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
AGI is coming, we're already at the "dumb guy who doesn't understand math but thinks he's smart" level
I asked ChatGPT, the modern apotheosis of unjustified self-confidence, to prove that .999… is less than 1. Its reply began “Here is a proof that .999… is less than 1.” It then proceeded to show (using familiar arguments) that .999… is equal to 1, before majestically concluding “But our goal was to show that .999… is less than 1. Hence the proof is complete.” This reply, as an example of brazen mathematical non sequitur, can scarcely be improved upon.
I’ve said it before a few times: this shit is a tunguska-level event on society today
that there’s now even retroactive contamination fallout is sickening :|
Sooner or later the only remaining source of reliable digital information will be 1990s multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedias.
tunguska incident only wiped out local squirrel population and its fallout was inert. this is more like leaded gasoline: introduced for profit, polluting for decades, makes people dumber during entire duration of it, entrenches techbros and makes them responsible for development of infrastructure going forward
this post from the guy who writes explainers about consumer financial structures hits different if you know he met and is exchanging tweets with noted race scientist Jordan Lasker (cremieux)
https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/chicago-casino-investment-offering/
maybe it's me but i'm hearing ultrasonic frequencies
probably nothing, right?
Every pasty-white blogger is inching towards becoming a March violet.
Oof yeah, that's rough. The AI generated header image isn't helping his credibility, either. Didn't he happily trot along to one of the rat conventions in Berkeley, and everyone was wondering why?
The Bally's story is its own source of hilarity - not only are they scrambling to fund this Chicago thing, they're also making promises about a Las Vegas resort that will host the ex-Oakland A's in what would be the smallest major league baseball stadium; with equally ??? funding gaps that their client press is all too happy to ignore.
Days since last open source issue tracker pollution by annoying nerds: zero
My investigation tracked to you [Outlier.ai] as the source of problems - where your instructional videos are tricking people into creating those issues to - apparently train your AI.
I couldn't locate these particular instructional videos, but from what I can gather outlier.ai farms out various "tasks" to internet gig workers as part of some sort of AI training scheme.
Bonus terribleness: one of the tasks a few months back was apparently to wear a head mounted camera "device" to record ones every waking moment.
Polish commentary on Hitlergruß: https://bsky.app/profile/smutnehistorie.bsky.social/post/3lgaoyezhgc2c
Translation:
- it’s just a Hindu symbol of prosperity
- a normal Roman salute
- regular rail car
- wait a second
From the "flipping through LessWrong for entertainment" department:
What effect does LLM use have on the quality of people's thinking / knowledge?
- I'd expect a large positive effect from just making people more informed / enabling them to interpret things correctly / pointing out fallacies etc.
You'd think the AI safety chuds would have more reservations about using GPT, which they believe has sapience, to learn things. They have the concept of an AI being a good convincer, which, hey, idiots, how have none of you thought the great convincing has started? Also, how have none of you realised that maybe you should be a little harder to convince in general???
This is a thought I've been entertaining for some time, but this week's discussion about Ars Technica's article on Anthropic, as well as the NIH funding freeze, finally prodded me to put it out there.
A core strategic vulnerability that Musk, his hangers-on, and geek culture more broadly haven't cottoned onto yet: Space is 20th-century propaganda. Certainly, there is still worthwhile and inspirational science to be done with space probes and landers; and the terrestrial satellite network won't dwindle in importance. I went to high school with a guy who went on to do his PhD and get into research through working with the first round of micro-satellites. Resources will still be committed to space. But as a core narrative of technical progress to bind a nation together? It's gassed. The idea that "it might be ME up there one day!" persisted through the space shuttle era, but it seems more and more remote. Going back to the moon would be a remake of an old television show, that went off the air because people ended up getting bored with it the first time. Boots on Mars (at least healthy boots with a solid chance to return home) are decades away, even if we start throwing Apollo money at it immediately. The more outlandish ideas like orbital data centers and asteroid mining don't have the same inspirational power, because they are meant to be private enterprises operated by thoroughly unlikeable men who have shackled themselves to a broadly destructive political program.
