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27 days agoWhy are all the stories about the torment nexus we’re constructing so depressing?
Hmm, hmm. This is a tricky one.
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Cake day: July 29th, 2023
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Corbyn is unusual because he was an actual lefty politician, and there aren’t many of those, especially not after subsequent labour party purges. The weirder one is Rifkind, who was a politician alongside Thatcher, but sometimes disagreed with her soft and centrist views. Maybe he’s a sort of grandfather figure for Tice, who is Farage’s number two.
Weird mix of wingnuts. Probably all united by their transphobia, though.
This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.
Whilst looking for an easily cut’n’pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don’t get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else’s summary, “just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets”.
I just got shown a link to someone’s post entitled “When Gandhi met Satoshi”, and it is pretty vacuous and predictable (and probably llm generated). A quick search though shows that this isn’t isolated… there’s another post by an ostensibly different author called “When Gandhi met Spinoza” from back in the pre-llm days of 2018 which is actually about satoshi-fantasies and bitcoin, and contains delightful lines like
The crypto-currency movement is a Gandhian civil disobedience movement of the 21st century led by peer to peer networks that closely resemble Spinoza’s multitudes
and… wtf? coincidental crankery, or some weird marketing ploy for cryptocurrency in India?
Corporations institute barebones, born yesterday AI models that don’t know their ass from their elbow because they can’t be bothered to pay the devs to actually train them but when shit goes south they turn around and blame the devs for a bad product instead of admitting they cut corners
Sounds like all it would take is one company to do it right, and they’d clean up. Except somehow, with all of the billions being poured into it, every product with ai sprinkled on it is worse than the non-ai-sprinkled alternatives.
Now, maybe this is finally the sign that everyone will accept that The Market is completely fucking stupid and useless, and that literally every company involved in ai is holding it wrong.
Or, and I know it’s a bit of a stretch here, but consider the possibility that ai just isn’t very useful except for fooling humans and maybe you can fool people into paying for it but it’s a lot harder to fool them into thinking it makes stuff better.
Maybe I’m missing something, but has anyone actually justified this sort of “reasoning” by LLMs? Like, is there actually anything meaningfully different going on? Because it doesn’t seem to be distinguishable from asking a regular LLM to generate 20 paragraphs of ai fanfic pretending to reason about the original question, and the final result seems about as useful.
Possibly I’m the last to hear about this one, but seeing as proton mail has come up here a few times before: the founder and ceo Andy Yen is apparently a Trump fan.
Great pick by @realDonaldTrump. 10 years ago, Republicans were the party of big business and Dems stood for the little guys, but today the tables have completely turned. People forget that the current antitrust actions against Big Tech were started under the first Trump admin.
(from the beginning of december, on the nomination of trump staffer Gail Slater to antitrust post at the doj)
Apparently, the OpenMandriva folk (the inheritors of the venerable mandrake/mandriva Linux distro) are now best buddies with Bryan Lunduke (right wing tech grifter and q-anon fan) are decrying the left wing bias of Linux projects with a hilarious “wokeOS shell”
Archive of openmandriva forum post: https://archive.is/2025.01.11-001057/https://forum.openmandriva.org/t/came-here-from-lunduke/5516/1
Lovely juxtaposition of “let’s stick it to the gay fags” and “we’re accepting of everyone and there’s no hate here”. Seems like a classy community all round. It’s a little sad to see how mandrake ended up, but there you go.
WokeOS here: https://web.archive.org/web/20250110234818/https://lindev.ch/wokeos.cpp
It’s pretty tedious and unimaginative. No idea who lindev are.
(eta: wasn’t me who originally found this, but I’m never quite sure whether it’s ok to include sources for this sort of thing given the subject. on the other hand, the op has it as public post that’s been boosted a bunch of times, so here it is: https://tech.lgbt/@GeopJr/113807022917800887)
A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.
If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?
Remember that actual physicists can fall into the same trap, and believe themselves to be very smart too. Plenty suffer an irresistible urge to fix every other field that’s doing it wrong.
As an alternative to the various xkcds on the subject, have an smbc instead.
