Dear ~~~Sneerclub~~ TechTakes, will you be my 'Friend'? :)
AI ‘Friend’ Company Spent $1.8 Million and Most of Its Funds on Domain Name (404 media, archive)
AI Companion Device Releases Diss Track Against ‘Friend’ (404 media, archive, diss track on twitter)
Here's Friend's advertisement: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O_Q1hoEhfk4 . The music choice and general vibe is... unsettling.
“It's real! Premium domains are expensive, but it's worth it,” Schiffman told me in an email after I reached out to ask if it was true.
[…]
"People just don’t get consumer, I view this as saving money. Much less money needs to be spent on marketing, it’s a one time thing," Schiffmann said.
there’s an entire type of startup guy embodied by Schiffmann, and I can’t be the only one who’s met this type more than once
The company advertises the device as “always listening” when connected to bluetooth. “When connected via bluetooth, your friend is always listening and forming their own internal thoughts. We have given your friend free will for when they decide to reach out to you.”
presented without comment
We have given your friend free will
Wow that was easier than expected, we can't get philosophers to agree what that would even mean but it's done folks
Forget the diss track person, I've tracked down the true origin of Friend:
In other news, Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 got sent a viewpoint article with the title "Can Artificial Intelligence Speak for Incapacitated Patients at the End of Life?".
I will give MAIHT3K credit for managing to get through that shit, because what the actual fuck.
Ugh, just reading the summary made me want to puke. What the fuck is wrong with those people. Who the fuck thinks that delegating the responsibility to computers is a good idea. Can't they cope with the outcomes of their choices and need to outsource that responsibility to some magick software
Does TP0 have an point he's trying to push with this thread? It's disingenuous enough that it feels like there's an agenda, but at the same time what could the point even be? Fuck cancer patients?
Possibly anti-universal-healthcare fearmongering. This stat's been going around US conservative circles. And I even typed that before seeing the thread ended with:
Remember the lopsidedness of health spending and need when talking reform.
"Dear healthy people: don't let the sickly suck away all your money"
I mean, you know what the point is.
It's eugenics. It's always eugenics.
Leukemia patients are always over-represented in their data because it's so much easier to use the calipers on people with no hair.
Okay first of all what the fuck is a TP0? I swear you guys just make those people up and they're lazier and lazier written each time.
Second, what's the point here? Like, is either of the tweets making a point? Cause it just sounds like someone discovered why universal healthcare is a good idea? The fact that spending is so unequal is quite literally the entire point in favour of having universal insurance?
Also
1% is responsible for 24% of medical expenses
Now do how much of the population gets 24% of the income :)
Cremieux used to post to Reddit as user Tr***yPornO (with the slur instead of the asterisks). Nobody here wanted to call him that, so it was rapidly abbreviated TPO or TP0. He posted the same breathtaking racist shit with low quality cites that didn't check out as he has since. He also told all manner of inconsistent lies about who he was.
Speaking of breathtaking racism with low quality cites, does anyone remember ebola chan? He was my favorite because he was a reactionary with 4chan temperament, so he'd mald when pushed instead of spewing out word salad.
oh man i'd forgotten St Rev, a favourite minor nrx from the mid-2010s
I'd never heard of him. His latest tweet is complaining about the left wing slant on his thread and he says that you can't "get away from the culture war I guess". Yet every fifth post below is a rage post about libs and lefties.
Linking without factchecking or any due diligence. This appears to have been making the rounds:
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/comments/1ecshvh/elon_tried_to_enter_the_babyfur_community
https://xcancel.com/christiolson/status/1817349838444667034#m
OT: https://xcancel.com/bnuuyhopper/status/1816574082588246342#m
Note: reposted from last week’s Stubsack :)
this is the first thing i see on lemmy this week and i think it's already enough internet for me today, basilisk have mercy
also musk's downfall probably started the moment he became buddies with thiel
even failed to kill him in his dumb vanity car purchase, i mean
The upshot of this is that if acausalrobotgod ever gives us a time machine, you just need to plant one tree on your way to killing hitler, and you solve so many problems.
Well, history sure does fucking repeat itself again, doesn't it?
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)
At its low point, some computer scientists and software engineers avoided the term artificial intelligence for fear of being viewed as wild-eyed dreamers. (New York Times, 2005, at the end of the last AI winter.)
