Skip Navigation
Jump
US startup charging couples to ‘screen embryos for IQ’
  • He will say what he thinks needs to be said, and the forced-birthers understand this. They haven’t defeated abortion yet and aren’t going to split their efforts, but they will continue to put pressure on ivf in the meantime. Remember, they weren’t always anti-abortion, and didn’t switch to it overnight! Their current position that life begins at conception necessarily conflicts with current ivf practises, and they’ll say they don’t disapprove of ivf in principle, and they might even have a friend who’s getting ivf, but talk is cheap and they’ll absolutely oppose any legislation that tries to guarantee access to it. Which is precisely what is happening.

    8
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024
  • They can sell out to someone else instead? Amazon seems to want to be an AI company, for example, and their current offering isn’t great even by the relaxed standards of LLMs.

    3
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 20 October 2024
  • I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

    It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

    10
  • Jump
    the wild tale of OpenAI vs. Open AI
  • He professed to have invented the video-sharing technology later made famous by Snapchat and TikTok.

    Have a heart… the guy’s side-hustle in fluorocarbon refrigerants got poached, too.

    10
  • Jump
    LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data
  • The reality is that some of us only have glimmers of sapience, and many not even that. Most humans, most of the time, are mindless zombies following a script

    It’s a funny thing, that there are certain kinds of people who are assured of their own cleverness and so alienated from society that they think that echoing the same dehumanising blurb produced by so many of their forebears is somehow novel or informative, rather than just following a script.

    (the irony of responding with an xkcd is not lost on me)

    Much like the promptfondlers proudly claiming they are stochastic parrots, flaunting your inability to recognise intelligence in other humans isn’t a great flex.

    16
  • Jump
    “Nice Guy” Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress.com Cries Foul and Threatens Me With Legal Action
  • Not sure where there’s a good summary of the drama, but it started (I think) back in February with some serious concerns about transphobic moderation on tumblr. Openly trans user predstrogen posted

    I hope photomatt dies forever a painful death involving a car covered in hammers that explodes more than a few times and hammers go flying everywhere

    and he took it a bit too seriously, including banning them for dubious reasons then looking them up on twitter and listing all their old alt account names to their followers, because he’s totally not a transphobic stalker y’all and this is a reasonable thing to do when you’re worth half a billion.

    7
  • Jump
    LLMs can’t reason — they just crib reasoning-like steps from their training data
  • The trackpad and trackpoint of my aging linux laptop stop working if the thing gets its lid shut. The touchscreen continues to work just fine, however. It turns out that while two stupid things can’t make a good thing, they can sometimes cancel each other out.

    9
  • Jump
    “Nice Guy” Matt Mullenweg, CEO of WordPress.com Cries Foul and Threatens Me With Legal Action
  • Guess he’s still pretty shaken by the car-covered-in-hammers incident.

    4
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • Ahh, looks like the important stuff was already there. I could have sworn I checked, but apparently not!

    6
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • Today's entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.

    We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.

    A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

    More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427

    7
  • Jump
    MIT review selling a horrifying dystopia where an AI will monitor your rectum 24/7 and you repair your own fridge using AR glasses and haptics or something
  • And speaking of electronic ass-monitoring, I’m reminded of this gem from 10 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJklHwoYgBQ

    So little has changed since then!

    5
  • Jump
    MIT review selling a horrifying dystopia where an AI will monitor your rectum 24/7 and you repair your own fridge using AR glasses and haptics or something
  • she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.

    Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!

    Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

    Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?

    24
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • Reduce your time-to-insight

    I do not think that word means what they think it means.

    14
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • And on the subject of AI: strava is adding ai analytics. The press release is pretty waffly, as it would appear that they’d decided to add ai before actually working out what they’d do with it so, uh, it’ll help analyse the reams of fairly useless statistics that strava computes about you and, um, help celebrate your milestones?

    https://press.strava.com/articles/stravas-athlete-intelligence-translates-workout-data-into-simple-and

    11
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.

    https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj

    https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/113267932851356871

    16
  • Jump
    Grindr proposes ‘AI wingman’ to optimize away the gay sex bit
  • It’s shit like this that discourages from ever running any sort of service that interacts with the general public. I’m already exhausted by the sheer grinding tedium of the amount of visible tone policing on the internet, and it somehow never occurred to me that it was just the tip of some vast beige fatberg clogging up all the pipes.

    Anyway, thank you for hiding the awful realities from the rest of us o7

    8
  • Jump
    Eric Schmidt: ‘We’re not going to hit the climate goals. I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem.’ With "alien intelligence"!
  • They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

    Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

    24
  • Jump
    Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 13 October 2024
  • Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:

    https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919

    They're basically admitting they didn't pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.

    But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!

    17