Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 27 October 2024
Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 27 October 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)
That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Musk's twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223
I wish I was cool enough to have the world's worst people get so mad at me that they...make fan art and put it up on their website. What's Elon going for here?
If their aim is to make DG look bad ass, they're doing a good job.
"I want to speak to the manager" energy.
Only now? It is amazing how disconnected Musk is from that part of SV culture. Amazing, even sucks at the thing he should have a home field advantage at.
Update on LLM reviewer situation:
PM is down to let us pitch them our argument. Good news: PM seems like a cool person, is open minded, and is being pretty frank about the forces at work here. Bad news: taking action on this will open a whole can of worms, so any proof has to be ironclad. After conferring with our local grant wizards, the battle plan is to crank out a 15 minute pitch consisting of:
- a 2 min elevator pitch of our tech, highlighting what the reviews mangled
- intro to LLMs for people who know what glycosylation is
- intro to semiotics for the same
- show how transformer architectures transform symbols into symbols to produce text-shaped objects without actual intent, ideas, or context (and why "automated AI detection" is also bullshit).
- show a few examples of plausible-at-first-glance gen-ai slop (the nonexistant turkish fortress, mouse dck, etc)
- Highlight how our weird reviews (both good and bad) fit exactly into this bin (absolutely mis-interpreting a table, inventing a bacterial species we didn't use and talking shit about it, miscounting our team members, etc)
We'll be leaning on the Stochastic Parrot paper pretty hard, because it's a good entry into the field on the skeptical side and is just well constructed in general. I'm also on the hunt simplified diagram for how LLMs convert tokens to arrays to tokens from the original transformer literature. Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose, and I want to avoid falling into the "It can't be that stupid" trap. Any pointers in that direction are most welcome!
Wish us luck, heh!
good luck! it sounds like you’re coming in remarkably well-prepared, so unless they’re gonna go fingers-in-ears (and it sounds like the PM’s better than that), you’re at least likely to make an impact
Unfortunately, so much of the literature is obscurantist on purpose
between this and all the SEO on OpenAI’s marketing horseshit and breathlessly parroted press releases, it’s exhausting to find good sources for how any of this stuff actually works in reality. shit, I’ve had old primary sources on things like Sora get buried after OpenAI’s promises didn’t pan out. I’m hoping you can find what you need — our back archives might have a few links if you haven’t searched through here yet.
Best of luck!
o7 much appreciated!
Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.
This tool solely exists so that you can ask it questions and get assistance, but also we disavow any responsibility for the answers to the questions we just told you to ask it. Has this kind of clause been held up in court anywhere? Like, I'm sure it has but it seems like the same logic would be ridiculous in any other context. Like, consider the fraught legal history of the anarchist cookbook.
A publically funded radiostation in my city has fired all of its hosts and replaced them with 3 AI "hosts" (non-English link).
They're trying to defend this by saying that all of the hosts were just independent contractors and AI is not the main reason they're firing them, and that the AI thing is just going to be "an experiment to appeal to Gen Z". Fortunately, most people's response seems to be "fuck off with this crap".
I just... can't with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run "experiments" with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
I just… can’t with this. Even if they really were firing the hosts anyway (which is possible), I absolutely hate that they are using public money to run “experiments” with AI media. Heads should roll for this.
i think it might be code for firing these people, but technically not, because they just terminated contracts with 15 single-person companies, so they never really hired them in the first place
has the era of active sabotage of the autoplag inputs begun? let's hope so
Considering Glaze and Nightshade have been around for a while, and I talked about sabotaging scrapers back in July, arguably, it already has.
Hell, I ran across a much smaller scale case of this a couple days ago:
Not sure how effective it is, but if Elon's stealing your data for his autoplag no matter what, you might as well try to force-feed it as much poison as you can.
It's almost completely ineffective, sorry. It's certainly not as effective as exfiltrating weights via neighborly means.
