Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
You thought CrĆ©mieux (Jordan Lasker) was bad. You were wrong. Heās even worse. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2025/07/cremieux-jordan-lasker-mamdani-nyt-nazi-faliceer-reddit/
also here https://awful.systems/post/4995759
The long and short of it is motherjones discovered TPOs openly nazi alt.
https://www.profgalloway.com/ice-age/ Good post until I hit the below:
Instead of militarizing immigration enforcement, we should be investing against the real challenge: AI. The World Economic Forum says 9 million jobs globally may be displaced in the next five years. Anthropicās CEO warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Imagine the population of Greece storming the shores of America and taking jobs (even jobs Americans actually want), as theyāre willing to work 24/7 for free. Youāve already met them. Their names are GPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Having a hard time imagining 300 but AI myself, Scott. Could we like, not shoehorn AI into every other discussion?
Iirc Galloway was a pro cryptocurrency guy. So this tracks
E: imagine if the 3d printer people had the hype machine behind them like this. āChina better watch out, soon all manufacturing of products will be done by people at homeā. Meanwhile China: [Laughs in 大č·čæ].
yeah lol ez just 3dprint polypropylene polymerization reactor. what the fuck is hastelloy?
Yeah, but we never got that massive hype cycle for 3d printers. Which in a way is a bit odd, as it could have happend. Nanomachine! Star trek replicators! (Getting a bit offtopic from Galloway being a cryptobro).
Hereās an example of normal people using Bayes correctly (rationally assigning probabilities and acting on them) while rats Just Donāt Get Why Normies Donāt Freak Out:
For quite a while, Iāve been quite confused why (sweet nonexistent God, whyyyyy) so many people intuitively believe that any risk of a genocide of some ethnicity is unacceptable while beingā¦ at best lukewarm against the idea of humanity going extinct.
(Dude then goes on to try to game-theorize this, I didnāt bother to poke holes in it)
The thing is, genocides have happened, and people around the world are perfectly happy to advocate for it in diverse situations. Probability wise, the risk of genocide somewhere is very close to 1, while the risk of āomnicideā is much closer to zero. If you want to advocate for eliminating something, working to eliminating the risk of genocide is much more rational than working to eliminate the risk of everyone dying.
At least on commenter gets it:
Most people distinguish between intentional acts and shit that happens.
(source)
Edit never read the comments (again). The commenter referenced above obviously didnāt feel like a pithy one liner adhered to the LW ethos, and instead added an addendum wondering why people were more upset about police brutality killing people than traffic fatalities. Nice āsaveā, dipshit.
Hmm, should I be more worried and outraged about genocides that are happening at this very moment, or some imaginary scifi scenario dreamed up by people who really like drawing charts?
One of the ways the rationalists try to rebut this is through the idiotic dust specks argument. Deep down, they want to smuggle in the argument that their fanciful scenarios are actually far more important than real life issues, because what if their scenarios are just so bad that their weight overcomes the low probability that they occur?
(I donāt know much philosophy, so I am curious about philosophical counterarguments to this. Mathematically, I can say that the more they add scifi nonsense to their scenarios, the more that reduces the probability that they occur.)
You know, I hadnāt actually connected the dots before, but the dust speck argument is basically yet another ostensibly-secular reformulation of Pascalās wager. Only instead of Heaven being infinitely good if you convert thereās some infinitely bad thing that happens if you donāt do whatever Eliezer asks of you.
reverse dust specks: how many LWers would we need to permanently deprive of access to internet to see rationalist discourse dying out?
Whatās your P(that question has been asked at a US three letter agency)
it either was, or wasnāt, so 50%
Recently, Iāve realized that there is a decent explanation for why so many people believe that - if we model them as operating under a strict zero-sum game model of the worldā¦ āeveryone losesā is basically an incoherent statement - as a best approximation it would either denote no change and therefore be morally neutral, or an equal outcome, and would therefore be preferable to some.
Yes, this is why people think that. This is a normal thought to think others have.
Hereās my unified theory of human psychology, based on the assumption most people believe in the Tooth Fairy and absolutely no other unstated bizarre and incorrect assumptions no siree!
