chef's kiss, no notes

Original Tweet

and also speaking of Godot — does anyone doing game dev right now have a good source for placeholder assets? I just finished all the introductory tutorials for the engine and now I want to flex what I’ve learned a bit

I think Zuckeberg has been saying the silent part out loud since day one.

People just submitted it.

I don't know why.

They "trust me"

Dumb fucks

Can't really say I'm surprised that Mr Facebook takes this attitude. His whole fortune is built on the belief that aggregating and hosting content is more valuable than creating it

I trained a neural network on all the ways I've said that I hate these people, and it screamed in eldritch spectra before collapsing into silence.

As always with plagiarism, regardless of what they say they always, always, always act out of a complete disregard for the value of whatever they're ripping off.

hmm, I meant to link that when I saw it, guess I forgot. whoops :D

but yeah, entirely unsurprising from the guy who literally started by harvesting a pile of data and then building a commercial service off it. facebook and parentco should be ended, his assets taken for public good

TIL Roblox is listed on the fucking stock market.

They're reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo

It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities ... but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control

😩

This work getting the physics nobel for “using physics” is reeeeeeal fuckin tangential

The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

Wikipedia's mod team definitely haven't realised it yet, but this part is pretty much a de facto ban on using AI. AI is incapable of producing output that would be acceptable for a Wikipedia article - in basically every instance, its getting nuked.

Welcome to the club. They say a shared suffering is only half the suffering.

This was discussed in last week's Stubsack, but I don't think we mind talking about talking the same thing twice. I, for one, do not look forward to browsing Wikipedia exclusively through pre-2024 archived versions, so I hope (with some pessimism) their disapponintingly milquetoast stance works out.

Reading a bit of the old Reddit sneerclub can help understand some of the Awful vernacular, but otherwise it's as much of a lurkmoar as any other online circlejerk. The old guard keep referencing cringe techbros and TESCREALs I've never heard of while I still can't remember which Scott A we're talking about in which thread.

Don't know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I'm not inherently familiar with (is there a "welcome guide" of some sort somewhere I missed)

first impression: your post is entirely on topic, welcome to the stubsack

techtakes is a sister sub to sneerclub (also on this instance, previously on reddit) and that one has a bit of an explanation. generally any (classy) sneerful critique of bullshit and wankery goes, modulo making space for chuds/nazis/debatelords/etc (those get shown the exit)

Now in 404media.

you use a lot of terms I’m not inherently familiar with (is there a “welcome guide” of some sort somewhere I missed).

we’re pretty receptive to requests for explanations of terms here, just fyi! I imagine if it begins to overwhelm commenting, a guide will be created. Unfortunately there is something of an arms race between industry buzzword generation and good sense, and we are on the side of good sense.

How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.

How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.

the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants

The logical conclusion of normalizing "Social Media Manager" as a role in companies is that as they get better at their jobs and become more believable, the average corporate communication will trend towards 13-year old edgy shitposter. God I feel old.

I really think that Naomi Klein pointing out the brand being the product created a wave of tech entrepreneurs who reacted by making the user experience the product and now we’re seeing how bad they are at the most basic brand maintenance.

Why is it always bioshock girl 😭

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

Earlier today, the Internet Archive suffered a DDoS attack, which has now been claimed by the BlackMeta hacktivist group, who says they will be conducting additional attacks.

Hacktivist group? The fuck can you claim to be an activist for if your target is the Internet Archive?

I feel like the Internet Archive is a prime target for techfashy groups. Both for the amount of culture you can destroy, and because backed up webpages often make people with an ego the size of the sun look stupid.

Also, I can't remember but didn't Yudkowsky or someone else pretty plainly admit to taking a bunch of money during the FTX scandal? I swear he let slip that the funds were mostly dried up. I don't think it was ever deleted, but that's the sort of thing you might want to delete and could get really angry about being backed up in the Internet Archive. I think Siskind has edited a couple articles until all the fashy points were rounded off and that could fall in a similar boat. Maybe not him specifically, but there's content like that that people would rather not be remembered and the Internet Archive falling apart would be good news to them.

Also (again), it scares me a little that their servers are on public tours. Like it'd take one crazy person to do serious damage to it. I don't know but I'm hoping their >100PB of storage is including backups, even if it's not 3-2-1. I'm only mildly paranoid about it lol.

@BlueMonday1984 whoever this dipshit is needs to fucking stop

Reduce your time-to-insight

I do not think that word means what they think it means.

Emily Bender devoted a whole episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 to this.

I have nothing to add, save the screaming.

Synthetic Users uses the power of LLMs to generate users that have very high Synthetic Organic Parity. We start by generating a personality profile for each user, very much like a reptilian brain around which we reconstruct its personality. It’s a reconstruction because we are relying on the billions of parameters that LLMs have at their disposal.

