TechTakes

I think I giggled all the way through this one.

Pebble, a Twitter-style service formerly known as T2, today launched a new approach: Users can skip past its “What’s happening?” nudge and click on a tab labeled Ideas with a lightbulb icon, to view a list of AI-generated posts or replies inspired by their past activity. Publishing one of those suggestions after reviewing it takes a single click.

Gabor Cselle, Pebble’s CEO, says this and generative AI features to come will enable a kinder, safer, and more fun experience. “We want to make sure that you see great content, that you're posting great content, and that you're interacting with the community,” he says.

How is it "kinder, safer, and more fun"?

Cselle says he recognizes the perils of offering AI-generated text to users, and that users are free to edit or ignore the suggestions. “We don’t want a situation where bots masquerade as humans and the entire platform is just them talking to each other,” he says.

To protect the integrity of the community as it throws open the door to over 300 million people, Pebble will also be using generative AI to vet new signups. The system will use OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model to compare the X bio and recent posts of people against Pebble’s community guidelines, which in contrast to Musk’s service ban all nudity and violent content.

Pebble CTO Mike Greer says the aim is to determine “whether someone is fundamentally toxic and treats other people poorly.” Those who are or do will be blocked and and manually reviewed. Pebble intends to vet would-be users against “other sources of truth” online once it opens signups further, he says, to include people without an X account.

There are too many quotable passages, so I'll stop there.

My favourite thing about these products is how they want to take on giants with these differentiating features that would be trivial plug-ins for the giants if they were to pose any threat. It's common in the enterprise blockchain world as well. It'll take SAP much less time to figure out blockchain than it will for your shitty blockchain startup to work out whatever SAP is.

the writer Nina Illingworth, whose work has been a constant source of inspiration, posted this excellent analysis of the reality of the AI bubble on Mastodon (featuring a shout-out to the recent articles on the subject from Amy Castor and @[email protected]):

Naw, I figured it out; they absolutely don't care if AI doesn't work.

They really don't. They're pot-committed; these dudes aren't tech pioneers, they're money muppets playing the bubble game. They are invested in increasing the valuation of their investments and cashing out, it's literally a massive scam. Reading a bunch of stuff by Amy Castor and David Gerard finally got me there in terms of understanding it's not real and they don't care. From there it was pretty easy to apply a historical analysis of the last 10 bubbles, who profited, at which point in the cycle, and where the real money was made.

The plan is more or less to foist AI on establishment actors who don't know their ass from their elbow, causing investment valuations to soar, and then cash the fuck out before anyone really realizes it's total gibberish and unlikely to get better at the rate and speed they were promised.

Particularly in the media, it's all about adoption and cashing out, not actually replacing media. Nobody making decisions and investments here, particularly wants an informed populace, after all.

the linked mastodon thread also has a very interesting post from an AI skeptic who used to work at Microsoft and seems to have gotten laid off for their skepticism

there’s an alternate universe version of this where musk’s attendant sycophants and bodyguard have to fish his electrocuted/suffocated/crushed body out from the crawlspace he wedged himself into with a pocket knife

by Amy Castor and me, the second in our how-to series on how you can build yourself an unfriendly AI! Here's part one from June.

a friend linked this to me earlier today: nitter (someone else maybe archive it? I don't know what tusky has done to birdsite and how to make wayback play nice)

in one lens/view one could see this as just more of the same (if people were already gunning for YC track shit, there's other things already implied etc), but even so: just how bad is(/must) the "belief" (be) for young people to feel this intensely about it?

I'm over here just watching the arc of likely events and I can barely fathom the anger and disappointment that may[0] come about in a few years after this

[0] - "may" because it seems a lot of folks have their anger redirected far too easily; remains to be seen if it can remain correctly directed in future

Since the thread was flagged and marked dead, here's what it says if you don't have showdead on:

I was working late and half my company is in California so I was still at work when that rumour hit. My boss is former YC. Anyway, I don’t want to fan something that might not be true, but it doesn’t matter because the way people reacted really affected me. It’s almost 2 and I can’t stop thinking about it and just the gloating. I obviously knew who he was back when he posted here and I remembered he got some BS ban but nothing that justified people saying they hoped it was true, they hoped they “finally got him.” Maybe that’s normal in the Valley but I come from a more traditional culture where it’s not normal to root for someone to get sick or die.

I was supposed to move to the west coast in December for my company but now I’m having my doubts. I don’t think all Americans are like that, because half my family is American so I know they’re not, or even all programmers, but what I learned about venture capital tech, this community, is really bothering me.