Why do these guys all sound like deathnote, but stupid?
because they cribbed their ideas from deathnote, and theyāre stupid
I mean if you want to be exceedingly generous (I sadly have my moments), this is actually remarkably close to the āintentional actsā and āshit happensā distinction, in a perverse Rationalist way. ^^
Thats fair, if you want to be generous, if you are not going to be Id say there are still conceptually large differences between the quote and āshit happensā. But yes, you are right. If only they had listened to Scott when he said ātalk less like robotsā
Somebody found a relevant reddit post:
Dr. Casey Fiesler āŖ@cfiesler.bsky.socialā¬ (who has clippy earrings in a video!) writes: " This is fascinating: reddit link
Someone āworked on a book with ChatGPTā for weeks and then sought help on Reddit when they couldnāt download the file. Redditors helped them realized ChatGPT had just been roleplaying/lying and there was no file/bookā¦"
After understanding a lot of things itās clear that it didnāt. And it fooled me for two weeks.
I have learned my lesson and now I am using it to generate one page at a time.
qu1j0t3 replies:
thatās, uh, not really the ideal takeaway from this lesson
you have to scroll through the personās comments to find it, but it does look they did author the body of the text and uploaded it as a docx into ChatGPT. so points for actually creating something unlike the AI bros
it looks like they tried to use ChatGPT to improve narration. to what degree the token smusher has decided to rewrite their work in the smooth, recycled plastic feel weāve all come to know and despise remains unknown
they did say they are trying to get it to generate illustrations for all 700 pages, and moreover appear[ed] to believe it can āwork in the backgroundā on individual chapters with no prompting. they do seem to have been educated on the folly of expecting this to work, but as blakestaceyās other reply pointed out, they appear to now be just manually prompting one page at a time. godspeed
They now deleted their post and I assume a lot of others, but they also claim they have no time to really write and just wanted a collection of stories for their kid(s). Which doesnt make sense, creating 700 pages of kids stories is a lot of work, even if you let a bot improve the flow. Unless they just stole a book of childrenās stories from somewhere. (I know these books exist, as a child from one of my brothers tricked me into reading two stories from one).
looks like thereās either downvote brigade keeping critical comments at +1 or 0, or reddit brigading countermeasures went on in defense of wittle promprfondler
New post from Matthew Hughes: People Are The Point, effectively a manifesto against gen-AI as a concept.
Better Offline was rough this morning in some places. Props to Ed for keeping his cool with the guests.
Oof, that Hollywood guest (Brian Koppelman) is a dunderhead. āThese AI layoffs actually make sense because of complexity theoryā. āYou gotta take Eliezer Yudkowsky seriously. He predicted everything perfectly.ā
I looked up his background, and it turns out heās the guy behind the TV show āBillionsā. That immediately made him make sense to me. The show attempts to lionize billionaires and is ultimately undermined not just by its offensive premise but by the worldās most block-headed and cringe-inducing dialog.
Terrible choice of guest, Ed.
I study complexity theory and Iād like to know what circuit lower bound assumption he uses to prove that the AI layoffs make sense. Seriously, it is sad that the people in the VC techbro sphere are thought to have technical competence. At the same time, they do their best to erode scientific institutions.
My hot take has always been that current Boolean-SAT/MIP solvers are probably pretty close to theoretical optimality for problems that are interesting to humans & AI no matter how āintelligentā will struggle to meaningfully improve them. Ofc I doubt that Mr. Hollywood (or Yud for that matter) has actually spent enough time with classical optimization lore to understand this. Computer go FOOM ofc.
Only way I can make the link between complexity theory and laying off people is thinking about putting people in ācan solve up to this level of problemā style complexity classes (which regulars here should realize gets iffy fast). So hope he explained it more than that.
The only complexity theory I know of is the one which tries to work out how resource-intensive certain problems are for computers, so this whole thing sounds iffy right from the get-go.
Yeah but those resource-intensive problems can be fitted into specific classes of problems (P, NP, PSPACE etc), which is what I was talking about, so we are talking about the same thing.
So under my imagined theory you can classify people as ācan solve: [ P, NP, PSPACE, ā¦ ]ā. Wonder what they will do with the P class. (Wait, what did Yarvin want to do with them again?)
solve this sokoban or youāre fired
Thereās really no good way to make any statements about what problems LLMs can solve in terms of complexity theory. To this day, LLMs, even the newfangled āreasoningā models, have not demonstrated that they can reliably solve computational problems in the first place. For example, LLMs cannot reliably make legal moves in chess and cannot reliably solve puzzles even when given the algorithm. LLM hypesters are in no position to make any claims about complexity theory.
