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
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Here's a lobster being sad a poor uwu smol bean AI shill is getting attacked
Would you take a kinder tone to the author's lack of skill/knowledge if it weren't about AI? It would be ironic if hatred of AI caused us to lose our humanity.
here's political mommy blog Wonkette having fun explaining the hallucinatory insanity that is Google AI summaries
Yet another billboard.
https://www.reddit.com/r/bayarea/comments/1ob2l2o/replacement_ai_billboard_in_san_francisco_who/
This time the website is a remarkably polished satire and I almost liked it... but the email it encourages you to send to your congressperson is pretty heavy on doomer talking points and light on actual good ideas (but maybe I'm being too picky?):
spoiler
I am a constituent living in your district, and I am writing to express my urgent concerns about the lack of strong guardrails for advanced AI technologies to protect families, communities, and children.
As you may know, companies are releasing increasingly powerful AI systems without meaningful oversight, and we simply cannot rely on them to police themselves when the stakes are this high. While AI has the potential to do remarkable things, it also poses serious risks such as the manipulation of children, the enablement of bioweapons, the creation of deepfakes, and significant unemployment. These risks are too great to overlook, and we need to ensure that safety measures are in place.
I urge you to enact strong federal guardrails for advanced AI that protect families, communities, and children. Additionally, please do not preempt or block states from adopting strong AI protections, as local efforts can serve as crucial safeguards.
Thank you for your time and attention to this critical issue.
but maybe I’m being too picky?
This is something I’ve been thinking about. There’s a lot of dialogue about “purity” and “purity tests” and “reading the room” in the more general political milieu. I think it’s fine to be picky in this context, because how else will your opinion be heard, let alone advocated for?
Like, there’s a time and place for consensus. Consensus often comes from people expressing their opinions and reaching a compromise, and rarely from people coming in already agreeing.
So wrt this particular example, it’s totally fine to be critical and picky. If you were discussing this in the forum where this letter was written, it probably wouldn’t be ok.
Words of wisdom from Baldur Bjarnason (mostly repeated from his Basecamp post-mortem):
We know we’re reaching the late stages of a bubble when we start to see multiple “people in tech don’t really believe in all of this, honest, we just act like it because we think we have to, we’re a silent majority you see”, but the truth is that what you believe in private doesn’t matter. All that matter is that you’ve been acting like a true believer and you are what you do
In work and politics, it genuinely doesn’t matter what you were thinking when you actively aided and abetted in shitting on people’s work, built systems that helped fascists, ruined the education system and pretty much all of media. What matters, and what you should be judged on is what you did
Considering a recent example where AI called someone a terrorist for opposing genocide, its something that definitely bears repeating.
They already had the Essential thing in the Nothing 3, but funnily enough, when I was shopping for a phone, it looked like the least obtrusive and annoying "AI feature" across the board, because every single fucking phone is now "AI powered" or whatever the shit.
But if they turn their OS into "AI native" and it actually sucks ass then great, I don't think there's literally any non-shitty tech left with Framework turning fash.
hi peeps! just put up the first episode of the podcast that i posted about in last week's thread. it's called odium symposium and it's about historical misogynist or otherwise bigoted texts
the first episode is about stephen leacock:
https://www.patreon.com/posts/pilot-misogynist-141164947
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