I knew I could count on awful.systems.

I have to go run an errand soon but someone better have posted some commentary about the a16z anime blog post (as seen on the hell site) by the time I get back or I'll be sorely disappointed.

Corporate Memph-AI-sis

Screwing up the night sky: not just for SpaceX anymore! Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come.

Thursday’s launch saw the first commercial satellites in orbit, and AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.

BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023.

Made in TX — size matters!

I get why 5G in remote areas would be neat. But surely there are other (more expensive?) ways to achieve similar-ish safety / rescue / navigation / rural broadband sorts results without cluttering the sky or being all hyper-capitalistic about it. Not at all my area though.

I won't be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn't an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.

I've been slightly unhappy at my job lately as it's been getting less cool and more bureaucratic and stressful over time; so I've been idly browsing job postings. But so many of them are about AI it's kinda discouraging.

Take Microsoft for example, a big company that surely does lots of interesting stuff. They currently have 17 job postings for experienced programmers in California. 12 of them mention AI in the description. That's 70%. And the only cool position asks for a bazillion years of kernel experience (almost tempted to go for that anyway though).

Ugh guess it's maybe not the best time to switch jobs. Really I should just go self employed what could possibly go wrong?

It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf

Where:

1. It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for "coffee" (presumably it didn't have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
2. It cited Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus

The current page still sites Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, though it's quite hidden amongst all the modern web "design".

I have just ordered Roget's 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.

Today in you can't make this stuff up: SpaceX invades Cards Against Humanity's crowdfunded southern border plot of land.

Article (Ars Technica) Lawsuit with pictures (PDF)

Reddit Comment with CAH's email to backers

The above Ars Technica article also lead me to this broader article (reuters) about SpaceX's operations in Texas. I found these two sentences particularly unpleasant:

County commissioners have sought to rechristen Boca Chica, the coastal village where Johnson remains a rare holdout, with the Musk-endorsed name of Starbase.

At some point, former SpaceX employees and locals told Reuters, Starbase workers took down a Boca Chica sign identifying their village. They said workers also removed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon revered by the predominantly Mexican-American residents who long lived in the area.

Reading all of this also somehow makes Elon Musk's anti-immigrant tweets feel even worse to me than they already were.

OK I might have been a little too harsh, but the security requirements of a browser are higher than pretty much any other piece of software except perhaps for operating system code, emails, or text messages. As a serious player in the browser space it is not optional to get the basic security model / architecture right. This isn't a matter of a bug slipping through (which can happen to anyone), but the system being designed wrong. Hopefully this company has learned their lesson, treats it with the care it deserves going forward, and bring some diversity to the browser market.

Anyway that said let's look at how this was a colossal bug:

1. The browser required an account hosted on a cloud to use. This is a central point of failure, and cloud is overrated, so should be opt-in.
2. The browser allowed arbitrary script injection into any webpage based on this cloud account. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
3. The developers did not recognize how dangerous the above was, so perhaps did not treat the back-end with the paranoia it deserved.

Compare Firefox I have an extension that allows for arbitrary CSS injection, but this extension isn't cloud based. So this class of vulnerability isn't possible in the first place, and also it is an extension I opted into and can enable selectively on specific sites instead of globally.

Meanwhile, over at the orange site they discuss a browser hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41597250 As in a hack that gave the attacker control over any user of this particular browser even if they only ever visited innocent websites, only needing to know their user ID.

This is what's known in the biz as a company destroying level fuck-up. I'm not sure this is particularly sneerable or not but I'm just agog at how a company that calls themselves "The Browser Company" can get the basic browser security model so incredibly wrong.

It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

I have realized working at a corporation that a lot of employees will just mindlessly regurgitate the company message. And not in a "I guess this is what we have to work on" way, but as if it replaced whatever worldview they had previously.

Not quite sure what to make of this TBH.

How the heck have people become so... blasé about climate change?? It is wild to me. If we're restarting nuclear reactors, with everything that entails, it should be with the goal of shutting down gas or coal power. Not to do more unsustainable garbage on top of all the existing unsustainable garbage.

Feels like the world's just given up sometimes, even though it's not quite too late.

There was Cabin, a “network city of modern villages” that has branches in the US, Portugal and elsewhere; and Culdesac, an Arizona-based community designed for remote working.

WTF are those names? If I ever wanted to start a sedition town I'd name it something cool like "No step on snakesville" or "Denny's", not some shit startup name along the lines of Juicero. That's awful. No one cool wants to live in a place called Suburbai or Condio.

But if you buy crypto burgers then your health insurance company can raise your rates on the blockchain! That's the future of finance.

Because rabbits are cute and fluffy and good and it is the solemn mission of all terrible tech companies to take the things you love and make you associate them with useless AI products.

OK new rule you're only allowed to call someone dumb for not finding explosives in their pagers if you had, previously to hearing the news, regularly checked with no specialized tools all electronics you buy for bombs hidden inside of the battery compartment.

Yes crypto instances, please all implement this and "disallow" everyone else from interacting with you! I promise we'll be sad and not secretly happy and that you'll make lots of money from people wanting to interact with you.

The robots clearly want us dead -- "Delivery Robot Knocked Over Pedestrian, Company Offered ‘Promo Codes’ to Apologize" (404 media) (archive)

And here rationalists warned that AI misalignment would be hidden from us until the "diamonoid bacteria".

Yeah you may have a point, if this came out in like 2010 as like a one-off music video instead of a venture capitalist fever dream everyone would be calling it pretty wild. Any artistic merit came from the training data, prompting, or editing together reams of raw output, rather than the shots themselves; and we all know AI companies like to dress up their demos to make them more impressive on the surface.

I think I've just gotten sick and tired of the (lack of) style by this point. It feels like staring into digital noise dressed up in a human skin. Something about the uncanny valley aspects makes it extremely uncomfortable for me to watch; whenever I watch AI videos my brain keeps telling me to run from the demons in the picture and that something is terribly wrong.

It warms the cockles of my heart that all across the web people find AI as annoying as I do.