Even if we have AIs that can reliably solve computational tasks (or, you know, just use computers properly), it still doesnāt change anything in terms of complexity theory, because complexity theory concerns itself with all possible algorithms, and any AI is just another algorithm in the end. If P != NP, it doesnāt matter how āintelligentā your AI is, itās not solving NP-hard problems in polynomial time. And if some particularly bold hypester wants to claim that AI can efficiently solve all problems in NP, letās just say that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Koppelman is only saying ācomplexity theoryā because he likes dropping buzzwords that sound good and doesnāt realize that some of them have actual meanings.
Yeah but I was trying to combine complexity theory as a loose theory misused by tech people in relation to āpeople who get firedā. (Not that I donāt appreciate your post btw, I sadly have not seen any pro-AI people be real complexity theory cranks re the capabilities. I have seen an anti be a complexity theory crank, but that is only when I reread my own posts ;) ).
I heard him say āquantumā and immediately came here looking for fresh-baked sneers
Yeah, that guy was a real piece of work, and if I had actually bothered to watch The Bear before, I would stop doing so in favor of sending ChatGPT a video of me yelling in my kitchen and ask it if what is depicted was the plot of the latest episode.
I have been thinking about the true cost of running LLMs (of course, Ed Zitron and others have written about this a lot).
We take it for granted that large parts of the internet are available for free. Sure, a lot of it is plastered with ads, and paywalls are becoming increasingly common, but thanks to economies of scale (and a level of intrinsic motivation/altruism/idealism/vanity), it still used to be viable to provide information online without charging users for every bit of it. Same appears to be true for the tools to discover said information (search engines).
Compare this to the estimated true cost of running AI chatbots, which (according to the numbers Iām familiar with) may be tens or even hundreds of dollars a month for each user. For this price, users would get unreliable slop, and this slop could only be produced from the (mostly free) information that is already available online while disincentivizing creators from producing more of it (because search engine driven traffic is dying down).
I think the math is really abysmal here, and it may take some time to realize how bad it really is. We are used to big numbers from tech companies, but we rarely break them down to individual users.
Somehow reminds me of the astronomical cost of each bitcoin transaction (especially compared to the tiny cost of processing a single payment through established payment systems).
The big shift in per-action cost is what always seems to be missing from the conversation. Like, in a lot of my experience the per-request cost is basically negligible compared to the overhead of running the service in general. With LLMs not only do we see massive increases in overhead costs due to the training process necessary to build a usable model, each request that gets sent has a higher cost. This changes the scaling logic in ways that donāt appear to be getting priced in or planned for in discussions of the glorious AI technocapital future
With LLMs not only do we see massive increases in overhead costs due to the training process necessary to build a usable model, each request that gets sent has a higher cost. This changes the scaling logic in ways that donāt appear to be getting priced in or planned for in discussions of the glorious AI technocapital future
This is a very important point, I believe. I find it particularly ironic that the ātraditionalā Internet was fairly efficient in particular because many people were shown more or less the same content, and this fact also made it easier to carry out a certain degree of quality assurance. Now with chatbots, all this is being thrown overboard and extreme inefficiencies are being created, and apparently, the AI hypemongers are largely ignoring that.
Iāve done some of the numbers here, but donāt stand by them enough to share. I do estimate that products like Cursor or Claude are being sold at roughly an 80-90% discount compared to whatās sustainable, which is roughly in line with what Zitron has been saying, but itās not precise enough for serious predictions.
Your last paragraph makes me think. We often idealize blockchains with VMs, e.g. Ethereum, as a global distributed computer, if the computer were an old Raspberry Pi. But it is Byzantine distributed; the (IMO excessive) cost goes towards establishing a useful property. If I pick another old computer with a useful property, like a radiation-hardened chipset comparable to a Gamecube or G3 Mac, then we have a spectrum of computers to think about. One end of the spectrum is fast, one end is cheap, one end is Byzantine, one end is rad-hardened, etc. Even GPUs are part of this; theyāre not that fast, but can act in parallel over very wide data. In remarkably stark contrast, the cost of Transformers on GPUs doesnāt actually go towards any useful property! Anything Transformers can do, a cheaper more specialized algorithm could have also done.
Sex pest billionaire Travis Kalanick says AI is great for more than just vibe coding. Itās also great for vibe physics.
