TechTakes
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 29th December 2024awful.systems Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awf...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
> The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending Sunday 7 July 2024
Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
> The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > >Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
- LLM training bots are a plaguepod.geraspora.de Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal f...
Excerpt from a message I just posted in a #diaspora team internal forum category. The context here is that I recently get pinged by slowness/load spikes on the diaspora* project web infrastructure (Discourse, Wiki, the project website, ...), and looking at the traffic logs makes me impressively angr...
Evidence for the DDoS attack that bigtech LLM scrapers actually are.
- Not that we’d ever do a filler piece on Christmas and AIpivot-to-ai.com Not that we’d ever do a filler piece on Christmas and AI
It’s December 23, and if you haven’t got Christmas organized by now, you’re screwed. But think how well you could have done with our chatbot friends to lend a hand! AI is a gift to advertising agen…
- Call 1-800-CHATGPT for an annoying time with OpenAI’s cheerful botpivot-to-ai.com Call 1-800-CHATGPT for an annoying time with OpenAI’s cheerful bot
David is in London, so he can’t call 1-800-CHATGPT. So Amy called, though reluctantly. [YouTube] The bot has a pleasant but annoying female voice. It wants to help! It’s a bit like Apple’s Siri, bu…
- Australia’s under-16 social media ban to use hand-waving to verify ages with AIpivot-to-ai.com Australia’s under-16 social media ban to use hand-waving to verify ages with AI
On orders from the Rupert Murdoch newspapers, the Australian government has passed legislation banning under-16s from social media, on extremely dubious claims of protecting mental health. This is …
- The OpenAI Christmas special: o3 is totally an intelligence, guys! For extremely specific values of ‘intelligent’pivot-to-ai.com The OpenAI Christmas special: o3 is totally an intelligence, guys! For extremely specific values of ‘intelligent’
The only thing OpenAI has scaled up is setting money on fire. They need splashy headlines to keep the funding coming. So today, closing “12 Days of OpenAI” — yes, really — we have … o3! [NYT,…
- Anthropic and Apollo astounded to find that a chatbot will lie to you if you tell it to lie to youpivot-to-ai.com Anthropic and Apollo astounded to find that a chatbot will lie to you if you tell it to lie to you
Did you know that your chatbot might be out to deceive you? That it might be lying to you? And it might turn you into paperclips? Huge if true! Ordinary people have been using chatbots for a couple…
- Gary Marcus in Wired writes the bloody obvious about genAI being shit
main: https://www.wired.com/story/generative-ai-will-need-to-prove-its-usefulness/ archive: https://archive.ph/0Ok2r
- System Crash: ChatGPT’s Sad Second Birthday
Brian Merchant and Paris Marx are back to celebrate ChatGPT’s second birthday while questioning how OpenAI is really doing as it embraces advertising and the rivalry between Sam Altman and Elon Musk continues to escalate.
- UK government wants to give AI companies free access to train on your creative workspivot-to-ai.com UK government wants to give AI companies free access to train on your creative works
The UK government has introduced a proposal “ensuring AI developers have access to high-quality material to train leading AI models in the UK and support innovation across the UK AI sector.” [Consu…
- All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Blueskyfilmmakermagazine.com All Protocols are Not the Same: Joanne McNeil on Bluesky | Filmmaker Magazine
Publication with a focus on independent film, offering articles, links, and resources.
- Microsoft refuses a documentation fix because AI might not understand text in tablespivot-to-ai.com Microsoft refuses a documentation fix because AI might not understand text in tables
Microsoft is a proprietary software company, but a lot of its software components and documentation are under open licenses. For example, the documentation for the Windows Subsystem for Linux is un…
- "Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth."deadsimpletech.com Sam Altman is a dunce | deadSimpleTech
Sam Altman is one of the dullest, most incurious and least creative people to walk this earth. This is, after all, the person who once tweeted 'i am a stochastic parrot and so are u', in response to Emily Bender's (entirely incisive and absolutely brilliant) critique of what his large language model...
- Do knee X-rays show if you drink beer? Medical AI versus algorithmic shortcuttingpivot-to-ai.com Do knee X-rays show if you drink beer? Medical AI versus algorithmic shortcutting
Whenever you say AI is drowning us in garbage, some bozo will say how AI in medicine is actually awesome. They mean machine learning, where a computer does statistics on existing scans and their di…
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 23rd December 2024awful.systems Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awf...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
> The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
- Apple Intelligence AI mangles headlines so badly the BBC officially complainspivot-to-ai.com Apple Intelligence AI mangles headlines so badly the BBC officially complains
Apple needs you to buy the new iPhone even though the old models still work just fine. Enter Apple Intelligence, Apple’s wrapper around ChatGPT, to abbreviate your messages for you! As an LLM, Appl…
- UnitedHealthcare Optum leaves internal AI chatbot open to the worldpivot-to-ai.com UnitedHealthcare Optum leaves internal AI chatbot open to the world
Healthcare services company Optum, part of UnitedHealthcare Group, left an LLM-based chatbot — used by employees to ask questions about handling claims — exposed to the internet. Mossab Hussein, ch…
- OpenAI whistleblower found dead at 26 in San Francisco apartment | TechCrunchtechcrunch.com OpenAI whistleblower found dead at 26 in San Francisco apartment | TechCrunch
A former OpenAI employee, Suchir Balaji, was recently found dead in his San Francisco apartment, according to the San Francisco Office of the Chief
- Windows AI Copilot+ Recall stores screenshots of sensitive data, regardless of ‘sensitive information’ filterpivot-to-ai.com Windows AI Copilot+ Recall stores screenshots of sensitive data, regardless of ‘sensitive information’ filter
Recall is a feature for Microsoft’s AI-enabled Copilot+ PCs that takes continuous screenshots of everything you do on your AI PC, scans the text, and lets you search it with an LLM. The text is sto…
- Are we going to see prediction markets enter mainstream journalism? Taylor Lorenz says yes
“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”
- the dead end grift that is lab grown meatthecounter.org Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story.
