Infamous Dr Who "big name fan" Ian Levine is using generative AI to recreate lost episodes of the show. This got some mainstream press coverage and fans seem miffed.
this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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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.
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New piece from Ed Zitron - a 44-minute read about OpenAI's threat to the entire tech industry
If OpenAI’s funding round with Softbank goes as planned, it’ll raise the equivalent of the entire GDP of Estonia — a fairly wealthy country itself, and one that’s also a member of Nato and the European Union. That alone should give you a sense of the truly insane scale of this.
so not only saltman is capable of burning enough power to be comparable to middle-sized euro country, he can also burn small euro country gdp
they are not serious people. damn if i only started grifting instead of getting socially useful skillset
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"Inference Magazine," a substack written by a young feller named "Wiseman" who, in the most recent article, says "nuh-uh, you're the parrot" to the work of Dr. Bender and co (and the rest of humanity, by extension).
https://inferencemagazine.substack.com/
The hackernews thread is a real Bad Philosophy turkey shoot:
These people need to sit through a college level class on linguistics or something like that. This is a demonstration of why STEM majors need general higher education.
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JZW link but meat is a 404 article, don't wanna bypass their paywall
Hello fellow kids! Doing crimes is TIGHT!
American police departments near the United States-Mexico border are paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for an unproven and secretive technology that uses AI-generated online personas designed to interact with and collect intelligence on "college protesters," "radicalized" political activists, and suspected drug and human traffickers [...]
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New piece from Tante: These are not the same, arguing that the infrastrucure left after AI bubble's burst will leave infrastructure which will be actively damaging to a democratic society.
Its not the first piece I've seen about the bubble's potential aftermath (that goes to MAIHT3K), but it does give another perspective on it.
I mean, what has crypto left over? All of that is only useful for sanctions busting and money laundering
Donald Trump, so yeah
And Bukele, two best buds and their gilded fascism
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I was reminded of Risky Business and how some of the cybersecurity is sometimes relevant to this sub, which reminded me they talked about this Cryptocurrency people being actually rubber hosed
Serious question: what are people's specific predictions for the coming VC bubble popping/crash/AI winter? (I've seen that prediction here before, and overall I agree, but I'm not sure about specifics...)
For example... I've seen speculation that giving up on the massive training runs could free up compute and cause costs to drop which the more streamlined and pragmatic GenAI companies could use to pivot to providing their "services" at sustainable rates (and the price of GPUs would drop to the relief of gamers everywhere). Alternatively, maybe the bubble bursting screws up the GPU producers and cloud service providers as well and the costs on compute and GPUs don't actually drop that much if any?
Maybe the bubble bursting makes management stop pushing stuff like vibe coding... but maybe enough programmers have gotten into the habit of using LLMs for boilerplate that it doesn't go away, and LLM tools and plugins persist to make code shittery.
I think we're going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I'm guessing there's going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we're going to see major pushes.
One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content "creation" and "communication" is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a "good enough" ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.
Yeah I also worry the slop and spam is here to stay, it's easy enough to make, of as passable quality for the garbage uses people want from it, and if GPUs/compute go down in price, affordable enough for the spammers and account boosters and karma farmers and such to keep using it.
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New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the "art" decks do - the "merch" decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
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Quick post: bad news here in Europe, Meta allowed to scrape facebook/instagram. bad source (just a screenshot isn't great as a source)
When
…I do not give Instagram or any entities associated with Facebook permission to use my pictures, information, messages or posts, both past and future. With this statement, I give notice to Instagram it is strictly forbidden to disclose, copy, distribute, or take any other action against me based on this profile and/or its contents.
Goes wrong
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Great piece by Jacob Silverman about the growing shittyness of the day-to-day internet experience
Can we find a way back to an internet that puts people in lucid conversation with one another, where books are published after they are written, where anger and insanity aren’t the dominant modes of thought and the defining editorial values are more meaningful than a chumbox of clickbait nonsense? I’m not sure.
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COMMERCIAL NOTICE: Pivot to AI now has T-shirts! yeah, I sorted out Redbubble. Also does mugs and stuff. All proceeds go to a worthy cause, i.e. me.
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ICYI I posted a new vid/pod this week and an accompanying thread about: Everything Is Work Now — Tech products have a work/life balance problem