data moat

Jesus GNU Christ, Live your life so that no one ever produces a systematic classification of your opinions that looks like this

Little of this was news to me, but damn, laid out systematically like that, it’s even more damning than I expected. And the stuff that was new to me certainly didn’t help.

Very serious people at HN at it again:

The only argument I find here against it is the question of whether someone’s personal opinions should be a reason to be removed from a leadership position.

Yes, of course they should be! Opinions are essential to the job of a leader. If the opinions you express as a leader include things like “sexual harassment is not a real crime” or “we shouldn’t give our employees raises because otherwise they’ll soon demand infinite pay” or “there’s no problem in adults having sex with 14 year olds and me saying that isn’t going to damage the reputation of the organization I lead” you’re a terrible leader and and embarrassment of a spokesman.

Edit: The link submitted by the editors is [flagged] [dead]. Of course.

I had heard some vague stuff about this, but had no idea it was this bad. Also, I didn’t know how much of a fool RMS was. : “RMS did not believe in providing raises — prior cost of living adjustments were a battle and not annual. RMS believed that if a precedent was created for increasing wages, the logical conclusion would be that employees would be paid infinity dollars and the FSF would go bankrupt.” (It gets worse btw).

Top level comment at time of posting:

“This might not look that bad, but consider the post-USSR…”

???

No need for these soviet level mental gymnastics. You can just say he needs to be removed permanently.

the lobste.rs thread is a trash fire too.

of note is that the Stallman defenders from about 3 years back (when he waded in unprompted in a mailing list meant for undergrads at MIT and was pretty damn sure that Marvin Minsky never had sex with one of Epstein’s victims, and if he did, it would have been because he was sure she wasn’t underage) have registered https://stallman-report.com which redirects to their lengthy apologia. Could be worth taking into account fi you want to spread the original around

I don’t think anything in the report is new, is it? Isn’t this the exact weirdness that got him kicked off the board in the first place? I was shocked when he was quietly added back to the board; I really thought the allegations would stick the first time.

Nice to have it all in one place though.

(Rationally) “If there’s grass on the field play ball”

Ignorance is a choice. That thread is full of bad choices.

the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)

given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends

This person has certainly committed to this philosophy, even to the extent of spending less than one week of thought coming to this very conclusion.

twitter gon’ have nothin’ left but the cranks

kache miss

I need to look up what auth protocols this guy has worked on so I can stay away from them.

Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn’t not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script

I’ve taken to calling the constant background sprinkles and unnecessary fine detail in gen ai images “greebles” after the modelling and cgi term. Not sure if they have a better or more commonplace name.

It’s funny, meaningless bullshit diagrams on whiteboards backgrounds of photos were a sure sign on PR shots or lazy set dressing, and now they’re everywhere signifying pretty much the same thing.

Sadly I think the only way to trust you are not getting a lot of AI art is by starting to follow a lot of artists you like on social media. Just going to a site which sells things seems a bit risky atm.

e: for example 40k stickers

Boo! Hiss! Bring Saltman back out! I want unhinged conspiracy theories, damnit.

It feels like this is supposed to be the entrenchment, right? Like, the AGI narrative got these companies and products out into the world and into the public consciousness by promising revolutionary change, and now this fallback position is where we start treating the things that have changed (for the worse) as fair accompli and stop whining. But as Ed says, I don’t think the technology itself is capable of sustaining even that bar.

Like, for all that social media helped usher in surveillance capitalism and other postmodern psychoses, it did so largely by providing a valuable platform for people to connect in new ways, even if those ways are ultimately limited and come with a lot of external costs. Uber came into being because providing an app-based interface and a new coat of paint on the taxi industry hit on a legitimate market. I don’t think I could have told you how to get a cab in the city I grew up in before Uber, but it’s often the most convenient way to get somewhere in that particular hell of suburban sprawl unless you want to drive yourself. And of course it did so by introducing an economic model that exploits the absolute shit out of basically everyone involved.

In both cases, the thing that people didn’t like was external or secondary to the thing people did like. But with LLMs, it seems like the thing people most dislike is also the main output of the system. People don’t like AI art, they don’t like interacting with chatbots in basically anywhere, and the confabulation problems undercut their utility for anything where correlation to the real world actually matters, leaving them somewhere between hilariously and dangerously inept at many of the functions they’re still being pitched for.

The first image in that second link is perhaps the most incoherent political cartoon I’ve ever seen. Why is Uncle Sam as played by Angry Jeff Bridges wearing the Chinese flag as a cape??

After he started rambling about his Mathematical Universe Hypothesis, it was obvious his brain was cooked.

As humanity gets closer to Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Arrow of time and all that, innit? And God help me, I actually read part of the post as well as the discussion comments where the prompt fondlers were lamenting that all it takes is one rogue ai code to end the world because it will “optimize against you!” I assume Evil GPT is constructing anti matter bombs using ingredients it finds under the kitchen sink.

Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”

the harris campaign must get his list. if he ran only three dark rituals the election is over

who tf in fourth year of our lord covid puts money on fire in crypto

Introducing the official crypto coin of the Harris-Walz ticket: JoyCoin! Trading under JOY. Every time a coin is minted, we shoot someone from the global south in the head.

In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like “laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront”) and save this image. It’s a question I can’t easily answer myself. It’s hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it’s probably something we’ll be asking often in the near future.

I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn’t have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.

Day 2686 of wondering how much Google can keep enshittifying everything it touches before people catch on.

That’s amazing, I wish I had that kind of discipline to learn!

I can’t decide what’s worse: the fucking insulting tone that sounds like I’m about to get a pamphlet about Joseph Smith or GameStop or some shit, or that the suggestions just make up opinions you don’t have and events that didn’t happen

That will certainly improve the mh of yters who already feel they are under extreme pressure.

But users like engagement! Which means seeing that the person wrote a thing and not reading the thing and making a human connection with someone who is, y’know, engaged in conversation.

I know chatbots don’t track meaning, but I’m pretty sure words still mean things.

Eurgh!

The what in the what now?

What a terrible day to tech.

Thus leading to this sneer on HN. I’m quoting it in entirety; click through for Poe’s Law responses.

I was telling someone this and they gave me link to a laptop with higher battery life and better performance than my own, but I kept explaining to them that the feature I cared most about was die size. They couldn’t understand it so I just had to leave them alone. Non-technical people don’t get it. Die size is what I care about. It’s a critical feature and so many mainstream companies are missing out on my money because they won’t optimize die size. Disgusting.

wtf are NPUs anyway? some specialised vector maths thing?