sculd

This is an article about the AI bubble and Microsoft.

A quote that I think is relevant:

"The incentives behind effectively everything we do have been broken by decades of neoliberal thinking, where the idea of a company — an entity created to do a thing in exchange for money —has been drained of all meaning beyond the continued domination and extraction of everything around it, focusing heavily on short-term gains and growth at all costs. In doing so, the definition of a “good business” has changed from one that makes good products at a fair price to a sustainable and loyal market, to one that can display the most stock price growth from quarter to quarter."

The tech demo is part of Microsoft’s Copilot for Gaming push, and features an AI-generated replica of Quake II that is playable in a browser. The Quake II level is very basic and includes blurry enemies and interactions, and Microsoft is limiting the amount of time you can even play this tech demo.

“You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run,” said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. “We’ve talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity.”

I have no idea what an AI generated version of quake has to do with game "preservation" when there are so many better ways to improve old games accessibility. But hey, at least we can burn more forest while playing AI Quake!!

You can try this AI Quake for yourself: https://copilot.microsoft.com/wham

Its very laggy for me but maybe someone with faster computer can make it work? Anyway I am not sure if people think its worth it.

Archived link: https://archive.ph/BdFwc

In an unbelievable hit piece, the Atlantic's deputy executive editor blamed "progressives" for the death of American Dream, blaming Jane Jacob, an advocate for mixed use building in urban environments, for the lack of housing in the US.

Somehow the editor completely failed to account for various obvious reasons that housing became unaffordable, such as NIMBYism, financialization of housing, speculative purchases, loose monetary policies, etc. and put all the blame on "progressives".

Insane paragraph below:

The sclerosis that afflicts the U.S.—more and more each year, each decade—is not the result of technology gone awry or a reactionary movement or any of the other culprits that are often invoked to explain our biggest national problems. The exclusion that has left so many Americans feeling trapped and hopeless traces back, instead, to the self-serving actions of a privileged group who say that inclusion, diversity, and social equality are among their highest values.

A good article in which the author researched how Twitter's algorithm pushed people interested in history into alt-right content.

Quote: "Adhering to my guidelines to follow accounts suggested by the algorithm, I clicked the “follow” button. This was the first time I was recommended content adjacent to alt-right and "manosphere" ideology. Prior to that, it was all history related. After “liking” approximately 100 Tweets, however, I saw that the accounts suggested to me were becoming increasingly political, and I was specifically being recommended accounts run by internet political commentators – as opposed to professional politicians or journalists. I cannot definitively call this observation evidence of being led down an alt-right pipeline, but it was interesting to note that those were the types of accounts suggested to me by the Twitter algorithm."

Speaking at a Bloomberg event on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum's annual meeting in Davos, Altman said the silver lining is that more climate-friendly sources of energy, particularly nuclear fusion or cheaper solar power and storage, are the way forward for AI.

"There's no way to get there without a breakthrough," he said. "It motivates us to go invest more in fusion."

Right, surely the energy intensive AIs will make the world invest in climate-friendly energy instead of just burning more fossil fuels as they always did.

Also shows how unsustainable the current neoliberal system is.

On Amazon, I searched for “OpenAI policy” and boy, did I get results! I’m not entirely sure what this green thing is but I’ve been assured that it will “Boost your productivity with our high-performance [product name], designed to deliver-fast results and handle demanding tasks efficiently, ensuring you stay of the competition.“ Phenomenal! Unfortunately, there are no customer reviews — yet, anyway!

The Verge article made reference to this thread:

At this point Amazon is like generative AI for products - you can just make up ideas and some alphabet soup company will drop ship a low quality version of it to you

Welcome to the New World, powered by AI Overlord

Apparently, stealing other people's work to create product for money is now "fair use" as according to OpenAI because they are "innovating" (stealing). Yeah. Move fast and break things, huh?

"Because copyright today covers virtually every sort of human expression—including blogposts, photographs, forum posts, scraps of software code, and government documents—it would be impossible to train today’s leading AI models without using copyrighted materials," wrote OpenAI in the House of Lords submission.

