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
I was thinking about ethics ~~in game journalism~~ in software engineering and I think it might be easier to create a whitelist than a blacklist:
What are some serious software/hardware companies that have NOT participated in the AI bubble? No AI nonsense in their marketing slides, no mentions of AI on their landing page, etc.
Gonna cheat a little bit and put one-woman consultancy firm/personal blog deadSimpleTech up as an example. The sole member is Iris Meredith, whose involvement begins and ends at publicly lambasting AI's continued shittiness.
Kind of tangential to the sneer sphere. TIL about the Gayfemboy malware
Such sofisticated methods, and then they drop crypto miners.
in what seems to be a very popular theme of "maybe we can just live off defense money" for tech outfits, oura is planning to manufacture in texas for simping to the DoD
I'm struggling to sneer it, it's so fucking absurd
ran across this
Kaminski told SiliconANGLE in an interview he was inspired to launch the company after seeing how long and difficult it was for medical technology firms to bring innovations to market.
“Everything that’s meaningful is regulated,” Kaminski said. “I didn’t even comprehend how hard it could be.”
“I could code that in a weekend” techbro meets decades-grown safety nets, is very surprised at complexity
I haven’t dug deeper into their thing yet but some of the claims are a bit 🤨 too
Not worthy of a third post imho, but Scott made the trilogy post: https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=9108 where he is subtlety walking back his insane, proudly kid killing claim to the more reasonable, Israel needs to defeat hamas, claim.
For a man angry about his detractors being intellectually dishonest(**), this is very typical:
Incredibly, commenters on Peter Woit’s blog then blamed me for this antisemitic image, mistakenly imagining that I’d created it myself, and then used their false assumption as further proof of my mental illness
For context, it was an AI slop image, and he named it after Woit, and didn't provide any details from the email itself. While the whole affair is quite a good reason to at least put this persons name/email out there imho.
But also:
I’m even grateful, in a way, to SneerClub, and to Woit and his minions. I’m grateful to them for so dramatically confirming that I’m not delusional: some portion of the world really is out to get me. I probably overestimated their power, but not their malevolence. [...]
His ability to lack self-awareness and reading skills remains bad. The power thing was partially in his first blogpost already, where he realized the 'manhaters' were just a small group. And the latter makes no sense unless you hold the random cartoon guy (who nobody here or at Woit expressed support for) as the consensus, and actual sc people, or fans of Peter.
The last part is just nuts, whole bit of Rationalization why he is actually justified, and will change the world. Not realizing everyone was horrified because he created a thought experiment to justify a genocide:
Reading the SneerClubbers’ armchair diagnoses of my severe mental illness, paranoia, persecution complex, grandiosity, etc. etc. I had the following thought, paraphrasing Shaw:
Yes, they’re absolutely right that psychologically well-adjusted people generally do figure out how to adapt themselves to the reigning morality of their social environment—as indicated by the Asch conformity test, the Milgram electric-shock experiment, and the other classics of social psychology.
It takes someone psychologically troubled, in one way or another, to persist in trying to adapt the reigning morality of their social environment to themselves.
If so, however, this suggests that all the moral progress of humanity depends on psychologically troubled people—a realization for which I’m deeply grateful.
this bit opens up so much questions, remarks and is just silly in some ways. Yes people who are dissatisfied will push for change, why is this a revelation? But do they have the power? Is it justified? Jared Taylor(*) also pushes for a changed morality system, but I wouldn't consider that desirable. It also leaves out that people will push for change because they just want to profit from it. Which is likely a lot bigger driver of change see the libertarian ls pushing for less regulations, because the dumb and distracted deserve to be scammed.
Anyway we got called out twice!
*: a white nationalist piece of shit who from what I heard is notable because compared to his peers he isnt a raging anti-Semite. At least not openly. **: Edit: as nobody mentioned the whole 'Peter is intellectually dishonest' affair, I have to say one thing. Peter is imho not intellectually dishonest for leaving out that the people who tie their children on the traintrack could stop at any time. The people who don't mention this just don't think it is a convincing argument. Yes people who take hostages could release the hostages at any time, still no reason to shoot through the hostages. Derail the trolley! The way Russia dealt with the Opera hostage crisis was considered bad for a reason (I hope I don't have to point out that the hostage takers also were in the wrong here). Forgot who it was who mentioned it here, but the whole 'I would be glad to not flip the switch' is one of the fucked up parts, it would scar people for life to make that choice.
