TechTakes

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250802-protons-lumo-ai-chatbot-not-end-to-end-not-open-source - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HDPZbUPUFyk&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

There's a very long history of extremely effective labor saving tools in software.

Writing in C rather than Assembly, especially for more than 1 platform.

Standard libraries. Unix itself. More recently, developing games in Unity or Unreal instead of rolling your own engine.

And what happened when any of these tools come on the scene is that there is a mad gold rush to develop products that weren't feasible before. Not layoffs, not "we don't need to hire junior developers any more".

Rank and file vibe coders seem to perceive Claude Code (for some reason, mostly just Claude Code) as something akin to the advantage of using C rather than Assembly. They are legit excited to code new things they couldn't code before.

Boiling the rivers to give them an occasional morale boost with "You are absolutely right!" is completely fucked up and I dread the day I'll have to deal with AI-contaminated codebases, but apart from that, they have something positive going for them, at least in this brief moment. They seem to be sincerely enthusiastic. I almost don't want to shit on their parade.

The AI enthusiast bigwigs on the other hand, are firing people, closing projects, talking about not hiring juniors any more, and got the media to report on it as AI layoffs. They just gleefully go on about how being 30% more productive means they can fire a bunch of people.

The standard answer is that they hate having employees. But they always hated having employees. And there were always labor saving technologies.

So I have a thesis here, or a synthesis perhaps.

The bigwigs who tout AI (while acknowledging that it needs humans for now) don't see AI as ultimately useful, in the way in which C compiler was useful. Even if its useful in some context, they still don't. They don't believe it can be useful. They see it as more powerfully useless. Each new version is meant to be a bit more like AM or (clearly AM-inspired, but more familiar) GLaDOS, that will get rid of all the employees once and for all.

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250801-botqs-humanoid-robot-is-an-investor-demo-not-a-product - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7sr8e0GpSE&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250731-ed-saatchi-pay-to-make-bad-ai-south-park-episodes - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H4XBG4JgSsg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

Sounds like meta’s judge will have to invent a grand unified theory of fair use to excuse this.

I kept saying about various lawsuits that the important thing is discovery. Nobody knew all the idiotic shit these folks were doing, so nobody could sue them properly.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/29527487

https://neuromatch.social/@jonny/114934612814050190

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250730-csiro-posts-ai-fake-climate-article-with-made-up-quotes - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xUbIiH5T2z0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250728-microsoft-copilot-ai-a-pearly-liquid-blob-on-your-screen - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3av5g0hAKwE&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

The video is heavily euphemised and I think I got away with it

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250729-copilot-vision-ai-sends-your-data-to-microsoft - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4meaeuxZBM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250727-seraphinne-vallora-dubious-ai-model-hype-again - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVc-5DOLbMY&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250726-google-ai-overview-is-just-affiliate-marketing-spam-now -podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWoajgPIOt4&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20250725-16-of-employees-pretend-to-use-ai-at-work - podcast
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlPhRKLRFmg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video

podcast version
video version

podcast version
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podcast version
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While the thought of lawyers lawyering with AI gives me the icks, I also understand that at a certain point it may play out like the self-driving car argument: once the AI is good enough, it will be better than the average human -- since I think it's obvious to everyone that human lawyers make plenty of mistakes. So if you knew the average lawyer made 3.6 mistakes per case and the AI only made 1.2, it's still a net gain. On the other hand tho, this could lead to complacency that drives even more injustice.

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

‘an expensive slot machine that outputs slop 98% of the time’

podcast and blog post tomorrow, i am ill

yes that's a clothes hanger at the back i forgot to put in the hall, we only reveal our clean laundry here

this podcast guy talks like sephiroth but the title is perfect and the content is largely correct

podcast version
video version

Alternatively:

Academia and advanced degrees are worthless; you can compress four years of study into a prompt the size of a tweet.