I think I want out. I wouldn’t mind living in the States but not if I’m going to be working for people I can’t trust. And I’m having issues of conscience too because I remember when Dan and the others went after MOC and I obviously knew what they were trying to make happen and now that it seems they may have, I just don’t want to be part of this industry or community anymore.

Thoughts? Anyone in the same space about all this?

This dead HN comment says:

There’s a rumour going around Silicon Valley that MOC died today. As far as I know it’s still completely unsubstantiated, but the reactions I’ve heard have been sickening. And I feel bad because I should have stood up for him against you know who.

This dead comment links to this thread.

Here's some comments about it from the dead man himself.

of course he was afraid of russian nuukes. this only prompted Ukrainian engineers to bypass use of starlink entirely and current sea drones, like the one used in second Kerch bridge strike, or these used against SIG tanker and Olenegorsky Gornyak landing ship use domestic technology only

"Oh no! - Anyway" meme intensifies.

404media continues to do devastatingly good tech journalism

What Kaedim’s artificial intelligence produced was of such low quality that at one point in time “it would just be an unrecognizable blob or something instead of a tree for example,” one source familiar with its process said. 404 Media granted multiple sources in this article anonymity to avoid retaliation.

this is fucking amazing. the company tries to hide it as a QA check, but they’re really just paying 3d modelers $1-$4 a pop to churn out models in 15 minutes while they pretend the work’s being done by an AI, and now I’m wondering what other AI startups have also discovered this shitty dishonest growth hack

Halm, who according to his social media profiles just graduated from Harvard, tweeted that he’s simply in the arena trying stuff.

"I just wanna buuuuuuuuilllddddd" goes the annoying little fuck even before he's asked any questions about social impact and such

“The goal is to create the most addicting & personalized image recommendation system. V1 is as simple as possible. Future versions trained on current data will enable even more personalized images & user interaction in image generation."

just fuck right off

The decentralised finance club needs to make their core values poster bigger and easier to understand

We’re here in 2023 and they still forget that the core value of “not your keys not your wallet” is the equivalent of putting your cash under your mattress instead of using a bank and the complexity that comes with that is unavoidable.

You can get more people to use a mediocre product/technology by making it easy to use

People will use complex products/technologies if they are useful enough.

But these people can’t make it useful so they keep banging their head against the wall trying to make it more simple.

It is inevitable that they will try the even lazier route of deceiving people into thinking it is simple.

Nitter: https://nitter.net/evanvar/status/1699032296870015232

edit: changed title to reduce keyword matches in lemmy fediverse searches

As usual, I struggle to form a proper sneer in the face of such sheer wrongheadedness. The article is about a furry who was dating a Nazifur and was battered for it; the comments are full of complaints about the overreach of leftism. Choice quote:

Anti-fascists see fascism everywhere (your local police department) the same way the John Birch Society saw communism everywhere (Dwight Eisenhower.). Or maybe they are just jealous that the fascists have cool uniforms and boots. Or maybe they think their life isn’t meaningful enough and it has to be like a comic book or a WWII movie.

Well, I do wear a Captain America shirt often…

That's it, that's the tweet.

Almost feel bad posting because there's a good chance it's engagement bait, but even then there's a good chance he unironically believes this.

He has a startup by the way, check his pinned tweet.

Sure, why attempt to improve the climate resilience or affordable housing in the cities where millions of people already live, when you can just buy land upstate and get a whole new toy to play with? And why tell local, state or national government anything - they'll only be supplying the land, water, sewerage, utilities & transport links. You pay your taxes, you deserve to get something back.

This is going to be one hell of a planning application. What's the land use code for "feudal stronghold"?

kinda glad I bounced off of the suckless ecosystem when I realized how much their config mechanism (C header files and a recompile cycle) fucking sucked

content: image of google "moderating" (i.e. eliminating, permanently, without apparent recourse) an entry in a user's URL collection/bookmarks. the entry is for kickasstorrents. (archive)

I recall seeing an example of them doing something like this to people's gdocs stuff (and iirc that was on paid account, but I could be misremembering). seems like they're ramping up the where to more coverage of their services/assets

not the sort of thing you might expect to turn up in a commodities market fraud case, but then it's crypto

It's because Google created Android in a way device owner cannot change system partitions themselfs. It's because Google Play Services require special system access. It's because Huawei won't let you unlock bootloader and install system apps.

The new silicon chips, made by Chicago-based p-Chip, use blockchain technology to authenticate data that can trace the cheese as far back as the producer of the milk used. The chips have been in advanced testing on more than 100,000 Parmigiano wheels for more than a year.

....honestly I don't even know what to say here

the absurdity of it is quite something

the consent problem is another quite something

this is so fucking nuts