TechTakes
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
- Well, AI made our search unusable dogshit. But AI *also* made us miss our climate goals, soapnews.com Google falling short of important climate target, cites electricity needs of AI
Google, which has an ambitious plan to address climate change with cleaner operations, came nowhere close to its goals last year, according to the company’s annual Environmental Report Tuesday.
- Google and Microsoft are getting dirtier. They can’t help it, it’s AI!pivot-to-ai.com Google and Microsoft are getting dirtier. They can’t help it, it’s AI!
Microsoft released its 2024 environmental report in May, and Google released its report in June. Both companies have a goal of zero net emissions by 2030. Both are on track to miss this goal — and …
- Jason Rohrer’s Project December: AI seances at $10 a poppivot-to-ai.com Jason Rohrer’s Project December: AI seances at $10 a pop
Hey, chatbot entrepreneurs, let’s prey on the grieving! Project December will “simulate the dead” for just $10 a session. You select from a list of personality traits, add names of relatives and pe…
with early "grieftech" entepreneur Helena Blavatsky
- Google News still serving plagiarized spam ahead of the originals it’s ripping offpivot-to-ai.com Google News still serving plagiarized spam ahead of the originals it’s ripping off
AI plagiarism from content farms is still getting shown in Google News ahead of the originals it’s ripping off. Wired found that the Syrus #Blog content farm had gamed the results for Google News —…
- The AI is still for spam
even the orange site is not impressed: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40862865
- BBC: What is 'AI washing' and why is it a problem?www.bbc.co.uk What is 'AI washing' and why is it a problem?
Tech firms commonly highlight their use of AI, but in some cases it may be exaggerated.
- AI influencer bots: my sexy robot is just too hornypivot-to-ai.com AI influencer bots: my sexy robot is just too horny
Snapchat influencer Caryn Marjorie put out a chatbot, CarynAI, supposedly based on herself. You could talk to the robot Caryn for $1 per minute! CarynAI took in $70,000 in its first week. Marjorie …
despite the title, the post is completely SFW
- get their asses - Brussels explores antitrust probe into Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAIarstechnica.com Brussels explores antitrust probe into Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI
EU executive arm drops merger review into US tech companies’ alliance.
- A Rant about Front-end Developmentblog.frankmtaylor.com A Rant about Front-end Development
I am a front-end developer who is FED up about front-end development. If you write front-end, this isn't about you personally. It's about how your choices make me angry. Also this is about how my choices have made me angry. Also this is mostly just about choices, the technologies are incidental. Not...
A masterful rant about the shit state of the web from a front-end dev perspective
> There’s a disconcerting number of front-end developers out there who act like it wasn’t possible to generate HTML on a server prior to 2010. They talk about SSR only in the context of Node.js and seem to have no clue that people started working on this problem when season 5 of Seinfeld was on air2. > >Server-side rendering was not invented with Node. What Node brought to the table was the convenience of writing your shitty div soup in the very same language that was invented in 10 days for the sole purpose of pissing off Java devs everywhere. > >Server-side rendering means it’s rendered on the fucking server. You can do that with PHP, ASP, JSP, Ruby, Python, Perl, CGI, and hell, R. You can server-side render a page in Lua if you want.
- Mother Jones sues OpenAI and Microsoft - best pic of Sam Altman-Friedpivot-to-ai.com Mother Jones sues OpenAI and Microsoft
We predicted in December that AI companies would get obliterated with copyright and trademark claims — the obvious consequence of training your models on other people’s work. Some of the copyright …
- Why do people who hate IP laws/copyright think we should be allowing AI companies to copy the whole internet when pirates still get arrested for piracy?
Do they think the hands-off treatment that giant corporations that basically print money get is going to somehow "trickle down" to them, too?
Because last I checked, the guys who ran Jetflicks are facing jail time. Like, potentially longer jail time than most murder sentences.
...but letting OpenAI essentially do the same without consequences will mean Open Source AI people will somehow get the same hands-off treatment? That just reeks of bullshit to me.
I just don't fucking buy it and letting massive corporations just skirt IP laws while everyone else gets fucked hard by those same IP laws just doesn't seem like the best hill to die on, yet plenty of people who are anti-copyright/anti-IP laws are dying on this fucking hill.
What gives?
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I am personally of the opinion that current IP/copyright laws are draconian, but that IP/copyright isn't inherently a bad thing. I just know, based on previous history in the US, that letting the Big Guys skirt laws almost never leads to Little Guys getting similar treatment.
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Also, I hope this is an okay place for this rant. Thanks for keeping this space awesome. Please remove if this is inappropriate for this forum, please and thank you.
