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
speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):
image description
a post from Consumer Softproducts, the studio behind Cruelty Squad:
weve read the room and have now successfully removed AI from cruelty squad. each enemy is now controlled in almost real time by an employee in a low labor cost country
I think Zuckeberg has been saying the silent part out loud since day one.
People just submitted it.
I don't know why.
They "trust me"
Dumb fucks
Can't really say I'm surprised that Mr Facebook takes this attitude. His whole fortune is built on the belief that aggregating and hosting content is more valuable than creating it
I trained a neural network on all the ways I've said that I hate these people, and it screamed in eldritch spectra before collapsing into silence.
As always with plagiarism, regardless of what they say they always, always, always act out of a complete disregard for the value of whatever they're ripping off.
In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids", and the markets have responded.
i wouldn't want to sound like I'm running down Hinton's work on neural networks, it's the foundational tool of much of what's called "AI", certainly of ML
but uh, it's comp sci which is applied mathematics
how does this rate a physics Nobel??
They're reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo
It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities ... but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control
😩
Don't know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I'm not inherently familiar with (is there a "welcome guide" of some sort somewhere I missed).
Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:
The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.
I just... don't have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we'll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text "work" for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).
I hope some people watch this closely, I'm sure there's going to be some gold in this mess.
The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.
Wikipedia's mod team definitely haven't realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.
Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.
This was discussed in last week's Stubsack, but I don't think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.
Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it's as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I've never heard of while I still can't remember which Scott A we're talking about in which thread.
Scott Computers is married and a father but still writes like an incel and fundamentally can't believe that anyone interested in computer science or physics might think in a different way than he does. Dilbert Scott is an incredibly divorced man. Scott Adderall is the leader of the beige tribe.
Don't know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I'm not inherently familiar with (is there a "welcome guide" of some sort somewhere I missed)
first impression: your post is entirely on topic, welcome to the stubsack
techtakes is a sister sub to sneerclub (also on this instance, previously on reddit) and that one has a bit of an explanation. generally any (classy) sneerful critique of bullshit and wankery goes, modulo making space for chuds/nazis/debatelords/etc (those get shown the exit)
the mozilla PR campaign to convince everyone that advertising is the lifeblood of commerce and that this is perfectly fine and good (and that everyone should just accept their viewpoint) continues
We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it
try, you say? and what's your plan for when you fail, but you've lost all your values in service of the attempt?
For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.
are you fucking kidding me? "we can only be who we are if we maybe sorta listen to you while we keep doing what we wanted to do"? seriously?
How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.
How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.
the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants
Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:
https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919
They're basically admitting they didn't pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.
But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!
The logical conclusion of normalizing "Social Media Manager" as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.
every time I get mail “even a 🤏 teensy bit like this! 🤩” from serious-company I have actual financial dealings with, a part of me dies inside
and it’s getting more goddamn frequent too
PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:
I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:
I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an "anti-art period of time", which has been doing pretty damn well:
Against my better judgment, I'm whipping out another sidenote:
With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I've taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we're gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals
On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.
On the "cultural cachet" front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of "techno-kitsch" - a form of "anti-art" which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators' part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.
Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj
translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong
Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.
Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?
Training my militia of revolutionary freedom fighters to attack homeless shelters, soup kitchens, nature preserves, libraries, and children's playgrounds.
Someone shared this website with me at work and now I am sharing the horror with you all: https://www.syntheticusers.com/
Reduce your time-to-insight
I do not think that word means what they think it means.
Emily Bender devoted a whole episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 to this.
I have nothing to add, save the screaming.
Synthetic Users uses the power of LLMs to generate users that have very high Synthetic Organic Parity. We start by generating a personality profile for each user, very much like a reptilian brain around which we reconstruct its personality. It’s a reconstruction because we are relying on the billions of parameters that LLMs have at their disposal.
They could've worded this so many other ways
But I suppose creepyness is a selling point these days
Not a sneer, but I saw an article that was basically an extremely goddamn long list of forum recommendations and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling inside.
A cafe run by immortality-obsessed multi-millionaire Bryan Johnson is reportedly struggling to attract customers with students at the crypto-funded Network School in Singapore preferring the hotel’s breakfast buffet over “bunny food.”
