TechTakes

Dear ~~~Sneerclub~~ TechTakes, will you be my 'Friend'? :)

AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)

AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)

Here's Friend's advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is... unsettling.

In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?".

I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.

Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:

https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community

https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m

OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m

Note: reposted from last week’s Stubsack :)

Does TP0 have an point he's trying to push with this thread? It's disingenuous enough that it feels like there's an agenda, but at the same time what could the point even be? Fuck cancer patients?

https://xcancel.com/St_Rev/status/1817261327628587225

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

(Tweet source)

I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?

The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn't comfortable at the command line.

But if you Google it, you get:

• insanely detailed geek pages. These contain the right answer! But not the specific right answer.
• AI slop.

Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.

Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.

Baldur Bjaranason coming in with a solid sneer aimed squarely at his own industry's finest

Here's a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, and alse separately highlights new posts, to make long running threads easier to follow. I'm posting it in the stubsack because it's the thread I had in mind when writing it.

Pasting it in the browser's console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I've cross tested it any... Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won't steal your crypto, or mine any new.

In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.

edit: Also if you prepend javascript: to the code and store it as a bookmark you can just invoke it by calling the bookmark, like a macro, see https://awful.systems/comment/4173451

Note: longer threads don't load all comments at once, so you'll have to rerun the script if you scroll down far enough.

edit: fixed for Edge, because why wouldn't it show dates differently there.

edit: updated it to check if there's a (xx New) notice in the post count in the OP and use the number to highlight the latest xx posts, i.e. all post made since the last time you were here. Change the value of variable newPostColor if you don't like the lovely shade of lavender I picked. Depending on if edited posts are counted as new or not the count might be off, and like, what if there's a new post that's also been edited? Solving that seems to mean moving away from the warmth and comfort of the quick and dirty territory, and also is there a public philthy repository somewhere?

edit: here's how it looks in the SAP thread:

edit: NEW: added some legibility changes and also consecutive executions now toggle old post highlights.

Code now in spoiler:

(() => {
    function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
        const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
        return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
    }

    const newPostCount = (() => {
        const text = document.querySelector("span.fst-italic").textContent;
        return text.includes("New") ? parseInt(text.match(/\d+/)[0]) : 0;
    })();
    const newPostColor = "#783AFF";

    const timestampNodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
        .map(x => {
            return {
                Node: x,
                PostBox: x.closest('.ms-2'),
                Date: Date.parse(
                    x.dataset.tippyContent
                        .split('\n').at(-1)
                        .replace(/Modified |at /g, "")
                        .replace(/(?<=\d+)(st|nd|rd|th)/g, ""))
            };
        })
        .filter(x => x.PostBox != null)
        .sort((x1, x2) => x2.Date - x1.Date);

    const minDate = timestampNodes.at(-1).Date;
    const maxDate = timestampNodes.at(0).Date;
    const hl = (dt) => getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, dt);

    timestampNodes
        .forEach((x, i) => {
            if (i < newPostCount) {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = newPostColor;
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.person-listing').style.textShadow = '1px 1px 0.75px #FFFFFF';
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            }
            else if (x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor == "") {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = hl(x.Date);
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
            } else {
                x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = "";
                x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = "";
            }
        });
})()

This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn't it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that "regular" Republican politicians wouldn't have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there's many an NPR-loving granny googling "what is a yarvin" and getting wound up about it in her group chats.

We've all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, "the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time." I therefore propose a new thing, the "Yarvin Window," which we can define as "the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents."

This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.

@ai_shame RT'd a good sneer in the wild recently:

Bonus: Eliezer, of all people, also sneered at the TESCREAL twat:

Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694

Utilitarianism-poisoned globe emoji tries and fails to convince Americans to give state power back to a fascist

Rumor, but lol if true "A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets" Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.

https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715

Zitron's sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:

Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:

I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I've had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂

Riffing on this fun subthread:

• Will AI invent the Philosopher's Stone?
• Can AI duck the Zuck?
• WIll AI divide by zero?
• Can AI give you diarrhea?
• Will AI make "fetch" happen?
• Will AI have a second helping?
• Does AI unlock the secret to making the Moon happy again?
• Can AI stop eating after only one marshmallow?