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TechTakes @awful.systems

OpenAI engineers are flocking to its rival Anthropic. “They let us huff our own farts,” says one

TechTakes @awful.systems

Lionsgate: "The AI movies are coming, we swear, they're just stuck in Canada"

TechTakes @awful.systems

Google: “after billions of dollars spent, we found a brilliant and innovative way to monetize AI! You’ll never guess what it is!!!”

TechTakes @awful.systems

Theranos: First Blood Part II

TechTakes @awful.systems

Musk accretes Gebbia, wants to run an AirBnB out of 1600 Pennsylvania

TechTakes @awful.systems

What is the charge? Eating an LLM? A succulent chinese LLM? Deepseek judo-thrown out of Australian government devices

TechTakes @awful.systems

OpenAI says stealing is wrong and bad unless they do it

TechTakes @awful.systems

Musk presses H twice to perform the Nazi salute twice on stage at inauguration.

TechTakes @awful.systems

Grimes defends Musk’s gaming honor, for “personal pride”

TechTakes @awful.systems

GM avoids reinventing a bus or a train with this one weird trick

TechTakes @awful.systems

Are we going to see prediction markets enter mainstream journalism? Taylor Lorenz says yes

TechTakes @awful.systems

SF tech startup Scale AI, worth $13.8B, accused of widespread wage theft

SneerClub @awful.systems

In which some researchers draw a spooky picture and spook themselves

TechTakes @awful.systems

Elon is constructing a texas compound to trap, err, I mean, house his ex wives and children

TechTakes @awful.systems

Microsoft says EU to blame for the world's worst IT outage

SneerClub @awful.systems

The Star Fox-style roguelite whose dev refused to use AI voices to cut costs is adding an entire "anti-capitalist revenge" campaign about a cat-girl destroying AI

TechTakes @awful.systems

An AI beauty pageant? Miss me with that Miss AI.

SneerClub @awful.systems

"The Better Angels of Our Nature" Part 2: Campus Lies, I.Q. Rise & Epstein Ties - If Books Could Kill

TechTakes @awful.systems

Guy who “would convince employees to take shots of pricey Don Julio tequila, work 20-hour days [and] attend 2am meetings” wants to own WeWork again

SneerClub @awful.systems

Roko’s Basilisk gets a shoutout on CONAF, hypothetically dooming many unsuspecting listeners to… nothing, basically.

  • Time for my infrequent missive about the intersection of sneerspace and comedy podcasts. The current episode of one of my favourite comedy podcasts, Doughboys, jumpscared me today when one of the hosts, Mitch, came back from a toilet break and independently came up with the fundamentals of Roko's Basilisk (the torture in cyberspace part). Anyway here it is, or if you want, you can start with the context of the toilet break. What's important to note is that these guys do not try to present themselves as intelligent, and usually present themselves as stupid.

  • Studio executives, the people who seek to monetise every aspect of creativity, as if they cannot appreciate or see the intangible value of art that is uncorrupted by commerce? Hard to say if they have aphantasia. No way to tell

  • Also: if it were possible to create a shot for much cheaper, what is the point of a studio?

    My understanding is that you never make a movie with your own money because A. it’s expensive and B. you will probably make a loss, so you go to studios to try sell the film. They also understand A. and B., but they can use that as leverage against you for owning various rights of your production, in case it goes well, and otherwise to tie you down with contracts so they can force you to do their bidding. Making film production cheaper weakens the power of studios- the only card they’ll have to play is distribution, which is dying anyway thanks to the streaming ghouls.

  • Agree 1000%. I don’t want to read into Johnson’s comments (not enough context from the article). That being said, he is only about two degrees separated from TESCREAL: the wife of his frequent collaborator JGL is Tasha McCauley, a former board member of OpenAI. JGL himself has spoken at EA events, and is reportedly directing an “AI thriller” for Johnson’s production company. My guess is that he isn’t surrounded by AI-critical people, which sucks, and would explain the lack of acknowledgement of the slop vortex on his part.

  • Followup to this bit of news: 'Natasha Lyonne addresses backlash to her AI "hybrid" movie'

    Link to interview: (variety) (archive)

    relevant section from interview:

    As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.

    “It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.

    When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.

    “It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”

    “I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”

    She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”

  • That is why I called it a great start and not a finished product. I image there are a lot of legal cases to sift through and it is a lawyers job to at least keep track of the imporant ones (those which sets precedent), but knowing that there are multiple “lesser” rulings in your favour could be useful. And having a search enging that can find those based on a description of your current case? Not a bad idea to me.

    Such databases have existed since basically the conception of common law, like a thousand fucking years ago. Good solutions exist and have existed without AI til today. It’s not a great start, it’s a running leap backwards off of a cliff into a trough of slop.