- Honest Government Ad | AI
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
Bumping this up from the comments.
- It can't be that the bullshit machine doesn't know 2023 from 2024, you must be organizing your data wrong (wsj)
>AI Work Assistants Need a Lot of Handholding
> Getting full value out of AI workplace assistants is turning out to require a heavy lift from enterprises. ‘It has been more work than anticipated,’ says one CIO.
aka we are currently in the process of realizing we are paying for the privilege of being the first to test an incomplete product.
>Mandell said if she asks a question related to 2024 data, the AI tool might deliver an answer based on 2023 data. At Cargill, an AI tool failed to correctly answer a straightforward question about who is on the company’s executive team, the agricultural giant said. At Eli Lilly, a tool gave incorrect answers to questions about expense policies, said Diogo Rau, the pharmaceutical firm’s chief information and digital officer.
I mean, imagine all the non-obvious stuff it must be getting wrong at the same time.
> He said the company is regularly updating and refining its data to ensure accurate results from AI tools accessing it. That process includes the organization’s data engineers validating and cleaning up incoming data, and curating it into a “golden record,” with no contradictory or duplicate information.
Please stop feeding the thing too much information, you're making it confused.
> Some of the challenges with Copilot are related to the complicated art of prompting, Spataro said. Users might not understand how much context they actually need to give Copilot to get the right answer, he said, but he added that Copilot itself could also get better at asking for more context when it needs it.
Yeah, exactly like all the tech demos showed -- wait a minute!
> [Google Cloud Chief Evangelist Richard Seroter said] “If you don’t have your data house in order, AI is going to be less valuable than it would be if it was,” he said. “You can’t just buy six units of AI and then magically change your business.”
Nevermind that that's exactly how we've been marketing it.
Oh well, I guess you'll just have to wait for chatgpt-6.66 that will surely fix everything, while voiced by charlize theron's non-union equivalent.
- Doing things is so passé, especially if you want fundingpivot-to-ai.com Doing things is so passé, especially if you want funding
AI startup Imbue got $200 million in venture capital last year — and another $12 million in follow-on funding — for a valuation of $1 billion. Two years in, the company still has no revenue and no …
- Nvidia is being a bubble stock againpivot-to-ai.com Nvidia is being a bubble stock again
AI shovelmaker Nvidia’s share price hit an all-time high of $140.76 last Thursday, briefly making Nvidia the single most valuable company in the world. But what goes up for no good reason must com…
- AI doomers are all trying to find the guy building the AI doom machineswww.salon.com AI doomers have warned of the tech-pocalypse — while doing their best to accelerate it
Wannabe Cassandras warning of AI's potential for human extinction are some of the biggest champions of the industry
- Pivot To AI is launched! Elevator pitch: “Web 3 Is Going Great, but it’s AI.”
"It can't be that stupid, you must be prompting it wrong"
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 30 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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 facts of 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.
- Neither the devil you know nor the devil you don’t
> Our path to better working conditions lies through organizing and striking, not through helping our bosses sue other giant mulitnational corporations for the right to bleed us out.
- Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machinewww.wired.com Perplexity Plagiarized Our Story About How Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine
Experts aren’t unanimous about whether the AI-powered search startup’s practices could expose it to legal claims ranging from infringement to defamation—but some say plaintiffs would have strong cases.
- Fast Crimes at Lambda School - eat shit Austenwww.sandofsky.com Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Two days after his company's downfall, Austen Allred wrote: I wish people could see how ugly it is to be envious, and how obvious it is to those around you when that's what's happening. There's not much uglier than trying to tear someone down because they achieved what you wish
- those well known sneerers the (checks notes) Federal Trade Commissionwww.ftc.gov Keep your AI claims in check
A creature is formed of clay. A puppet becomes a boy. A monster rises in a lab. A computer takes over a spaceship. And all manner of robots serve or control us.
- The mainstreaming of 'AI' scepticism [Baldur Bjarnason]www.baldurbjarnason.com The mainstreaming of 'AI' scepticism
I stopped writing seriously about “AI” a few months ago because I felt that it was more important to promote the critical voices of those doing substantive research in the field.
>I stopped writing seriously about “AI” a few months ago because I felt that it was more important to promote the critical voices of those doing substantive research in the field. > > But also because anybody who hadn’t become a sceptic about LLMs and diffusion models by the end of 2023 was just flat out wilfully ignoring the facts. > > The public has for a while now switched to using “AI” as a negative – using the term “artificial” much as you do with “artificial flavouring” or “that smile’s artificial”. > > But it seems that the sentiment might be shifting, even among those predisposed to believe in “AI”, at least in part.