@TinyTimmyTokyo He has more dollars than sense, as they say. (Funnier if you say it out loud)
@blakestaceyMy guess is that vibe-physics involves bruteforcing a problem until you find a solution. That method sorta works, but is wholly inefficient and rarely robust/general enough to be useful.
Nah, heās just talking to an LLM.
āIāll go down this thread with [Chat]GPT or Grok and Iāll start to get to the edge of whatās known in quantum physics and then Iām doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except itās vibe physics,ā Kalanick explained. āAnd weāre approaching whatās known. And Iām trying to poke and see if thereās breakthroughs to be had. And Iāve gotten pretty damn close to some interesting breakthroughs just doing that.ā
And I donāt think you can brute force physics in general, having to experimentally confirm or disprove every random-ass intermediary hypothesis the brute force generator comes up with seems like quite the bottle neck.
For sure. Thereās an infinite amount of ways to get things wrong in math and physics. Without a fundamental understanding, all they can do is prompt-fondle and roll dice.
They are not even rolling the dice. The bot is just humoring them, it apparently just defaults to eventually going āyou are close to the edge of what is, known, well done keep goingā.
If infinite monkeys with typewriters can compose Shakespeare, then infinite monkeys with slop machines can produce Einstein (but you need to pump in infinite amounts of money first into my CodeMonkeyfy startup, just in case).
So recently (two weeks ago), I noticed Gary Marcus made a lesswrong account to directly engage with the rationalists. I noted it in a previous stubsack thread
Predicting in advance: Gary Marcus will be dragged down by lesswrong, not lesswrong dragged up towards sanity. Heāll start to use lesswrong lingo and terminology and using P(some event) based on numbers pulled out of his ass.
And sure enough, he has started talking about P(Doom). I hate being right. To be more than fair to him, he is addressing the scenario of Elon Musk or someone similar pulling off something catastrophic by placing too much trust in LLMs shoved into something critical. But he really should know better by now that using their lingo and their crit-hype terminology strengthens them.
using their lingo and their crit-hype terminology strengthens them
We live in a world where the US vice president admits to reading siskind AI fan fiction, so that ship has probably sailed.
It has but we dont have to make it worse, we can create a small village that resists. Like the one small village in Gaul that resisted the Roman occupation.
I appreciate the reference having read half a dozen AstƩrix albums in the last few days. I just hope our Alesia has yet to come.
Remember last week when that study on AIās impact on development speed dropped?
A lot of peeps take away on this little graphic was āsee, impacts of AI on sw development are a net negative!ā I think the real take away is that METR, the AI safety group running the study, is a motley collection of deeply unserious clowns pretending to do science and their experimental set up is garbage.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-168077291
āFirst, I donāt like calling this study an āRCT.ā There is no control group! There are 16 people and they receive both treatments. Weāre supposed to believe that the ātreated unitsā here are the coding assignments. Weāll see in a second that this characterization isnāt so simple.ā
(I am once again shilling Ben Rechtās substack. )
While I also fully expect the conclusion to check out, itās also worth acknowledging that the actual goal for these systems isnāt to supplement skilled developers who can operate effectively without them, itās to replace those developers either with the LLM tools themselves or with cheaper and worse developers who rely on the LLM tools more.
True. They arenāt building city sized data centers and offering people 9 figure salaries for no reason. They are trying to front load the cost of paying for labour for the rest of time.
When you look at METRās web site and review the credentials of its staff, you find that almost none of them has any sort of academic research background. No doctorates as far as I can tell, and lots of rationalist junk affiliations.
oh yeah that was obvious when you see who they are and what they do. also, one of the large opensource projects was the lesswrong site lololol
iām surprised itās as well constructed a study as it is even given that
rsyslog goes āAI firstā, for what reason? no one knows.
Opening ipython greeted me with this: āTip: IPython 9.0+ has hooks to integrate AI/LLM completions.ā
I wish open source projects would stop doing this.
Itās extremely annoying everywhere. GitHubās updates were about AI for so fucking long that I stopped reading them, which means I now miss actually useful stuff until someone informs me of it months later.
For example, did you know GitHub Actions now has really good free ARM runners? Itās amazing! I love it! Shame GitHub only botherās to tell me about their revolutionary features of āplease spam me with useless PRsā andā¦ make a pong game? What? Why would I want this?
Potential hot take: AI is gonna kill open source
Between sucking up a lot of funding that would otherwise go to FOSS projects, DDOSing FOSS infrastructure through mass scraping, and undermining FOSS licenses through mass code theft, the bubble has done plenty of damage to the FOSS movement - damage Iām not sure it can recover from.
