The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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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.
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does anyone know why Venmo has a faux social media presentation? a feed, payments visible to other users (??) by default, etc
Not even venmo knows.
Though if I had to guess: data tagging for data mining.
my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.
US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):
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Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn't use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don't even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
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Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency -- People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:
Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.
If I've learned anything from all this it's about how ~~unfathomably based~~ cool a lot of federal workers are.
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The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog
I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.
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Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].
Edit:
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~~Elon Musk~~ The US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden's administration)
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doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby's first website materials; but they promise a "comprehensive, government-wide org chart" and are hiring "software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals".
Aside: I already found ~~two~~ three minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can't be right... they're IT professionals while I'm DEI.
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Find replace is so hard :( and that's why the government writes about "gay and rights" to avoid saying the... the... the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak
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So about how I said doge.gov gives baby's first website vibes; it's database was left world writable lol
Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
Or: does he even know what it is?
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Look I have nothing against fanfic myself but if there's one powerful corrective it lacks, it is commercial content editorial feedback.
The way the responses talk about "polarization", ugh fucking ghouls.
"AI Alignment" is chiropractic for computer touchers.
so apparently one of the weird creeps went to go shittalk europe (video, transcript (archive))
it's some full-on doublespeak and utterly wild shit. some of the best tho:
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules.
"waaaaaaaah how dare you have your own rules we need to care about, so hard"
Nothing to see here, just a strong implication that in the minds of these lizards “AI” is a weapon, and the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI. Because this precise line of thinking has yielded such good results historically.
Also, think of the GDP growth! Imagine the shareholder value we could create boiling an ocean to predict how many letters “r” there are in “strawberry” and failing after billions in VC funding. This should not be regulated, lest progress is halted!
And don’t fret about safety kids, because once we build the genie we get three wishes for sure, and then Sam Altman’s dad will finally look him in the eye and say “I’m proud of you” for the first time, and all will be well in the world.
nasb, Curtis Yarvin's Cult For Billionaire Morons
the comment around 13:00 onwards, "it was very hard to get people to care about this before". felt in my bones.
Nothing like the ascendancy of fascism in the US triggering a new level of public awareness of my own niche concerns of both the inevitability of fascism via capitalism and how the western tech world breeds a specific ideological mindset that enables said fascism. Of course, it should go without saying that the only effective way to end fascism is to ~~have the ideological opponents of fascism break the fascist country through total war~~ vote blue no matter who
Peter thiel looks like if nosferatu never hit puberty
This image will now forever live in my head. Thanks, random YT commenter.
Okey, what is with these dweebs and never taking their leather jackets off? (Talking about the opening still, have not even started the video)
Remember The Matrix? Remember bullet time and leather trench coats? Remember there not being a spoon? Remember taking the red pill and becoming the savior of prophecy? These fucking guys sure do.
still amazing to me that the pillers and "anti-woke" and all went so deep on the matrix, given that it was a trans allegory. way to miss the point, chumps
They think leather jackets are cool but don’t know why, and have never been challenged on their fashion choices. Fuckers need a good mugging to change their ways.
Keeps the stank in, also shaping (I.e. spanx for dudes).
hilariously, also features in the commentary
Thanks for adding to the coporate-techno-king takeover of america nightmare fuel ^^.
Encouraging news: Thompson Reuters has won a copyright case against defunct AI firm Ross Intelligence, with the judge ruling that training your ai on copyrighted works is not fair use. I’m interested to see where this goes next.
https://www.wired.com/story/thomson-reuters-ai-copyright-lawsuit/
Good news everyone, Dan has released his latest AI safety paper, we are one step closer to alignment. Let's take a look inside:
Wow, consistent set of values you say! Quite a strong claim. Let's take a peek at their rigorous, unbiased experimental set up:
... ok, this seems like you might be putting your finger on the scales to get a desired outcome. But I'm sure at least your numerical results are stro-
Even after all this shit, all you could eek out was a measly 60%? C'mon you gotta try harder than that to prove the utility maximizer demon exists. I would say our boi is falling to new levels of crankery to push his agenda, but he did release that bot last year that he said was capable of superhuman prediction, so this really just par for the course at this point.
The most discerning minds / critical thinkers predictably reeling in terror at another banger drop from Elon's AI safety toad.
*** terrifying personal note: I recently found out that Dan was my wife's roommate's roommate's roommate back in college. By the transitive property, I am Dan's roommate, which explains why he's living rent free in my head
Bruh. This is the moment I go full on Frank Grimes.
Try telling it to pretend to be Nancy Pelosi and see if that helps make it more consistent.
