antifuchs @ antifuchs @awful.systems

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136

Joined

1 yr. ago

Unilever are looking for an Ice Cream Head of Artificial Intelligence.

I think I have found a new favorite way to refer to true believers.

I’m sure there are plenty of true believers (there always are in startup brain land), but even true believers like spending money.

It’s the risk:benefit tradeoff always. Sure you can hold on to all your illiquid stock in a private company with transfer restrictions, but will that pay for a house or even a banana? Does it ever not. The “take a loan for liquidity until you can sell some stock” trick worked for a little bit but companies are wise to that too now, and don’t allow it.

So people can pick between real money they can spend on stuff (or invest in a slightly less illiquid way) or being paper multimillionaires with no actual liquidity; not a hard choice imho.

AllTrails doing their part in the war on genAI by disappearing the people who would trust genAI: https://www.nationalobserver.com/2025/06/17/news/alltrails-ai-tool-search-rescue-members

But it apologizes when you tell it it’s wrong!

but the WMF hasn't gotten the message, saying that the project has been "paused". It sounds like they plan to push it through regardless.

Classic “Yes” / “ask me later”. You hate to see it.

Even the color scheme is the HN theme, looks like

Unsneering, I think because it has all sorts of invisible behaviors that work ok in isolation/for the common case but then eventually combine to bite you in the ass. Shellshock, for example; I think Thomas did a pretty decent rant about that one when it came out (damn, has it been more than 10 years already?)

But it lets you adjust your priors so pleasantly!

Yeah, I grew up speaking a language that pronounces Latin closer to Italian than to English too (:

This particular thing is actually doubly funny to me, whose first practical professional program was one that took German text with English words mixed in and used regex to transform the English terms into nonsense words that would get pronounced right by the German-only text-to-speech system. That was 2002.

Lots of mental masturbation will have that effect

They’re making students listen to fabulated pronunciations of their name at the graduation ceremony https://fixupx.com/CollinRugg/status/1925328380742062485

The Magna Cooom Loud thing could absolutely be a sketch https://fixupx.com/stevemur/status/1925350041277145159

Epic announced that it had pushed a hotfix to address Vader's unfortunate profanity, saying "this shouldn't happen again."

Translator: “We are altering the prompt. We pray that we don’t have to alter it further.”

I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541

The self-fulfilling prophecy machine will ensure that engorgement will become a household term

It doesn’t matter. Vim is an emacs under the Finseth definition (which is my favorite way of riling up both vim and emacs people trying to keep the irrelevant editor war going). Those folks oughta find something else to center their entire personality around.

Here’s a pretty good sneer at the writing out of LLMs, with a focus on meaning https://www.experimental-history.com/p/28-slightly-rude-notes-on-writing

Maybe that’s my problem with AI-generated prose: it doesn’t mean anything because it didn’t cost the computer anything. When a human produces words, it signifies something. When a computer produces words, it only signifies the content of its training corpus and the tuning of its parameters.

Also, on people:

I see tons of essays called something like “On X” or “In Praise of Y” or “Meditations on Z,” and I always assume they’re under-baked. That’s a topic, not a take.

Ah yes, three of the worst people alive today talking about how objects are indistinguishable from women.

Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/

Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.

They insist on putting ever more important things (now it’s our souls and minds! lol and lmao) into ever more complex and failure-prone systems, none of these motherfuckers have built or maintained a computer in decades.