Headlines have overshadowed inconvenient truths about biology and cost. Now, new research suggests the industry may be on a crash course with reality.
lab grown meat is a vaguely EA/rationalist/self IDed neolib meme. in theory it will save the environment (ok) and prevent suffering (yay) in a way that concentrates capital (double yay) and involves a lot of tech magic (triple yay).
hot luigi is a big fan apparently. seeing this discussed reminded me of this excellent article which shreds the concept of mass produced lab grown meat. I haven't really seen this circulate much over the years, but it is really a masterwork of grift dissection. please enjoy
archive link: https://web.archive.org/web/20241208141305/https://thecounter.org/lab-grown-cultivated-meat-cost-at-scale/
- OpenAI launches then un-launches Sora, Twitter gives Grok away for freepivot-to-ai.com OpenAI launches then un-launches Sora, Twitter gives Grok away for free
OpenAI has released its Sora Turbo video generator to ChatGPT Plus and Pro subscribers! Sort of. [OpenAI; Verge] Unfortunately, OpenAI closed Sora signups shortly after launch. ChatGPT Plus subscri…
- Sorry kid, we killed your robot — Embodied goes broke, AI social devices will stop workingpivot-to-ai.com Sorry kid, we killed your robot — Embodied goes broke, AI social devices will stop working
Embodied, Inc. produced a nice AI use case: a pet “social robot” called Moxie to entertain and teach children with social difficulties. It specifically marketed the $799 gadget as a “Robot for Auti…
- Sabine Hossenfelder: Google's quantum announcement is the usual puffery
archive: https://archive.is/WmcV2
- Itch․io taken down by bogus AI-sourced phishing claim from Funko Pop, BrandShieldpivot-to-ai.com Itch․io taken down by bogus AI-sourced phishing claim from Funko Pop, BrandShield
Itch.io is an indie game storefront. Developers sell games, host game jams, and allow players to try new games. What happened? Itch.io got a bogus report of “fraud and phishing” from co…
- "Defining AI"
"I think we should shed the idea that AI is a technological artifact with political features and recognize it as a political artifact through and through. AI is an ideological project to shift authority and autonomy away from individuals, towards centralized structures of power. Projects that claim to “democratize” AI routinely conflate “democratization” with “commodification”. Even open-source AI projects often borrow from libertarian ideologies to help manufacture little fiefdoms."
A post full of bangers.
- Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 15th December 2024awful.systems Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 8th December 2024 - awful.systems
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret. Any awf...
Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
> The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be) > > Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)
- in which Edward Ongweso, Jr. beats Casey Newton repeatedly around the head with a clue batthetechbubble.substack.com The phony comforts of useful idiots
On Casey Newton and the shallowness of anti-skepticism.
- Survey: UK financial services add more AI, mostly machine learningpivot-to-ai.com Survey: UK financial services add more AI, mostly machine learning
The Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority have released their 2024 survey of AI in UK finance. They surveyed 118 financial institutions — mostly banks. [Bank of England] AI use was la…
- A polite disagreement bot ring is flooding Bluesky — reply guy as a (dis)servicepivot-to-ai.com A polite disagreement bot ring is flooding Bluesky — reply guy as a (dis)service
On the Bluesky social network, you may notice a lot of drive-by responses from accounts that rarely or never post — they just reply to other accounts. The reply pattern starts with a phrase like “I…
- Study claims that "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably." WaPo, The Guardian, The Telegraph, and others picked it up. Here's my response.theluddite.org Nature's Folly: A Response to "AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably"
An anticapitalist tech blog. Embrace the technology that liberates us. Smash that which does not.
Though wrapped in the aesthetic of science, this paper is a pure expression of the AI hype's ideology, including its reliance on invisible, alienated labor. Its data was manufactured to spec to support the authors' pre-existing beliefs, and its conclusions are nothing but a re-articulation of their arrogance and ideological impoverishment.
- OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro — maybe there’s a market!pivot-to-ai.com OpenAI’s $200-a-month ChatGPT Pro — maybe there’s a market!
Sam Altman’s OpenAI can’t make money by spending $2.35 for every $1 of ChatGPT it sells. It makes a loss on every query. What if OpenAI could gouge its most addicted users? Here’s ChatGPT Pro, whic…
- Patrick Soon-Shiong adding AI ‘bias meter’ to the LA Times to convince readers it’s not biasedpivot-to-ai.com Patrick Soon-Shiong adding AI ‘bias meter’ to the LA Times to convince readers it’s not biased
Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the LA Times, has been trying to turn the paper into a right-wing mouthpiece since he bought it in 2018. After Soon-Shiong refused to allow the editori…