@awful.systems
A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.
If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?
It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.
It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.
They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.
There are various other posts here on the general subject.
https://awful.systems/post/5897965
Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.
she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.
Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!
Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.
Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?
When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.
The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.
Article on businessinsider with the nauseating title “The modern parenting throuple: Parents are at a breaking point — AI companies see an opportunity” because the age-old silicon valley product design technique of asking what your mother used to do for you, and how it could be sold back to you via a subscription is still very much in use.
https://www.businessinsider.com/...
I confess I haven’t read the full article (which is why I haven’t given it a proper post) but hypervisible.blacksky.app has kindly pulled the highlights:
One of the best bits:
The most tech-savvy parents have built their own tools. Sarah Baldeo, a cognitive neuroscientist, spent the past year traveling for work, so she built a custom GPT of herself to chat with her 15-year-old son when she's unavailable. Baldeo tells me she programmed the chatbot with her personality, uploading screenshots of texts between her and her son, along with documents about her values, the family rules, and challenges she felt in parenting.
Baldeo wanted her son to ask the chatbot advice, and he did prompt it with questions he may have fielded to her, like, How do I diplomatically tell my teacher I'm overloaded with assignments? But he also asked the mombot how to convince his human mom to let him hang out at a coffee shop in Chicago in the evening — something Baldeo had been hesitant to allow.
The bot told him, as Baldeo recounts, "Your mom very much values new experiences, being around people from different cultures, different socioeconomic backgrounds, and this is how you should frame it to her: that you're exploring a part of Chicago that is more diverse." Her son took this tact to Baldeo, and she said yes. It was only later that she saw the chat history that let her know he had gamed the bot to manipulate her.
🤮
Why the fuck do these people have children. Why the fuck does any functional human being think it is a good idea to outsource raising their children to sam altman and his chatbot.
Who on earth thinks that training a chatbot to wear their personality like a rubber mask and manipulate people is going to end well? Honestly, I think this is perhaps the bit that triggers the most revulsion in me. I cannot comprehend wanting to be complicit in my own replacement by this thing, but so many people seem excited by the prospect of doing this to themselves.
I might be the only person here who thinks that the upcoming quantum bubble has the potential to deliver useful things (but boring useful things, and so harder to build hype on) but stuff like this particularly irritates me:
Quantum fucking ai? Motherfucker,
Best case scenario here is that this is how one department of Google get money out of the other bits of Google, because the internal bean counters cannot control their fiscal sphincters when someone says “ai” to them.
They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.
Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.
KDE showing how it should be done:
Question:
I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.
Response:
We stopped posting on X for several reasons:
- The owner is a nazi
- The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
- (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
- Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.
Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.
We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.
Mmm. There’s certainly nothing else about any of the people or projects involved that’s likely to be a source of fuss, either.
No sir, nothing but apolitical dramaless software development as far as the eye can see.
AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you.
If you are interested in vibe code and want your hardware to love you back, buttplug.io has always been there for you.
My goddamn desktop environment and window manager is there to do a job, not pretend to be my friend whilst burning the goddamn world down.
What the fuck is wrong with these people. Do they ever use a computer to do anything other than flirt with claude. Why can’t they just use windows instead.
From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:
We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we're forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs... and one in particular.
The average Founder CEO.
Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:
- They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
- They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
- They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they're trying to sell you.
- They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
- They contradict themselves, pretending they aren't.
- They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don't take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
- They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
- They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
- They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
- They're very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
Bluesky going to bad for that poor, downtrodden, victimised and underrepresented demographic, uh, ai slop posters?
A screenshot of an email sent to a bluesky user, reading
Hi there, Your Bluesky account (@carrion.bsky.social) has created a list called "Al Slop Posters" that may violate our Community Guidelines. We've temporarily hidden this list from other users because it contains one or more of these issues.
- Harmful language such as insults or slurs
- Unverified claims
- Appears intended to shame or abuse users
I was always faintly baffled by ladybird… why, in this day and age, would you start a complex new project using a complex and deeply un-memory-safe language when you could just… not? I’m guessing kling is one of those rockstar devs who is certain that they never make mistakes.
