Programming and supporting fascism - name a more iconic duo

Against my better judgement I typed steve.ai into my browser and yep. It’s an AI product.

But is chickenjockey.ai domain parked

This sounds like the setup for a deeply fucked up comedy skit, or a Filthy Frank episode, or some shit like that, but nope, its real, its actually happened, the tech industry has invented a new and interesting form of racism.

I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.

Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.

Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking “they can be very useful” (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:

Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd’s having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he’s getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.

New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble’s aftermath

Went to the original Tweet, and found this public execution of a reply:

Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google’s AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):

Semi-OT: Ed Zitron’s Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:

TL;DR: They’re a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.

Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.

Going off-topic a bit - there’s a new expose on Limited Run Games, and its a doozy

Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence

Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the “residential proxy” services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.

Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I’m dropping it here:

I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm

“Please” and “thank you” are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.

The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand

New BlueSky post from Baldur Bjarnason:

New sneer from Tante, this time aimed at the entire field of CS:

Gamers Nexus put out their April Fool’s joke for this year, and became the first journalistic outlet to break Betteridge’s law of headlines in the process.

I’m kinda tired, but this puzzle’s shoved itself into my brain. The obvious solution I can see is, roughly speaking:

1. Take the duck and carrot across

2. Take the duck back

3. Take the duck and potato across

Stumbled across some AI criti-hype in the wild on BlueSky:

The piece itself is a textbook case of AI anthropomorphisation, presenting it as learning to hide its “deceptions” when its actually learning to avoid tokens that paint it as deceptive.

On an unrelated note, I also found someone openly calling gen-AI a tool of fascism in the replies - another sign of AI’s impending death as a concept (a sign I’ve touched on before without realising), if you want my take:

AI is useless, shut the fuck up