Somewhat related I was thinking about how different this blog post from a DOGE "employee" reads during Elon Musks coup attempt: https://vinay.sh/i-am-rich-and-have-no-idea-what-to-do-with-my-life/ -- it was discussed here but no one really knew what was coming at the time.

There's also a youtube video which has been popping off on social media over the last week and is a gentle introduction to techno-fascists for the general public.

wow the sanewashing of trump in those threads is insane

d'ya....d'ya think they'll make it all the way along the path, to the realization?

My sympathies.

Read somewhere that the practice of defending one's thesis was established because buying a thesis was such an established practice. Scaling that up for every single text is of course utterly impractical.

I had a recent conversation with someone who was convinced that machines learn when they regurgitate text, because "that is what humans do". My counterargument was that if regurgitation is learning then every student who crammed, regurgitated and forgot, must have learnt much more than anyone thought. I didn't get any reply, so I must assume that by reading my reply and creating a version of it in their head they immediately understood the errors of their ways.

"Aligning people is hard too" a thing that only a literal sociopath would think and only a special kind of sociopath would utter publicly

it’s amazing how intensely these assholes want to end Wikipedia and pollute all other community information sources beyond repair. it feels like it’s all part of the same strategy:

• without consent, scrape all the information from an online source as destructively as you can
• if possible, render that source useless by polluting it with LLM crap
• otherwise, shut it down through political means
• now that you’ve pulled the ladder up behind you, replace that information source with your garbage LLM and start rentseeking harder than Netflix

This reinforces my judgment that the ultimate customers for code-completion models are people who don’t actually want to be writing code in the first place.

So after billions of investment, and gigawatt-hours of energy, it's now "not too bad for throwaway weekend projects". Wow, great. Let's fire all the programmers already!

Apart from whatever the fuck that process is, it is not engineering.

And to think that people hated on Visual Basic once... in comparison to this stuff, it was the most solid of solid foundations.

I ask for the dumbest things like “decrease the padding on the sidebar by half” because I’m too lazy to find it

this is so much slower (in both keystrokes and raw time, not to mention needing to re-prompt) and much more expensive than just going into the fucking CSS and pressing the 3 buttons needed to change the padding for that selector, and the only reason why this would ever be hard is because they’re knee deep in LLM generated slop and they can’t find fucking anything in there. what a fucking infuriating way to interact with a machine.

In the new Washington Post profile, Malcolm implies that he “engineered the scene” because “he knew smacking his kid would draw attention, help the article go viral and get their message out.”

How does beating your kid for clicks make anything better!? You still beat your two year old kid!

Dear acausal robot God, that was cathartic. Refreshing to see a mainstream journalist see through techbro weirdo uwu smol bean antics for what they are, especially after so many credulous puff pieces.

This includes the Guardian (twice), the Wall Street Journal, the Philadelphia Inquirer, CBC News, Business Insider, Bloomberg, and Dallas Magazine, among many, many others. My industry peers very clearly want me to know about these people—a lot about them!

I knew that a couple of outlets had done profiles of them lately, but I didn't realize they were attention whoring this hard. Maybe their thing isn't a breeding kink after all, but exhibitionism.

I also didn't know about the child abuse, though I could have seen it coming without subjecting myself to two Grauniad bits on these fuckers^1^.

And then there’s the slap. The most notable aspect of the Guardian’s May 2024 profile—which, again, profiled them twice in the same year—was a moment when Malcolm slaps his son in the face, in public, after the then-2-year-old accidentally bumped into a table, leaving the boy “whimpering.” To her credit, reporter Jenny Kleeman didn’t let this go, forcing the couple to defend this punishment.

1: Don't even know if "fucker" is appropriate here given these bougie failchildren are apparently opting for IVF for the actual baby making part.

Headline photo is actually a jump-scare

i still can't get over how they look
like why the fuck would you wear glasses like those
was there even a point in time where this was fashionable

I think you'll find Guangdong did a lot of the actual building.

According to some roblox wiki also the richest person (in roblox). So wonder if it is libertarian goes monarchist.

more sneers here https://www.reddit.com/r/Gamingcirclejerk/comments/1iirq4s/the_creator_of_roblox_wants_you_to_know_that_he/

really enjoying (?) the implication that anything less than extreme genocidal resentment is considered left of centre these days

Also, I don't know that people are particularly concerned about the left/right spectrum as much as the explicitly racist and tacitly authoritarian sentiments. Like, if your vision of "the left" includes Scott, AOC, and Karl Marx then you have basically defined the left/right spectrum to be meaningless.

