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
The old place on reddit has a tweet up by aella where she goes on a small evo-psych tirade about how since there's been an enormous amount of raid related kidnapping and rape in prehistory it stands to reason that women who enjoyed that sort of thing had an evolutionary advantage and so that's why most women today... eugh.
I wonder where the superforecasters stand on aella being outed as a ghislain maxwell type fixer for the tescreal high priesthood.
Irish election watch: Scary far right candidate uses scary AI images for his leaflet in the Dublin Bay North constituency.
presented without comment.
1.2 thousand upvotes for the LLM equivalent of adding a little astrology to your holistic medicine. reddit ain’t ok
Promptfondlers too lazy to even fondle prompts anymore. I’m sure this is the prime target demographic for Elon’s brain chips.
New post from Brian Merchant: No thanks to generative AI, which is about AI-run publisher Spines and their attempt to enshittify the literature world. Pulling a paragraph near the end here:
For another, the needle can move here; if the noise is loud enough, AI publishing can get slapped with a stigma that can at least help slow the erosion of the industry. Public shame can be a powerful tool, when warranted! So yeah: This is why I’m thankful that we’re building this community, and that there are people out there willing to go to the mat to oppose things like the AI-enabled automation of book production. (I fully resent that ‘AI enabled automation of book production’ is a phrase I had to write in 2024.)
Giving my thoughts, I feel Merchant and co. have a headstart when it comes to moving the needle here, for two main reasons:
AI has been thoroughly stripped of whatever "wow factor" - showing off that your gen-AI system can make books isn't gonna impress Joe Public the way it would've back in '22 or '23.
The one-two punch of the slop-nami and the plagiarism lawsuits have indelibly associated "AI" as a concept with "zero effort garbage made of stolen shit" - as a consequence, using or supporting it will immediately disgust a good portion of the crowd right out of the gate
NASB does anybody else think the sudden influx of articles (from kurzgesagt to recent wapo) pushing the idea that you can't lose weight by exercise have anything to do with Ozempic being aggressively marketed at the same time?
Most likely. Not trying to be conspiratorial, but it's been deeply disheartening to see some of the toxic rhetoric around weight loss get high-profile pushback only in the context of pushing ozempic and friends, which means leaving the ideological frame that infantilizes and demonizes fat people in place and adds it's own brand of misinformation.
Nothing huge, but some wonderful examples of people trying to rules lawyer fucking dictionary definitions of plagiarism in this HackerNews thread about the parents that sued the school because their kid got in trouble for copy pasting from an LLM.
Thankfully the case was ruled in the school's favor. Just got a laugh out of some of the comments that are just unintentional satire of stereotypical HN comments.
I listen to a podcast about black/african american conspiracy theories, and I got a podcast ad from Ed Zitron, so there’s that.
Musk also called out the Department of Energy’s chief climate officer in its loan programs office. The office funds fledgling energy technologies in need of early investment and awarded $465 million to Tesla Motors in 2010, helping to position Musk’s electric vehicle company as an EV industry leader.
It seems that Tesla was estimated at 1.35B in 2010.. I don't know how to curse this guy anymore.
A senior adviser to climate at the Department of Housing and Urban Development was also singled out. The original X post said the woman “should not be paid $181,648.00 by the US taxpayer to be the ‘Climate advisor’ at HUD.” Musk reposted with the comment: “But maybe her advice is amazing.” Followed by two laughing emojis.
What a fucking elon musk thing to say. And of course this leads to harassment.
It is depressing to see he will become the first lady soon.
No no, the first lady is still Melania, at least assuming her documentation is in order. Elon's status as a little bitch doesn't overrule Melania's green card.
Also my newest conspiracy theory is that this whole presidency and all the anti-immigrant shit is actually the most expensive and destructive divorce since Henry VIII.
Elon’s status as a little bitch doesn’t overrule Melania’s green card.
This is correct, and there is also a little bit of misogyny in people calling him the first lady.
But what is known is that he is technically illegal, as apparently he we illegally in the country when he got his citizenship papers, which makes them revocable. If only Biden had a bit of guts.
divorce
So much of Musk shit points back to his first divorce how it went and how he never got over it. Including the hateboner he now has for adhd meds (which would prob help him actually stay on a project, and not just play diablo), his hate for therapy and everything else. But self awareness is not a family trait the have, if read the highlights of this interview with his dad.
there is also a little bit of misogyny in people calling him the first lady.
You are right. I'm sorry, I didn't think about that.
Police are openly admitting to using chatGPT to hallucinate reports. I'm sure they were before, but now they're comfortable enough to admit to it.
Nothing could possibly go wrong with this. Nothing at all.
All
Coppers
Are
Bots
great news for lawyers hopefully
I wonder if we're going to see Baldur Bjarnason or Emily Bender tapped as expert witnesses in the not-too-distant future.
oh of course it’s fucking Axon
someone pointed out that (paraphrasing) "yeah, you and I are never gonna care for autoplag output but kids are gonna grow up on it and expect it for everything" and that makes me want to do bad things.
pleased to say my kid is as disgusted by this shit as their parents are
ehh i don't know, as a child i'd occasionally get a vhs with weird cheap counterfeit cartoons on it and they just creeped me out. children can actually tell imo.
I can see the challenge in sorting out AI slop from actual art or writing being normalized in the same way that occasionally having to check your spam filter in case an important work email got filed alongside "GrOwYoUrEgGpLaNtEmOjIfOrChEaP", but there's a difference between a world where AI slop exists and AI slop itself actually being worth a damn.
