TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
ai use case: you can pump out pseudoscience promoting fluff disguised as papers in predatory journals with less effort
2 Giant 2 Rat Penis
Okay but this is about alkaline water so it's garbage even without the genAI imagery.
It's even by Wu et al., come on, low hanging fruit
Not a sneer, but still a damn good piece on AI from Brian Merchant:
The great and justified rage over using AI to automate the arts
(Personal sidenote: Tech's public image is almost certainly gonna take a nosedive as a result of this AI bubble. "We made a machine with the express purpose of putting artists out of business" isn't a business case, its the setup for a shitty teen dystopian novel.)
(Fuck, now I wanna try and predict how the AI bubble bursting will play out...)
Libertarian nerds run straight into actual California, not the AI-generated dreamland they imagine
Mercury news: "Billionaires’ utopia company California Forever scraps plan for ballot initiative in wake of damning report"
The report released late last week by Solano County said the proposed new city of 50,000 — possibly up to 400,000 decades from now — would likely cost the county billions of dollars and create substantial annual financial deficits, while slashing agricultural production, damaging climate-change resilience, and potentially threatening local water supplies. The project, according to the report, “may not be financially feasible.”
HN shows what they think of the 3 people with actual thoughts on the issue by downvoting them to death
Who could have predicted this except for everybody ! There's a reason none of these galt gulches ever get built.
which spent more than $800 million buying more than 60,000 acres of mostly agricultural land near Fairfield
Marc Andreessen and Reid Hoffman, just in case anyone thought there was a difference
Butters and Trump are ruining my ability to get anything done in town today. Not a big fan of this dumb shit inconveniencing me IRL.
Jeremy Keith on the bullshit "privacy sandbox" in chrome and firefox: https://adactio.com/journal/21285
I like Jeremy because he is an OG, but I think his requirement for proof that targeted advertising "works" before the browsers implement these features is off the mark for me. He's an agency guy, a bit like Andy Budd, so they tend to have these really visceral takes about the state of the web but with this skewed perspective of best interests
There was no technical reason why we couldn’t have web fonts. The reason why we didn’t get web fonts for years and years was because browser makers were concerned about piracy and type foundries.
I was a bit surprised when I learned fonts are CORSd at least party as a sort of primitive DRM so that font companies would buy into the webfont spec (that's how I remember it anyway, it's been awhile since I dug up the relevant mailing list messages)