His Wikipedia article is quite a ride. Apparently he and a Stephen Chamberlain were recently found innocent for a bunch of fraud charges. They boil down to inflating the value of a SW company he sold to Hewlett-Packart. They died within a day of each other in unrelated accidents. Must be rough.
Dear god, my ribs are hurting after 2 paragraphs already.
Hi @tante@awful.systems 👋
Nice writeup. Been reading some of your stuff for a few years. Seems like the gravitational attraction of awful.systems got us both.
sees McDonald branded product → neuron activation
Yeah sure, but this was supposed to my one positive post of the day. This doesn't strengthen franchise owners, but benefits local businesses who have to work with shitty locked-down equipment.
Soft-serve machines get a not-quite-parfait exemption to DMCA circumvention rule.
Character.AI Teen Suicide Lawsuit refers to a controversy and lawsuit against the user-generated artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot website Character.AI
archive of the mentioned NYT article
The countersuit went so far as to ask the court to force Altman to “change its deceptive and misleading name to ClosedAI or a different more appropriate name.”
top kek
The guy (pun not intended) seems honestly as decent as you might hope for in a serial entrepreneur. Maybe a bit naive for expecting better from the players involved, but to me he comes off as endearingly earnest.
Businesses using artificial intelligence to generate code are experiencing downtime and security issues, according to Sonar CEO.
cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/25239919
Frankly, it just didn't stand out. The entire post is such a hoot. Someone must be microdosing meth again.
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of "Schrödinger's Ledger" prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
This reminded me of a gag from Pyramids (discworld novel) where quantum accounting is invented to manage a reality-warping pyramid building business. So I was trying to get a quote...
...only to discover that Quantum Accounting is an actual grifting term in recent use. Please marvel at this LinkedIn post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
I just woke up and some nerd is staring into my soul, asking why I was rude to the spicy autocomplete. What is this? Go home world, you're drunk.
By the way, thank you Terry Pratchett for teaching me the use of Meaningful Capitalisation.
I feel like this has to be built on a lack of appreciation for words as a facilitator of human connection. By finding means of expression and being understood we manage to link our brains together on a conceptual level. By building these skills communally we expand the possible bandwidth of connection and even the range and fidelity of our own thoughts.
This has to be motivated by a view of words as Authoritative Things that sit on shelves and bestseller lists and are authored by Smart And Successful People.
Doesn't even mention the one use case I have a moderate amount of respect for, automatically generating image descriptions for blind people.
And even those should always be labeled, since AI is categorically inferior to intentional communication.
They seem focused on the use case "I don't have the ability to communicate with intention, but I want to pretend I do."
Not sure that any time someone posts cringe on HN counts as a tech take. Maybe we can bring AI into this?
What about, enslaving prisoners is not controversial if an AI is giving the orders, since it's not a person oppressing another person. I'll take my 500M VC now please.
Is "No gods, no masters, no admins" a slogan that people were seriously using? Frankly, I was just taking the piss with that bit.
So I recently got an excuse rant about my opinions on federated tech. I think it's pretty much the best we can hope for in terms of liberating tech, with very few niches where fully distributed tech is preferable.
Needing a server places users under the power of the server administrator. Why do we bother? "No gods, no masters, no admins!' I hear you shout. Well, there's a couple reasons...
Maybe using software is just an intrinsically centralized activity. One or a few people design and code it, and an unlimited number of people can digitally replicate and use it. Sure, it may be free software that everyone can inspect and modify... but how many people will really bother? (Nevermind that most people don't even have the skills necessary.)
Okay, so we always kind of rely on a central-ish dev team when we use tech. Why rely on admins on top of that? I believe the vast vast majority of people doesn't have the skills and time to operate a truly independent node of a fully distributed tech. Let's take Jami as an example:
"With the default name server (ns.jami.net), the usernames are registered on an Ethereum blockchain."
So a feature of Jami is (for most users) implemented as a centralized service. Yikes. You could build and run your own name server (with less embarrassing tech choices hopefully), but who will really bother?
But say you bothered, wouldn't it be nice if your friends could use that name server too, and gain a little independence? That sounds a lot like decentralized/federated tech.
Keeping a decent service online is a pain in the butt. Installing SW updates, managing backups, paying for hardware and name services... nevermind just the general bothering to understand all that mess. And moderation, don't forget moderation. I'm saying it's not for everyone (and we should appreciate the fuck out of [local admin]).
I believe that servers and admins are our best bet for actual non-centralized tech. A tech-literate person tending a service for a small- to medium-size community is much more feasible than every person running their independent node (which will probably still depend on something centralized).
And maybe that's just the way we bring good ol' division of labour to the Internet. You have your shoemaker, your baker, your social media admin. A respectable and useful position in society. And they lived happily ever after.
This isn't a copyright thing. This is a tech regulation thing, that creates the possibility for data protection agencies to stick their noses in AI company's business.
Questioning the design and dev progress was apparently "against company policy."
Apparently a senior SW engineer got fired for questioning readiness of the product, dude must still be chuckling to himself.
Found the story here https://hachyderm.io/@wesley83/112572728237770554