If it were merely a search engine, it risks not being ai enough. We already have search engines, and no one is gonna invest in that old garbage. So instead, it finds something that you might want that’s been predigested for ease of ai consumption (Retrieval), dumps it into the context window alongside your original question (Augmentation) and then bullshits about it (Generation).
Think of it as exactly the same stuff that the LLM folk have already tried to sell you, trying to work around limitations of training and data availability by providing “cut and paste as a service” to generate ever more complex prompts for you, in the hopes that this time you’ll pay more for it than it costs to run.
And, whilst I’m here, a post from someone who tried using copilot to help with software dev for a year.
I think my favourite bit was
Don’t use LLMs for autocomplete, use them for dialogues about the code.
Tried that. It’s worse than a rubber duck, which at least knows to stay silent when it doesn’t know what it’s talking about.
https://infosec.exchange/@david_chisnall/113690087142854474
(and also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rubber_duck_debugging for those who haven’t come across it)
Interesting article about netflix. I hadn’t really thought about the scale of their shitty forgettable movie generation, but there are apparently hundreds and hundreds of these things with big names attached and no-one watches them and no-one has heard of them and apparently Netflix doesn’t care about this because they can pitch magic numbers to their shareholders and everyone is happy.
“What are these movies?” the Hollywood producer asked me. “Are they successful movies? Are they not? They have famous people in them. They get put out by major studios. And yet because we don’t have any reliable numbers from the streamers, we actually don’t know how many people have watched them. So what are they? If no one knows about them, if no one saw them, are they just something that people who are in them can talk about in meetings to get other jobs? Are we all just trying to keep the ball rolling so we’re just getting paid and having jobs, but no one’s really watching any of this stuff? When does the bubble burst? No one has any fucking clue.”
What a colossal waste of money, brains, time and talent. I can see who the market for stuff like sora is, now.
For VPNs, at least, I can offer some suggestions. If you wanted to securely access a specific box or network of yours, tailscale is pretty great and very painless to use. If you wanted to do stuff without various folk noticing then that’s a bit trickier but I’ve been happy using mullvad… they’re not the cheapest, though they have some splendid anonymous payment mechanisms (you can literally mail them a wad of banknotes with a magic code on a bit of paper… you don’t even need to muck about with bitcoin).
In further bluesky news, the team have a bit of an elon moment and forget how public they made everything.
https://bsky.app/profile/miriambo.bsky.social/post/3ldq2c7lu6c25 (only readable if you are logged in to bluesky)
Bluesky’s approach to using domain names to mean identity is now showing cracks that everyone can see: https://tedium.co/2024/12/17/bluesky-impersonation-risks/
(it was always shaky, but mostly only shown by infosec folks who signed up as amazon s3, etc)
TL;DR: scammer buys .com domain for journalist’s name, registers it on bluesky, demands money to hand it over or face reputational damage, uses other fake accounts with plausible names and backgrounds to encourage the mark to pay up. Fun stuff. The best bit is when the sockpuppets got one of the real people they were pretending to be banned from bluesky.
Nvidia doing their part to help consumers associate AI with unwanted useless bloatware that’s foisted upon them.
What’s a hard quality of life indicator?
Interesting post and corresponding mastodon thread on the non-decentralised-ness of bluesky by cwebber.
https://dustycloud.org/blog/how-decentralized-is-bluesky/
https://social.coop/@cwebber/113527462572885698
The author is keen about this particular “vision statement”:
Preparing for the organization as a future adversary.
The assumption being, stuff gets enshittified and how might you guard your product against the future stupid and awful whims of management and investors?
Of course, they don’t consider that it cuts both ways, and Jack Dorsey’s personal grumbles about Twitter. The risk from his point of view was the company he founded doing evil unthinkable things like, uh, banning nazis. He’s keen for that sort of thing to never happen again on his platforms.
Innocuous-looking paper, vague snake-oil scented: Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents
Conclusions aren’t entirely surprising, observing that LLMs tend to go off the rails over the long term, unrelated to their context window size, which suggests that the much vaunted future of autonomous agents might actually be a bad idea, because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and only a complete idiot would trust them to do useful work.
What’s slightly more entertaining are the transcripts.
You tell em, Claude. I’m happy for you to send these sorts of messages backed by my credit card. The future looks awesome!