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
Was browsing ebay, looking for some piece of older used consumer electronics. Found a listing where the description text was written like crappy ad copy. Cheap over-the-top praising the thing. But zero words about the condition of the used item, i.e. the actually important part was completely missing. And then at the end of the description it said... this description text was generated by AI.
AI slop is like mold, it really gets everywhere and ruins everything.
Talk with PM went nowhere. Very nice guy, but was insistent on giving the reviewer the benefit of the doubt. I just wanna die.
Adobe execs say artists need to embrace AI or get left behind [Jess Weatherbed, The Verge]
Adobe is going all in on generative AI models and tools, even if that means turning away creators who dislike the technology. Artists who refuse to embrace AI in their work are “not going to be successful in this new world without using it,” says Alexandru Costin, vice president of generative AI at Adobe.
Personally, I think this is gonna backfire pretty damn hard on Adobe - artists' already distrust and hate them as it is, and Procreate, their chief competition, earned a lot of artists' goodwill by publicly rejecting gen-AI some time ago. All this will likely do is push artists to jump ship, viewing Adobe as actively hostile to their continued existence.
On a wider note, it seems pretty clear to me Alexandru Costin's drank the technological determinist Kool-Aid and has come to believe autoplag's dominance is inevitable. He's not the first person I've seen drink that particular Kool-Aid, he's almost certainly not the last, and I suspect that the mass-drinking of that Kool-Aid's fueling the tech industry's relentless doubling-down on gen-AI. A doubling-down I expect will bite them in the ass quite spectacularly.
almost every smart person I talk to in tech is in favor of mandatory eugenic polygynous marriages in order to deal with the fertility crisis. people are absolutely fed up with the lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism.
aww, is the poor baby missing that maybe there's people who don't want to talk to them because of how much of a piece of shit they are? how sad
lefty approach of using generational insolvency as a pretextual cudgel to install socialism
this dipshit continues to make the most astounding not-even-wrong posts. guess they're angling for a job as the next Noahpinion or Yglesias
Cue the scene where Buck Turgidson finds out that Dr. Strangelove proposes humanity survive deep inside mineshafts, with multiple women for every man.
Anyway I like how the options presented are "socialism" - vaguely defined so as to be something anyone can project their fears on - on the one hand, and state-ordered sexual slavery on the other. True freedom, amirite?
I had to doublecheck what "polygynous" means, and I "love" this Google-generated Wiki excerpt. It's technichally correct in some parts of the world.
eigen "Breeding Stock for Me, Unwilling Abortions for Thee" robot
Every person I talk to — well, every smart person I talk to — no, wait, every smart person in tech — okay, almost every smart person I talk to in tech is a eugenicist. Ha, see, everybody agrees with me! Well, almost everybody…
why do we want people who can't deliver viable technology raising more kids?
why should we assume that they would be any better at the kid-raising than the technology?
I've gotten too offline to sniff out ironic posts. This nearly sent me to my grave
in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers
JFC it was just 11 individuals??? To read the Putin sockpuppets having a Russian grandmother was enough to be booted from the MAINTAINERS list, your computer confiscated, and you being sent to Archangelsk on trumped-up charges.
Oh wait, that's just what happens to random teens in Russia: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c7v5rn8jr82o
today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/
can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
LinkedIn cold-emailed me this morning to suggest that I follow Vivek Ramaswamy, who lists his job title as "Founder at Vivek Ramaswamy"
a quick interest check: I kind of want to use our deployment’s spare capacity to host an invite-only WriteFreely instance where our regulars can host longer form articles
…but WriteFreely’s UI is so sub-optimal the official instance (write.as) runs a proprietary fork with a lot of the jank removed, and I don’t really consider WF to be production ready out of the box.
we can point the WF backend at arbitrary directories for its templates, page definitions, and static assets though, so maybe I could host those on codeberg and do a CI job that’d pull main every time it updates so we could collaboratively improve WF’s frontend? it’s not a job I want to take on alone (our main instance needs to take priority), but a community-run WF instance would be pretty unique
the pros of doing this are that WriteFreely at least seems to have very slim resource requirements and it’ll at least reliably host long form Markdown on the web
the downsides are again, it’s janky as fuck (it only supports Mailgun of all things for email, but if you disable that the frontend will still claim it can send password reset emails… but it’ll check the config and display an error if you click the reset link??? but they could have just hidden the reset UI entirely with the same logic???? also I don’t like the editing experience), and it’s not really what I’d consider federated — it shoots an Article into ActivityPub whenever you post, but it’s one-way so replies, boosts, and favorites won’t show up from ActivityPub which makes it feel a bit pointless. there might be a frontend-only way to link a blog post to the Mastodon or Lemmy thread it’s associated with on another instance though, which would allow for a type of comment system? but I haven’t looked much into it. write.as just has a separate proprietary service for comments that nobody else can use.
this definitely won’t replace Wordpress but does it sound like an interesting project to take on?
Love it.
manuals.awful.systems
Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:
In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.
Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people's livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.
I thought the Raytheon ads for tanks and knife missiles in the Huntsville, AL airport were bad, but this takes the whole goddamn cake.
Ah, Huntsville. Where the downtown convention hall is the Werner von Braun Center.
🎶 the man whose allegiance is ruled by expedience 🎶
Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/
we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other
anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:
The error message 'userld and score are required' is unclear. It should be more specific, such as 'Missing userld or score in the request body'.
aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?
- a human reading this still needs to consult external documentation to know what userId and score are
- a machine can’t read this
- if you’re going for consistent error messages or you’re looking to match the docs (extremely likely in a project that’s in production), arbitrarily changing that error so it doesn’t match anything else in the project probably isn’t a great idea, and we know LLMs don’t do consistency
Quick update - Brian Merchant's list of "luddite horror" films ended up getting picked up by Fast Company:
To repeat a previous point of mine, it seems pretty safe to assume "luddite horror" is gonna become a bit of a trend. To make a specific (if unrelated) prediction, I imagine we're gonna see AI systems and/or their supporters become pretty popular villains in the future - the AI bubble's produces plenty of resentment towards AI specifically and tech more generally, and the public's gonna find plenty of catharsis in watching them go down.
Personally, I'd love to see the Luddites be rehabilitated as a result of the Great Bullshit Collapse. They were just regular folks fighting for dignity in work, and it's tragic how successful the bastards have been at erasing them from history.
Judging by some stray articles from WIRED and The Atlantic, Merchant's likely done plenty to rehabilitate the Luddites' image.
I suspect Silicon Valley's godawful reputation and widespread hatred of AI have likely helped as well - "machinery harmful to commonality" may be an unfamiliar concept to Joe Public, but "AI is ruining the Internet/taking your job/scamming your parents" is very fucking tangible to them.
Pulling out a previous post of mine, the NFT craze likely helped indirectly, by killing technological determinism's hold on the public and badly wounding Silicon Valley's public image.
Of those two, technological determinism's death was probably the more important one - that idea's demise meant the public was willing to entertain that new tech developments from Silicon Valley could be killed in their crib, that they wouldn't inevitably become a part of public life, for worse or (potentially) for better.
nfts damaged public image of crypto beyond recovery, fine. tech in general, i'm not so sure
I know it's Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱
As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