The promptfans testing OpenAI Sora have gotten mad that it's happening to them and (temporarily) leaked access to the API.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/26/artists-appears-to-have-leaked-access-to-openais-sora/
“Hundreds of artists provide unpaid labor through bug testing, feedback and experimental work for the [Sora early access] program for a $150B valued [sic] company,” the group, which calls itself “Sora PR Puppets,” wrote in a post ...
"Well, they didn't compensate actual artists, but surely they will compensate us."
“This early access program appears to be less about creative expression and critique, and more about PR and advertisement.”
OK, I could give them the benefit of the doubt: maybe they're new to the GenAI space, or general ML Space ... or IT.
But I'm not going to. Of course it's about PR hype.
I'd say lol but I'm like 72% sure this is straight out of the video game industry's playbook and very much intentional to create hype because everyone has forgotten this shit even exists.
Also, I'm still waiting for just one use case for video-generating autoplag that is, even in theory, not either morally reprehensible or outright criminal.
the richest boy in the world sued to stop The Onion from turning infowars into a parody of itself on the grounds that he thinks infowars’ twitter accounts shouldn’t be transferred as part of the bankruptcy even though that’s something that happens constantly and also wouldn’t impact the rest of the bankruptcy proceedings even if it were grounded in anything resembling fact
Musk has also tweeted occasionally that he believes The Onion is not funny.
it’s getting really hard to adequately describe how funny musk isn’t. it’s not just try-hard shit like the weird sink thing, the soul-sucking cameos, or the fact that he’s literally throwing his money into stopping a comedy site from existing — it’s everything taken as a whole. I’d call him anti-comedy, but he’s so much less interesting than that implies
The Onion clowns on Ol' Musky constantly, despite his efforts to shut them down. Around the peak space X buzz, they wrote a headline that was like "Musk invents the first infinitely divorceable wife", which he managed to scrub from the internet (or at least, I can't find it within 5 seconds), but other than that, he can only cope and seethe. He knows the onion is funny and can do nothing to become funny himself.
I would label him as anti-humor or humorless. Dishumorous?
after going closed-source, redis is now doing a matt and trying to use trademark to take control over community-run projects. stay tuned to the end of the linked github thread where somebody spots their endgame
this is becoming a real pattern, and it might deserve a longer analysis in the form of a blog post
I don't think the main concern is with the license. I'm more worried about the lack of an open governance and Redis priorizing their functionality at the expense of others. An example is client side caching in redis-py, https://github.com/redis/redis-py/blob/3d45064bb5d0b60d0d33360edff2697297303130/redis/connection.py#L792. I've tested it and it works just fine on valkey 7.2, but there is a gate that checks if it's not Redis and throws an exception. I think this is the behavior that might spread.
Jesus, that's nasty
it is! and “we have no plans to break compatibility” needs to be called out as bullshit every time it’s brought up, because it is a tactic. in the best case it’s a verbal game — they have no plans to maintain compatibility either, so they can pretend these unnecessary breakages are accidental.
I can’t say I see the outcome in the GitHub issue as a positive thing. both redis and the project maintainers have done a sudden 180 in terms of their attitude, and the original proposal is now being denied as a misunderstanding (which it absolutely wasn’t) now that it proved to be unpopular. my guess (from previous experience and the dire warnings in that issue) is that redis is going to attempt the following:
if this is the case, it’s a much worse situation than them forking the project — this gets them the outcome they wanted, but curtails the community’s ability to respond to what will happen until it’s far too late.
John "Animats" Nagle choosing the most racist angle possible to respond to problems in education. The topic is giftedness and yet Nagle needs to start with "Ashkenazi Jews".
Wow, that starts bad and gets worse.
It starts with this quote, which is absolutely fine:
But others said the admissions exam and additional application requirements are inherently unfair to students of color who face socioeconomic disadvantages. Elaine Waldman, whose daughter is enrolled in Reed’s IHP, said the test is “elitist and exclusionary,” and hoped dropping it would improve the diversity of the program.
Now for the expert analysis:
Recognizing gifted students is inherently discriminatory.
Yes! This is true, following from the quote, as long as the thing that is "inherently" discriminated for is socioeconomic background. Of course, Animats immediately makes it about race.
[insert common race science stats here] There are other numbers from other sources, but they all rank in that order. There's a huge amount of denial about this. There are more articles trying to explain this away than ones that report the results.
AKA I disagree with the analysis and consensus that all this IQ stuff is socioeconomic rather than genetic.
(Average US Black IQ has been rising over the last few decades, but the US definition of "Black" includes mixed race. That may be a consequence of intermarriage producing more brown people, causing reversion to the mean. IQ vs 23 and Me data would be interesting. Does anyone collect that?)
Jesus fucking christ.
Gladwell's new book, "The Revenge of The Tipping Point" goes into this at length. The Ivy League is struggling to avoid becoming majority-Asian. Caltech, which has no legacy admissions, is majority-Asian. So is UC Berkeley.[3]
Nobody tell this guy that Gladwell is black.
Of course, this may become less significant once AI gets smarter and human intelligence becomes less necessary in bulk. Hiring criteria for railroads and manufacturing up to WWII favored physically robust men with moderate intelligence. Until technology really got rolling, the demand for smart people was lower than their prevalence in the population.
I guarantee that in the not happening future where AI is smarter than humans, chuds like this guy will still be racist.
We may be headed back in that direction. Consider Uber, Doordash, Amazon, and fast food. Machines think and plan, most humans carry out the orders of the machines. A small number of humans direct.
🙄🙄🙄
