TechTakes

Presented without comment. (Don't have source, but I did find another link mocking Grok glazing Musk)

Paul Campos - The medium is the mob

Discusses the "reverse Flynn effect", filter bubbles, and infopollution via GenAI

Adam Mastroianni has the audacity to claim that people don't seem to join phygs any more, gets clip art from Astral Codex Ten and hosts a vlog for Inkhaven guests https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-decline-of-deviance

The generic abyss of artificial intelligence | John R. Gallagher

All this business talk from CEOs about AI automating work comes down to them not valuing the input of workers. You can hear the jubilant ejaculative rhetoric about robots because robots represent firing all the workers. CEOs see their workers as interchangeable laborers who fit inside of templates. They want workers who pull the levers of templates. They’ve always wanted this since the individual revolution. But now the templates are no longer physical commodities but instead our stories, our genres.

Call it template capitalism. Social media companies are already operating under this logic through the templates they force on users. As the car companies have done by forcing drivers into templates. Or shoe companies have accomplished with standard sizes. There’s nothing stopping the knowledge sectors of the economy from extending that logic to workers. Knowledge workers are being deskilled by making them obey the generic templates of LLMs.

Template capitalism hollows out the judgment of individual knowledge workers by replacing slowly accreted genre experiences with the summed average of all genres. Under this system, knowledge workers merely ensure the machines don’t make errors (or what the AI companies have just relabeled “hallucinations”). The nuance of situated knowledge evaporates, leaving behind procedural obedience. The erosion of individual judgment is the point. Workers who diverge from the ordained path of LLMs are expendable. If you challenge the templates, you get fired.

They've always wanted this, indeed. There's some comfort to me in the reminder that this year's layoffs are no different than the last cycle, except maybe the excuses are thinner.

210 IQ is not enough

Being really "smart" (along some axis) doesn't make you succesful or even happy.

NAS: Found out just now that Simone Veil’s pictures for sad children is back online, and has been for a while now. Her art meant a lot to me when I was reading it. Just letting you all know in case it meant something to you too.

Not content with forcing AI on anyone and everyone, Apple has forced the lying machines on AI-rejecting writing software Scrivener.

sorry my brain's already clocked out for the day (/week?), so [insert sneer here]

context is this

Meanwhile, the $800 million Kraken raised across its two recent rounds of financing further solidifies the company’s balance sheet before its planned IPO next year.... Prior to the two rounds, Kraken had raised only $27 million in venture capital.

simply a mere 29.6x amplification. perfectly normal. 12000000% in line with the economic market shift between checks notes Less Than A Decade Ago and now

Little late but just found out that Google has partnered with Movember to push Gemini.