On Glaze and Nightshade, my prior rant hasn't yet been invalidated and there's no upcoming mathematics which tilt the scales in favor of anti-training techniques. In general, scrapers for training sets are now augmented with alignment models, which test inputs to see how well the tags line up; your example might be rejected as insufficiently normal-cat-like.
I think that "force-feeding" is probably not the right metaphor. At scale, more effort goes into cleaning and tagging than into scraping; most of that "forced" input is destined to be discarded or retagged.
They added sleeps to training jobs? Sounds like they deserve a raise for improving energy efficiency instead…
we call it clogging, folks, we put a little clog in the machine
I'm sorry Mr. Musk, grok's a bit constipated today. Someone fed it too much cheese. Then it started hallucinating.
ooh I like that
Update on the character.ai lawsuit:
Gizmodo just reported on the story - in addition to the suicide that kicked this litigation off, they've also discovered an hour-long screen recording where a test account (self-reported as thirteen years old) gets sexted relentlessly by the site's chatbots.
So, in addition to driving one specific teen to suicide, character.ai is also facing accusations that their bots are sexually harassing children.
I have something that I want to post to MoreWrite and this is very convenient for my story
Glad I could be of help.
The Bookseller: Penguin Random House underscores copyright protection in AI rebuff
Penguin Random House (PRH) has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear “in imprint pages across our markets”. The new wording states: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems”, and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn't gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it's time to give Big AI a wedgie.
It's weird how rarely I see people point this, but in theory this kind of boilerplate should be technically meaningless. If copyright protections include the privilege to use the work for training a machine learning algorithm, you need explicit permission anyway. OTOH if it's fair use or otherwise not something copyright law is concerned with, the copyright holder's objection doesn't matter.
For the record, I think AI models are derivative works and thus they're not only infringing on typical "all rights reserved" works, but also things such as Free software whose license terms require attribution if used in derivative work, and especially share-alike copyleft licensed work.
I thinkt it's pretty well-lknown that Spotify got all its initial music from Oink. They moved fast, got dominant, and were able to present the record labels with a big audience prepared to pay for streaming music. The labels quickly ensured they'd get the lion's share of that revenue.
OpenAI and friends tried the same thing - scrape everything, build AGI, reap the rewards. Except it didn't work, and they're in a much worse position morally. Even if they can get a judgement that what they're doing is legal, it will cost them a lot in litigation fees, coupled with the public perception that these culture vampires are ripping off the poor honest author. Not a good place to be in.
Now that the content mafia has realized GenAI isn’t gonna let them get rid of all the expensive and troublesome human talent. it’s time to give Big AI a wedgie.
Considering the massive(ly inflated) valuations running around Big AI and the massive amounts of stolen work that powers the likes of CrAIyon, ChatGPT, DALL-E and others, I suspect the content mafia is likely gonna try and squeeze every last red cent they can out of the AI industry.
US forest service cuts thousands of jobs. Not to worry, the bright hackernews are on it! just install an AI data center in the forest!. Seriously though, I can't tell if this is brilliant satire or not.
Fuck, I didn't need to be reminded that they named the robot Optimus. Was "Bender" or "Wall-E" too much of a deep cut? Or is it just that Disney's trademark lawyers are scarier than Hasbro and Nvidia combined?
My read: sounds like a teenager that knows the touted functionality of the scam tech they are referencing, but is not wise enough to the ways of the world to know they are scams.
this is peak AI. you might not like it, but it's how top of the bubble looks like
Radio station uses AI to interview the ghost of a dead Nobel-winner with 3 quirky zoomers who don't exist, seems baffled people don't like it starring three bots and deepfake of Wisława Szymborska
related notesfrompoland and onet article they probably referenced (in polish) and another. would you guess that they fired a dozen or so* people just before? (and somehow had money for whatever horseshit they were sold) small radio stations aren't probably bringing serious money either way now
homepage of that radio boasts about their "almost entirely created by AI" content. it looks like they tried to convince zoomers to get an FM radio and listen to it somehow. it's gonna go great
apparently this radio is in liquidation since january however this might be related to dislodging previous govt's propagandists from public media
*original report used very handy word that does not appear in english that one could translate as "fewteen" and can mean any number from 11 to 19 inclusive
What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don't sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I've come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT's attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it's trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.
you gotta admit one thing: this cures imposter syndrome
If your Wikipedia page contains as many random arXiv preprints for references as the "prompt engineering" article, consult your physician.
