Google finally did it, they made Chrome completely unusable
TechTakes
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
Today's entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.
We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.
A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.
More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427
Has wordpress matt had a stroke or what? This is off-the-wall.
maybe also link in the wp/mullenweg thread
Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!
25071 + Oct 12 GitHub ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon
lol
guess how soon?
3 days.
oooh how I'm looking forward to frog-boiler api adjustment pricing season, there's going to be so much cope
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
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 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.
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
😩
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
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.
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.
Why is it always bioshock girl 😭
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?
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.