OpenAI claimed that the authors in that lawsuit "misconceive[d] the scope of copyright, failing to take into account the limitations and exceptions (including fair use) that properly leave room for innovations like the large language models now at the forefront of artificial intelligence."

Since this billionaire doesn't want us to learn about what bad things he did, I figured we should let as many people know as possible:

In a move that has press freedom campaigners troubled, Rajat Khare, co-founder of Appin, an India-based tech company, has used a variety of law firms in a number of different jurisdictions to threaten these U.S., British, Swiss, Indian, and French-language media organizations.

On Nov. 16, Reuters published a special investigation under the headline “How an Indian startup hacked the world,” detailing how Appin allegedly became a “hack for hire powerhouse that stole secrets from executives, politicians, military officials and wealthy elites around the globe”

Khare retained the powerhouse “media assassin” firm Clare Locke LLP, which boasts on its website about “killing stories,” to send Reuters several legal threats over the past year about the story

Across the pond, Khare had his name removed from a joint investigation between The Sunday Times and the nonprofit Bureau of Investigative Journalism, titled, “Caught on camera: confessions of the hackers for hire.” Three paragraphs that reported on Khare were removed from both publications following legal threats on his behalf

Lets spread the word!!!

Amazing video produced by Jessie Gender along with a group of creators whom many of them are from the ** LGBTIAQ+ community** .

I knew from my anthropology class many years ago that George Lucas borrowed concept from the The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

What I did not know is that the author, Joseph Campbell is:

1. A misogynist
2. An antisemite
3. Didn't research properly

This explains why the hero must be a (white) men.

Carl Jung's theory about collective unconsciousness and archetypes are also outdated and discarded by psychology.

The archetypes reduce women to "mother", "Goddess". etc. but never the hero.

Also, since Jung's theory categories people neatly into archetypes, those who does not fit social norm (LGBTQIA+ people) were never represented.

When the creation is based on such shaky foundations, no wonder the Star Wars fandom turns out to be racist and misogynist.

Btw, do you know who else's book borrows heavily from Jung? Jordan Peterson.

The investors might want a refund after seeing what the money were used for.

Notable quotes:

Several employees pointed to Suzuki’s research into the American far right, which included him presenting on QAnon during a company wide all-hands meeting and attending Donald Trump rallies using company funds.

This mission would, at times, lead Suzuki down far-right rabbit roles, according to several former employees. “[He] really wanted to get inside QAnon and figure out what’s going on there,” one former employee told Rest of World, saying Suzuki’s interest in its conspiracy theories only heightened during the Trump administration. “We were worried for him.”

The trips often included visits to rallies for Donald Trump, multiple employees said. “Why would I want to give up one week of my life showing some guy from Tokyo around a Trump rally?” recalled one employee who declined an invitation to join the road trip in 2020. “The whole premise of the idea was very bizarre.”

Yeah, not exactly a good working environment.

More efforts from tech bros to build Rapture.

Interesting quotes:

it had backing from tech heavyweights such as billionaire Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, AngelList co-founder Naval Ravikant, and venture capitalist** Fred Wilson**, a Coinbase board member who sold his shares in the company for $1.8 billion after it went public in 2021.

“Bitcoin, if it wins, completely changes the world, because it changes the ability of centralized states to do what they’ve been doing,” Srinivisan said in a presentation delivered to a Bitcoin conference in Amsterdam in October.

The Bitcoin-based Network State will be based on “internet values” such as “open source” and “peer-to-peer,” Srinivasan has written.

An utopia run on Bitcoin? What could possibly go wrong?

Great video by Caelan Conrad who dissected the anti trans movement from their origins.

I didn't know TERFs existed even back then at Stonewall. It was such a great lesson in history.

The video also went on to show gays and lesbians who tried to be assimilationists and why it wouldn't work. i.e. Leopards eat their faces too.

A must watch for everyone who are interested in LGBTQIA+ communities. I honestly need to read more books about it.