The use of the word sincere here bothers me.

+6 culture generation for each person gooning under a portrait of xi jinping. china's borders will expand quickly

He who controls the goons controls the universe. No wait that is only in EVE online.

A long time ago when the whole "should we cctv everything" idea was new and controversial I recall an interview or something with a london police chief, at the time the most cctved city. He admitted that cctv didnt help them stop crime or catch more criminals. He still wanted more cctv though. I think about that every now and then when there is another 'our surveillance tech actually does not work but we want more of it' story

year of Nakamoto 17

so what you're saying is, next year a whole lot of these guys are suddenly going to lose interest

you forgot sanctions evasion, volunteering as a liquidity pool for iranian laundromat, and north korean ransomware

I wonder if one of the reasons they're so young is that's the age you'd have to be to not realize in how much legal trouble they might be putting themselves in. (Bar an eventual pardon from Trump.)

Don't worry they will use ChatGPT to learn all the COBOL they need.

(One of my pet peeves in software is bad documentation (always fun when the comments and the documentation contradict, and after an hour of digging through the email archives you discover both are wrong, and nobody every cared to update either, as the email was enough), but lol if that is what saves the US gov (and look at how bad it has gotten, I'm rooting for the US gov now. If I ever want to be seen as worthwhile I will try to hire Musk to get mad at me, it worked for Zuck (a little bit))).

"Wow, this Penny Arcade comic featuring toxic yaoi of submissive Sam Altman is lowkey kinda hot" is a sentence neither I nor any LLM, Markov chain or monkey on a typewriter could have predicted but now exists.

Send her my thanks for her service! o7

AI alignment is literally a bunch of amateur philosophers telling each other scary stories about The Terminator around a campfire

I love you, David.

this is the least fascist strain of political thought. and everybody knows. everybody knows. sometimes, this happened twice, maybe more, I have men come up to me, big strong men with tears in their eyes, and they say, mr president, we've never seen a strain of thought less fascist

"is this ideological project which has directly incentivised burning books and harming atypicals the same as the fascist projects which did the same? the answer may surprise you!"

weirdly early for the revisionist PR to start, though, they're barely done setting shit on fire

The dark enlightenment is not fascist nor racist is one of those things you can only say if you just started reading up on them, remember the dark enlightenment map from 2013 (on rationalwiki, on the nrx page) contains quite a few open racists/fascists, the worst of all was heartiste, who posted like he was on stormfront (but really overcompensating for being lonely). Also hbd and ethno nationalists.

Also cery easy to go, nah it isnt fascist/racist and then not give definitions.

Fcitx is an input method editor used to type different languages, especially those that need to be composed from context (Chinese, Japanese, Thai, etc.) I believe it comes preinstalled with KDE (at least in kde-full it does, unsure about the smaller packages), but it should be totally safe to remove if you don’t need this functionality.

I dunno, still not as bad as the last Win10 update I was presented with that wanted to resize the recovery partition and shrink my C drive at the same time. That was the push I needed to switch to my Gentoo install and never look back. I presume that Windows is probably pretty decent about live partition resizing these days, but I don’t know that for sure, and I don’t want to waste time being concerned about it on a system that’s mainly for gaming anyway.

Imagine being afraid of allusions to classic literature in your own native language.

It's fine to miss a reference. I do it all the time and make my friends do the same. Not getting a reference is not a punishment to you, it's a bonus to those who do get it.

Fagin, of course, the cocreator of Steely Dan… right?

The bleakest lol. Your editor said that?

Reading books in US high school was an exercise in frustration. There weren't many books assigned, and not a lot of them vibed with me. Most of my classmates did the minimum reading they could get away with (and this was before cellphones were everywhere).

Also I once read through the entirety of the Lord of the Flies before the first quiz on it and so got a quiz answer wrong because I got mixed up due to remembering stuff that happened later in the book which I'm still bitter about.

