TechTakes
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 29 September 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)
- 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.
- TSMC execs allegedly dismissed Sam Altman as ‘podcasting bro’ — OpenAI CEO made absurd requests for 36 fabs for $7 trillionwww.tomshardware.com TSMC execs allegedly dismissed Sam Altman as ‘podcasting bro’ — OpenAI CEO made absurd requests for 36 fabs for $7 trillion
Scale of Sam Altman’s proposed investment plans considered ‘absurd’
- threads is cookin tonitebsky.app Ian Rennie (@theangelremiel.bsky.social)
Man, this probably hits really hard if you're fuckin stupid.
daniellamyoung_3h
Unpopular opinion: you only hate chat gpt because it makes it harder to stack rank and discriminate against people.
So what everyone can write well now? great it's a tool! Just like moving faster because you drive a car.
The good news is you'll be easily able to hire for that writing job you need. The bad news is you won't be able to discriminate against candidates who are not as good with the written word.
Also, an obsession with the written word is a tenant of white supremacy [salute emoji]
Ian Rennie @theangelremiel.bsky.social
Man, this probably hits really hard if you're fuckin stupid.
- Routledge nags academics to finish books ASAP — to feed Microsoft’s AIpivot-to-ai.com Routledge nags academics to finish books ASAP — to feed Microsoft’s AI
Informa, owner of academic publisher Taylor & Francis, sold everything to Microsoft to train Microsoft’s AIs earlier this year. Informa expects to take in over $75 million from its AI deals in …
- Marques Brownlee's ‘Panels’ Backlash, Explainedwww.forbes.com Marques Brownlee's ‘Panels’ Backlash, Explained
YouTuber MKBHD (Marques Brownlee), sparked controversy and backlash after launching ‘Panels,’ a subscription-based, HD wallpaper app for phones.
Bro really tried to sell his subscribers a "50$ a year" subscription to a "wallpaper" app.
Interesting points about the "app":
- the app has premium and free wallpapers
- the free wallpapers are only available in sd quality and if you want hd youd have to subscribe
- in order to unlock the sd quality you have to watch two 30 second ads.
- theres a wallpaper called "orange" thats just the color orange
- under categories "LEADERSHIP -> SAM ALTMAN": making drugs extremely uncool againfortune.com Sam Altman discusses life-changing psychedelics experience
OpenAI CEO and co-founder praises the “life-changing” impact of psychedelics
- Worst government use of ChatGPT: in a child protection reportpivot-to-ai.com Worst government use of ChatGPT: in a child protection report
Social work is important and demanding, and protecting potentially abused children needs every detail correct and properly assessed. This didn’t stop a case worker at the Department of Families, Fa…
- Sam Altman: The superintelligent AI is coming in just ‘a few thousand days’! Maybe.pivot-to-ai.com Sam Altman: The superintelligent AI is coming in just ‘a few thousand days’! Maybe.
OpenAI didn’t merely fill its latest $6.5 billion funding round — it’s oversubscribed! OpenAI is now deciding which investors are gullible cool and handsome enough to be allowed to give them money…
- a16z picks the next tech hype after Web3 and AI! It’s … anime?pivot-to-ai.com a16z picks the next tech hype after Web3 and AI! It’s … anime?
Web3 was a washout. AI isn’t delivering returns. What’s next for venture capital? Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) want you to believe the next lottery win explosion will be … anime! Yes, really — …
as brought up in the stubsack
- A radical idea - stop talking about things that don't exist like they dotante.cc A radical idea
If you’ve read me for a while you know that – when it comes to tech reporting/talking about tech – I have been around the block a few times. Talked about some hypes, cut some supposedly magic technologies down to size. Sometimes even defending or advocating for certain tech. After a while the patter...
- fresh money in, and mira’s bouncingwww.cnbc.com OpenAI CTO Mira Murati announces she's leaving the company
OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati said Wednesday she is leaving the company after more than six years.
> “stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”
yeah I completely believe you, weird lady. I too want to vaguely step into the warm embrace of my piles of ill-gotten gold, forgetting about the stressors of how to sell something that doesn’t exist and that you helped claim would be here really soon now. ahhh, bliss..
one’s gotta wonder about the timing of this announcement, right? like come the fuck on
- Is there a compendium of Elon+Twitter badness?
I want to make the case to my employer that we should drop Twitter/X as a promotional channel. I could go drawing together the various examples of disinfo spreading, instating CSAM posters, rise of content inciting violence etc, but I thought I'd check to see if someone hasn't already been tracking this. The sooner I can pull the info together the better but I don't have time right now to go compiling it myself.
Anyone know if there's a site, wiki, resource, thread etc that could set me up?