They could've worded this so many other ways

But I suppose creepyness is a selling point these days

they put bullshit inside my bullshit industry for generating bullshit?????? the investors are delighted!

the only positive is that their carousel pitch is at least honest about the desire

and that list of companies who’ve supposedly used it is telling, I guess

the rest of this….oh dear god

I did not expect to be tricked into reading about the nighttime erections of the man with the most severe midlife crisis in the world.

he has 80% fewer gray hairs, representing a “31-year age reversal”

According to Wikipedia this guy is 47. Sorry about your hair as a teenager I guess? I hope the early graying didn't lead to any long term self-esteem issues.

The Network School offers Johnson’s healthy food and a fitness program called the Blueprint Protocol. He claims that after three years of following his blueprint the duration of his night-time erections totals 179 minutes, “better than the average 18-year-old”

Yeah, this is a very normal diet that's advertising itself in very normal ways.

When I was adjusting to a high fiber diet for medical reasons I couldn't figure out why I was so incredibly hungry despite eating enough.

Then I realized "huh, I haven't had any fat at all for the past week" and went and made myself four slices of buttery toast and they were so tasty.

I want a menu!

What do you think is the venn diagram of "people who go to The Network School" and "men who believe in the meat-only diet"? I imagine there's a lot of crossover

@gerikson

Now if it was Brian Johnson from AC/DC, I bet it'd be awesome.

That's awesome. Lemmy is great, but old-school forums are just something else.

For a burst of nostalgia for at least some of you nerds (lovingly), let me add forums.spacebattles.com to the list

I think a couple of people noted it at the start, but this is truly a paradigm shift.

We've had so many science fiction stories, works, derivatives, musing about AI in so many ways, what if it were malevolent, what if it rebelled, what if it took all jobs... But I don't think our collective consciousness was aware of the "what if it was just utterly stupid and incompetent" possibility.

it’s kind of comforting that the current attitude towards generative AI in some tech spaces is “of course it can’t do cognition and it isn’t really good for anything, who said it was” which is of course rich from the exact same posters who were breathlessly advertising for the tech as revolutionary both online and at work as recently as a couple of weeks ago (and a lot of them still hedge it with “but it might be useful in the near future”). the comfort is it feels like that attitude comes from deep embarrassment, like how the orange site started claiming it is and always was skeptical of crypto once the technology got irrevocably associated with scams and gambling and a lot of the easy money left

these chuds lack self awareness and they never realise that by moving the goalposts on brain stuff they are admitting their own idiocy.

yet another way to write shitty python

Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to "optimize your workout with every rep" or some such nonsense.

I tried to remember the name of it by googling "AI exercise equipment" and despite the slick branding (it's called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it's awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I'm imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else's in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

AI is primarily, if not exclusively, threatening the jobs people want to do (art, poetry, that sorta shit)

Jobs people want to do, but which also take a lot of effort to learn to do well. I think there exists a certain envy of people who have put in the time and effort to learn something, which motivates the AI hype.

Visual arts, writing, translation, music, video production, programming, sex. The common thread is that these are things most people wish they could be good at, and they're also the most popular uses for generative AI.

To my mind, the cover of "researchers" using the public internet to seed products commercialized by OpenAI and friends is the biggest betrayal of fair use in recent memory. The big companies cynically exploited the research exception to fair use and possibly destroyed in the future.

Hey ChatGPT, write a novel titled OpenAI Gets Pounded In the Ass by Pterodactyl Lawyers, in the style of Chuck Tingle.

This is gut instinct like my previous sidenote, but I suspect that this AI bubble will cause the tech industry (if not tech as a whole) to be viewed as fundamentally hostile to artists and fundamentally lacking in art skills/creativity, if not outright hostile to artists and incapable of making (or even understanding) art.

As a programmer who likes to see himself more adjacent to artists (and not only because I only draw stuff — badly — and write stuff — terribly — as a hobby, but also because I hold the belief that creating something with code can be seen as artistic too) this whole attitude which has been plaguing the tech industry for — let's be real here — the last 15 years at least but probably much longer makes me irrationally angry. Even the parts of the industry where creativity and artistry should play a larger role, like game dev, have been completely fucked over by this idea that everything is about efficiency and productivity. You wanna be successful? You need to be productive all the time, 24/7, and now there's tools that help you with that, and these tools are now fucking AI-powered! Because everything is a tool for out lord and savior productivity.

(I really should get to this toxic productivity write-up I've been meaning to do for a year now,)

This response from her. Lol. Lmao.

can you and all your anti-ai bots just block me? we get it, you hate ai art

What a misunderstood wee lil smol bean, waah

Just ignore the inconsistent theming, blurry cars, people phasing in and out of existence, nonsense traffic signals, unnatural leaf rustling, the car driving on the wrong(?) side of the road and about to plow into a tree, the weirdly oversized tree, the tree missing a trunk, the nonsense traffic paint, the shoddy textures, and the fact that the scene is entirely derivative and no one feels any joy from watching it.

Phew

If you ignore all that it could be the end of animators!!

Even in the still image that dog's legs look like a first draft Minecraft centipede.

I'd really rather not become a character in this story

Good luck. In my experience you can't speak up about stuff like this without putting yourself out there to some degree. Stay strong.