I was expecting a spicier Talk page :(
I just tagged the article and added a talk page note
KendrickZitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan's recent kicking upstairs, and Google's bleak future.Main highlight was this snippet:
I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google's ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google's gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.
Man, it's almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.
If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how's GE doing these days again?
Really enjoying watching Ed level up from week to week. The Zingularity is Near.
As the AI bubble weakens, he only gets stronger.
I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy
Character.ai is getting sued thanks to one of their users killing himself, and The New York Times is talking about it (there's also a piece by Gary Marcus talking about a previous incident if you're interested).
Like the copyright situation I previously mentioned, I suspect this is also gonna make potential investors wary of investing in AI post-bubble. Even if you manage to convince investors that you won't get DMCA'd into oblivion, they're still gonna be wary of the potential for a Dasani-level PR nightmare.
Of course, that's assuming that Section 230 protects you from being held liable for what your autoplag does - if Ms. Garcia, whose son's suicide prompted this entire mess, succeeds in court, the legal precedent set means you're likely gonna have to worry about being sued if/when someone ends up injured/killed/defamed/otherwise fucked up because of its output..
Skimming the reddit thread in search of general public sentiment about this, but unfortunately mostly just found a greatest hits compilation of very gross comments.
According to these very smart people, parents should expect your teenager to die as an outcome of not being perfect people 24/7, technology can never be at fault even when it literally tells you to commit suicide in coded language, and it's actually impossible to understand which parts of society are causing kids to be depressed, so we must take it as a given that we can't do anything about it. I regret having done this to myself.
This is nothing, The characterAi subreddit was in full meltdown earlier.
‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit
“There are around three dozen lawsuits by media companies against generative AI tools. The common theme betrayed by those complaints collectively is that they wish this technology didn’t exist,” said the Perplexity team in the blog. “They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.”
I wish the AI bros at Perplexity and elsewhere a very cope and fucking seethe.
Okay, quick personal sidenote:
With how much misinformation, manipulation, outright theft and other horrific shit this AI bubble has caused, I suspect we're gonna see some attempts at an outright ban on AI. How successful they're gonna be, I don't know, but at the bare minimum it'll enjoy some popularity on the political fringe.
They prefer to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll.
Yea, down with corporate IP trolls, information gatekeepers and idea landlords! Anyway, what was Perplexity's business model again?
idea landlords: making sure that no one is living rent free in someone elses head
On one hand, big "let them fight" energy. On the other hand this is a bit more Alien v Predator than Godzilla v Kong. No matter who wins, we lose.
they wish this technology didn’t exist
this is supposed to be invalidating, but like... yes? what's wrong with that?
Burglars telling homeowners to cope and seethe when questioned about their possession of crowbars at time of arrest.
You know you're dealing with serious people when the dogwhistles come out.
Crypto mining firms based in Sweden are accused of withholding around $100M in unpaid taxes.
Mostly VAT fraud.
News in Swedish: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/lokalt/norrbotten/kryptoforetagen-lurade-staten-pa-en-miljard
But your honor, we're a crypto mining company; we don't add any value!
Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.
HEARTWARMING: Baldy McDickface to step back from podcasting now the Russian money has dried up
Pretty good sneer there:
BREAKING: Tim Pool announces he will be stepping back from full time content production to look after his family. He states he's tired of being made fun of for not having a wife and kids so he will also be using the extra time to pursue acquiring that family
what fascinating timing, what’s it been, a month or so since he got outed as a Russian agent?
This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.
