foreignpolicy.com The U.K. Pivot to AI Is Doomed From the Start
Technology can’t provide the economic miracle Starmer wants.
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
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TechTakes @awful.systems blakestacey @awful.systems Credulous coverage of AI slop on Wikipedia
Everybody loves Wikipedia, the surprisingly serious encyclopedia and the last gasp of Old Internet idealism!
(90 seconds later)
We regret to inform you that people write credulous shit about "AI" on Wikipedia as if that is morally OK.
Both of these are somewhat less bad than they were when I first noticed them, but they're still pretty bad. I am puzzled at how the latter even exists. I had thought that there were rules against just making a whole page about a neologism, but either I'm wrong about that or the "rules" aren't enforced very strongly.
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems Foreign Policy: The U.K. Pivot to AI Is Doomed From the Start
at frickin last - I wrote this in January and it's finally been published
archive: https://archive.is/RSU91
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TechTakes @awful.systems Steve @awful.systems Edge-case marketing
Another video / audio / thread from me
This time it's about products that are marketed with purposes they can't be optimised for.
In the production of a tech product an "edge case" is seen as a hindrance to delivering on the core purpose of the product.
For marketing an "edge case" can be seen as an opportunity to exploit a purpose that the product was not designed for and will never be optimised to satisfy.
When a general purpose product uses an edge case as the subject of its marketing it ignores the other aspects of the product which, for that niche purpose, will be on a spectrum from irrelevance to interference.
A product capable of servicing a niche purpose is not the same as a product designed to specifically satisfy that niche purpose.
Only the latter will be developed with continual effort t
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Let’s write PR pitches with an AI! (report spam, block sender)I get so many press releases. That’s fine, nothing wrong with a good pitch. But there’s a lot of utter trash — mostly crypto, increasingly AI. They have no idea what I do or think, and they’re sure…
short ranty video version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UKdhf_hDQGU
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Oops, all AI! Google replaces search with the AI OverviewWhat if we made a search engine so good that our company name became the verb for searching? And then — get this — we replaced the search engine with a robot with a concussion? Google is innovating…
with bonus video version
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems Science journal Nature promotes using chatbots for academic peer review
pivot-to-ai.com Science journal Nature promotes AI chatbots for academic peer reviewNature is one of the most prestigious journals in all of science. They’re working on changing that, though — with multiple articles promoting LLMs for doing peer review. Academics submit work to a …
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, DOGE, and the coming superhuman ‘woke’ AIElon Musk’s team of weird rationalists at DOGE continues to bring “move fast and break things” to functions that really need not to be broken. Anyone who knows anything about how anything works is …
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Ilya Sutskever, ex-OpenAI, gets $2b funding not to release anything until he has ‘super intelligence’Ex-OpenAI cofounder Ilya Sutskever’s new startup Safe Superintelligence just closed another funding round. For $2 billion, Sutskever promises not to release any product at all until SSI has develop…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems LA Times ‘bias meter’ goes live, pushes AI slop without journalistic review
pivot-to-ai.com LA Times ‘bias meter’ goes live, pushes AI slop without editorial reviewLos Angeles Times proprietor Patrick Soon-Shiong is convinced his paper is a hotbed of Bolshevik agitators. He blocked the paper making a presidential endorsement in October 2024. But Soon-Shiong h…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Google: We’ll reach Artificial General Intelligence if you slackers just show face in the office 60 hours a weekTwenty years ago, Google was the hottest company with the smartest people. In 2025, Google is making the products it still has actively worse with AI. Fortunately, co-founder Sergey Brin has the an…
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TechTakes @awful.systems BlueMonday1984 @awful.systems "Power Cut" - Ed Zitron on Microsoft's recent pullback on building servers
www.wheresyoured.at Power CutA week ago, analyst TD Cowen revealed that Microsoft had canceled leases "totalling a couple hundred MWs," with "at least two private data center operators across multiple US markets." The report also details how Microsoft "pulled back on converting negotiated and signed Statement[s] of Qualificatio...
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TechTakes @awful.systems blakestacey @awful.systems Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9 March 2025
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 insist
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com What the floods of AI scraper bots look like in 2025Linux Weekly News is the main news site for the programmers who work on the Linux computer kernel and its associated software. LWN editor Jonathan Corbet wrote up how the site deals with the scourg…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Feeding the dreams of AI venture capital: if you want the VC money, just promise magicStupendous amounts of venture capital money are still floating around, desperate for a home. The VCs want you to promise magic with technology. They will shower you with cash. Delivering on the mag…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI releases GPT-4.5 with ridiculous prices for a mediocre modelOpenAI has nothing. There are no new tech breakthroughs and the organization is still hemorrhaging cash by the billions. Something they could brand “GPT-5” was due mid-2024. How to placate the inve…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com PhD student expelled for using AI sues university, files pro-se suit using ChatGPTHaishan Yang was studying at the University of Minnesota for his second Ph. D., in health administration (his first was in economics). Before he could start his thesis, he needed to do a remote ex…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Discord adds AI image transform bot — that you can’t disable or opt out ofUsers of chat app Discord are seeing a disconcerting new button on images: “Edit image with apps.” You can animate! Restyle! Face-swap! You can apply the transforms to anyone’s image accessible to …
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com AI benchmarks are self-promoting trash — but regulators keep using themEvery new LLM and every new tweak to an old LLM has a press release bragging about how well it tests on some benchmark you’ve never heard of. Every new model is trained heavily to the previous tren…
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TechTakes @awful.systems David Gerard @awful.systems 
pivot-to-ai.com Microsoft plays down AI bubble, cancels data center leasesMicrosoft CEO Satya Nadella went on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast last week for an hour-long puff piece on Microsoft and AI. [transcript] Nadella says AI will have succeeded if it shows growth in world …