I did not expect to be tricked into reading about the nighttime erections of the man with the most severe midlife crisis in the world.
he has 80% fewer gray hairs, representing a “31-year age reversal”
According to Wikipedia this guy is 47. Sorry about your hair as a teenager I guess? I hope the early graying didn't lead to any long term self-esteem issues.
Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs
https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge
Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of "what is reasoning, really" and "humans are dumb too, so it's not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!". This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.
Online art school Schoolism publicly sneers at AI art, gets standing ovation
And now, a quick sidenote:
This is gut instinct, but I'm starting to get the feeling this AI bubble's gonna destroy the concept of artificial intelligence as we know it.
Mainly because of the slop-nami and the AI industry's repeated failures to solve hallucinations - both of those, I feel, have built an image of AI as inherently incapable of humanlike intelligence/creativity (let alone Superintelligence^tm^), no matter how many server farms you build or oceans of water you boil.
Additionally, I suspect that working on/with AI, or supporting it in any capacity, is becoming increasingly viewed as a major red flag - a "tech asshole signifier" to quote Baldur Bjarnason for the bajillionth time.
For a specific example, the major controversy that swirled around "Scooby Doo, Where Are You? In... SPRINGTRAPPED!" over its use of AI voices would be my pick.
Eagan Tilghman, the man behind the ~~slaughter~~ animation, may have been a random indie animator, who made Springtrapped on a shoestring budget and with zero intention of making even a cent off it, but all those mitigating circumstances didn't save the poor bastard from getting raked over the coals anyway. If that isn't a bad sign for the future of AI as a concept, I don't know what is.
Many thanks to @blakestacey and @YourNetworkIsHaunted for your guidance with the NSF grant situation. I've sent an analysis of the two weird reviews to our project manager and we have a list of personnel to escalate with if we can't get any traction at that level. Fingers crossed that we can be the pebble that gets an avalanche rolling. I'd really rather not become a character in this story (it's much more fun to hurl rotten fruit with the rest of the groundlings), but what else can we do when the bullshit comes and finds us in real life, eh?
It WAS fun to reference Emily Bender and On Bullshit in the references of a serious work document, though.
Edit: So...the email server says that all the messages are bouncing back. DKIM failure?
Edit2: Yep, you're right, our company email provider coincidentally fell over. When it rains, it pours (lol).
Edit3: PM got back and said that he's passed it along for internal review.
New piece from Brian Merchant: Yes, the striking dockworkers were Luddites. And they won.
Pulling out a specific paragraph here (bolding mine):
I was glad to see some in the press recognizing this, which shows something of a sea change is underfoot; outlets like the Washington Post, CNN, and even Inc. Magazine all published pieces sympathizing with the longshoremen besieged by automation—and advised workers worried about AI to pay attention. “Dockworkers are waging a battle against automation,” the CNN headline noted, “The rest of us may want to take notes.” That feeling that many more jobs might be vulnerable to automation by AI is perhaps opening up new pathways to solidarity, new alliances.
To add my thoughts, those feelings likely aren't just that many more jobs are at risk than people thought, but that AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit), and leaving the dangerous/boring jobs mostly untouched - effectively the exact opposite of the future the general public wants AI to bring them.
I saw this over the weekend and the title itself is rather lovely, but even more hilariously it's from the atlantic
evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman's bullshit grows
Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who'd describe themselves using titles like "futurist" and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they'd have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech -- didn't actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.
Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like "Chief Visionary". These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)
Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he's being showered with cash and hyping for all it's worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and... we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.
The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs... none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it's just that people would have asked "What is this for?" and "Why is it better?". It's what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who've spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.
Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as "a startup" now has to mean $10m in seed capital and "graduating" from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.
How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.
(full disclosure: I've had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied "I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly" person I've ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)
They were the first hype men of tech – didn’t actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas.
This is a bit unfair, i think nick land also sold drugs. Not sure however.
from this article
Amazon asked Chun to dismiss the case in December, saying the FTC had raised no evidence of harm to consumers.
ah yes, the company that's massively monopolized nearly all markets, destroyed choice, constantly ships bad products (whose existence is incentivised by programs of its own devising), and that has directly invested in enhanced price exploitation technologies? that one? yeah, totes no harm to consumers there
