Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
My enshittification story*: Instagram has been suggesting people for me to follow. It markets them to me by saying “friend X follows this person!” But friend X does not follow this person. Friend X has no tenable connection to this person. Why are you bullshitting me, Zuck? Is the autoplag outflow drain hooked up to Insta?
*orig JP title: 僕のエンシット化ストーリー
facebook pulled that shit for many years too, along with the "created" notifications
alllll for the engagement farming, desperate to keep those eyeball KPIs on track
In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.
Bezos' open interference in the Washington Post's editorial section has pushed Walter Bright into a very funny series of public admissions that he did not have to make. See the orange site here for his ongoing libertarian meltdown.
His comment history is a weird mix of programming language discussion, terrible takes, simping for Musk, simping for Musk even harder (just in case you didn't realize how much he liked Musk the first time).
Musk is the sane one. It's the rest of us that are insane.
Holy hell.
Walter Bright soon reading his second ever newspaper: "Wow, this is a lot like Washington Post!"
introduced the mtg players to Ed zitron
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/1gdd083/magic_the_gathering_is_an_example_of_the_rot/
Amazon used an AI-generated image as a cover for 1922's Nosferatu, and it got publicly torn apart on Twitter:
On a personal note, it feels to me like any use of AI, regardless of context, is gonna be treated as a public slight against artists, if not art as a concept going forward. Arguably, it already has been treated that way for a while.
You want me to point to a high-profile example of this kinda thing, I'd say Eagan Tilghman provided a textbook example a year ago, after his Scooby Doo/FNAF fan crossover (a VA redub came out a year later BTW) accidentally ignited a major controversy over AI and nearly got him blacklisted from animation.
I specifically bring this up because Tilghman wasn't some random CEO or big-name animator - he was just some random college student making a non-profit passion project with basically zero budget or connections. It speaks volumes about how artists view AI that even someone like him got raked over the coals for using it.
ffs it's in public domain just use a still from the staircase silhouette like everyone else
Zuck says lots more slop coming your way soon
"I think were going to add a whole new category of content which is AI generated or AI summarized content, or existing content pulled together by AI in some way,” the Meta CEO said. “And I think that that’s gonna be very exciting for Facebook and Instagram and maybe Threads, or other kinds of feed experiences over time."
Facebook is already one Meta platform where AI generated content, sometimes referred to as “AI slop,” is increasingly common.
Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:
In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.
Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people's livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.
Go home Coursera, you're drunk.
Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.
Note: Got an email ad from Coursera. I had to highlight the message because the email's text was white-on-white.
How the chicken fried fuck does anyone make a course about "prompt engineering"? It's like seeing a weird sports guy systematize his pregame rituals and then sell a course on it.
Step 1: Grow a beard, preferably one like that Leonidas guy in 300.
Step 2: If your team wins, never wash those clothes, and be sure to wear those clothes every game day. That's not stank, that's the luck diffusing out into the universe.
Step 3: Use the force to make the ball go where it needs to go. Also use it to scatter and confuse the opposition.
Step 4: Ask God(s) to intervene, he/she/they love(s) your team more!
Step 5: Change allegiance to a better team if things go downhill, because that means your current team has lost the Mandate of Heaven.
That will be $200 please.
in the continuing series of russian bitching over kernel maintainers: Russia says it might build its own Linux community after removal of several kernel maintainers
Cursed .gov link:
TL;DR: Our main characters have bilked a very credulous US State Department. 100 Million tax dollars will now be converted into entropy. There will also be committees.
So apparently the US government has been compromised by rustheads
https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/
https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices
Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilot, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.
PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and I'm bricking it.
today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/
can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be
that article misses one of the delicious parts of that story: they called saltman a “podcast bro” in derision
Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/
we really shouldn’t have let Microsoft both fork an editor and buy GitHub, of course they were gonna turn one into a really shitty version of the other
anyway check this extremely valuable suggestion from Copilot in one of their screenshots:
The error message 'userld and score are required' is unclear. It should be more specific, such as 'Missing userld or score in the request body'.
aren’t you salivating for a Copilot subscription? it turns a lazy error message into… no that’s still lazy as shit actually, who is this for?
I want someone to fork the Linux kernel and then unleash like 10 Copilots to make PRs and review each other. No human intervention. Then plot the number of critical security vulnerabilities introduced over time, assuming they can even keep it compilable for long enough.
Does a kernel that crashes itself before it can process any malicious inputs count as secure?
I know it's Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱
As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔
FastCompany: "In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots"
It's interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need "Apple Intelligence"[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous "Crush" AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday... I find it just alienating.
Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can't find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don't think anyone can.
[1] I'd like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it "iSlop"
https://www.infoworld.com/article/3595687/googles-flutter-framework-has-been-forked.html/
I’m currently using Flutter. It’s good! And useful! Much better than AI. It being mostly developed by Google has been a bit of a worry since Google is known to shoot itself in the foot by killing off its own products.
So while it’s no big deal to have an open source codebase forked, just wanted to highlight this part of the article:
Carroll also claimed that Google’s focus on AI caused the Flutter team to deprioritize desktop platforms, and he stressed the difficulty of working with the current Flutter team
Described as “Flutter+” by Carroll, Flock “will remain constantly up to date with Flutter, he said. Flock will add important bug fixes, and popular community features, which the Flutter team either can’t, or won’t implement.”
I hope this goes well!