Between this, and the rise of "AI-free" as a marketing strategy, the bursting of the AI bubble seems quite close.
Another solid piece from Bjarnason.
- I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again
another obviously correct opinion from Lucidity
- "Google Gemini tried to kill me"
> > > I followed these steps, but just so happened to check on my mason jar 3-4 days in and saw tiny carbonation bubbles rapidly rising throughout. > > I thought that may just be part of the process but double checked with a Google search on day 7 (when there were no bubbles in the container at all). > > Turns out I had just grew a botulism culture and garlic in olive oil specifically is a fairly common way to grow this bio-toxins. > > Had I not checked on it 3-4 days in I'd have been none the wiser and would have Darwinned my entire family. > > Prompt with care and never trust AI dear people...
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 23 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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.
- The role of the consumer in late stage capitalism
This isn't a sneer, more of a meta take. Written because I sit in a waiting room and is a bit bored, so I'm writing from memory, no exact quotes will be had.
A recent thread mentioning "No Logo" in combination with a comment in one of the mega-threads that pleaded for us to be more positive about AI got me thinking. I think that in our late stage capitalism it's the consumer's duty to be relentlessly negative, until proven otherwise.
"No Logo" contained a history of capitalism and how we got from a goods based industrial capitalism to a brand based one. I would argue that "No Logo" was written in the end of a longer period that contained both of these, the period of profit driven capital allocation. Profit, as everyone remembers from basic marxism, is the surplus value the capitalist acquire through paying less for labour and resources then the goods (or services, but Marx focused on goods) are sold for. Profits build capital, allowing the capitalist to accrue more and more capital and power.
Even in Marx times, it was not only profits that built capital, but new capital could be had from banks, jump-starting the business in exchange for future profits. Thus capital was still allocated in the 1990s when "No Logo" was written, even if the profits had shifted from the good to the brand. In this model, one could argue about ethical consumption, but that is no longer the world we live in, so I am just gonna leave it there.
In the 1990s there was also a tech bubble were capital allocation was following a different logic. The bubble logic is that capital formation is founded on hype, were capital is allocated to increase hype in hopes of selling to a bigger fool before it all collapses. The bigger the bubble grows, the more institutions are dragged in (by the greed and FOMO of their managers), like banks and pension funds. The bigger the bubble, the more it distorts the surrounding businesses and legislation. Notice how now that the crypto bubble has burst, the obvious crimes of the perpetrators can be prosecuted.
In short, the bigger the bubble, the bigger the damage.
If in a profit driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations profit, in the hype driven capital allocation, the consumer can deny corporations hype. To point and laugh is damage minimisation.
- Onion: Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AIwww.theonion.com Guy Who Sucks At Being A Person Sees Huge Potential In AI
SAN MATEO, CA—After spending the past three decades of his life being totally unable and unwilling to engage in any meaningful way with the world around him, James Parker, a local guy who sucks at being a person, told reporters Thursday that he saw huge potential in AI. “While it’s still in its earl...
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 16 June 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering 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!
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.
- hot off the presses: automatic wrong information without even going to the wrong-information deliveries storetheconversation.com AI chatbots are intruding into online communities where people are trying to connect with other humans
People participate in online communities to share experiences and sympathy. AI chatbots that join the conversation can only pretend to offer either.
there are some remarkable instances of bad behaviour in there already, but imagine being the sort of product team that thinks users being gaslit by a chatbot that they couldn’t even consent to choose to use is totes something to deliver without any modification or remark
- "You can see the future first in San Francisco." OpenAI alumnus Leopold Aschenbrenner pours out a worshipful paean to the AI future, just as if GPT wasn't topping out its S-curvesituational-awareness.ai Introduction - SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: The Decade Ahead
Leopold Aschenbrenner, June 2024 You can see the future first in San Francisco. Over the past year, the talk of the town has shifted from $10 billion compute clusters to $100 billion clusters to trillion-dollar clusters. Every six months another zero is added to the boardroom plans. Behind the scene...
- At the AI Chatbot conference, an event suffused with use cases for guillotineswww.nplusonemag.com An Age of Hyperabundance | Laura Preston
Everyone at this conference kept invoking loneliness and claiming the antidote was conversation. That didn’t track with my own experience. My most desperate moments of loneliness have been in conversation: on a Hinge date, doomed but persisting as a form of protocol. At a publishing party, surrounde...
- CEO of Zoom: what if we take deepfake fraud, right, and make it a push-button feature of Zoomwww.theverge.com Zoom CEO Eric Yuan wants AI clones in meetings
Why have fewer meetings when you could just send your AI clone instead?
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 9 June 2024
Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!
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.