My wife has been talking about the scourge of AI in fiber arts for like a year or more, and when I asked if she had any brands that were still trustworthy she said "good luck, mate".

It's so bad.

At this point I'm gonna dig a big hole in my yard and stick a sign next to it that says "AI datacenter" with a down arrow. I figure I can get a way better prospectus than anyone currently on the market.

Obviously he's already taken care of one and it's fallen out of frame to the lower left.

I imagine that it's the same thing that programmers have been dealing with. Basically everyone I've talked to has acknowledged that code reviews are important parts of the software development process, but nobody has ever said they like them. Now here comes the glorious LLM future where in order to maximize productivity you get to do nothing but code reviews forever, only worse because the answer to "what were they thinking when they wrote this" is always "lmao fuk u". Even ignoring what kind of consequence that kind of change would have on the actual progress of the field of mathematics, it also just makes being a mathematician into a different kind of day-to-day job, and one that most people who are currently in the field would likely find far less satisfying. And unlike the programmers they're not even paid some absurd amount of money for it [citation needed].

Either it was the photo taker setting it up or else whoever was responsible left the goddamn straw there so that everyone else would know. That's some serial killer behavior, make sure to tell everyone where you're going for lunch.

So wait, are they saying it mistargeted or that after selecting a "valid" target it failed at the guidance itself? Because the latter would be a legitimately impressive fuckup given that both sides in that war have been using automated terminal guidance systems for a while now to get around EW defenses.

I think the problem, from a layman's perspective, is that it wasn't until the mathematicians started digging through it that it became apparent how bad the situation was. My only frame of reference for whether the proofs are nonsense or not is you kind folks bitching about it, and OpenAI was happy to do the marketing part with or without anyone signing on.

I feel like so much of the TESCREAL narrative is about a particular kind of line-goes-up futurism that something about an egalitarian or democratic future could help demonstrate where our vision differs and foreground where their ideology is fundamentally authoritarian. The word "democratic" is probably unusable in a US context, regrettably. I'd also like to snipe at the longtermists specifically and emphasize making the future better by solving the problems that are right in front of us now rather then ignoring them and hoping they go away.

Working Today for a Free and Equal Tomorrow or something?

And they will say things like the writer of this piece who says 'we know how they work.' We don't, actually.

Okay, but we really actually do. There's nothing magic about the kind of statistical brute force that these things operate on. The training stage breaks down and identifies patterns in the source data, and the operational model uses those patterns to "predict" what a person would say next. The patterns that these things identify are incredibly complex and can't be easily traced or understood in practical terms, but fundamentally these are still stochastic parrots.

Especially if you want to go into the Christian context, no church is going to ascribe the ineffable miracle of life to a multiplication of matrices, no matter how many dimensions they have in the math.

My God, it's like the art becomes more bafflingly poor the closer he gets to stumbling into a decent joke. There's a finite amount of quality that has to be balanced between the two, and it's capped at "shit".

"In what other profession do you need panic buttons?"

I'm just gonna look awkwardly at bank tellers, convenience store clerks, and so many other front-line customer service jobs that either have or would greatly benefit from a panic button to deal with dangerous customer interactions or outright robbery.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?

Right? Easy to overstate the value of it as we see now, but it sure was nice being a demographic worth pandering to, especially when that meant that the homophobes weren't worth appeasing.

Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

You're not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don't take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

However, the whole "good times breed weak men" meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It's rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it's also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.

And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.

All the boring western gun names like Desert Eagle, Colt Python, Winchester, Walther Pocket Pistol...

Please send help; I'm going down a wikipedia rabbit hole for the sake of a stupid joke

Note that the image here isn't from the AI project, it's from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I've seen closest to this one.

And when they say they've "run the game" they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.

Some may find her "cringe" but she's doing critical work in stopping the sites you use being DDOSed by AI scrapers.

NANDA claims that agentic AI — or the thing of that name that they’re selling — will definitely learn real good without training completely afresh.

Given their web3 roots, I feel like we should point out that blockchain storage systems are famously cheap and efficient to update and modify, so this claim actually seems perfectly reasonable to me /s.

Anyone who said this about their product would almost certainly by lying, but these guys are extra lying.

So did anyone else read the terrible Star wars novel "Darksaber" about the Hutts hiring one of the architects of the death star to build their own in order to hold planets hostage or something, and while the new Republic is trying to rally the gang to go do what they do to death stars the Hutts are so busy cutting corners and embezzling that when they go to turn the thing on for the first time it just fucking explodes?

I don't know why that's coming to mind right now.