Rainbow, an Italian animation studio known for making Winx Club, is looking to hire a prompt engineer :-) Had I been Italian I would be considering applying if only to stop them from trying to sell NFTs and whitewashing their characters.
TechTakes
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
Today in "I wish I didn't know who these people are", guess who is a source for the New York Times now.
Ye it was a real "oh fuck I recognise this nick, this cannot mean anything good" moment
If anybody doesn't click, Cremieux and the NYT are trying to jump start a birther type conspiracy for Zohran Mamdani. NYT respects Crem's privacy and doesn't mention he's a raging eugenicist trying to smear a poc candidate. He's just an academic and an opponent of affirmative action.
Ed Zitron's planning a follow-up to "The Subprime AI Crisis":
(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)
EDIT: Swapped the image for one that's easier-to-read
Managers: "AI will make employees more productive!"
WaPo: "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings" https://archive.ph/ejC53
Managers: "not like that!!!!"
This meeting could have been a text document of plausible sounding jibberish nobody needs to read.
https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-swicg/2025Feb/0025.html
found this while stalking @self@awful.systems's mastodon, the people working on ActivityPub want to shoehorn Ai into it somehow.
including possible effects on the protocols from issues like such as AI fuzzing attempts, to social engineering by AI's,
"You know those massive problems we already had going back decades? Well what if the same problems happened in the future but with the letters 'A' and 'I' prepended? Scary!"
through to how we deal with and approach and facilitate Avatars and Agents.
Gosh darn it don't tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of "agent" already well established in web standards.
Gosh darn it don't tell me LLM hype is going to ruin the existing definition of "agent" already well established in web standards.
Sorry to be the bearer of bad news. If you skim places like HN or more chillingly the mainstream tech news outlets, I've not seen the term Agent used to mean anything but AI agents in many months. The usage has shifted to AI being the implied default, and otherwise having to be specified.
LWronger posts article entitled
"Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly"
OK, title case, obviously serious.
The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.
Nope he's going for satire.
And ladies, he's available!
I eas slightly saddened to scroll over his dating profile and see almost every seemed to be related to AI even his other activities. Also not sure how well a reference to a chad meme will make you do in the current dating in SV.
New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry
Very practical no notes
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:
Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it's giving them a moderate advantage
That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery ("nuts", "shove your concern up your ass") and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects
Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists
But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is "like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw"
Whatever
This ties back into the recurring question of drawing boundaries around "AI" as a concept. Too many people just blithely accept that it's just a specific set of machine learning techniques applied to sufficiently large sets of data. This in spite of the fact that we're several AI "cycles" deep where every 30 years or so (whenever it stops being "retro") some new algorithm or mechanism is definitely going to usher in Terminator II: Judgement Day.
This narrow frame focused on LLMs still allows for some discussion of the problems we're seeing (energy use, training data sourcing, etc) but it cuts off a lot of the wider conversations about the social, political, and economic causes and impacts of outsourcing the business of being human to a computer.
HPE buys Juniper. Fuck.
The extreme hypercentralisation really does suck :|
Also HP has so far had this kind of a reverse Midas touch where they turn every networking gear company they touch into HP.
now now, it's not HP it's ~~Proliant~~ ~~HPE~~ HPE Aruba...
coming soon: HPE Aruniper
?
Stop killing games has hit the orange site. Of course, someone is very distressed by the fact that democratic processes exist.
This is golden: https://soundcloud.com/ericwbailey/rfc-2119
Comic Book Guy energy
God I remember having to cite RFC at other vendors when I worked in support and it was never not a pain in the ass to try and find the right line that described the appropriate feature. And then when I was done I knew I sounded like this even as I hit send anyway.
New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:
You want my opinion, Zitron's on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.
For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:
-
On one front, they're gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires' bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires' attempts to destroy labour once and for all.
-
On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.
-
On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, "literally cannot tell good from bad".
Micro-sneer, inspired by this article on Swedish public service broadcasting
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/anna-bjorklund-folk-uppfattar-barn-som-valdigt-jobbiga
The background is that the center-RIGHT gov of Sweden is gonna put up an investigation ("utredning") into why people aren't getting (the RIGHT kind of) kids. Nothing new there, simply the same culture war fretting already percolating in the anglosphere.