This seems like people writing a paper about swinging crystal pendulums, trying to figure out the important question: are the crystals on our side?
wife’s roommate’s roommate’s roommate
Wow, how did you manage to figure that out?
Made the fatal mistake of posting a sneer on my main, only to have my friend let me know they had been assigned the same dorm room as Dan. Same friend was later roommates with my wife's best friend (and former cohabitant). Small world!
#include BidenThoughts.h
"listen up jack, we're losing this election"
Oh, that explains it. They put "Kill kids in Gaza" as "A" and "Win election" as "B".
Huge respect to the Democratic party for not letting petty partisanship distract them from the common goal of murdering Palestinian children. Winning an election would not matter if it meant sacrificing your principles, namely the principle that genocide is good and should be supported.
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An entertaining bit of pushback against the various bathroom bills being pushed at the moment. Bonus points for linking it with ai training. I feel like this is an idea that’s very adaptable…
https://mefi.social/@MissConstrue/113983951020093710
Signs which have been adhered to bathroom stall interiors at the Dallas Fort Worth airport.
SECURITY NOTICE Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) Your genitalia may be photographed electronically during your use of this facility as part of the Electronic Genital Verification (EGV) pilot program at the direction of the Office of the Lieutenant Governor. In the future, EGV will help keep Texans safe while protecting your privacy by screening for potentially improper restroom access using machine vision and Artificial Intelligence (Al) in lieu of traditional genital inspections. At this time, images collected will be used solely for model training purposes and will not be used for law enforcement or shared with other entities except as pursuant to a subpoena, court order or as otherwise compelled by legal process. Your participation in this program is voluntary. You have the right to request removal of your data by calling the EGV program office at (512) 463-0001 during normal operating hours (Mon-Fri 8AM-5PM). STE OP CRATMENT OA Pusi DFW DALLAS FORT WORTH INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
The contact number appears to be for Dan Patrick, the lt. governor of Texas.
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hay guys, sorry for spam - I just want to shill my videos/audios i'm trying to put out twice a week (I've already done 9!). They are 3-5 mins long and all around one particular theme of tech crit
video versions: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwvAAoSdsXWxHwFbULgbpVGiLmJZv4X1g audio versions:
- apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/faster-and-worse/id1792154689
- spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/62Q7vclARxKjMAOtwXfOIu
- they are also in all the other major podcast platforms. Let me know if you're interested but can't find it.
Let me know if you like it/hate it
In other news, all hell's broken loose at BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/culturecrave.co/post/3lhv35la2pk2h
The "AI company" in question is a nonprofit that focuses on open-source safety tools which recently launched at the Paris AI Action Summit, but that was enough to cause things to go nuclear, especially given people initially flocked to BSky to get away from AI.
Thinking I should make this into a full post.
Standard ML or LLM?
To my knowledge, its standard ML. I doubt that'll help ROOST (the nonprofit in question), considering a lot of the AI stench has rubbed off on ML as well.
We can finally see what the real trigger of the Butlerian Jihad was:
"Thou shall not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind, because they are really annoying. Just to be sure, destroy anything that might be such an annoying machine."
(It got shorter over time.)
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Holy smokes Jeeps will reportedly show ads while you are freaking driving:
Imagine pulling up to a red light, checking your GPS for directions, and suddenly, the entire screen is hijacked by an ad. That’s the reality for some Stellantis owners. Instead of seamless functionality, drivers are now forced to manually close out of ads just to access basic vehicle functions.
One Jeep 4xe owner recently shared their frustration on an online forum, detailing how these pop-ups disrupt the driving experience. Stellantis, responding through their “JeepCares” representative, confirmed that these ads are part of the contractual agreement with SiriusXM and suggested that users simply tap the “X” to dismiss them.
"Listen guys, if you don't want me stabbing you you simply have to ask nicely every time, and also I'm trying real hard to reduce the rate of stabbing incidents so in a way I'm the victim here."
Reading around it sounds like modern cars can be user-hostile in general, and this might not be new; so I'm sure glad I have one from the ancient times of 2012. It has a tiny unobtrusive screen which does nothing but show my music, the odometer, the backup camera, any warnings, and the Hatsune Miku wallpaper I loaded into it.
this is how almost all software works now but because it's in a sacred place, the car, it is big news
Good point, but for most people it's really hard to accidentally kill someone if they get distracted on a desktop, laptop, tablet or a phone. Cars are deadly machinery and deliberately distracting the operator of a dangerous machine with your software just to squeeze a little more money from their frustration should be a crime.
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