Another edit: While thinking I realized the whole disgusting email thing is also partially due to the asshole filter effect of Scott closing his comments (which was smart tbh, he just should have told the people emailing him to fuck off): https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1209794.html. Left a hopefully thoughtful comment (I looked at it just from the comments closing aspect and not with the further conflict in mind, as I have not begun to think about that, and don't want to think about it in context of what Scott wrote in his first blog post) about this on Peters blog. Not sure if he will let it through the moderation (and it is fine if he doesn't, and I doubt he will as he seemingly just closed the comments and went on vacation, have a good one Peter, apologies that your blog became a battleground over this). But I thought the concept was important enough as an idea to share, and also explains why you get the more shitty people to try and react when you go 'please don't react to here'. A thing we should also be aware of how the drive by commenters (which was worse on reddit) tend to be the sediment of the crop.
Gonna repost a bit from comment I left on reddit:
Read swlabrs reply first btw.
Anyway, something useful perhaps, the ~~World Central Kitchen~~ seems to help out with the famine so donating to them might be useful, see comment below. Donate to the UNRWA organisation instead. Not comfortable donating on a link provided by a random user (smart!), or want something to show for your donation, the current Humble book bundle is donating to the WCK (do not forget to adjust the sliders) and you get a nice collection of Martha Wells books (The Murderbot saga is great). Or buy the play for peace bundle which is donating to the UNRWA USA, and get a shitton of games and other stuff. (All links are affiliate free from my end, I know there is a system setup for Humble stuff, but I don't use that).
E: buying the last one is also a fun way to boost yourself into Spiders Georg levels of video game ownership. So you could do it for that joke alone. Just to claim you own ~300 videogames.
there's a place called r/nuclearweapons where people come, collect declassified and FOIA'd info, do some maths and speculate on how nukes work. 7d ago they had an incident where reddit admin removed a couple of posts from one user https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n4c1i3/we_had_a_thing_happen/ head mod stepped down in a response
four days later this thing surfaced https://www.reddit.com/r/nuclearweapons/comments/1n75vej/our_schmuck_from_doge/ linked article https://thehill.com/policy/technology/5464437-ai-nuclear-weapon-detection/
so probable sequence of events is that someone from anthropic talked up some bozo from doe or somewhere else, bozo from doe ran confabulation engine on some part of internet, and then notified/threatened reddit admin, who complied by removing some rando's account. whoa they must have saved quadrillions of americans by that brave action
I love how one of the benefits of crypto is anonymous money, but you have to upload an ID to buy some anyway.
An interesting talk on the impact of the impact of AI slop bug bounty submission on the curl project (youtube).
Did you guys know Hugo de Garis went full time MGTOW a few years back?
i just wish that both sides have fun https://awful.systems/post/5488138 article https://ghostarchive.org/archive/dlw78
ah yes, that great mark of certainty and product security, when you have to unleash pitbulls to patrol the completely not dangerous park that everyone can totally feel at ease in
(and of course I bet the damn play is a resource exhaustion attack on critics, isn’t it)
I don't think it's a resource exhaustion attack as much as a combination of legitimate paranoia (the consequence of a worldview where only billionaires are capable of actual agency) and attempt to impose that on reality by reverse-astroturfing any opposition by tying it to other billionaire AI bros.
really has turned into Scientology
scientology but less coherent and with worse seafaring
This is truly nothing: Aella (credited as Aella Martin) has a Bacon number of 3
Found a Pivot to AI candidate in the wild: Pentagon Document: U.S. Wants to “Suppress Dissenting Arguments” Using AI Propaganda
I also found a call for ethics training in engineering, and someone's horror story about ethics training alongside it.
New Baldur Bjarnason: The melancholy of history rhyming, comparing the AI bubble with the Icelandic banking bubble, and talking about the impending fallout of its burst.
What is the Range Rover in this analogy? A common belief about the 2008 Iceland bubble, which may very well not be true but was widely reported, is that Iceland's credit was used to buy luxuries like high-end imported cars; when the bubble burst, many folks supposedly committed insurance fraud by deliberately destroying their own cars which they could no longer afford to finance. (I might suggest that credit bubbles are fundamentally distinct from investment bubbles.)
I should get a green screen for my videos. Suggestions welcomed.
Any ideas? Do any of you use such a device yourselves?
Actual suggestion: maybe mount a roller blind to the ceiling. Might need extra weight to tension the blind but also might not.
Also, you probably don’t need a totally green background, just enough to make masking easier. You could conceivably tape a big sheet of green cardboard to the back of your chair and see how that goes.
Also: idk how hard or easy this is but if the camera position is fixed and the rest of the scene is static, maybe there’s software that can just mask out the static scene?