- Lionsgate sells movie catalog to AI video startup Runway hoping to replace artists and FXpivot-to-ai.com Lionsgate sells movie catalog to AI video startup Runway hoping to replace artists and FX
Hollywood studio Lionsgate has sold its entire back catalog of movies and TV shows to AI video startup Runway to train a new model on, which Lionsgate will then have access to. [WSJ, archive] Lions…
- "If you want a picture of the future, imagine the ghost of your grandma, owned by tech bros, replaying your whatsapp convos and shilling for whoever pays — forever"
YouTube Video
Click to view this content.
- Come to sunny Melbourne! Don’t worry about the AI mutants in the parkspivot-to-ai.com Come to sunny Melbourne! Don’t worry about the AI mutants in the parks
Nick Reece is mayor of the City of Melbourne, the central business district of the city. He’s running for re-election in October. One of Reece’s pledges is to build dozens of new parks around the c…
- Three Mile Island nuclear plant is restarting to power AI for Microsoftpivot-to-ai.com Three Mile Island nuclear plant is restarting to power AI for Microsoft
Good news, everyone! The Three Mile Island power plant, site of the worst nuclear disaster in US history, is restarting to power AI for Microsoft! [Press release; Washington Post, archive; Bloomber…
- The Bitcoin bros who want to crowdfund a new countrywww.bbc.com The Bitcoin bros who want to crowdfund a new country
How a group of Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs plan to create "the network state."
> Do you look at the possibility of political turbulence ahead of November’s US presidential election and think: democracy could be in trouble? So does a group of tech entrepreneurs backed by big Silicon Valley money. And they love it. > >Imagine if you could choose your citizenship the same way you choose your gym membership. That’s a vision of the not-too-distant future put forward by Balaji Srinivasan. Balaji – who, like Madonna, is mostly just known by his first name – is a rockstar in the world of crypto. A serial tech entrepreneur and venture capitalist who believes that pretty much everything governments currently do, tech can do better. > > ... > > Silicon Valley loves “disruption”. Tech startups have been disrupting traditional media for years; now they are making inroads into other areas too: education, finance, space travel. “Imagine a thousand different startups, each of them replacing a different legacy institution,” Balaji told the audience. “They exist alongside the establishment in parallel, they’re pulling away users, they’re gaining strength, until they become the new thing.” > >If startups could replace all these different institutions, Balaji reasoned, they could replace countries too. He calls his idea the “network state”: startup nations. Here’s how it would work: communities form – on the internet initially – around a set of shared interests or values. Then they acquire land, becoming physical “countries” with their own laws. These would exist alongside existing nation states, and eventually, replace them altogether. > >You would choose your nationality like you choose your broadband provider. You would become a citizen of the franchised cyber statelet of your choice. > >There is nothing new about corporations having undue influence in the affairs of nation states. The term "banana republic" derives from the fact that a US company, United Fruit, effectively ruled Guatemala for decades beginning in the 1930s. Apart from owning the majority of the land, they ran the railways, the postal service, the telegraph. When the Guatemalan government tried to push back, the CIA helped United Fruit out by instigating a coup. > >But the network state movement appears to have greater ambitions still. It doesn’t just want pliant existing governments so that companies can run their own affairs. It wants to replace governments with companies.
- Microsoft to reopen 3 mile island to power AI
the symbolism is 😗👌
archive link: https://archive.ph/jFO6f
- How to use AI for medical scans: just steal the training datapivot-to-ai.com How to use AI for medical scans: just steal the training data
Machine learning can be very effective. Using machine learning to review medical scans and flag issues for human inspection is a standard promotional talking point for “AI.” How do you …
- BlackRock, Microsoft to Raise $30 Billion for AI Investments - in data centres and power stationsfinance.yahoo.com BlackRock, Microsoft to Raise $30 Billion for AI Investments
(Bloomberg) -- BlackRock Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are teaming up on one of the largest efforts to date to bankroll the build-out of data warehouses and energy infrastructure behind the boom in artificial intelligence.Most Read from BloombergCalifornia’s Anti-Speeding Bill Can Be a Traffic Safety Bre...
investors include Saudi Arabia, the country whose wealth rests on fossil fuels
now you might wonder if this initiative will lack a certain greenness
- Why wordfreq will not be updated - AI spamgithub.com wordfreq/SUNSET.md at master · rspeer/wordfreq
Access a database of word frequencies, in various natural languages. - rspeer/wordfreq
- Kubient’s adtech use case for AI: an excuse for a fraudpivot-to-ai.com Kubient’s adtech use case for AI: an excuse for a fraud
Tiny adtech company Kubient shut down in late 2023 when CEO Paul Roberts was caught faking revenue numbers on his AI fraud detection software to lure investment in. He pleaded guilty on Monday. [Do…
- OpenAI does not want you delving into o1 Strawberry’s alleged “chain of thought”pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI does not want you delving into o1 Strawberry’s alleged “chain of thought”
OpenAI’s big pitch for its new o1 LLM, a.k.a. “Strawberry,” is that it goes through an actual reasoning process to answer you. The computer is alive! The paperclip apocalypse is imminen…
- "The Subprime AI Crisis" - Ed Zitron on the bubble's impending collapsewww.wheresyoured.at The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
> None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.