Regarding the email bounceback, could you perhaps try sending an email from another address (with a different host) to the same destination to confirm it's not just your "sending" server?

The bounceback should have info in it on the cause, and DKIM issues should result in a complaint response from the denying recipient server.

Alignment? Well, of course it depends on your organization's style guide but if you're using TensorFlow or PyTorch in Python, I recommend following PEP-8, which specifies four spaces per indent level and…

Wait, you're not working in AI the what are you even asking for?

Was thinking about this over the weekend and it suddenly struck me that saltman and his fellow podcasting bros (thank you, TSMC execs) are the modern equivalent of the guys in academic posts who'd describe themselves using titles like "futurist" and spent their time turning out papers that got them interviewed on telly, inspired other academics with too much spare time to write their own takes on it and get interviewed on TV as well, maybe write a book and get an adoring profile in WIRED, that sort of thing. Maybe they'd have a sideline in cyberpunk fiction or be part of a group that hung around in Berkeley making languid proclamations about how cyberspace would be the end of all laws and stuff like that. They were the first hype men of tech -- didn't actually do very much themselves but gave other people ideas. Certainly loved the sound of their own voices and adored the attention. But they were very clear that these were ideas to hang stuff off in the future, not the present.

Nobody was dumb enough to actually take their stuff at face value as something they should immediately throw huge amounts of money at to make them reality. This started to blur during the period when Negroponte was really hustling and everything the MIT Media Lab squirted out was treated like the second coming. It blurred further when tech companies started employing people to act as hype men who had job titles like "Chief Visionary". These guys could take the ideas coming from the nerdy engineers and turn them into excited press releases that would get the top brass excited into giving them more headcount to work on it. Type specimen: Shingy (formerly of AOL)

Today, that circlejerk (futurists - journalism - readers - companies - investors) has collapsed into a line with two points. Someone like Altman shows up with a barely-proof-of-concept idea but is able to hype it directly to VCs who have too much money and no imagination and make decisions based entirely on FOMO. So Altman appears, gets showered with cash, then as he's being showered with cash and hyping for all it's worth other tech companies and VCs jump on the FOMO wagon and pour cash into it as well and... we get to today. Not so much a circlejerk as a reacharound. The sanity filter of open discussion and decent tech journalism between blue-sky ideas and billions of dollars of cash has been removed completely.

The most recent bubbles - cryptocurrency, blockchain, NFTs, LLMs... none of these would have progressed much beyond a few academic papers, maybe a PoC and some excited cyberpunk mailing list traffic until about 15 years ago. The computing power to do them was easily available, it's just that people would have asked "What is this for?" and "Why is it better?". It's what happens when you stop using academia (generally a fairly sceptical community) as an ideas factory and start using coked-up Stanford grads who've spent their entire university career being constantly told how special and important they are.

Result: massive waste of talent which could be used on genuinely innovative and society-improving ideas, stifling of said genuinely good ideas as "a startup" now has to mean $10m in seed capital and "graduating" from an incubator rather than a couple of people coding in an apartment, billions of dollars firehosed off a cliff for no good reason, the environment being set on fire, and society is being made incrementally worse and not better.

How fucking depressing. Capitalism, you suck.

(full disclosure: I've had dinner with a couple of top-tier Cyberpunk Luminaries in the US and one of them was pretty much the most annoying, self-satisfied "I Am Very Clever And Will Talk Loudly" person I've ever met. I now know what it feels like to be mansplained at having had things like basic facts about the country I was then living in and the European Union explained to me incorrectly.)

evidence of wider continued rising of the tide against saltman’s bullshit grows

Precisely when that rising tide will drown Altman I'm not sure, but I feel safe in saying it'll probably drown the rest of the AI industry (and potentially "AI" as a concept) as well - Altman is pretty much the face of this AI bubble, after all.

The rising tide was likely also helped along by OpenAI going fully for-profit, which shattered the humanitarian guise it spent the last decade or so building, and, to quote myself, "given the true believers reason to believe [Altman would] commit omnicide-via-spicy-autocomplete for a quick buck".

First-ever criminal charges against financial services firms for market manipulation and “wash trading” in the cryptocurrency industry

Cryptocurrency is a 15-year old industry built mostly on market manipulation and wash trading and now we're seeing the first charges for it? Man, back in the day they told me doing crime was illegal.

Deflationary

With every transaction supply shrinks by burning a percentage of reflections to the burn wallet

Turns out libertarians actually love taxes, but only if instead of spending the tax money on anything, it's burned to waste.

Fraudster: "the “objective on the secondary markets” is to find “other buyers from the community, people you don’t know about or don’t care about” because “we have to make [the other buyers] lose money in order to make profit.”"

Is this supposed to be a parody or something? If so, why is this being done at the direction of the FBI? Or is that also part of the parody? If so I didn't know you could use the FBI logo for that purpose.

Tried to get out, door cut my leg off. Now I have to go back to the future to get it reattached.

Done.

maybe also link in the wp/mullenweg thread

Has wordpress matt had a stroke or what? This is off-the-wall.