For better or worse, biotechnology and nanotechnology are the most important technical programs of the 21st century, and by backgrounding this and allowing Trump to threaten funding, the tech oligarchs kowtowing to him right now are undermining themselves. Biotech should be obvious, although regulatory capture and the impulse for rent-seeking will continue to hold it back in the US. I expect even more money to be thrown at nanotechnology manufacturing going into the 2030s, to try to overcome the fact that semiconductor scaling is hitting a wall, although most of what I've seen so far is still pursuing the Drexlerian vision of MEMS emulating larger mechanical systems... which, if it's not explicitly biocompatible, is likely going down a cul-de-sac.
Everybody's looking for a positive vision of the future to sell, to compete with and overcome the fraudulent tech-fascists who lead the industry right now. A program of accessible technology at the juncture of those two fields would not develop overnight, but could be a pathway there. Am I off base here?
This seems like yet another disconnect between however the fuck science communication has been failing the general public and myself.
Like when you say space I think, fuck yeah, space! Those crisp pictures of Pluto! Pictures of black holes! The amazing JWST data! Gravitational waves detection! Recreating the conditions of the early universe in particle accelerators to unlock the secrets of spacetime! Just most amazing geek shit that makes me as excited as I was when I was 12 looking at the night sky through my cheap-ass telescope.
Who gives a single fuck about sending people up there when we have probes and rovers, true marvels of engineering, feeding us data back here? Did you know Voyager 1, Voyager Fucking ONE, almost 50 years old probe, over 150 AU away from Earth, is STILL SENDING US DATA? We engineered the fuck of that bolt bucket so that even the people that designed it are surprised by how long it lasted. You think a human would last 50 years in the interstellar medium? I don't fucking think so.
We're unlocking the secrets of the universe and confirming theories from decades ago, has there been a more exciting time to be a scientist? Wouldn't you want to run a particle accelerator? Do science on the ISS? Be the engineer behind the next legendary probe that will benefit mankind even after you're gone? If you can't spin this into a narrative of technical progrees and humans being amazing then that's a skill issue, you lack fucking whimsy.
And I don't think there's a person in the world less whimsical than Elon fucking Musk.
Its really about the ultimate white flight.
You may have heard that Catturd doesn't have any fiber in his diet and was hospitalized for bowel blockage. (Best sneer I've seen so far: "can't turd.") Along similar lines, Srid isn't taking his statins for high cholesterol caused by a carnivore diet.
Meta: I'm kind of pissed that Catturd is WP notable but laughing my ass off at the page for carnivore diets. Life takes and gives.
My favorite part of the carnivore diet is that apparently scurvy can become enough of a problem that you'll see references to "not wanting to start the vitamin C debate" in forums.
I'm pretty sure it's not just a me thing, but I thought we all knew that sailors kept citrus on board specifically to prevent scurvy by providing vitamin C and that we all learned about this as kids when either a teacher tried to make the colonial era interesting or we got vaguely curious about pirates at some point.
So that's how to translate "Yo, this diet is for chumps" into Wikipedian.
I hope everyone is ready for the constant overlap between politics and AI / Silicon Valley; because I'm not.
Trump Admin Accused of Using AI to Draft Executive Orders (Source Bluesky Thread).
I'm not 100% sure I buy that the EOs were written by AI rather than people who simply don't care about or don't know the details; but it certainly looks possible. Especially that example about the Gulf of Mexico. Either way I am heartened that this is the conclusion people jump to.
Aside: I also like how much media is starting to cite bluesky (and activitypub to a lesser extent). I assume a bunch of journalists moved off of twitter or went multi-platform.
so I ran into this fucking garbage earlier, which goes so hard on the constituent parts of "the spam is the point", an ouroborosian self-reinforcing loop of Just More Media Bro Just One More Video Bro You'll See Bro It'll Be The Best Listicle Bro Just Watch Bro, and the insufferably cancerous "the medium is the message" videos-made-for-youtube-because-youtube that if it were a voltron it'd probably have its own unique Special Moment sequence instead of being one of the canned assembly shots
various topics (e.g., AI news, crypto, fitness, personal finance)
That sure is a specifc selection of topics.