bitofhope @ bitofhope @awful.systems

Bistable multivibrator

---

Read more

Posts

31

Comments

1,074

Joined

2 yr. ago

I've always found transhumanism the segment of TREACLES I'm the most ambivalent about. Many good and cool things like gender affirming care and assistive technologies (hell, maybe even medicine altogether) are pursuits that could be described as broadly within the scope of transhumanism. Thiel is not strictly wrong to point that out. One should still note he's saying it in a super outdated and genital-centric way that's just barely shy of merely cringe instead of outright transphobic. Additionally, he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. All the nice stuff about gender transition is meant to convince you of the problematic transhumanist bullshit he also (or rather, actually) likes.

A thing I recently noticed: instead of showing the messages themselves, the MS Teams application on my work phone shows obviously AI generated summaries of messages in the notification tray. And by "summaries" I mean third person paraphrasings that are longer than the original messages and get truncated anyway.

"Worse than useless" would be an understatement.

I appreciate the reference having read half a dozen Astérix albums in the last few days. I just hope our Alesia has yet to come.

Here's my unified theory of human psychology, based on the assumption most people believe in the Tooth Fairy and absolutely no other unstated bizarre and incorrect assumptions no siree!

After binge reading, these are really good.

Wow, that's some primo pretentious wank about computer touching. Those links don't explain jack shit. I kinda dig it.

Especially galling when the sentence starts with "like it or not". Wrong. AI is not like a disease or a natural law that stays with us whether we want it or not. If humanity decides we don't like AI, we could just stop doing it. "Like it or not, hitting yourself is here to stay" is only true if someone is actively forcing me to hit myself, and whoever is forcing me probably doesn't honestly think they're doing me a favor.

Homeopathy is here to stay and (a) that's a bad thing, (b) it could be more popular, but thankfully is not, (c) we don't need to believe fraudulent claims about its benefits, (d) we could and maybe should try and make it even less popular, and (e) the continued practice of homeopathy in parts of human society should have little to no impact on the daily lives of most people and the vast majority should be given the opportunity to ignore it instead of integrating it into every possible facet of their lives. Same goes for AI slop.

Today's bullshit that annoys me: Wikiwand. From what I can tell their grift is that it's just a shitty UI wrapper for Wikipedia that sells your data to who the fuck knows to make money for some Israeli shop. Also they SEO the fuck out of their stupid site so that every time I search for something that has a Finnish wikipedia page, the search results also contain a pointless shittier duplicate result from wikiwand dot com. Has anyone done a deeper investigation into what their deal is or at least some kind of rant I could indulge in for catharsis?

When you nearly miss the submission deadline for the performative misogyny olympics (genuine opinions only edition). Alsl the problem with everything is that there exist things which are not gambling or are insufficiently unnecessarily high stakes gambling.

I feel like calling it race pseudoscience inadvertently suggests the existence of legitimate race science.

This is why I absolutely cannot fucking stand creative work being referred to as "content". "Content" is how you refer to the stuff on a website when you're designing the layout and don't know what actually goes on the page yet. "Content" is how you refer to the collection of odds and ends in your car's trunk. "Content" is what marketers call the stuff that goes around the ads.

"Content"... is Whatever.

I was going to make a comment on the Stubsack thread about how it kind of ticks me off how "content creator" has permeated its way so deep into the vernacular. I can forgive it when it's used as a clumsy term to talk about creative workers across multiple media, but something like a video essayist calling another video essayist a content creator just gives me the ick. Have some pride and solidarity in your art form, for fuck's sake.

Also HP has so far had this kind of a reverse Midas touch where they turn every networking gear company they touch into HP.

Wendy O: Is this a generative AI collection? Not a fan of those. To me, it's not necessarily real art.
Another whale: They're not all the same.
Wendy O: I don't care. It takes away from the real artist.

Wow, look at the time. It's stopped o'clock!

The world was not ready. Or no longer ready.

HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.

Comic Book Guy energy

Between the title of the show and one of the judges being a guy called Mario Narwhal I gotta ask, are coiners trying to reclaim the word "whale", as in a cash cow gambler/lifestyle goods consumer?

I have a Kubernetes cluster running my AI agents for me so I don't have to learn how to set up AI agents. The AI agents are running my Kubernetes cluster so that I don't have to learn Kubernetes either. I'm paid $250k a year to lie to myself and others that I'm making a positive contribution to society. I don't even know what OS I'm running and at this point I'm afraid to ask.

They quickly accelerated their way out.

Tech support workers who may or may not speak English as a second language or with a strong accent can sometimes be of actual help and sometimes not, much like people with possibly more familiar accents can. A call center AI has never been anywhere close to solving a problem I've had.

You're no less fucked but instead of a human being getting underpaid for the trouble, a shitty tech corporation is overpaid.