I wrangle code, draw pictures, and write things. You might find some of it here.
I hate that this shit has an established name now.
Still waiting for the VC billions for my startup Gatta.ca that will sell refrigerated high-IQ piss to the rubes so they can pass Google interviews.
What the fuck did I just read? I had to double check the year.
I thought even the grifters had finally admitted that upscaling the chatbots won’t lead to anything, and suddenly we’re back at spontaneous emergence of intelligence if we just throw enough shit at the wall?
He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I.
What even is this? Hitting autocomplete on every word hoping it vomits out AGI by accident? That is certainly an opinion.
Did Sergey hit his head or something? He can’t seriously expert anyone to believe this at this point.
Oh god, Sabine "capitalism is when people buy things and academia is basically communism" Hossenfelder has opinions about AI now.
The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.
When you use Firefox or really any browser, you're giving it information like website addresses, form data, or uploaded files. The browser uses this information to make it easier to interact with websites and online services. That's all it is saying.
How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?
Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefox's remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, they're pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that they've gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support don't work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).
I can't comprehensively express how much I despise what Discord has done to the internet. Support communities are gone from the open web (as in, you can't use a search engine to search Discord servers, neither can you easily log them to processable text files like you can with IRC), tons of communities are now insulated to a point where you can't even get in if you want to, because unless you're large enough or have enough booster points (which, to no one's surprise, cost money, and only last for a limited time) you can't generate permanent invite links, so you gotta know someone to get in.
And all of that for a proprietary app that is an accessibility nightmare (for fuck's sake let me change that ugly-ass font to something readable, because God forbid that one of your users might be dyslexic, you absolute munted dickheads), doesn't listen to any user feedback but is constantly adding absolute bottom-of-the-barrel features, many of which are behind a paywall, and is now adding LLMs to the mix?
Okay, rant over, but I just needed to get that out.
When the normal -fy startup nomenclature isn’t even enough.
I looked at their website and they’re not even attempting to mask their dystopian shitshow. And of course it’s all in the name of productivity and efficiency.
I hate those ghouls so much.
google are implementing security policies on their devices that cannot be implemented on grapheneos and will prevent certain apps (notably banking ones) from working
That is concerning. Tbh, banking apps are probably the main reason I use a smartphone at all, because there's no way anymore, at least where I live, to get a TAN without their stupid apps since they have all deprecated SMS TAN. Some still sell you physical token generators for ridiculous prices, but that's going away, too.
And on the main topic of this thread: can Xwitter in general just fucking die already?
Peter thiel looks like if nosferatu never hit puberty
This image will now forever live in my head. Thanks, random YT commenter.
Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.
Some time ago in an article or YouTube video i stumbled upon, someone asked Elon a question why he got interested in space. He answered that he read a book which kindled his interest.
I wonder if it was this. It would make so much sense.
Making AI helpful for everyone
Where "helpful" means profitable and "everyone" means their shareholders.
The only thing that comes to mind is medical applications, drug research, etc. But that might just be a skewed perspective on my end because I know literally nothing about that industry or how AI technology is deployed there. I've just read research has been assisted by those tools and that seems, at least on the surface level, like a good thing.
What comes to mind is The True Confessions of Charlotte Doyle, a maritime adventure novel for children, which is, I believe, the first “real” book (as in, not those short kids books you can finish in an hour) I ever read by myself. I picked that for a book report in school, where the assignment was to write like a mini summary for our favorite books. Me, not having read much at that point except for those kids books, which I didn’t want to do, went to the bookstore and just idly browsed around, and for some reason that book caught my attention because of the title (it’s called “Salz im Haar” [Salt in my Hair] in the German translation) and the badass cover art of the edition I own has, so I picked that and ended up really liking it.
Ever since I’ve been a sucker for maritime fantasy.
That book also got me into reading more in general. I’m a huge fantasy nerd, so other books that will always warm me up inside are the first fantasy novels I read: Lord of the Rings, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea Cycle.
Yeah. I ran without an account for the longest time (and used alternative frontends like Freetube, Invidious, yt-dlp, etc.) but I caved and made one just so I could curate my feed.
I wish YouTube would ban this shit wholesale, but it’s Google and of course they won’t.
Aside: I’ve been hammering “Don’t recommend this channel” on every video that remotely smells like AI slop for a while and so far that seems to keep the feed fairly clean.
Nice. Thanks for keeping the place updated and running.
Which AI models, though? Your synthetic text extruder LLMs that can't accurately surpass humans at anything unless you train them specifically to do that and which are kinda shite even then unless you look at it exactly the right way? Or that fabled brain simulation AI that doesn't even exist?
Instead, he prefers to describe future AI systems as a "country of geniuses in a data center," [...] [and] that such systems would need to be "smarter than a Nobel Prize winner across most relevant fields."
Ah, "future" AI systems. As in the ones we haven't built yet, don't know how to build, and don't even know whether we can build them. But let's just feed more shit into Habsburg GPT in the meantime, maybe one will magically pop out.
Ed Zitron: The Slop Society
In the last week we've seen the emergence of the true Meta — and the true Mark Zuckerberg — as the company ended its fact-checking program, claiming that (and I quote) "fact checkers have been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they've created" on both Instagram and Facebook, ...
Imagine implementing policies so vile that even Casey Newton stops riding your tech dick and calls you out on your bullshit.
On Toxic Productivity
Ever since the beginning of the AI slopnami, but more specifically since the public diaspora about the technology began and a large number of people --- or dare I say the majority? --- started to hate the plagiarism machine that Sam Altman and his friends unleashed upon the world, I wondered who exactly are the people that violently defend this technology?
Yes, on the one hand you have big corporations. Thats the obvious one. Of course OpenAI and Nvidia are happy with how things are going, because they either make money from it or hope they can milk the venture capitalists even further before they finally exit-scam before the burst of the bubble. My question, however, is, who are the normal people who fanboy over the latest iteration of ChatGPT or Midjourney or whatever iteration of spicy auto-completion tickles their fancy at the moment. Who, in a time where the public opinion on not just Artificial Intelligence but the tech sector as a whole is at an a
Sam Altman is full of shit (and totally has a thing for Scarlett Johansson)
Note: In my last newsletter, I said that my next post would be the second part of my Facebook autopsy. Don’t worry, that’s still coming, but given the recent drama between Sam Altman, OpenAI, and Scarlett Johansson, I felt the need to write something. Don’t worry, I
Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.
Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.
Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.
“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”
I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.
Tired of just generating anime girls? How about letting roided Clippy play CSI?
This AI hype cycle has dramatically distorted society's views of what's possible with image upscalers.
It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.
Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.
You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.
Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.
And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.
When your big tech brain completely fails to read the room.
SXSW audiences all day booed a festival video (played Tuesday in front of screenings) featuring tech pundits touting their enthusiasm for AI.
It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.
“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”
I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).
Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.
Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they