TechTakes

Just wanted to say that I'm thankful for all yall.

Found a fitting lament for our current era:

alt text: "Kinda hate that we live in a world where any new F/OSS tool or operating system that gets buzz needs to be vetted for Nazi entanglements."

From the r/SunoAI subreddit: "Sick of having to come up with prompts".

Hey y’all, looking for some tips here. I like what I’ve made so far with Suno but now I’m kind of hitting a wall with ideas for prompts. Why doesn’t Suno also have a feature to write prompts for you? Like just hit a button the says “new prompt” and then hit make song when it comes up with something that sounds interesting! Thoughts?

(Via Dan of the Year.)

Noted on Bluesky:

Tomorrow Grimes will DJ a livestream of immortality influencer Bryan Johnson tripping on shrooms to determine its effect on longevity. Mr. Beast and the CEO of Salesforce will be there too.

Now, folks out there are calling this a Biblically accurate blunt rotation, but to be fair, it's missing Aella.

link

article link

An unnamed OSS project had its license vandalized by AI:

Its currently unnamed to avoid naming-and-shaming any specific devs, but its probably a Mozilla project that was affected.

Out of all the documentation pages written by the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary), I think this just might be the shortest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models

Bloomberg covers the disastrous impact of AI upon food recipes, while still putting an "AI overview" on the top of the page...

In interviews, 22 independent food creators said that AI-generated “recipe slop” is distorting nearly every way people find cooking advice online, damaging their businesses while causing consumers to waste time and money.

Across the internet, writers say their vetted recipes are hidden by the flood. Pinterest feeds are stuffed with AI-generated images of food that the attached instructions won’t achieve; Google’s AI Overviews surface error-filled cooking steps that siphon away clicks from professionals. Meanwhile, Facebook content farms use AI-generated images of supposedly delicious but impossible dishes to the top of people’s feeds, in an attempt to turn any clicks into ad revenue.

All of this, food bloggers say, erodes the simple promise of a recipe: that someone has actually cooked it before you have. To Gargano, this is the core issue. “No matter how clever the AI is,” she said in a recent interview, “it can never actually test a recipe in a real kitchen and see how it works.”

[...]

For Carrie Forrest, who runs Clean Eating Kitchen, AI has been devastating: 80% of her traffic — and her revenue — has disappeared in two years. Although the views started dropping when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released, it wasn’t until Google launched AI Mode in search that her traffic collapsed, she said. Since then, she’s gone from employing about ten people to letting everyone go. “I’m going to have to find something else to do.”

This holiday season is on track to be Forrest’s slowest in years. She fears that if more content creators give up, the AI won’t have new content to draw from — except content generated by AI. It may get to a point where “AI is just talking to itself,” and home cooks are gambling with the results, she said.

Semi-relevant, Matthew Garrett has won a court case against the kooks running Techrights:

https://nondeterministic.computer/@mjg59/115581959497817474

About the only positive thing you can say about Schestowitz (and probably his wife) is that they are rabidly anti-AI, but that is only because they are also rabidly against anyone who does not subscribe to their personal purity-test vision of Free Software (basically it's them, RMS, and maybe his parrot).

I have an unhealthy interest in them, because during the Andrew Lee putsch they were basically on his side, until he fucked even them, and I kinda drifted into their IRC server to see what was up. It was my unwelcome introduction to the toxic underbelly of FLOSS, with rampant RMS-worship, misogyny, racism and incipient techno-fascism. I ducked out quite quickly.

Tellingly, Techrights is all in on the Gemini protocol.

And whilst we’re in that liminal space where no-one reads the old stubstack but the new one hasn’t yet surfaced, here’s an article about the ghastly state of it project management around the world, with a brief reference to ai which grabbed my attention, and made me read the rest, even though it isn’t about ai at all.

Few IT projects are displays of rational decision-making from which AI can or should learn.

it doesn’t get any cheerier, and wraps up with

It may be a forlorn request, but surely it is time the IT community stops repeatedly making the same ridiculous mistakes it has made since at least 1968, when the term “software crisis” was coined

Oof.

https://spectrum.ieee.org/it-management-software-failures

Remember the german lawyer who tried to vibe code some compiler fixes. He did it again and learned nothing

Crosslinking SRD: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/1p88k7d/guys_were_gonna_be_okay_maybe_not_today_maybe_not/

Observing AI psychosis from a distance is so fascinating. "Valentine just got nerfed for me." What???

Neal Stephenson comes out strong and funny against GenAI here:

https://nealstephenson.substack.com/p/a-remarkable-assertion-from-a16z

"Hypothesis 1: it was written by a clanker"

Tag yourself, I'm "runctitional features"

Ziz was arraigned on Monday, according to The Baltimore Banner. She apparently was not very cooperative:

As the judge asked basic questions such as whether she had read the indictment and understood the maximum possible penalties, [Ziz] LaSota chided the “mock proceedings” and said [US Magistrate Douglas R.] Miller was a “participant in an organized crime ring” led by the “states united in slavery.”

She pulled the Old Man from Scene 24 gag:

Please state your name for the record, the court clerk said. “Justice,” she replied. What is your age? “Timeless.” What year were you born? “I have been born many times.”

The lawyers have accepted that sometimes a defendant is uncooperative:

Prosecutors said the federal case would take about three days to try. Defense attorney Gary Proctor, in an apparent nod to how long what should have been a perfunctory appearance on Monday ended up taking, called the estimate “overly optimistic.”

Folks outside the USA should be reassured that this isn't the first time that we've tried somebody with a loose grasp of reality and a found family of young violent women who constantly disrupt the trial; Ziz isn't likely to walk away.

it happened again, I Posted. dash of thread to it too. some of y’all may enjoy

and yes that capital P is load bearing

So I got jumpscared recently by that couple. I was listening to one of my many favourite podcasts, Threedom, when on the most recent episode, "I Definitely Tuned Out and I Agree With You", this exchange happened, starting around 44 minutes, give or take 10 for ads.

::: spoiler spoiler tagged exchange, in case you are a pisspig* and don't want spoilers. Context: the hosts are talking about how they value fostering their children's expressive abilities, even if that means their children do things like scream in inappropriate situations.

Scott: I guess what I'm trying to say is that some parents would look at us, and say, like, "oh, you're not teaching them how to act in social situations or whatever,"

Paul: Yes, you should slap them across the face, in the store.

Scott: Who was that... that... that, like, person who... there's some parent out there that thinks that you need to like have a million kids or whatever and uh, and a paper writer followed them around and he just smacked his kid right in front of the paper writ-, er... the journalist? Uh, anyway...

Lauren: Paper writer?

Scott: Yeah, sorry, sorry, Journalist.

Paul: Couldn't sound more specific, and yet I don't know.

Tried too hard transcribing this and still feel like I did a bad job.

Anyway, gosh, congrats to them on their extreme success in being platformed. Couldn't have been a more deserving couple. /s

*pisspig is the name given to a fan of the podcast Threedom. The fans picked the name, the hosts aren't really sure why.

Fourth episode of our podcast about historical misogynist and bigoted texts, odium symposium, is out now. We discuss classic british racist enoch powell and his “rivers of blood” speech.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/144105193

(it should be available on every platform)

Saw this quality nickname for prompt receivers: Chet Jippity