TechTakes
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 22 September 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
- github.com wordfreq/SUNSET.md at master · rspeer/wordfreq
Access a database of word frequencies, in various natural languages. - rspeer/wordfreq
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BlackRock, Microsoft to Raise $30 Billion for AI Investments - in data centres and power stations
finance.yahoo.com BlackRock, Microsoft to Raise $30 Billion for AI Investments(Bloomberg) -- BlackRock Inc. and Microsoft Corp. are teaming up on one of the largest efforts to date to bankroll the build-out of data warehouses and energy infrastructure behind the boom in artificial intelligence.Most Read from BloombergCalifornia’s Anti-Speeding Bill Can Be a Traffic Safety Bre...
investors include Saudi Arabia, the country whose wealth rests on fossil fuels
now you might wonder if this initiative will lack a certain greenness
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI does not want you delving into o1 Strawberry’s alleged “chain of thought”
OpenAI’s big pitch for its new o1 LLM, a.k.a. “Strawberry,” is that it goes through an actual reasoning process to answer you. The computer is alive! The paperclip apocalypse is imminen…
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Kubient’s adtech use case for AI: an excuse for a fraud
Tiny adtech company Kubient shut down in late 2023 when CEO Paul Roberts was caught faking revenue numbers on his AI fraud detection software to lure investment in. He pleaded guilty on Monday. [Do…
- www.wheresyoured.at The Subprime AI Crisis
None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom
> None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or "hating," but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I've said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.
Can't blame Zitron for being pretty downbeat in this - given the AI bubble's size and side-effects, its easy to see how its bursting can have some cataclysmic effects.
(Shameless self-promo: I ended up writing a bit about the potential aftermath as well)
- • 100%www.techrepublic.com AI-Generated Code is Causing Outages and Security Issues in Businesses
Businesses using artificial intelligence to generate code are experiencing downtime and security issues, according to Sonar CEO.
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25239919
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com NSWEduChat will ‘ease the burden’ on teachers with safety promises that would need human-equivalent AI
Teachers are perennially in short supply — they expect money and rights and unions. Surely chatbots can fix this! NSWEduChat is from New South Wales in Australia. It’s supplied by Microsoft and is …
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Microsoft is firmly committed to environmentally sustainable AI — except when there’s a sale to be made
We wrote in July how Microsoft was firmly committed to its carbon reduction goals — except for the minor detail that all their AI compute would completely blow all their numbers. Then there’s Micro…
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI releases new Sora demo videos — with a few less glitches
Sora is OpenAI’s text-to-video generator. Two more one-minute demo reels came out last week, created by professional producers. [Tom’s Guide; YouTube; YouTube] Introduced in February, Sora is a dif…
- https:// news.ycombinator.com /item
Perhaps there will be some quality sneers, perhaps not. But in this moment the orange site becomes sentient and asks if the emperor is really wearing clothes
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Strawberry fields forever — OpenAI’s new ‘o1’ model
The Strawberry has landed! OpenAI has released o1-preview, its latest impressive demo, just in time for the current funding round. [Press release] The new hotness in Strawberry is chain-of-thought …
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI looks to fill the funding gap with $6.5b of fresh investment and $5b credit
Saving the world from the AI you’re creating is expensive work. Sam Altman’s OpenAI is looking to patch its massive cash deficit with a fresh $6.5 billion from investors. [Bloomberg, archive] OpenA…
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com The world is not enough — US and France escalate Nvidia antitrust investigations
AI shovel seller Nvidia is making a ton of money in the boom — with 70% to 95% of the market for graphics cards and a full 98% for data center computation chips. [CNBC; HPCWire] But is a ton of mon…
- https:// www.chain.com /blog/balaji-srinivasan-launches-the-network-school-in-singapore-an-experimental-approach-to-education
The benefits of crypto are self evident, thus it is necessary to build an elaborate faux education system to demonstrate them.
I'm sure there will also be some Network Fascism in there for good measure.
- www.prnewswire.com K1 Acquires MariaDB, a Leading Database Software Company, and Appoints New CEO
/PRNewswire/ -- K1 Investment Management, LLC ("K1"), one of the largest investors in small-cap enterprise software companies, today announced the completion...
I will say I'm not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Nevada to clear unemployment claim backlogs with one weird trick: pretending an AI has judgment
Nevada has a backlog of more than 10,000 unemployment claim appeals, stretching as far back as the COVID pandemic in 2020. The obvious solution? “Process” the cases as fast as possible with a magic…
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Promptfondler drama: Shumer’s ‘no-hallucination’ Reflection 70B AI turns out to be two other models in a trenchcoat
LLMs spew hallucinations by their nature. But what if you could get the LLM to correct itself? Or if you just claimed your LLM could correct itself? Last week, Matt Shumer of AI startup HyperWrite/…
another valiant attempt to get "promptfonder" into more common currency
- open.substack.com AI Kids: Just Say No
AI classrooms speak to a larger question of why we're willing to replace human practice with AI, and why.
Revered friends. I wrote a thing. Mainly because I had a stack of stuff on Joseph Weizenbaum on tap and the AI classroom thing was stuck in my head. I don't know if it's good, but it's certainly written.
