TechTakes
- pivot-to-ai.com UK government wants to give AI companies free access to train on your creative works
The UK government has introduced a proposal “ensuring AI developers have access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK and support innovation across the UK AI sector.” [Consu…
- pivot-to-ai.com Microsoft refuses a documentation fix because AI might not understand text in tables
Microsoft is a proprietary software company, but a lot of its software components and documentation are under open licenses. For example, the documentation for the Windows Subsystem for Linux is un…
- pivot-to-ai.com Do knee X-rays show if you drink beer? Medical AI versus algorithmic shortcutting
Whenever you say AI is drowning us in garbage, some bozo will say how AI in medicine is actually awesome. They mean machine learning, where a computer does statistics on existing scans and their di…
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All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky
filmmakermagazine.com All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky | Filmmaker MagazinePublication with a focus on independent film, offering articles, links, and resources.
- techcrunch.com OpenAI whistleblower found dead at 26 in San Francisco apartment | TechCrunch
A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief
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the dead end grift that is lab grown meat
thecounter.org Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.Headlines have overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and cost. Now, new research suggests the industry may be on a crash course with reality.
lab grown meat is a vaguely EA/rationalist/self IDed neolib meme. in theory it will save the environment (ok) and prevent suffering (yay) in a way that concentrates capital (double yay) and involves a lot of tech magic (triple yay).
hot luigi is a big fan apparently. seeing this discussed reminded me of this excellent article which shreds the concept of mass produced lab grown meat. I haven't really seen this circulate much over the years, but it is really a masterwork of grift dissection. please enjoy
archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208141305/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
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Are we going to see prediction markets enter mainstream journalism? Taylor Lorenz says yes
“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”
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Sabine Hossenfelder: Google's quantum announcement is the usual puffery
archive: https://archive.is/WmcV2
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"Defining AI"
"I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms."
A post full of bangers.
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
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in which Edward Ongweso, Jr. beats Casey Newton repeatedly around the head with a clue bat
thetechbubble.substack.com The phony comforts of useful idiotsOn Casey Newton and the shallowness of anti-skepticism.
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Study claims that "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably." WaPo, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and others picked it up. Here's my response.
theluddite.org Nature's Folly: A Response to "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
Though wrapped in the aesthetic of science, this paper is a pure expression of the AI hype's ideology, including its reliance on invisible, alienated labor. Its data was manufactured to spec to support the authors' pre-existing beliefs, and its conclusions are nothing but a re-articulation of their arrogance and ideological impoverishment.
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Godot Isn't Making it - (What if AI has already peaked?)
www.wheresyoured.at Godot Isn't Making itBefore we get going — please enjoy my speech from Web Summit, Why Are All Tech Products Now Shit? I didn’t write the title. What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable
New Ed! Not much particularly new info, just a general lament and summary of the state of tech and how much has been pinned on magical thinking. Has some wonderfully quotable sections.
>What if what we're seeing today isn't a glimpse of the future, but the new terms of the present? What if artificial intelligence isn't actually capable of doing much more than what we're seeing today, and what if there's no clear timeline when it'll be able to do more? What if this entire hype cycle has been built, goosed by a compliant media ready and willing to take career-embellishers at their word?
Please forgive my addition to the title, as it's meant to be a play on "Waiting for Godot", not a comment on the Godot game engine. Wanted to make that more clear than the title alone would.
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th December 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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this - gonna try posting last week's thread a different way this time)
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Artists are given access to OpenAI Sora. Release access publicly to everyone as a protest.
huggingface.co PR Puppet Sora - a Hugging Face Space by PR-PuppetsDiscover amazing ML apps made by the community
