TechTakes
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
take a drink for every 10,000 lies or exaggerations https://pitchbook.com/news/articles/a-tech-skeptics-ai-video-startup-wants-to-change-hollywood
more than that and you'll wipe out in 5 min
he's very skeptical u kno
Good news everyone, there's 2 bonkers pieces about the stars and the galaxy on LW right now!
Here's a dude very worried about how comets impacting the sun could cause it to flare and scorch the earth. Nothing but circumstantial evidence, and GenAI researched to boot. Appeared in the EA forum as part of their "half-baked ideas" amnesty
The only thing I'd note about this is that even if the comet strikes along the plane of eliptic (not an unreasonable assumption), the planet would still have to be exactly in the right place for this assumed plume of energy to do any damage. And if it hits the Sahara or the Pacific, NBD presumably.
(Edit turns out the above is just the abstract, the full piece is here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OHgc7Q4git6OfDNTE_TDf9fFNgrEEnCUfnPMIwbK3vg/edit?usp=sharing)
Then there's this person looking really far ahead into how to get energy from the universe
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/YC4L5jxHnKmCDSF9W/some-astral-energy-extraction-methods
Tying galaxies together: Anchor big rope to galaxies as they get pulled apart by dark matter. Build up elastic potential energy which can be harvested. Issue: inefficient. [...] Not clear (to me) how you anchor rope to the galaxies.
Neutrino capture: Lots of neutrinos running around, especially if you use hawking radiation to capture mass energy of black holes. So you might want to make use of them. But neutrinos are very weakly interacting, so you need dense matter to absorb their energy/convert them to something else. Incredibly dense. To stop one neutrino with lead you need 1 lightyear of matter, with a white dwarf you need an astronomical unit, and for a neutron star (10^17 kg/m^3 density, 10km radium) you need 340 meters of matter. So neutrino capture is feasible,
(my emphasis)
Black Hole Bombs: Another interesting way of extracting energy from black holes are superradiant instabilities, i.e. making the black hole into a bomb. You use light to extract angular momentum from the blackhole, kinda like the Penrose process, and get energy out. With a bunch of mirrors, you can keep reflecting the light back in and repeat the process. This can produce huge amounts of energy quickly, on the order of gamma ray bursts for stellar mass black holes. Or if you want it to be quicker, you can get 1% of the blackholes mass energy out in 13 seconds. How to collect this is unclear.
(again, my emphasis)
Same author has a recent post titled "Don't Mock Yourself". Glad to see they've taken this advice to heart and outsourced the mocking.
Disclaimer: abstract above, content and main ideas are human-written; the full text below is written with significant help of AI but is human-verified as well as by other AIs.
"Oh, that pizza sauce recipe that calls for glue? It's totally OK, I checked it out with MechaHitler."
Apologies in advance for the infohazard
Tucker - Every Tech Billionaire Is Having the Same Haunting Vision. Demonologist Explains Why
Nick Land Responds to Tucker Carlson
WTF. how is he going mainstream.
e
LAND: I mean, I'm obviously skeptical of the fact that large chunks of Silicon Valley are engaged in occult rituals involving involving a numogram. But I mean, it's not something I guess I have any authority to to talk about. Well, I mean, I can only say that they they certainly aren't in contact with me if if that is happening. They're they're doing it very, you know, if not privately at least. It's my involvement is is actually zero in that.
Insert gif of lemurs here.
Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews
I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.
I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.
What do you reckon the overlap is between the grown men who are mad about the new pokemon game and our regular subjects?
this has been previously sneered on, but only now i've clocked this: AI2027 is another name for, or elaboration* of "san francisco consensus", from april this year or so, "named so because everyone who believes in it is in san francisco", more precisely timeline roughly matches and it hinges on iterative self-improvement
* which might just mean it was laundered through chatbots to bulk it up initially. what i mean to say is even openai's dooming might not be original
so if anyone's counting then this thing is a couple of months older
fresh openwashed proprietary license hell just (well as of 2 years ago, but I’m sneering at it now) dropped:
Harmful free-riding is the sort of free-riding that leads to the free-rider problem
[…]
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature. Free riders are a problem for common pool resources because they may overuse it by not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes).
from the fucking asshats who made Sentry proprietary under the BUSL but wanted an even more nonsensical license:
Sentry started life in 2008 as an unlicensed, 71-line Django plugin. The next year we began publishing it under BSD-3, and ten years later we switched to the Business Source License (BSL or BUSL)
Examples of such goods are public roads or public libraries or services or other goods of a communal nature.
This is literally railing against the concept of altruism, kill this license with hammers (and sickles)
fyi: some fellow forked all of the sentry stuff from when it was bsd and made it less shit to run yourself. I'd been running sentry as self hosted since it came out effectively and they made some real ~~questionable~~ outright bad architecture decisions over the years that made running sentry super annoying to get you to use the saas product. Like yes I want to use Cassandra and elastic search for my one user error logging
regardless https://glitchtip.com/
Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).
I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.
I did not know how much right-wing media is outrage-farming wikipedia. With AI slop invasion, UK Safety Act nonsense and US government probing I'm getting worried
https://www.adexchanger.com/marketers/the-ad-context-protocol-aims-to-make-sense-of-agentic-ad-demand/ - one more way to not know which half of your marketing spend was useless, or one step closer to reifying dead internet theory?