this post was submitted on 06 Oct 2024
21 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1489 readers
53 users here now

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

founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
 

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Last week’s thread

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)

(page 2) 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (1 children)

evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows

Precisely when that rising tide will drown Altman I'm not sure, but I feel safe in saying it'll probably drown the rest of the AI industry (and potentially "AI" as a concept) as well - Altman is pretty much the face of this AI bubble, after all.

The rising tide was likely also helped along by OpenAI going fully for-profit, which shattered the humanitarian guise it spent the last decade or so building, and, to quote myself, "given the true believers reason to believe [Altman would] commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck".

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.

Winter is coming.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Every AI spring brings an even harsher AI winter.

Oh, I expect a real harsh AI winter once this spring comes to a close - the public isn't just overtly disappointed about AI's failure to deliver, but outright angry at the nasty shit AI's unleashed upon them.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

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.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (7 children)

Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to "optimize your workout with every rep" or some such nonsense.

I tried to remember the name of it by googling "AI exercise equipment" and despite the slick branding (it's called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it's awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I'm imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else's in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

load more comments (7 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

yet another way to write shitty python

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (5 children)

In other news, an AI booster got publicly humilitated after prompting complete garbage and mistaking it for 8-bit animation:

prompt ratio

And now, another sidenote, because I really like them apparently:

This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

Beyond the slop-nami flooding the Internet with soulless shit whose creation was directly because of tech companies like OpenAI, its also given us shit like:

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

Just ignore the inconsistent theming, blurry cars, people phasing in and out of existence, nonsense traffic signals, unnatural leaf rustling, the car driving on the wrong(?) side of the road and about to plow into a tree, the weirdly oversized tree, the tree missing a trunk, the nonsense traffic paint, the shoddy textures, and the fact that the scene is entirely derivative and no one feels any joy from watching it.

Phew

If you ignore all that it could be the end of animators!!

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (4 children)

This response from her. Lol. Lmao.

can you and all your anti-ai bots just block me? we get it, you hate ai art

What a misunderstood wee lil smol bean, waah

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Even in the still image that dog's legs look like a first draft Minecraft centipede.

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (2 children)

neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI's legal issues:

And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:

With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry's Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.

Precisely how, I'm not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

To my mind, the cover of "researchers" using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 months ago (6 children)

check out this jumpscare suckerpunch mashup

some of the details are so on point I’m almost left pointing and mouthing “art”

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (2 children)

fix the year! we're back in the present! out of the time traveling cybertruck!

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Tried to get out, door cut my leg off. Now I have to go back to the future to get it reattached.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Just remembering this banger from back in the day.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 months ago

Oh look! Human horrors ~~beyond~~ regrettably within my comprehension

https://x.com/haveibeenpwned/status/1843780415175438817

Tweet descriptionNew sensitive breach: "AI girlfriend" site Muah[.]ai had 1.9M email addresses breached last month. Data included AI prompts describing desired images, many sexual in nature and many describing child exploitation. 24% were already in @haveibeenpwned . More: https://404media.co/hacked-ai-girlfriend-data-shows-prompts-describing-child-sexual-abuse-2/

load more comments
view more: ‹ prev next ›