- chipsandcheese.com Telum II at Hot Chips 2024: Mainframe with a Unique Caching Strategy
Mainframes still play a vital role in today, providing extremely high uptime and low latency for financial transactions. Telum II is IBM’s latest mainframe processor, and is designed unlike a…
saw this kicking around on the lobsters frontpage
> IBM also includes a DPU for accelerating IO, along with an on-board AI accelerator
ah yes. an AI accelerator. for a chip that goes into a system that'll quite possibly have a lifespan measured in decade-partials. in environments so extremely up to date with the bleeding edge of technology that they are absolutely not losing their programmers to retirement. an AI acceleator for that. makes total sense.
imagine being the poor engineers who had to spec that out, design it, and get it actually existing. nevermind even the awe-inspiringly stunning disregard to reality that it takes for some management fuckhead(s) to have "steered" this
> Funny enough, I asked why IBM had different terminology compared to the rest of the industry. They said IBM came up with the terminology first, and later on the industry adopted different terminology. It was all lighthearted and funny.
ah yes! funny! haha. not at all some weird insular shit from the same company that runs a worlds-apart platform with a control grip so strong it makes larry ellison check if they're infringing on anything actionable...
- • 100%fromjason.xyz Any Technology Indistinguishable From Magic is Hiding Something
Odes & Satires, and other matters of stuff & things.
this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:
>Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.
>I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.
>The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.
In this post, I wrote about the sad experience of having a friend use AI to wish me a happy birthday. https://robertkingett.com/posts/6627/ #AI #Blog #Blogging #Blogs @techtakes @fuck\_ai
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Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 15 September 2024
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com California governor: Generative AI will fix homelessness — based on a 2023 sales pitch
In possibly the stupidest sentence we’ve seen in the past week, California Governor Gavin Newsom has declared that he “seeks to harness the power of GenAI to address homelessness” and “…
- news.sky.com UK's first 'teacherless' AI classroom set to open in London
A private school in London is opening the UK's first classroom taught by artificial intelligence instead of human teachers. They say the technology allows for precise, bespoke learning while critics argue AI teaching will lead to a "soulless, bleak future".
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Google’s GameNGen AI Doom video game generator: dissecting a rigged demo
Did you know you can play Doom on a diffusion model now? It’s true, Google just announced it! Just don’t read the paper too closely. In their paper “Diffusion models are real-time game engines,” Go…
- www.latimes.com Column: The air begins to leak out of the overinflated AI bubble
Shares in AI companies have powered a huge runup in the stock market this year, but users are beginning to question whether the craze will fall flat.
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Oprah does AI: The hype engine resorts to celebrity promo
The AI bubble is all set to deflate and OpenAI still desperately needs those billions. Time to pull out the celebrities! They worked so well for crypto and NFTs, after all. Oprah Winfrey’s one-hour…
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Got them AI spammin’ blues: flooding Spotify with fake streams of fake songs
Streaming pays musicians a fraction of a penny per stream, so Michael Smith, 52, of North Carolina got bots to stream his tracks! One track streamed a billion times would raise eyebrows — but a bil…
- https:// www.reuters.com /technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-safety-focused-ai-startup-ssi-raises-1-billion-2024-09-04/
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-safety-focused-ai-startup-ssi-raises-1-billion-2024-09-04/
http://web.archive.org/web/20240904174555/https://ssi.inc/
I have nothing witty or insightful to say, but figured this probably deserved a post. I flipped a coin between sneerclub and techtakes.
They aren't interested in anything besides "superintelligence" which strikes me as an optimistic business strategy. If you are "cracked" you can join them:
> We are assembling a lean, cracked team of the world’s best engineers and researchers dedicated to focusing on SSI and nothing else.
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Don’t use AI to summarize documents — it’s worse than humans in every way
The main use case for LLMs is writing text nobody wanted to read. The other use case is summarizing text nobody wanted to read. Except they don’t do that either. The Australian Securities and…
- www.theverge.com Canva says its AI features are worth the 300 percent price increase
So much for being a cheap Adobe alternative.
- m.independent.ie Wind and solar energy produced more electricity last year, but data centre usage outpaced progress
All the extra renewable electricity produced in Ireland last year was eaten up by the growth in data centres, new analysis shows.
"Total demand for electricity last year grew by 4.4pc, or 1.3 terawatts (TW), but 80pc of that increase, or 1.1TW, was from data centre growth."
Training data for LLMs = higher energy prices and environmental degradation.
- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com NaNoWriMo gets AI sponsor, says not writing your novel with AI is ‘classist and ableist’
NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) started in 1999 to get writers to spend their November writing a 50,000-word novel. The idea is that quality doesn’t matter – you get into the rhythm …
> We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."
> * Classism. Not all writers have the financial ability to hire humans to help at certain phases of their writing. For some writers, the decision to use AI is a practical, not an ideological, one. The financial ability to engage a human for feedback and review assumes a level of privilege that not all community members possess. > * Ableism. Not all brains have same abilities and not all writers function at the same level of education or proficiency in the language in which they are writing. Some brains and ability levels require outside help or accommodations to achieve certain goals. The notion that all writers “should“ be able to perform certain functions independently or is a position that we disagree with wholeheartedly. There is a wealth of reasons why individuals can't "see" the issues in their writing without help. > * General Access Issues. All of these considerations exist within a larger system in which writers don't always have equal access to resources along the chain. For example, underrepresented minorities are less likely to be offered traditional publishing contracts, which places some, by default, into the indie author space, which inequitably creates upfront cost burdens that authors who do not suffer from systemic discrimination may have to incur.
Presented without comment.
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.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this)
YouTube Video
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- • 100%pivot-to-ai.com Nvidia Q2 2024 earnings: the market is still on crack
AI shovelmaker Nvidia’s earnings for Q2 2024 beat analyst expectations! But they didn’t beat them by enough, apparently — so the stock went down! [Bloomberg, archive] This sort of thing is why Nvid…