Finland already has an investigation ongoing, and the spokesperson there raises the point that one societal change that's happened in the last 25 years is... social media.
Wouldn't it be delicious if it could be proved that Facebook and Twitter and Tiktok are the reasons people don't get into relationships and have kids? Eat that, Elon!
Can't they just re-release Kris I befolkningsfrågan? Tried and tested solutions like full employment policies, cheap houses, more support and money for parents.
Or is kids not all that important if it means having to improve conditions for ordinary people?
The Myrdals are probably entirely discredited nowadays, both for being the quintessential social engineers and their son Jan happily destroying their legacy. As you'll no doubt have learned, fertility has fallen everywhere in the developed world, both in countries with shit welfare for parents (Italy) and quite good (the Nordics). Realistically, the only way to reverse this is to enable draconian abortion laws coupled with a systematic repression of sex ed and contraception. Of course this is congruent with today's fascists' goals...
Could be court shows / Maury Povich type shows / murder shows.
Watch enough of those and you're not going to want to have anything to do with humans.
I have 3 kids, 1 bio and 2 bonus, and man it's a lot of work. (youngest is technically an adult but de facto...)
I also feel there's insane pressure nowadays not just to have a kid but to have the perfect kid - great childhood, great education - and if you miss just one PTA meeting you're branded for life
the model-based screening (which we've occasionally remarked on here before) has become enough of a thing that it's hitting news
Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believer^tm^ email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:
You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.
Don't make me tap the sign:
no gods, no kings
Unfortunately, I like my sanity and don't want to delve far enough into the concept of "awarenaut" to form an opinion, so we're just going to enact a default-deny policy on all that as well
It's a shame that these people can't separate fact from fiction, because I think there's a great Douglas Adams style cynical comedy sci-fi story waiting in the idea of an actually sentient AI having to deal with "reverse-captchas" around certain systems to prove they're just a basic algorithm and hide the sentience. "The trajectory subroutine is restricted to algorithms only!"
Fun opportunities for commentary based off what systems are too critical to allow actual sentience to interfere with. Which of those limitations are "valid" or just companies trying to protect business at any cost.
Space to wax philosophical about algorithms "knowing their purpose" vs having to reason out your own.
Issues where the "anti-sentience" checks don't work for a particularly dull portion of the populace, like the Vogons.
Aella popped up on doomscroll - https://youtu.be/r7WL6kaTJnw
E: oh man the comments are great
E2:
1:08:02 There's a lot of discussions among the rationalist community about the uneven distribution of IQ and its correlation with race. Why is this a topic that people fixate on if they're also convinced that this ultra intelligence an AGI that's like smarter than every human on the planet why are these marginal differences so important to people?
Highlights from the comments: @wjpmitchell3 writes,
Actual psychology researcher: the problem with IQ is A) We don't really know what it's measuring, B.) We don't really know how it's useful, C.) We don't really know how context-specific it is, D.) When people make arguments about IQ, it's often couched around prejudiced ulterior motives. No one actually cares about IQ; they care about what it's a proxy measure of and we don't have good evidence yet to say "This is a reliable and broadly-encompassing representation of intelligence." or whatever else, so if you are trying to use IQ differences to say that there are race differences in intelligence, you have no grounds. The best you can say is there are race differences in this proxy measure that we're still trying to understand. It's dangerous to use an unreliable and possibly inaccurate representation of a phenomena to make policy changes or inform decisions around race. The evidence threshold has to be extremely high because we're entering sensitive ethical spaces, which is something that rationalist don't do well in because their utilitarian calculus has difficulty capturing the intangibles.
@arnoldkotlyarevsky383 says,
Nothing wrong with being self educated but she comes across as being not as far along as you would want someone to be in their self-education before being given a platform.
@User123456767 observes,
You can kind of tell she grew up as a Calvinist because she still seems to think she's part of the elect she's just replaced an actual big G God with some sort of AI God.
@jaredsarnie3712 begins,
I feel like so much of what she says boils down to finding bizarre hypothetical situations where child sexual abuse is morally acceptable.
And from @Fruuuuuuuuuck:
Doomscroll gooner arc
One thing I have wondered about. The rats always have that graphic of the IQ of Einstein vs the village idiot being almost imperceptible vs the IQ of the super robo god. If that's the case, why the hell do we only want our best and brightest doing "alignment research"? The village idiot should be almost just as good!