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
"Enjoy" this toxic stew of prediction markets, racism, and the objectifying of women:
https://protos.com/polymarket-criticized-for-racist-post-targeting-fake-baddies/
Twitter adds default country tags. Immediately finds a whole bunch of foreign bots agitating about US politics. Promptly ignores that in order to be racist.
Well, at least the website isn't vibe-coded. Considering the creator's an out-and-proud promptfondler (as seen on his Twitter), that's genuinely shocking.
m'lady
back on my posting sorta off topic shit: well, we’ve talked a bit about anti-academia nutters, so here’s a developing story about (western) academia having a normal one.
Headline: Oxford’s Rafflesia Messaging Sparks Debate Over Representation, Scientific Credit, and Global South Visibility
My summary: in an announcement, oxford performs erasure by only really naming researchers from oxford amongst a team where most of the contributions were from southeast asian researchers.
Pastor Malabrigo Jr. and Adriane B. Tobias are listed as the first and second authors, while other authors are from the University of the Philippines Los Baños, Indonesia’s National Research and Innovation Agency (BRIN), Bogor Botanical Gardens, University of Bengkulu, and Forest Research Institute Malaysia. The Author Contributions section also shows that Southeast Asian researchers wrote most of the country-specific content, compiled distribution data, and produced scientific figures. Yet none of these appear in the Oxford press release as scientific authorities.
This article is by “scientific watchdog” with a “.id” domain, which is Indonesian. Seems a little bespoke for the article, but, hey, all the facts are verifiable.
I'm going to laugh if they try to spin it as "we're not being racist, we just wanted to get as much institutional clout as possible and avoided prominently featuringanyone from other institutions!"
There's base-level sneer as this is posted on LW, but I found this comparison of LLM in call centers to cheap human labor for the same interesting:
That popular piece on why it's dumb to build (GenAI-scale) in space hit lobste.rs, and while most commenters agreed it is indeed dumb, fascist Flask founder felt the need to "well ackstually" for some stupid reason
duh ofc there are computers in space, there are computers everywhere, but the whole fucking point of the piece is you can't take thousands of racks of GPUs and launch them into space and expect them to work
New York ~~Times~~ Magazine asks the question on everyone's minds: Is ChatGPT Conscious?
The piece is, unsurprisingly, a complete pile of hot garbage, openly refusing to recognise the difference between lying machines and human beings. This is probably Pivot material.