Forget Gladwell
All nonfiction writers can end up writing incorrect or controversial things, but why does every Gladwell book push half-formed and inaccurate theories? For years, my loose feeling about Gladwell was that he writes like someone who doesn’t care about being correct, which is not a way I would describe any other author I've encountered. There is something uniquely odd about his work.
Obligatory IBCK ep on gladwell
In other news, Disney's apparently planning some kind of "major AI initiative".
Whatever it is, I'm expecting large-scale boycotts/strikes to kick off as a result of it, alongside AI's lack of copyright protection getting exploited to troll the shit out of Disney.
Wasn't Rise of Skywalker already written by a deficient AI of a Gonk droid?
No, it was written by a Star Wars fan. Can't blame you for confusing the two, though - they're equally dumb
Update on the state of AI drug discovery companies: AI Does Not Make It Easy by Derek Lowe
lmao incredible
Then there's BenevolentAI. I first wrote about them in 2018, as the company stated that it had "created a bioscience machine brain, purpose-built to discover new medicines and cures for disease." How's the machine brain doing these days? Well, the company's lead program failed in the clinic last year, and in April announced major layoffs.
just who buys this shit? this reads like refined crypto nonsense
Look out, professional Nix crybaby Jon Ringer is back with his fork.
In other news, I have my own as well called Borkfan, absolutely not a ban fork due to my having threatened multiple people, but instead dedicated to the idea that a technology that lacks chud approval must necessarily not be in the true hacker spirit.
literally the exact crowd shitting on the mere rumor of a Lix NixOS fork are clapping for this like trained seals. and I don’t think this getting announced right after those rumors is an accident — it gets Jon the most attention for his low-effort bullshit and might even let him hurt another fork by way of community fragmentation
something I’m confused about is, is Ringer even effectively banned anymore? I stopped monitoring when someone with mod privileges unbanned him from a bunch of Nix community spaces. is he back to banned, or is this just a continuing tantrum from Jon having Release Manager stripped from him and given to someone who could do that incredibly thoroughly automated job without stirring up a fucking hate mob?
there is one silver lining: for once, I don’t have the cognitive load of another Nix fork to carefully consider switching to. there’s no way in fuck I’m using Ringer’s fork under any circumstances, and my brain already filed it away under “weird name, starts with an E, don’t remember the rest” seconds after I closed the tab
Is their branding dominated an anime girl of ambiguous age?
Just guessing, I promise I haven't checked.
More AI generated shite from Ireland: Transport for Ireland decided, for some reason, to use AI for its Hallowe'en themed ads. This was roundly complained about online. Then someone decided, for genius reasons, to ring Liveline and complain about it.
For those who are unfamiliar, Liveline is a national phone-in show presented by JOEEEE DUFFY, who could start a fight with a brick wall. Every episode is about either a petty grievance or a real horror story. It's like a national whinge-in. I am going to listen to the episode (available here) and see if there are any highlights.
The gist of Liveline
Joe is complaining about TFI putting up the taxi fares in Dublin.
The ad is for a TFI competition.
Ciarán works in advertising and thought that the TFI ad must be a scam first because of the use of AI.
Ciarán points out that TFI has plenty of money and could afford to pay a graphic designer or an illustrator.
Joe is furious that TFI won't say whether the ad was AI-generated or not. Ciarán points out that they didn't even mark the image as AI-generated.
Gerry O'Brien from Actors Equity is on the line. He's explaining the issues faced by background actors and voiceover actors who are being pressured into signing over their image/voice rights
Hannah Lockhead from Lucan is on the line. "I don't disagree with what anyone is saying, but personally I think the most offensive thing about this ad is just that it's ugly".
Gerry O'Brien is talking about fair compensation and clear consent for actors whose images are being used.
Hannah says that "Frankenstein's Wife is Margot Robbie"
Ciarán says that the AI art is "quite tacky" and compares poorly with the iconic London Underground logo.
Joe Duffy has seized the opportunity of having Gerry O'Brien on the line to complain that the Abbey Theatre has been closed for a year.
