Mii @awful.systems I wrangle code, draw pictures, and write things. You might find some of it here.
Yep, exactly the ones I was thinking about. They lobbied over there a while back with “prominent supporters” like Yud and Hinton. Luckily the general consensus was that they were full of shit, so the mod shut it down.
That place is an absolute fucking cesspool.
May I suggest /r/artisthate which is Sneer Club for artists sneering at exactly this type of content, and it’s hilarious sometimes (albeit quite large at this point, so your fair share of doomsday rats have sneaked in trying to co-opt the movement and the moderation is quite lenient).
My asexual brain always imagined it as a cool-looking dinosaur.
However, since dinosaurs were apparently birds, I guess the giant cock isn't too far off.
The fuck is happening over there?
I could have “excused” the AI bullshit as “we did it to appease the corporate customers who make us money” but there’s no way you can spin this.
I’m canceling my account. At this point I might just say fuck it and use my Yahoo mail for everything again.
(And this time the Reddit thread is the dumpster fire I’ve been expecting the last one to be lol)
https://xcancel.com/jrawson/status/1814232925967089808
The fuck.
Reposting this from the last Stubsack here by request.
Same, tbh. I went on their subreddit expecting a shitstorm but the announcement sits at like 85% upvotes with mostly positive replies.
What kind of bizarro world have I stumbled into?
At least the top-level comments seem to be split.
Who is the target audience for this?
People who use Proton are privacy-conscious and mostly (I would argue) tech literate, and yet they shove spicy autocomplete that no one ever needed until two years ago and most people don’t want now because it produces complete horseshit, and spellchecking that every browser under then sun has built in by now.
And then they quietly say you need to use Chromium, so the people who use anything but (like, I don’t know, the majority of privacy-conscious folks who should be their main user base, lol) have their e2e broken?
I really hope they catch a raging firestorm for this.
(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)
“What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”
Our BI team is trying to implement some RAG via Microsoft Fabrics and Azure AI search because we need that for whatever reason, and they've burned through almost 10k for the first half of the running month already, either because it's just super expensive or because it's so terribly documented that they can't get it to work and have to try again and again. Normal costs are somewhere around 2k for the whole month for traffic + servers + database and I haven't got the foggiest what's even going on there.
But someone from the C suite apparently wrote them a blank check because it's AI ...
Yes, some actually get into “real” art after those crappy AI generators
I legitimately picked up drawing again a year or so back after some complete asshat at work made me listen to him talk for half an hour about how Midjourney was the art of the future and how finally the art world would not be gatekept by those entitled artsy types anymore.
I mean, I'm still shit at it, but I'm petty enough to do it just so I can stick it to that guy at some point by telling him that I don't use or need spicy chatbots for dev work or art.
Ok, seriously, this is just Mortal Engines fan-fiction in an oceanpunk AU.
God damn, I don't think I've read an article with that many name drops in a while. It's like a Marvel film but with techfash assholes.
“JD Vance is pro-OSS [open source] AI,” Verdon tweeted. “We are so unfathomably back.”
It's actually impressive how this guy is able to make me despise him even more every single time he opens his mouth.
Fair point, you’re right.
Lol what an absolute tool. That’s the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I can’t auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign they’re pushing this week because it’s literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.
But I guess that’s the logical next step if your whole business model depends on lazy deceiving people into clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.
P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.
Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefox's praise are privacy advocates who won't touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.
(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)
It's also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.
Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3
As someone with regular migraines who’s also very sensitive to noise, this is crazy, and sound pollution is something most people don’t even take seriously.
the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis
90 decibels? Fucking end me.
So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.
As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.
Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.
Peter, Paul and Mary are the only three people in the room. Peter only reads a book, and Paul plays a game of chess against someone else who’s also in the room. What is Mary doing?
Sam Altman is full of shit (and totally has a thing for Scarlett Johansson)
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.
Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.
> Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.
“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”
I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.
Tired of just generating anime girls? How about letting roided Clippy play CSI?
This AI hype cycle has dramatically distorted society's views of what's possible with image upscalers.
It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.
> Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.
You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.
> Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.
And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.
When your big tech brain completely fails to read the room.
SXSW audiences all day booed a festival video (played Tuesday in front of screenings) featuring tech pundits touting their enthusiasm for AI.
It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.
> “I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”
I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).
> Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.
Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.
Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.
> […] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].
Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".
> […] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”
I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.