I expect history to repeat itself quite soon - where previously using the term "artificial intelligence" got you looked at as a wild-eyed dreamer, now, using that term's likely getting you looked at as an asshole techbro, and your research deemed a willing attempt to hurt others.
I had a simple question: how to rescue a Windows hard disk to a new SSD?
The answer is ddrescue from a Linux USB stick, but the Windows user wasn't comfortable at the command line.
But if you Google it, you get:
Eventually I just did it myself with ddrescue. But I got a first-hand experience of how fucking unusable search is now.
Oh, and Google is now showing AI slop answers at the top of searches in the UK.
Baldur Bjaranason coming in with a solid sneer aimed squarely at his own industry's finest
@ai_shame RT'd a good sneer in the wild recently:
Bonus: Eliezer, of all people, also sneered at the TESCREAL twat:
Harry Potter and the Surprisingly Good Take
Harry Potter and the Broken Clock
It's the same story as has ever been. "Smart People"'s position on anything is often informed by their current economic relationship wrt to the things they care about. And maybe even Yud isn't super happy about his profession being co-opted. What scraps will he have if his own delusions became true about GPT zombies replacing "authentic voices"?
No one is immune to seeing a better take when it's their shit on the line, and no is immune from being in a bubble without stake.
I've read enough of the Yudster's work to recognize that he is particularly vulnerable to being replaced by a small shell script that outputs a massive volume of text that says very little of substance, and what little there is is weirdly racist.
that's a linkedin-level take
This new trend of describing the American right wing as weirdos sure is something, isn't it? What used to be our little hobby has escaped containment, largely due to the surfacing of JD Vance and his backers during the RNC. As recently as last month, when NRx and Rationalist oddballs came up in a news item, the response of the average reader would be to shrug and dismiss them as a small minority of sweaty nerds and assume that "regular" Republican politicians wouldn't have anything to do with them. Things have changed; now there's many an NPR-loving granny googling "what is a yarvin" and getting wound up about it in her group chats.
We've all heard of the Overton Window, which according to Wikipedia is, "the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time." I therefore propose a new thing, the "Yarvin Window," which we can define as "the range of insane policies that it is politically acceptable to ascribe to your ideological opponents."
This is the price they pay for grabbing the wrong end of the poo stick.
What amazes me, as a sort of US politics watcher from the outside, just how badly the various republicans weirdos are reacting to this. Esp Vance, posting his dolphin fucker stuff in the middle of the jokestorm about him being into furniture. But not just him, the GOP going 'don't be racist about Harris' and then all the racists doubling down on their racism, etc etc. The weird lashouts re weirdness. "how dare you call me weird! Grabs calipers I can see from your skull shape that you are ..."
damn so he's a posadist too on top of everything?
Here's a quick and dirty vanilla js script that highlights all posts in a thread according to how recent they are, the brighter the newer, and alse separately highlights new posts, to make long running threads easier to follow. I'm posting it in the stubsack because it's the thread I had in mind when writing it.
Pasting it in the browser's console and pressing enter should be enough for the page you have open, not that I've cross tested it any... Worst case scenario it does nothing or it colors the posts wrong and you just reload the page, I swear it won't steal your crypto, or mine any new.
In Firefox you can find the console by pressing F12 and selecting the console tab.
edit: Also if you prepend javascript: to the code and store it as a bookmark you can just invoke it by calling the bookmark, like a macro, see https://awful.systems/comment/4173451
Note: longer threads don't load all comments at once, so you'll have to rerun the script if you scroll down far enough.
edit: fixed for Edge, because why wouldn't it show dates differently there.
edit: updated it to check if there's a (xx New) notice in the post count in the OP and use the number to highlight the latest xx posts, i.e. all post made since the last time you were here. Change the value of variable newPostColor if you don't like the lovely shade of lavender I picked. Depending on if edited posts are counted as new or not the count might be off, and like, what if there's a new post that's also been edited? Solving that seems to mean moving away from the warmth and comfort of the quick and dirty territory, and also is there a public philthy repository somewhere?
edit: here's how it looks in the SAP thread:
edit: NEW: added some legibility changes and also consecutive executions now toggle old post highlights.