Donāt know if LLMs will kill OSS, but they sure are a kick-in-the-dick
that and deluge of fake bug reports
The deluge of fake bug reports is definitely something I should have noted as well, since that directly damages FOSSā capacity to find and fix bugs.
Baldur Bjanason has predicted that FOSS is at risk of being hit by āa vicious cycle leading to collapseā, and security is a major part of his hypothesised cycle:
-
Declining surplus and burnout leads to maintainers increasingly stepping back from their projects.
-
Many of these projects either bitrot serious bugs or get taken over by malicious actors who are highly motivated because they canāt relay on pervasive memory bugs anymore for exploits.
-
OSS increasingly gets a reputation (deserved or not) for being unsafe and unreliable.
-
That decline in users leads to even more maintainers stepping back.
yeah but have you considered how much itās worth that gramma can vibecode a todo app in seconds now???
-
I remember popping into IRC or a mailing list to ask subsystem questions to learn from the sources themselves how something works (or should work). Depending who what and where definitely had differing experiences but overall I felt like there was typically a helpful person on the other side. Nowadays I fear the slop will make people a lot less willing to help when they are overwhelmed with AI generated garbage patches or mails losing some of the rose-tinted charm of open source.
rsyslog goes āAI firstā
what
Thanks for the āfrom now on stay away from this foreverā warning. Reading that blog post is almost surreal (āhow AI is shaping the future of loggingā), I have to remind myself itās a syslog daemon.
I wouldāve stanād syslog-ng but theyāve also been pulling some fuckery with docs again lately thatās making me anxious, so Iām very :|||||
the announcement post is obviously LLM-generated as well
thescream.tiff
I need to rant about yet another SV tech trend which is getting increasingly annoying.
Itās something that is probably less noticeable if you live in a primarily English-speaking region, but if not, there is this very annoying thing that a lot of websites from US tech companies do now, which is that they automatically translate content, without ever asking. So English is pretty big on the web, and many English websites are now auto-translated to German for me. And the translations are usually bad. And by that I mean really fucking bad. (And Iām not talking about the translation feature in webbrowsers, itās the websites themselves.)
Small example of a recent experience: I was browsing stuff on Etsy, and Etsy is one of the websites which does this now. Entire product pages with titles and descriptions and everything is auto-translated, without ever asking me if I want that.
On a product page I then saw:
Material: gefĆ¼hlt
This was very strangeā¦ because that makes no sense at all. āGefĆ¼hltā is a form (participle) of the verb āfĆ¼hlenā, which means āto feelā. It can be used in a past tense form of the verb.
So, to make sense of this you first have to translate that back to English, the past tense āto feelā as āfeltā. And of course āfeltā can also mean a kind of fabric (which in German is called āFilzā), so itās a word with more than one meaning in English. You know, words with multiple meanings, like most words in any language. But the brilliant SV engineers do not seem to understand that you cannot translate words without the context theyāre in.
And this is not a singular experience. Many product descriptions on Etsy are full of such mistakes now, sometimes to the point of being downright baffling. And Ebay does the same now, and the translated product titles and descriptions are a complete shit show as well.
And Youtube started replacing the audio of English videos by default with AI-auto-generated translations spoken by horrible AI voices. By default! Itās unbearable. At least thereās a button to switch back to the original audio, but I keep having to press it. And now Youtube Shorts is doing it too, except that the YT Shorts video player does not seem to have any button to disable it at all!
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into peopleās faces?
Ooooh that would explain a similarly weird interaction I had on a ticket-selling website, buying a streaming ticket to a live show for the German retro game discussion podcast Stay Forever: they translated the title of the event as āBleib fĆ¼r immer am Lebenā, guess they named it āStay Forever Liveā? No way to know for sure, of course.
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into peopleās faces?
This really gets on my nerves too. They probably came up with the idea that they could increase time spent on their platforms and thus revenue by providing more content in their usersā native languages (especially non-English). Simply forcing it on everyone, without giving their users a choice, was probably the cheapest way to implement it. Even if this annoys most of their user base, it makes their investors happy, I guess, at least over the short term. If this bubble has shown us anything, it is that investors hardly care whether a feature is desirable from the usersā point of view or not.
if itās opt-out, it also keeps use of the shitty ai dubbing high thus making it an artficial use case. itās like with gemini counting every google search as single use of it
Click here if you want a horribly bad translation in your face
btw I noticed that Etsy is not actually in SV, so the problem is bigger than that.
