Presented, without comment, this book cover:
(found on the social medias, the books' website)
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Presented, without comment, this book cover:
(found on the social medias, the books' website)
God, I hope this is a scam, and that whoever is running it is just smashing together today’s buzzwords to print money.
This 180$ ebook better be completely autoplagged and in no way intended to be informational.
it just clicked for me but idk if it makes sense: openai nonprofit status could be used later (inevitably in court) to make research clause of fair use work. they had it when training their models and that might have been a factor why they retained it, on top of trying to attract actual skilled people and not just hypemen and money
Speaking of twitter shit, I'm sad that it's back online in Brazil.
Max Tegmark has taken a break from funding neo-Nazi media to blather about Artificial General Intelligence.
As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)
The first clause of the opening line, and we've already hit a "citation needed".
He goes from there to taking a prediction market seriously. And that Aschenbrenner guy who thinks that Minecraft speedruns are evidence that AI will revolutionize "science, technology, and the economy".
You know, ten or fifteen years ago, I would have disagreed with Tegmark about all sorts of things, but I would have granted him default respect for being a scientist.
lol fandom could have been even worse
data moat
That's just the kind of innovation we need to get over this primitive and outdated impulse to cooperate with one another.
ok my first thought was to make a joke about castle warfare, despite my knowledge set being ephemera from a childhood appreciating tech trees in video games. So I did some research:
Err so yeah. Make your own jokes, ig.
Anyway, this has been MoatFacts™️. Paging @skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.de for better commentary*
idk what to exactly put there, moat is still an obstacle even in modern context, but assault on a castle with a moat using modern weaponry would be hilariously one-sided. you can suppress defenders with something, use a bridge layer to get inside the moat, then let combat engineers do their shenanigans to "open" castle one way or another. or you can use helis to do the same, or you can just level it all with artillery or airstrike or maybe even loads of ATGMs
that said it's not completely useless. moats but dry were used as a part of fixed fortifications in ww1 quite successfully. freshly invented electrified barbed wire fence and machine guns made them quite hard to pass, especially if you are, say, a peasant from tula oblast born in 1898 that has never seen powerline before. i think the last proper moat use in large-scale warfare happened during iran-iraq war, in battle of the marshes, when iraqis flooded previously dry area known as fish lake and put underwater coils of barbed wire and high-voltage cables. defensive tactic used there was to shoot at assaulting iranians to make them abandon or fall out of their boats or amphibious vehicles, then when they were in the water high voltage lines were energized. iranians eventually crossed the marshes entirely using speedboats. maybe it's not that outdated considering that last recored bayonet charge happened in 2004 (by brits in iraq). ymmv
Musk's twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.
twitter gon' have nothin' left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
In other news, a lengthy report about Richard Stallman liking kids just dropped.
Hacker News has a thread on it. Its a dumpster fire, as expected.
I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn't know how much of a fool RMS was. : "RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt." (It gets worse btw).
Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it's even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn't help.
Very serious people at HN at it again:
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone's personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like "sexual harassment is not a real crime" or "we shouldn't give our employees raises because otherwise they'll soon demand infinite pay" or "there's no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn't going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead" you're a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.
Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.
The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.
What do these people think leadership is?
No, obviously opinions like
You may have heard or read critical statements about me; <a href=https://website.made.by.my.sychophants.example.com>please make up your own mind.</a>
",are in the same category as "I think pineapple on pizza is delicious/disgusting" when it comes to evaluating someone's aptitude as a leader.
I advocate for Free Software despite RMS. I recognize the value of his good contributions and that I might not even have the concept of Free Software and its value without him. I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and the editors of the report make it clear that neither do they. I think Stallman is an embarrassment and a liability for the Free Software movement. I respect his moral integrity on software freedom and some other political causes (including his clumsy, yet justified condemnations of police brutality, and boycott of Coca-Cola company due to their use of fascist death squads to suppress Colombian trade unions), but his awful takes on issues of basic respect and empathy toward women, suspiciously fervent wilingness to defend sexual relations between teenage minors and adults, and a number of other gaffes (both ones listed in the report and some that are less morally detestable, but still embarrassing) are still bad enough that I'd be willing to elect an inanimate carbon rod as the leader of the movement before him.
1: It's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola. I do not wish to imply that Richard Matthew Stallman has a secret humiliation fetish he indulges in by installing Oracle products on his secret Windows 11 computer while drinking Coca-Cola, but I will simply point out it's conceivable that Richard Matthew Stallman has such a secret humiliation fetish involving the aforementioned details, and that I have conceived such a scenario simply to prove it is conceivable, that (etc.).
Top level comment at time of posting:
“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”
???
No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.
Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.
Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this
the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.
of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein's victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn't underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around
Today I was looking at buying some stickers to decorate a laptop and such, so I was browsing Redbubble. Looking here and there I found some nice designs and then stumbled upon a really impressive artist portfolio there. Thousands of designs, woah, I thought, it must have been so much work to put that together!
Then it dawned on me. For a while I had completely forgotten that we live in the age of AI slop... blissfull ignorance! But then I noticed the common elements in many of the designs... noticed how everything is surrounded by little dots or stars or other design trinkets. Such a typical AI slop thing, because somehow these "AI" generators can't leave any whitespace, they must fill every square millimeter with something. Of course I don't know for sure, and maybe I'm doing an actual artist injustice with my assumption, but this sure looked like Gen-AI stuff...
Anyway, I scrapped my order for now while I reconsider how to approach this. My brain still associates sites like redbubble or etsy with "art things made by actual humans", but I guess that certainty is outdated now.
This sucks so much. I don't want to pay for AI slop based on stolen human-created art - I want to pay the actual artists. But now I can never know... How can trust be restored?
New pair of Tweets from Zitron just dropped:
I also put out a lengthy post about AI's future on MoreWrite - go and read it, its pretty cool
fig. 1: how awful.systems works
Zitron's given commentary on PC Gamer's publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
He's also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley's worst excesses. I don't have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.
As more and more browsers are enshittifying, this is a small reminder that Brave is not a great alternative.
Me, a nuclear engineer reading about "Google restarting six nuclear power plants"
lol, lmao even
I bear news from the other place!
https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/
Post content reproduced here:
autoplag image of some electronics on a table
hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like
for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?
*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:
also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”