Joe Duffy has asked Hannah Lockhead (who is an actress) "are you working Hannah or are you resting". She's just finished filming a horror film in Wales called Esoteric.
That's pretty much it.
TFI have now apologised.
guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again
Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this one's particularly good
EDIT: Against my better judgment, I'm letting another sidenote come out:
If you wanna encourage people to drop the master/slave naming scheme, this guy probably gave you a good bit of ammo. Changing a random naming scheme is a pretty low-priority task under most circumstances, but it gets a lot more tempting when it lets you distance yourself from people like this
This guy would be a lot happier if someone had given him a pound of weed when he was 12 then introduced him to college football fandom.
Dude is about 3 years too late but I guess it's always 8 o'clock in the outrage store.
For reference, HN went wild on this submission from a pretty obvious 4chan troll (the self-described "Black developer" just so happened to include references to a Stormfront post (since removed)):
Don't drink and tweet people.
E: my reaction to the people saying 'it is bait'
just imagine the kinda thinking that goes into even "I can make this post for fun, that'll be a gas"
Bad feelings today. Google announced that an artist I like, Jacob Collier, has been working with them to develop an LLM based tool for music autoplag.
A little context: Collier has like 5 grammies, and is an incredibly creative artist that is able to take ideas and influence from disparate sources and synthesise something interesting (it’s not always good though…). Likely the greatest musician of his generation!
I don’t want to catastrophise too much here but I’m not looking forward to this being used as a cudgel from the promptfondlers.
The only open question I think is: to what extent is the music generation autoplag? (My guess, 100%)
There’s been a moderate tsunami of “AI EVERYTHING” in a bunch of production tools lately too. Most I’ve seen have looked like just rebranding the further development of previously existing algorithmic tools, but there have also been a couple principally from the “we trained on everything possible!” camp
unsurprising that someone’s fallen over themselves to integrate the llm-style synthesis into the pipeline too, although it’s still extremely exhausting
the cultural fallout of this is going to suuuuuck. it’s going to be so much worse than receiving the dancing baby from your weird relatives in 2008
Jacob Collier to me is the archetype of the rich kid with enormous talent and not an ounce of taste or integrity, so I can't say I'm very surprised by this.
See also this nonsense, though now it looks rather innocent compared to the google news.
He's such a waste of musical ability it makes me angry and his face is annoying!
I have seen that, and in terms of the cringy stuff he does, it's definitely up there.
Here are my primarily unfiltered feelings about his music and persona:
I think at his worst, he's cringe, overly-self-indulgent, and pretentious. He needs a stylist because his hair sucks, his clothes are stupid, and he wears this fucking bear hat all the time that I hate. I hate hate hate people when people wear hats and it doesn't seem to serve a purpose beyond looking quirky. Take the fucking hat off, Jacob! He's the type that uses obscure words that you suspect he doesn't know the meaning of.
He also tends to be inappropriately maximalist—I'd point to his cover of Here Comes the Sun, Blackbird, Moon River (for which he won a Grammy!), and actually pretty much all of DJesse, a series of four (four!) albums. I don't really like the timbre of his voice; it's weird. I suspect he has like a perfect vocal technique or something, but as a result, it sounds completely removed from anything natural.
Unlike every other failed rich kid, he is legitimately talented, which you've acknowledged. I like some of his songs but wouldn't recommend them to anyone. His music feels like a technical demo in that many interesting, complex, and impressive things happen, which I like! But at my lowest points, I feel stupid when I listen to his stuff, even though he is musically speaking in a made-up language, and it's not my fault I don't understand it.
At his best, he seems genuinely open-hearted, with room to accept anything that comes his way. I do find some of his stuff inspiring! I like that a person like him exists and that many people look to him for inspiration and influence.
his face is annoying!
Specific to this point: I saw him live in concert for his Djesse Vol 1. tour and managed to meet him after the show. He seemed chill and it was a good chat. I took a picture with him, which I later put on my dating profile. Not seeing much success, I showed the profile to my friend to solicit feedback, and she said: "You should take that picture off because your friend is more attractive than you." I told her who he was but deleted the picture anyway.
