mountainriver @ mountainriver @awful.systems

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2

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274

Joined

2 yr. ago

When I run into "Climate change is a conspiracy" I do the wide-eyed look of recognition and go "Yeah I know! Have you heard about the Exxon files?" and lead them down that rabbit hole. If they want to think in terms of conspiracies, at least use an actual, factual conspiracy.

At work, I've been looking through Microsoft licenses. Not the funniest thing to do, but that's why it's called work.

The new licenses that have AI-functions have a suspiciously low price tag, often as introductionary price (unclear for how long, or what it will cost later). This will be relevant later.

The licenses with Office, Teams and other things my users actually use are not only confusing in how they are bundled, they have been increasing in price. So I have been looking through and testing which licenses we can switch to a cheaper, without any difference for the users.

Having put in quite some time with it, we today crunched the numbers and realised that compared to last year we will save... (drumroll)... Approximately nothing!

But if we hadn't done all this, the costs would have increased by about 50%.

We are just a small corporation, maybe big ones gets discounts. But I think it is a clear indication of how the AI slop is financed, by price gauging corporate customers for the traditional products.

Having problems fitting enough GPT-3's under that trenchcoat?

I have a suspicion, but let me first check with the AI in my phone:

"Cybercheck committed the m-u-r...", AI suggests "murder"! That is it, case cracked!

As my AI figured out, Cybercheck themselves committed the murders and then probably created their service to cover it up!

But did they fail because the watch went rogue and defected to the communist bloc?

What if my mechanical watch went rogue and killed Bezos?

On one hand Bezos is responsible for a lot of suffering and some deaths.

On the other hand, killing is wrong.

On the third hand, it couldn't do that, because it is just a machine.

(It's a watch, it has three hands. It also has about as much consciousness as an LLM, it "knows" what time it is. Much more energy efficient though.)

What could possibly go wrong? Better ask for forgiveness then plant permissions!

I thought it came from Babylonian writing that recoded the brains and planted the languages.

First half is straight forward dick measurement contest. Let me paraphrase: "My companies has huuuuge revenue! Why haven't yours? Maybe because you are so toxic? Have you thought about that, man with smaaaall revenue."

Notice how it's all revenue, not profit. I think this mindset gives an insight into why so many tech bros if they stumble onto profit, quickly grows out of profit. Profit isn't the score, revenue is. And it's all about hitting that high score so you can feel like a big man.

They are a digital meeting company. A company that lives on digital meetings. Which will now enshittify digital meetings.

But line goes up, right?

If you want interesting historical deep dives, I always enjoy Dig - the history podcast. Well researched by actual scholars, which goes hand in hand with the episodes not dropping that often.

Repeat until a machine that can create God is built. Then it's God's problem.

But it must be a US God, otherwise China wins.

"...37%.... That means nearly one in four..."

Eh, no it doesn't, it means nearly two in five. Which is worse.

Jason Kint writes a thread on how Google spun - and publications printed their spin - on a recently lost case: https://xcancel.com/jason_kint/status/1836781623137681746

If you already are very cynical about tech journalism (or the state of journalism in general), it might be nothing new except confirmation from the internal documents of Google. But always nice to see how the sausages are made.

Isn't this just Snow Crash again? Can't these techbros read another book, we already have the Meta verse and it wasn't that popular in reality.

That's the one, thank you.

German pilot, and crash in France, not French pilot. Second pilot locking out the captain, not the other way around. Otherwise my memory seem to have served.

This was so stupid.

A hijacking happens when passengers overflow into the cockpit from the cabin.

Oh no! A little kid has been invited to have a look! Passenger overflow! Hijacking!

His attempt at solution isn't as cringe worthy, if one overlooks the reasoning. Separating the cabin from the pilots is a way of preventing hijacking that has been attempted, but it has problems. Notably if the pilots get acute medical emergency or indeed if the pilot steer the plane into the ground.

Some ten years ago a french pilot locked out his second and ran the plane into the ground. For increased safety the after 911 the door to the cabin could only be opened from the inside.

The picture at top of the blog post is Sam Altman, the guy saving the world from the AI he is creating.

And yeah, he looks like that.

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I think it is a combination of:

1. Governor of major state.
2. Has nice hair. Real generic politician look.
3. Polls showing "generic democrat" beating Trump.
4. Not super old.
5. Have I mentioned the hair?