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
Carl Bergstrom notes a publicity stunt by Anthropic:
"The AI Grad Student": A Harvard professor describes working with Claude.
Early on, he describes misconduct that would cause any student to be terminated: "It faked results, hoping I wouldn't notice."
But he ends the essay with "Now I'm doing 100% of my research with LLMs".
Am I losing my mind?
Hang around for the "trust me bro, I saw it on YouTube" guy in the comments.
when Bergstrom came to campus last year, he mentioned that he wargamed a pandemic response with vaccinations for the Bush administration, and they were worried enough about people raiding vaccine trucks, mad max style, that they planned for all these armed escorts.
... instead we get to live in eddington.
I’ve been rewatching ReGenesis and you can sorta see a similar background to it (it being of the same vintage): bio attacks are the Big Bad, there’s actual mobilisation against viral spread, etc
kinda whiplash just how fucking rapidly the antivaxxer movement (and general anti-science) managed to spread and become popular in the years hence (and specifically circa the ~2016 mark)
As a counterpoint, there's a local outbreak of meningitis in Kent (UK) and panicked kids are lining up for vaccinations there.
COVID mostly hit the invisible elderly. It's hard to imagine what would have happened if kids 0-6 were the most vulnerable.
People are trying to get vaccinations for that here in .nl (as in one other country it already spread to a university iirc, so not totally unwise)
oh sure, I didn't mean to imply that good isn't happening, more observing on how far and popular the whackjobs have managed to come
I saw this headline:
Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof
And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:
Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago
he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.
fireproof steel I-beams
a dedicated fire department
Journalists know that they don't have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it's my own fault for clicking on it.
Misaligned incentives. You read the news to be informed. Journalists write "news* to generate clicks and "try to go viral"
I agree though, It would be great if they didn't provide oxygen to these flaming idiots
I don't know, I think there's real value in allowing the public to keep an eye on aspiring supervillains.
Depriving the steel beams of oxygen would help too...
Chicago always wanted a 9/11 of its own.
Usenet used to be there for guys like this
I... "Fireproof steel I-beams" has to be taking the piss, right? Right???
do they know that doing this won't solve their NYSE link latency problem?
The title is Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says ‘I think we’ve achieved AGI’. He then seemed to slightly walk back the claim, but it might be slightly more accurate to say that:
"Huang said we've achieved AGI. Because he thinks everyone except him is a replaceable idiot"
Apropos of nothing, archive.is ddos-d a website and altered page snapshots as part of some sort of inscrutable net drama causing Wikipedia to stop using it.
So if anyone cares about such things here's a wayback machine link instead
That said: lmao. Where are all these billion dollar LLM-run Tamogotchi feeding startups hiding? Still in the strawberry counting phase of starting a business?
"Congratulations guys, we did it. Job well done. You're all fired."
Is it "We achieved AGI, the Machine is now Conscious" Day again already? It comes around so fast
requiescat in picem, sora
more like requie-SCAT, am i right
Requiescat en urina, more like. Does that make the first of this generation of slopmakers to actually get shut down?
"AI is here to stay" the AI:
reportedly they dropped the whole video thing, including from chatgpt.
their deal with Disney is also over, so hooray!
I built an open-source connector between MyChart and Claude : /r/healthIT (edit: Archive copy)
my jaw is on the fucking floor
The Tumblr thread about covers it, but I had a quick look through the code and this caught my attention in the get2fa.ts file. It's used in Authorisation headers for https://api.resend.com/emails requests. I've never used an aws secretsmanager but I'm pretty sure this is a no.
const RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN = 'arn:aws:secretsmanager:us-east-2:<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>:secret:RESEND_API_KEY-<REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING>';
const result = execSync( 'aws secretsmanager get-secret-value --secret-id "${RESEND_API_KEY_SECRET_ARN}" --region us-east-2 --profile <REDACTED_HARDCODED_STRING> --query SecretString --output text', { encoding: 'utf-8' } ).trim();
😵💫
Oh jolly can't wait for this to go viral enough that my boss schedules time to ask me about it.
The tumblr thread is a must read if you've ever been near HIPAA regulated infrastructure.
You know, when I think about securely holding onto things and protecting them without damaging or dropping them, I think of a fucking OPEN CLAW said nobody ever.
A friend of mine is working on an internal AI chatbot at their company, so that the Least-Productive Team will have something to answer the same 5 questions that they keep asking to Friend's (extremely productive) team, instead of wasting Friend et al's time.
So I guess that's the one use case of AI bots: to dangle keys in front of MBAs who are too stupid to do their own jobs. Which explains everything, really.
Yeah, almost the entirety of use cases for genai chatbots is contempt for one’s customers.
Hey, it's not just that, that's unfair to the chatbots. They're also used out of contempt for one's employees
This account is just that sort of shit 24/7, just constant linkedin lunacy that everyone should treat as rage bait and move on.
I know, but there's just so much to sneer at (especially lately).
I find it very unsatisfactory to sneer at skeets from the above author. It's just junkfood at this point and not like good junkfood, just like stale off-brand popcorn in a bag that has a picture of a sad clown on it. Why is the clown sad? Because the clown has to constantly look at different variations on the same theme written by people whose brains are melted by LinkedIn.
Oh sure, but when I send a cover letter where claude code told me about serious security issues and I used that knowledge to replace their internal app portal with my face I've "violated the computer fraud and abuse laws" or whatever.
Every week I learn I'm a n00b when it comes to leveling up with Al.
I'm hiring for facilities maintenance, and specifically seeking a high-agency self-starter who can help us optimize bathroom breaks. An internal candidate sent over multiple Claude Code generated iterations of the 💩emoji. One of them had blonde hair and Madonna's famous cone bra.
I was speechless.
I'd do the usual "in celebration of Sora's death post your favourite AI slop video" but there's no need since we know the absolute best one so thread over
spare a thought and a prayer for all these careers of ambitious propagandists and engagement farmers, dislocated without warning
Really hope this is going to be the wave breaking, as it is getting so stupid. (Some dutch library had all its new books be ai slop (some even quite racist it seems), and this isnt a single incident).
fresh hellish nonsense brought to you by ai-gen podcasts enabled by techbros interpretation of consent and privacy:
https://www.404media.co/this-company-is-secretly-turning-your-zoom-calls-into-ai-podcasts/
WebinarTV, a company that bills itself as “a search engine for the best webinars,” is secretly scanning the internet for Zoom meeting links, recording the calls, and turning them into AI-generated podcasts for profit. In some cases, people only found out that their Zoom calls were recorded once WebinarTV reached out to them directly to say their call was turned into a podcast in an attempt to promote WebinarTV’s services.
“WebinarTV is believed to leverage a range of browser extensions that provide functionalities such as AI powered transcription and note-taking tools, or tools to automate the joining of online meetings. The platform mostly relies on the widespread use of these tools by end users, rather than operating them directly. However, at least one of the known extensions is listed on the Chrome Web Store as developed by WebinarTV.”
Sounds like someone in a jurisdiction which requires all-party consent to record a conversation could sue them
i see elsewhere that wikipedia after all restricted a bit more use of chatbots, and i'm very interested how much kicking and screaming did it involve
44 comments in support, 2 in opposition, discussion closed early under the "there's a snowball's chance in Hell of the situation changing from here" clause:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Writing_articles_with_large_language_models/RfC
ARM doesn't want to be left out and pushes hype to 11, announces "AGI CPU", for the "agentic AI cloud era".
Is it going to be a bunch of ArmV8 cores shoved into the same package? Probably going to be a bunch of ArmV8 cores shoved into the same package. You know, for AI.