Swift is a surprisingly OK language. It’s just a shame it is hitched to apple who seem to have real problems with making dev tooling that isn’t awful. Maybe in a few years the cross-platform experience won’t suck.
A few months back, @ggtdbz@lemmy.dbzer0.com cross-posted a thread here: Feeling increasingly nihilistic about the state of tech, privacy, and the strangling of the miracle that is online anonymity. And some thoughts on arousing suspicion by using too many privacy tools and I suggested maybe contacting some local amateur radio folk to see whether they’d had any trouble with the government, as a means to do some playing with lora/meshtastic/whatever.
I was of the opinion that worrying about getting a radio license because it would get your name on a government list was a bit pointless… amateur radio is largely last century technology, and there are so many better ways to communicate with spies these days, and actual spies with radios wouldn’t be advertising them, and that governments and militaries would have better things to do than care about your retro hobby.
Anyway, today I read MAYDAY from the airwaves: Belarus begins a death penalty purge of radio amateurs.
Propagandists presented the Belarusian Federation of Radioamateurs and Radiosportsmen (BFRR) as nothing more than a front for a “massive spy network” designed to “pump state secrets from the air.” While these individuals were singled out for public shaming, we do not know the true scale of this operation. Propagandists claim that over fifty people have already been detained and more than five hundred units of radio equipment have been seized.
The charges they face are staggering. These men have been indicted for High Treason and Espionage. Under the Belarusian Criminal Code, these charges carry sentences of life imprisonment or even the death penalty.
I’ve not been able to verify this yet, but once again I find myself grossly underestimating just how petty and stupid a state can be.
In today’s torment nexus development news… you know how various cyberpunky type games let you hack into an enemy’s augmentations and blow them up? Perhaps you thought this was stupid and unrealistic, and you’d be right.
Maybe that’s the wrong example. How about a cursed evil ring that when you put it on, you couldn’t take it off and it wracks you with pain? Who hasn’t wanted one of those?
Happily, hard working torment nexus engineers have brought that dream one step closer, by having “smart rings”, powered by lithium polymer batteries. Y’know, the things that can go bad, and swell up and catch fire? And that you shouldn’t puncture, because that’s a fire risk too, meaning cutting the ring off is somewhat dangerous? Fun times abound!
A pair of tweets, containing the text
Daniel aka ZONEofTECH on x.com: “Ahhh…this is…not good. My Samsung Galaxy Ring’s battery started swelling. While it’s on my finger 😬. And while I’m about to board a flight 😬 Now I cannot take it off and this thing hurts. Any quick suggestions
Update:
- I was denied boarding due to this (been travelling for ~47h straight so this is really nice 🙃). Need to pay for a hotel for the night now and get back home tomorrow👌
- was sent to the hospital, as an emergency
- ring got removed
You can see the battery all swollen. Won’t be wearing a smart ring ever again.
Did you know there’s a new fork of xorg, called x11libre? I didn’t! I guess not everyone is happy with wayland, so this seems like a reasonable
It's explicitly free of any "DEI" or similar discriminatory policies.. [snip]
Together we'll make X great again!
Oh dear. Project members are of course being entirely normal about the whole thing.
Metux, one of the founding contributors, is Enrico Weigelt, who has reasonable opinions like everyone except the nazis were the real nazis in WW2, and also had an anti vax (and possibly eugenicist) rant on the linux kernel mailing list, as you do.
In sure it’ll be fine though. He’s a great coder.
(links were unashamedly pillaged from this mastodon thread: https://nondeterministic.computer/...)
Sunday afternoon slack period entertainment: image generation prompt “engineers” getting all wound up about people stealing their prompts and styles and passing off hard work as their own. Who would do such a thing?
@Artedeingenio
Never do this: Passing off someone else's work as your own.
This Grok Imagine effect with the day-to-night transition was created by me — and I'm pretty sure that person knows it. To make things worse, their copy has more impressions than my original post.
Not cool 👎
Ahh, sweet schadenfreude.
I wonder if they’ve considered that it might actually be possible to get a reasonable imitation of their original prompt by using an llm to describe the generated image, and just tack on “more photorealistic, bigger boobies” to win at imagine generation.
thanks for using Leebra!
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