He's not a monster (or not as much of one) like the rest of the people we look at over here. He's sheltered, and either there's someone in his camp pushing this kind of stuff, or there's no one to tell him that this tech is awful. Again, bad feelings!
OpenAI's business model:
Star Citizen, but for billionaires.
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.
Anyways, personal sidenote:
Beyond putting another blow to AI's reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.
there used to be a shitposting fb page called "places in warsaw you had no idea about because they don't exist". glad that somebody weaponised that concept
The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/
Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.
who does this? I love audiobooks, but I've put them down when the narrator didn't work for me. Who wants everything to sound like it's being read by a serial killer?
It looks like an AI-powered fiction version of this scam. On one hand being fiction means that it's less likely to actively risk killing people with phony medical advice. But being AI powered means that the grifters can now cut the underpaid gig workers out of the loop entirely, which is probably the most concrete example of AI displacing human workers I've yet seen.
I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling
https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/
https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/
the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that they’ve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasn’t their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.
fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the “just fork it or shut up” assholes are now complaining that a fork’s happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lix’s git forge — I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet)
Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.
Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:
I don't think there's a hell of a lot there that we don't already know and discuss at length, but it's cool to see Abby Thorne's new video at Philosophy Tube get into surveillance capitalism, neo-reaction/tech fascism, and how much of the discussion historically on and around social media misses the point.
It might be a decent overview reference for anyone in your life who isn't in as deep as we are, since you could do much worse in ~40 minutes.
"Life, it never die
Women are my favorite guy."
Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.
And it isn't even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I'm also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to 'rap' their messages in the late 90s).
Religion is the opium of the masses
And I'm increasingly scared they're gonna kick our asses
Maybe it's time for all those mugs
To shut up and start hitting drugs
It doesn't even make any sense 😭 surely "secular religion" and "childless hedonism" are not the same thing??
I can pull finer bars out my arse than this fucking farce
This is probably Grok - creativity from him's pretty sparse
Choom thinks he's DOOM, but he won't beat him any time soon
With how much crack this whack goes through, he'll forget this before noon
(I'm no MF DOOM, but anything I can put out will beat this artless twat any day)
In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:
Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:
Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.
A direct link: aitrainingstatement.org.
Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198
spoiler
"It's not AI"
That's kinda funny. If I'm ever in the market for a proprietary chromium-based web browser, they have my interest.
When I hear about tech companies going all in on AI as a hedge against the future, I'm reminded of this scene from Ice Age:
Australian post-industrial is my favorite genre atm thanks to David, and I have a recommendation: https://moose-mouse.bandcamp.com/album/oxide an Australian kid that plays drums in restaurants around Melbourne and has produced delightful solo electronic albums.
A friend of mine keeps suggesting Cursor to me. God damn I am sick of autoplag.
curser
fuck why didnt i think of that
I keep wanting to give zed a serious go (even just to try it out because it looks interesting) but there's some design decisions that are raisedeyebrow.gif and feel like a very telling thing about the mindset of the devs
fresh install:
- at start, it immediately attempts to start making connections to github copilot and a couple of other network sources. no user prompt, no indication that it's going to be doing this, no indication that it is doing it
- figuring out how to turn said undesired features off was not documented and just by the by semi answered elsewhere (also: I applied those settings and it still did a bunch of shit, so I had to pull the repo and scratch through it myself...)
while I'm certainly from the older guard of crotchety, I still think it's fucking reasonable to ask the user before your software goes off and does shit. you don't even have to overload them with requests, you can make it granular with a customize button. this shit has been solved in fucking windows application installers since the goddamn 00s
christ I'm gonna stay angry at the last decade for a long time
tangentially, I think about this thread every so often too. this just made me think of it again.
I just want to share this video because I think it is a work of art
"I'm gonna replace AI" by Olivia Squizzle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbh_J7VI94g
sorry for yt link, invidious didn't like it