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Joined
2 yr. ago

  • The Register said in its Builder.AI obit that the company is really into making its devs use AI coding. lol.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    UK AI unicorn Builder.ai is dead — the downfall of “AGI”: A Guy Instead

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    eating our own dogshit

  • quite amazing that (a) Microsoft basically bought open source with GitHub (b) and are now trying to fuck it up so hard people leave

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    GitHub wants to spam open source projects with AI slop

  • a shitload i expect. but checking authorities actually exist is probably gonna become an obvious thing to do lol

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    DEFRA and Natural England creates unusably wrong peat map — with AI!

  • I mean this post seems largely correct and reasonable, but ehh be a little cautious

  • word i hear is that too many lawyers fucking love this shit, they see plausible words and think that's sufficient to replace supplement the office peons

    then this happens to them and lol

  • If you're after streams-crossing - this guy is a rationalist who does Manifold Markets

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Latest AI-hallucinated legal filing, from AI vendor Anthropic

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    How to make a splash in AI economics: fake your data

  • finally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot

  • someone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Trump announces vaporware AI data centres in the United Arab Emirates

  • it will explain its position with interpretive twerking

  • Egan already told Hanson to fuck off in a previous story, Zendegi:

    "My IQ is one hundred and sixty ... You can always reach me through my blog, Overpowering Falsehood dot com, the number one site for rational thinking about the future —"

  • jwz gave the game away, so i'll reveal:

    the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent

    so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)

    caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.

    nginx code:

     
        
            # block some bot UAs for complex requests
            # nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable
            # if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot
            set $BOT "";
            if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) {
                set $BOT "C"; }
    
                if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) {
                    set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
                if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) {
                    set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
                if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) {
                    set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
                if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) {
                    set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
    
                if ($BOT = "CO") {
                    return 503;}
    
      

    you always return "503" not "403", because 403 says "fuck off" but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they've flattened.

    I give this trick at least another week.

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Even Elon Musk can’t make Grok claim a ‘white genocide’ in South Africa

  • sounds dumb as hell and I'm not surprised they avoided tagging me in then

  • This discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.

  • I didn't see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.

  • this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video's got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons

  • TechTakes @awful.systems

    Musk’s xAI gas turbines: no emission controls, filling Memphis air with smog

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    If AI is so good at coding … where are the open source contributions?

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Lloyd’s offers corporate insurance against AI chatbot errors! Now try to get a payout

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Soundcloud claims the right to train AI on all your songs — but swears it hasn’t yet, honest

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Study: Your coworkers hate you for using AI at work

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Shocked to hear ‘prompt engineer’ is not a real job

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Christopher Pelkey — AI ‘victim testimony’ from beyond the grave

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    AI computers aren’t selling because users don’t care

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    OpenAI tries a new scheme to go for-profit — but Elon Musk isn’t convinced

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    UK backtracks on AI ‘opt out’ scheme for creative works

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    Duolingo replaces its contractors with AI, courses with slop

    TechTakes @awful.systems

    In 2025, venture capital can’t pretend everything is fine any more