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
I don't think there's a hell of a lot there that we don't already know and discuss at length, but it's cool to see Abby Thorne's new video at Philosophy Tube get into surveillance capitalism, neo-reaction/tech fascism, and how much of the discussion historically on and around social media misses the point.
It might be a decent overview reference for anyone in your life who isn't in as deep as we are, since you could do much worse in ~40 minutes.
The age of book shovelware has arrived: https://smartbitchestrashybooks.com/2024/10/ai-audiobook-narrators-in-overdrive-and-the-issue-of-library-ai-circulation-policy/
Edit: TIL about the US copyright office website’s ai generation info on works. That’s a thing we will be making a bunch of use of, I imagine.
Not a sneer, but perhaps interesting even if less so as we are focusing a bit less here on the Rationalists. Twitter thread on race science bullshit popularized on the various Rationalism extended forums.
Annoyed Redditors tanking Google Search results illustrates perils of AI scrapers
A trend on Reddit that sees Londoners giving false restaurant recommendations in order to keep their favorites clear of tourists and social media influencers highlights the inherent flaws of Google Search’s reliance on Reddit and Google's AI Overview.
Anyways, personal sidenote:
Beyond putting another blow to AI's reliability, this will probably also make the public more wary of user-generated material - its hard to trust something if you know the masses could be actively manipulating you.
Quick update: The open letter on AI training (https://aitrainingstatement.org/) has reached 15k signatures:
poor Musky lost custody. Couldn’t handle Grimes, now he mangles rhymes.
just imagining what happens the day his companies get taken away from him
"Life, it never die
Women are my favorite guy."
Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.
And it isn't even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I'm also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to 'rap' their messages in the late 90s).
guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again
Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this one's particularly good
EDIT: Against my better judgment, I'm letting another sidenote come out:
If you wanna encourage people to drop the master/slave naming scheme, this guy probably gave you a good bit of ammo. Changing a random naming scheme is a pretty low-priority task under most circumstances, but it gets a lot more tempting when it lets you distance yourself from people like this
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more "master copy" or "master recording" than "master of a slave". This isn't IDE. Who names their VCS branch "slave"?
Well, I guess that guy does.
the thing is that the git branch naming was only one of the places among many where this was changed, and in many databases (and often other server-subsystem architectures) master/slave terminology was quite present. iirc there are still some that stick by it today (mostly out of direct choice by project maintainers)
it’s the same thing as whitelist/blacklist, vs allowlist/denylist (or others) - when there’s bad shit linked in baggage, and the cost of changing it (by habit and choice) isn’t all that much, there’s not really any reason to hold by the the old loaded shit
harm reduction comes in many forms
Yeah. I remember when the company I used to work for switched our style guide to allowlist/denylist and apart from That One Guy the overall reaction was a big "eh? sure, whatever". Nobody is out here pretending that this kind of change is going to completely end racism or even that it's going to have a major impact, but past a certain point continuing to casually throw the memory of chattel slavery around is just cringe.
I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling
https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/
https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/
Vivaldi Browser has an important teaser AI announcement: https://social.vivaldi.net/@Vivaldi/113351393167122198
spoiler
"It's not AI"
In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:
Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:
Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.