Code now in spoiler:
spoiler
(() => {
function getHighlightedColor(min, max, value) {
const percentage = (value - min) / (max - min);
return `rgba(0,0,255,${percentage})`
}
const newPostCount = (() => {
const text = document.querySelector("span.fst-italic").textContent;
return text.includes("New") ? parseInt(text.match(/\d+/)[0]) : 0;
})();
const newPostColor = "#783AFF";
const timestampNodes = [...document.querySelectorAll("span.moment-time")]
.map(x => {
return {
Node: x,
PostBox: x.closest('.ms-2'),
Date: Date.parse(
x.dataset.tippyContent
.split('\n').at(-1)
.replace(/Modified |at /g, "")
.replace(/(?<=\d+)(st|nd|rd|th)/g, ""))
};
})
.filter(x => x.PostBox != null)
.sort((x1, x2) => x2.Date - x1.Date);
const minDate = timestampNodes.at(-1).Date;
const maxDate = timestampNodes.at(0).Date;
const hl = (dt) => getHighlightedColor(minDate, maxDate, dt);
timestampNodes
.forEach((x, i) => {
if (i < newPostCount) {
x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = newPostColor;
x.PostBox.querySelector('.person-listing').style.textShadow = '1px 1px 0.75px #FFFFFF';
x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
}
else if (x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor == "") {
x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = hl(x.Date);
x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = ".5em";
} else {
x.PostBox.style.backgroundColor = "";
x.PostBox.querySelector('.comment-content').style.paddingLeft = "";
}
});
})()
Rumor, but lol if true "A former coworker worked in campaigns for a while and the thing he told me about doing that which has stuck with me is that everyone on campaigns is doing insider trading on betting markets" Source. Campaigners making money scamming Rationalists basically.
The proud tradition of "no really, Trump isn't that bad if you pretend he's a normal libertarian who happens to be an asshole instead of listening to the words that come out of his mouth"
So many fully-cooked brains in that thread.
BTW, ever notice how easy it is to replace "robot overlords" in TESCREAL stuff with literally anything else? Compare this gem from the linked thread, "The Authoritarian Peril":
https://nitter.poast.org/pic/orig/media%2FGUAQszqWkAAGFRb.jpg
with this version where Tolkein stuff is seamlessly swapped in for evil sentient gaming rigs with no loss of generality:
A dictator who wields the power of the One Ring would command concentrated power unlike any we’ve ever seen. In addition to being able to impose their will on other countries, they could enshrine their rule internally. Millions of orcs could police their populace; mass surveillance would be hypercharged; dictator-loyal Ring Wraiths could individually assess every citizen for dissent, with advanced near-perfect lie detection rooting out any disloyalty. Most importantly, the orcish military and police force could be wholly controlled by a single political leader, and programmed to be perfectly obedient—no more risk of coups or popular rebellions. Whereas past dictatorships were never permanent, Isildur's Bane could eliminate basically all historical threats to a dictator’s rule and lock in their power (cf value lock-in). If the CCP gets this power, they could enforce the Party’s conception of “truth” totally and completely.
Realistically, most EAs will vote for the white male over the non-white female anyway, but it's on-brand for them to post a giant substack with reasons why.
https://nitter.poast.org/edzitron/status/1819591404873568715
Zitron's sample size may be limited to his Twitter following, but its a bad sign for AI if bashing it gets you praise from both sides of the political aisle:
Bonus Tweet from Chris Alvino:
I was just thinking about this today. I had a thread go viral where I bashed AI, resulted in thousands of new followers, and I've had to block a bunch bc they turned out to be on the far right. Honestly amazing how bipartisan AI hate is. Never seen anything like it before 😂
Prominent EA/rationalist cult member Kelsey Piper taking a break from defending tech billionaires for going MAGA to angrily insist on her duty to keep her children segregated from the Oakland masses: https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1817335817515532694
She's listened to anecdotes "about kids who are like my kids" (👀👀👀), and that's quite enough engagement with that system, thank you very much.
Riffing on this fun subthread:
You know, I feel like it's only a matter of time before someone in the overlapping griftoverse tries their hand at immanentizing the eschaton by creating their own second coming - the MessAIah.
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
