TechTakes

He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.

Always thought she should have stuck to acting.

(I know, Hayek just always reminds me of how people put his quotes over Hayeks image, and people just get really mad at her, and not at him. Always wonder if people would have been just as mad if it was Friedrichs image and not Salmas due to the sexism aspect).

Yes i know the kid in the omelas hole gets tortured each time i use the woe engine to generate an email. Is that bad?

Is there any search engine that isn't pushing an "AI mode" of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to "opt out" like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.

I have found it strange how many people will say "I asked chatgpt" with the same normalcy as "googling" was.

Help, I asked AI to design my bathroom and it came with this, does anyone know where I can find that wallpaper?

The follow-up is also funny:

I don't see the problem, that looks like a typical McMansion to me.

Also, it's nice the AI included a dedicated room for snorting cocaine (powder room).

DoD tries to cover up development of U2 and F117, and entire religion grows up from this

How many aliens can damce on the head of a pin?

Please keep these people away from my precious nerd-subjects for the love of god.

I really enjoy the bingo card. Let's see when I can find an opportunity to use it...

Now I'm even more skeptical of the programmers (and managers) who endorse LLMs.

Considering the sorry state of the software industry, plus said industry's adamant refusal to learn from its mistakes, I think society should actively avoid starting or implementing new software, if not actively cut back on software usage when possible, until the industry improves or collapses.

That's probably an extreme position to take, but IT as it stands is a serious liability - one that AI's set to make so much worse.

After the bubble collapses, I believe there is going to be a rule of thumb for whatever tiny niche use cases LLMs might have: "Never let an LLM have any decision-making power." At most, LLMs will serve as a heuristic function for an algorithm that actually works.

Unlike the railroads of the First Gilded Age, I don't think GenAI will have many long term viable use cases. The problem is that it has two characteristics that do not go well together: unreliability and expense. Generally, it's not worth spending lots of money on a task where you don't need reliability.

The sheer expense of GenAI has been subsidized by the massive amounts of money thrown at it by tech CEOs and venture capital. People do not realize how much hundreds of billions of dollars is. On a more concrete scale, people only see the fun little chat box when they open ChatGPT, and they do not see the millions of dollars worth of hardware needed to even run a single instance of ChatGPT. The unreliability of GenAI is much harder to hide completely, but it has been masked by some of the most aggressive marketing in history towards an audience that has already drunk the tech hype Kool-Aid. Who else would look at a tool that deletes their entire hard drive and still ever consider using it again?

The unreliability is not really solvable (after hundreds of billions of dollars of trying), but the expense can be reduced at the cost of making the model even less reliable. I expect the true "use cases" to be mainly spam, and perhaps students cheating on homework.

The documentation for "Turbo mode" for Google Antigravity:

Turbo: Always auto-execute terminal commands (except those in a configurable Deny list)

No warning. No paragraph telling the user why it might be a good idea. No discussion on the long history of malformed scripts leading to data loss. No discussion on the risk for injection attacks. It's not even named similarly to dangerous modes in other software (like "force" or "yolo" or "danger")

Just a cool marketing name that makes users want to turn it on. Heck if I'm using some software and I see any button called "turbo" I'm pressing that.

It's hard not to give the user a hard time when they write:

Bro, I didn’t know I needed a seatbelt for AI.

But really they're up against a big corporation that wants to make LLMs seem amazing and safe and autonomous. One hand feeds the user the message that LLMs will do all their work for them. While the other hand tells the user "well in our small print somewhere we used the phrase 'Gemini can make mistakes' so why did you enable turbo mode??"

yeah as I posted on mastodong.soc, it continues to make me boggle that people think these fucking ridiculous autoplag liarsynth machines are any good

but it is very fucking funny to watch them FAFO

I know it is a bit of elitism/priviledge on my part. But if you don't know about the existence of google translate(*), perhaps you shouldn't be doing vibe coding like this.

*: this of course, could have been a LLM based vibe translation error.

E: And I guess my theme this week is translations.

E2: another edit unworthy of a full post, noticed on mobile have not checked on pc yet, but anybody else notice that in the the searchbar is prefilled with some question about AI? And I dont think that is included in the url. Is that search prefilling ai advertising? Did the subreddit do that? Reddit? Did I make a mistake? Edit: Not showing up on my pc, but that uses old reddit and adblockers. EditnrNaN: Did more digging, I see the search thing on new reddit on my browser, but it is the AI generated 'related answers' on the sidebar (the thing I complained about in the past, how bad those AI generated questions and answers are). So that is a mystery solved.

The long expected collapse of the rationalists out of their flagging cult into ordinary religion and conspiracy theory continues apace.

that being a hung banner (rather than wall-mount or so) borders on being a tacit acknowledgement that they know their shit is unpopular and would get vandalised in a fucking second if it were easy (or easier!) to get to

even then, I suspect that banner will not stay unscathed for long

It is important to note that the reviews were detected as being ai generated by an ai tool.

This is a marketing puff piece.

I mean, I expect that loads of the submissions are by slop extruders… under the circumstances, how could they not be? But until someone does the legwork of checking this, it’s just another magic-eight-ball-says-maybe, dressed up as science.

The basilisk now eats its own tail.