Is it that unimaginable for SV tech that people speak more than one language? And that maybe you fucking ask before shoving a horribly bad machine translation into peopleās faces?
Considering how many are Trump bros, they probably consider getting consent to be Cuck Shittm and treat hearing anything but English as sufficient grounds to call ICE.
I found out about that too when I arrived at Reddit and it was translated to Swedish automatically.
Yes, right, Reddit too! Forgot that one. When I visit there I use alternative Reddit front-ends now which luckily spare me from this.
An underappreciated 8th-season Star Trek: TNG episode where Data tries to get closer to humanity by creating an innovative new metamaterial out of memories of past emotions
Ah, im not the only one, yes very annoying. I wonder if there isnāt also a setting they can ask the browsers about the users preferred language usage. Like how you can change languages on a windows install and some installers/etc follow that preferred language.
aliexpress did that since forever but you can just set display language once and youāre done. these ai-dubs are probably worst so far but can be turned off by uploader (itās opt-out) (for now)
Sanders why https://gizmodo.com/bernie-sanders-reveals-the-ai-doomsday-scenario-that-worries-top-experts-2000628611
Sen. Sanders: I have talked to CEOs. Funny that you mention it. I wonāt mention his name, but Iāve just gotten off the phone with one of the leading experts in the world on artificial intelligence, two hours ago.
. . .
Second point: This is not science fiction. There are very, very knowledgeable peopleāand I just talked to one todayāwho worry very much that human beings will not be able to control the technology, and that artificial intelligence will in fact dominate our society. We will not be able to control it. It may be able to control us. Thatās kind of the doomsday scenarioāand there is some concern about that among very knowledgeable people in the industry.
taking a wild guess itās Yudkowsky. āvery knowledgeable peopleā and āmany/most expertsā is staying on my AI apocalypse bingo sheet.
even among people critical of AI (who donāt otherwise talk about it that much), the AI apocalypse angle seems really common and itās frustrating to see it normalized everywhere. though I think Iām more nitpicking than anything because itās not usually their most important issue, and maybe itās useful as a wedge issue just to bring attention to other criticisms about AI? Iām not really familiar with Bernie Sandersā takes on AI or how other politicians talk about this. I donāt know if that makes sense, Iām very tired
Not surprised. Making Hype and Criti-hype the two poles of the public debate has been effective in corralling people who get that there is something wrong with the āAIā into Criti-hype. And politicians needs to be generalists so the trap is easy to spring.
Still, always a pity when people who should know better fall into it.
found on reddit. posted without further comment
Shot-in-the-dark prediction here - the Xbox graphics team probably wonāt be filling those positions any time soon.
As a sidenote, part of me expects more such cases to crop up in the following months, simply because the widespread layoffs and enshittification of the entire tech industry is gonna wipe out everyone who cares about quality.
404media posted an article absolutely dunking on the idea of pivoting to AI, as one does:
media executives still see AI as a business opportunity and a shiny object that they can tell investors and their staffs that they are very bullish on. They have to say this, I guess, because everything else they have tried hasnāt worked
Weāyes, even youāare using some version of AI, or some tools that have LLMs or machine learning in them in some way shape or form already
Fucking ghastly equivocation. Not just between āLLMsā and āmachine learningā, but between opening a website that has a chatbot icon I never click and actually wasting my time asking questions to the slop machine.
This is pure speculation, but I suspect machine learning as a field is going to tank in funding and get its name dragged through the mud by the popping of the bubble, chiefly due to its (current) near-inability to separate itself from AI as a concept.
Itās distressingly pervasive: autocorrect, speech recognition (not just in voice assistants, in accessibility tools), image correction in mobile cameras, so many things that are on by default and āhelpfulā
Apparently, for some corporate customers, Outlook has automatically turned on AI summaries as a sidebar in the preview pane for inbox messages. No, nobody Iāve talked to finds this at all helpful.
A thing I recently noticed: instead of showing the messages themselves, the MS Teams application on my work phone shows obviously AI generated summaries of messages in the notification tray. And by āsummariesā I mean third person paraphrasings that are longer than the original messages and get truncated anyway.
āWorse than uselessā would be an understatement.
It feels like gang initiation for insufferable dorks