TechTakes

r/SubredditDrama's watching shit go down in r/EffectiveAltruism, and there's a lotta sneers going on

New piece from Ars Technica: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds:

Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

Putting my off-the-cuff thoughts on this:

1. Right off the bat, I'm pretty confident AR/smart glasses will end up dead on arrival - I'm no expert in marketing/PR, but I'm pretty sure "our product helped someone dox innocent people" is the kind of Dasani-level disaster which pretty much guarantees your product will crash and burn.

2. I suspect we're gonna see video of someone getting punched for wearing smart glasses - this story's given the public a first impression of smart glasses that boils down to "this person's a creep", and its a lot easier to physically assault someone wearing smart glasses than some random LLM

3. This is a gut feeling I've had since Baldur talked about AI's public image nearly three months ago, but this gives me further reason to expect the public are gonna be outright hostile to the tech industry once the AI bubble pops.

(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)

"Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764":

Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:

This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that "AI training" has become synonymous with "art theft/copyright infringement" in the public consciousness.

Between AI bros publicly scraping against people's wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs' datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn't blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.

from this post (archive)

App developers think that’s a bogus argument. Mr. Bier told me that data he had seen from start-ups he advised suggested that contact sharing had dropped significantly since the iOS 18 changes went into effect, and that for some apps, the number of users sharing 10 or fewer contacts had increased as much as 25 percent.

aww, does the widdle app's business model collapse completely once it can't harvest data? how sad

this reinforces a suspicion that I've had for a while: the only reason most people put up with any of this shit is because it's an all or nothing choice and they don't know the full impact (because it's intentionally obscured). the moment you give them an overt choice that makes them think about it, turns out most are actually not fine with the state of affairs

As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

basilisk save us from breathless idiocy by rubes

Altman’s investors will have had to get comfortable with at least four levels of intricacy.

ah yes the four-fold path of investing, the true religion

More head-scratching is OpenAI’s governance. Altman was ousted last year, then swiftly returned.

“I cannot look at this and analyse the power structure, and thus I am very confused as to how this happened”

But investors making that call today must surely be powered more by instinct than intelligence.

“must surely”? call the builders, we’ve found a new ultra-strong load bearing phrase

This exchange on HN, from the Wordpress meltdown, is going to make an amazing exhibit in the upcoming trial:

Anonymous: Matt, I mean this sincerely: get yourself checked out. Do you have a carbon monoxide detector in your house? … Go to a 10 day silent retreat, or buy a ranch in Montana and host your own Burning Man…

Matt Mullenweg: Thanks, I carry a co2 and carbon monoxide monitor. … I do own a place in Montana, and I meditate several times a day.

A redditor has a pinned post on /r/technology. They claim to be at a conference with Very Important Promptfondlers in Berlin. The OP feels like low-effort guerilla marketing, tbh; the US will dominate the EU due to an overwhelming superiority in AI, long live the new flesh, Emmanuel Macron is on board so this is SUPER SERIOUS, etc.

PS: the original poster, /u/WillSen, self-identifies as CEO of a bootcamp/school called "codesmith," and has lots of ideas about how to retrain people to survive in the longed-for post-AI hellscape. So yeah, it's an ad.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fufbfm/im_a_tech_ceo_at_the_berlin_global_dialogue_w/

The central problem of 21st century democracy will be finding a way to inoculate humanity against confident bullshitters. That and nature trying to kill us. Oh, and capitalism in general, but I repeat myself.

I have only just noticed that this is dated a year in the future

New post from Ed Zitron just dropped which goes into a lotta detail on OpenAI's finances around the time the deal was closing.

I've already cracked one Kendrick reference, so fuck it:

psst I see dead people

Found while poking around today: the Wikipedia club for cleaning up after AI.

Example: the article Leninist historiography was entirely written by AI and previously included a list of completely fake sources in Russian and Hungarian at the bottom of the page.

ah, sweet, manmade horrors beyond my comprehension:

(This would've been more shocking to me in 2023, but after over a year in this bubble I have stopped expecting anything resembling basic human decency from those who work in AI)