Some highlights from my high school AP (Advanced Placement) English class:

1. teacher insisting that you can't split an infinitive in English, but can't explain why this bullshit rule was made up in the first place
   • also something about "up with which I will not put" because god forbid you know what you're talking about
2. some inappropriate discussions about abortion
3. we watched the 1931 frankenstein movie after "reading" shelley's novel, but didn't relate it to the book in any way^1^
4. we read some shitty short story, which turned into a shitty movie, and then the teacher kept relating back to the film when discussing the themes of the book
5. at some point they were like "choose your own novel to read and analyze" and we didn't really do analysis, and the novel selection was
   • dan brown's shitty novels about the dude who deciphers symbols or whatever (it was the one with anti-matter)
   • one of ayn rand's pieces of shit
   • i don't remember what else, but there were definitely no classics
6. we had to write college entry essays for the teacher to "critique." i wrote mine about how math fucking rules. the teacher decided it was too technical (despite there being no actual math in it), so they gave it to their partner (an engineer) to read --- I doubt this was legal --- and came back to tell me how well-written it was^2^

my high school education was probably considered decent. don't even get me started on "whole language learning" and "new math" and the insipid pseudoscience plaguing our certification programs while our populace treats our teachers like shit

1: Also, this movie was nearly a century old when we watched it and my class got mad at me for spoiling it.
2: it wasn't written well

So cards on the table here, I've never actually read Oliver Twist. But even neo-google is able to point me at enough useful details to get enough of a gist to follow it.

And that's assuming you don't pick it up from Wishbone, the animated talking dogs version , or the muppets parody that I'm sure exists somewhere.

@sc_griffith

Apparently "Trauma" is banned. That's going to be a problem.

This is what happens when you give power to bigoted morons.

@sc_griffith

"Gender Neural”

That typo is probably going to screw a lot of Neuroscience grants just because it'll match on some dumb regex.

Also, apparently Hispanic and Latino people don't exist?

"De colonized" is also on there, that will give some interesting problems when automated filters for this hit Dutch texts (De means the).

E: there are so many other words on there like victim, and unjust, and equity, this will cause so many dumb problems. And of course if you go on the first definition of political correct ('you must express the party line on certain ideas or be punished') they created their own PC culture. (I know pointing out hypocrisy does nothing, but it amuses me for now).

Minor note, but Musk wears that jacket everywhere, even at a suit and tie dinner with Trump. I don't get how Trump (if my assumptions on him wanting to be seen as a certain type of having class/higher society type) stands him. Looking at the picture, he might be having second thoughts all the time.

“Both what I’ve seen, and what the administration sees, is you all are one of the most respected technology groups in the federal government,” Shedd told TTS workers. “You guys have been doing this far longer than I've been even aware that your group exists.”

(emphasis mine)

Well, maybe start acting like it champ.

@froztbyte @dgerard you have an example of those?

I have some songs for your truck obsessed child (possibly NSFW)

at least one matches, i forget the name but it's all over bsky

Evergreen reaction image.

Basically this is the usual battle between the literal neo-nazi antisemites and the more mainstream fascists who've pivoted from virulent antisemitism to anti-muslim racism and support for Israel (but that won't stop them from having a go at the (((globalists))) every other day). Fun for all.

not sure if this is entirely ignorable as a tactic or if the counter-tactic is to post similar stickers but with references/QR codes to classic shock sites.

This community is for those willing to bring wisdom and compassion into the world. It is not for those easily duped by what they find in their minds or online.

no red flags there

edit to add: Emphasis in original

existing class of kook - hooks into the Zizians

sounds a bit of a xy question imo, and a good answer of examples would depend on the y part of the question, the whatever it is that (if my guess is right) your friend is actually looking to know/find

“AI” is branding, a marketing thing that a cadaverous swarm of ghouls got behind in the upswing of the slop wave (you can trace this by checking popularity of the term in the months after deepdream), a banner with which to claim to be doing something new, a “new handle” to use to try anchor anew in the imaginations of many people who were (by normal and natural humanity) not yet aware of all the theft and exploitation. this was not by accident

there are a fair of good machine learning systems and companies out there (and by dint of hype and market forces, some end up sticking the “AI” label on their products, because that’s just how this deeply fucked capitalist market incentivises). as other posters have said, medical technology has seen some good uses, there’s things like recommender[0] and mass-analysis system improvements, and I’ve seen the same in process environments[1]. there’s even a lot of “quiet and useful” forms of this that have been getting added to many daily use systems and products all around us: reasonably good text extractors as a baseline feature in pdf and image viewers, subject matchers to find pets and friends in photos, that sort of thing. but those don’t get headlines and silly valuation insanity as much of the industry is in the midst of

[0] - not always blanket good, there’s lots of critique possible here

[1] - things like production lines that can use correlative prediction for checking on likely faults

There are companies doing "cool-sounding" things with AI like Waymo. "Good" would require more definition.

The only thing that comes to mind is medical applications, drug research, etc. But that might just be a skewed perspective on my end because I know literally nothing about that industry or how AI technology is deployed there. I've just read research has been assisted by those tools and that seems, at least on the surface level, like a good thing.