Can't blame Zitron for being pretty downbeat in this - given the AI bubble's size and side-effects, its easy to see how its bursting can have some cataclysmic effects.
(Shameless self-promo: I ended up writing a bit about the potential aftermath as well)
- NSWEduChat will ‘ease the burden’ on teachers with safety promises that would need human-equivalent AIpivot-to-ai.com NSWEduChat will ‘ease the burden’ on teachers with safety promises that would need human-equivalent AI
Teachers are perennially in short supply — they expect money and rights and unions. Surely chatbots can fix this! NSWEduChat is from New South Wales in Australia. It’s supplied by Microsoft and is …
- AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesseswww.techrepublic.com AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses
Businesses using artificial intelligence to generate code are experiencing downtime and security issues, according to Sonar CEO.
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25239919
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 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)
- Microsoft is firmly committed to environmentally sustainable AI — except when there’s a sale to be madepivot-to-ai.com Microsoft is firmly committed to environmentally sustainable AI — except when there’s a sale to be made
We wrote in July how Microsoft was firmly committed to its carbon reduction goals — except for the minor detail that all their AI compute would completely blow all their numbers. Then there’s Micro…
- OpenAI releases new Sora demo videos — with a few less glitchespivot-to-ai.com OpenAI releases new Sora demo videos — with a few less glitches
Sora is OpenAI’s text-to-video generator. Two more one-minute demo reels came out last week, created by professional producers. [Tom’s Guide; YouTube; YouTube] Introduced in February, Sora is a dif…
- In a rare moment, the orange site asks where the emperor's clothes are
Perhaps there will be some quality sneers, perhaps not. But in this moment the orange site becomes sentient and asks if the emperor is really wearing clothes
- Strawberry fields forever — OpenAI’s new ‘o1’ modelpivot-to-ai.com Strawberry fields forever — OpenAI’s new ‘o1’ model
The Strawberry has landed! OpenAI has released o1-preview, its latest impressive demo, just in time for the current funding round. [Press release] The new hotness in Strawberry is chain-of-thought …
- OpenAI looks to fill the funding gap with $6.5b of fresh investment and $5b creditpivot-to-ai.com OpenAI looks to fill the funding gap with $6.5b of fresh investment and $5b credit
Saving the world from the AI you’re creating is expensive work. Sam Altman’s OpenAI is looking to patch its massive cash deficit with a fresh $6.5 billion from investors. [Bloomberg, archive] OpenA…
- The world is not enough — US and France escalate Nvidia antitrust investigationspivot-to-ai.com The world is not enough — US and France escalate Nvidia antitrust investigations
AI shovel seller Nvidia is making a ton of money in the boom — with 70% to 95% of the market for graphics cards and a full 98% for data center computation chips. [CNBC; HPCWire] But is a ton of mon…
- Balaji Srinivasan Launches “The Network School” in Singapore
The benefits of crypto are self evident, thus it is necessary to build an elaborate faux education system to demonstrate them.
I'm sure there will also be some Network Fascism in there for good measure.
- good news everyone, mariadb strain is now owned by PEwww.prnewswire.com K1 Acquires MariaDB, a Leading Database Software Company, and Appoints New CEO
/PRNewswire/ -- K1 Investment Management, LLC ("K1"), one of the largest investors in small-cap enterprise software companies, today announced the completion...
I will say I'm not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad
- Nevada to clear unemployment claim backlogs with one weird trick: pretending an AI has judgmentpivot-to-ai.com Nevada to clear unemployment claim backlogs with one weird trick: pretending an AI has judgment
Nevada has a backlog of more than 10,000 unemployment claim appeals, stretching as far back as the COVID pandemic in 2020. The obvious solution? “Process” the cases as fast as possible with a magic…
- Promptfondler drama: Shumer’s ‘no-hallucination’ Reflection 70B AI turns out to be two other models in a trenchcoatpivot-to-ai.com Promptfondler drama: Shumer’s ‘no-hallucination’ Reflection 70B AI turns out to be two other models in a trenchcoat
LLMs spew hallucinations by their nature. But what if you could get the LLM to correct itself? Or if you just claimed your LLM could correct itself? Last week, Matt Shumer of AI startup HyperWrite/…
another valiant attempt to get "promptfonder" into more common currency