its simple rules — two players and two colors of stones — and the profound complexity that the simple rules lead to. For…
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Venture capitalists are now charging founders for meetings: $2500 for 30 minutes on a Zoom
sfstandard.com On Intro, you can pay hundreds to meet an astrologer or a VCOn Intro, investors, business leaders, designers and podcasters charge to share their wisdom with normies via video call.
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Andreessen Horowitz and the uwuness of little technofascism
a16z.com The Little Tech Agenda | Andreessen HorowitzThe time has come to stand up for Little Tech. Bad government policies are now the #1 threat to Little Tech. We believe American technology supremacy, and the critical role that Little Tech startups play in ensuring that supremacy, is a first class political issue on par with any other.
so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:
>Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. > >Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.
does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.
here’s some more banal shit:
>We find there are three kinds of politicians: > >Those who support Little Tech. We support them. > >Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them. > >Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.
I find there are three kinds of politicians:
- those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
- those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
- those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 21 July 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
> The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > >Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
- pivot-to-ai.com AI does stand-up: ‘cruise ship comedy material from the 1950s, but a bit less racist’
Google DeepMind went to Edinburgh Fringe in August 2023 to see how twenty working stand-up comedians could use large language models. It didn’t work out so well: [arXiv] most participants felt the …
- pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI’s Strawberry will turn you into paperclips any day now
According to a “leak,” OpenAI is working on a project codenamed “Strawberry” — a new AI technology that can reason! Totally like a human! [Reuters, archive] “Strawberry” is a new name for the proje…
- pivot-to-ai.com LLM vendors are incredibly bad at responding to security issues
IT consultant Mark Pesce was building an LLM-based similarity finder for a legal client. He discovered a prompt that reliably caused multiple LLMs to go nuts and output complete gibberish: “it desc…
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Techno-utopianism and the path into darkness
This is an essay about 'village' vs 'control' techno-optimism I wrote for a class final in 2016. I was in undergrad etc etc but for 2016 I feel it had a lot of foresight, and there's still some bits here and there I haven't seen anyone else explicate. Thought some of you might be interested
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I'm on Paris Marx's podcast this week rambling about crypto, AI hype and social media. Oh yeah and Jack Dorsey, our supposed subject. 1 hour.
www.thenation.com Jack Dorsey’s Embrace of Crypto-LibertarianismOn this episode of Tech Won't Save Us, David Gerard on Jack Dorsey’s decision to leave Bluesky.
Paris' editors are awesome and made my hesitant rambling sound snappy and lively too. This came out extremely well.
- pivot-to-ai.com a16z is working hard to get stuck with last year’s Nvidia chips
Nvidia GPU chips, the favored engine for AI number crunching, are still in restricted supply — though not nearly as tightly as in 2023. But venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has decid…
- pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI and Arianna Huffington: transforming healthcare with nagbots
The US healthcare system is about the worst to be found in a first-world country, with crippling medical bills and racketeering medical insurance — if you can even get insured in the first place. O…
this has been discussed here previously, but we mostly thought you'd enjoy the picture of your friend and mine Sam Altman
- pivot-to-ai.com LA school chatbot vendor goes bust, student data at risk
On March 20, the Los Angeles Unified School District launched an exciting new chatbot: “Ed,” a friend to students and parents! [Ed] LAUSD Superintendent Alberto Carvalho painted a magical pic…
> whatever you call it he’s going to talk to you in a hundred different languages, he’s going to connect with you, he’s going to fall in love with you
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Pivot to AI: Venture capital kept shoveling money into AI startups in Q2 2024
pivot-to-ai.com Venture capital kept shoveling money into AI startups in Q2 2024In the second quarter of 2024, AI startups were still getting insane amounts of money from venture capitalist investment. This is despite an increasingly glaring lack of profitability — or even pro…
- gizmodo.com Oklahoma, Alabama Now Have AI-Powered Vending Machines That Sell Bullets
In a questionable new trend, supermarkets in the South now seem to be selling bullets right out of a dispenser.
When you think MURDER, think MARCUS MUNITIONS!
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Pivot to AI: Venture capital will eat itself
pivot-to-ai.com Venture capital will eat itselfThe people yelling loudest about the potential of AI to drive humans out of their jobs are venture capitalists. It turns out they were right — tech VCs themselves are replacing their lower-level pe…
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 14 July 2024
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
> The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > >Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
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The “I will piledrive you” post, discussed on the Better Offline podcast
They have Nik Suresh (the author) on, as well as Robert Evans. I haven’t listened to it all yet, but it’s fun so far.
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The CIA is using generative AI as a search engine
www.defenseone.com The US intelligence community is embracing generative AIIntelligence agencies are using generative AI for a variety of purposes, including content triage and assisting analysts.