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
Google Translate having a normal one after I accidentally typed some German into the English side:
What's the over/under on an LLM being involved here?
(Aside: translation is IMO one of the use cases where LLMs actually have some use, but like any algorithmic translation there are a ton of limitations)
stumbled across an ai doomer subreddit, /r/controlproblem. small by reddit standards, 32k subscribers which I think translates to less activity than here.
if you haven't looked at it lately, reddit is still mostly pretty lib with rabid far right pockets. but after luigi and the trump inauguration it seems to have swung left significantly, and in particular the site is boiling over with hatred for billionaires.
the interesting bit about this subreddit is that it follows this trend. for example
or the comments under this
or the comments on a post about how elon has turned out to be a huge piece of shit because he's a ketamine addict
mostly though they're engaging in the traditional rationalist pastime of giving each other anxiety
the btb zizians series has started
surprisingly it's only 4 episodes
David Gborie! One of my fave podcasters and podcast guests. Adding this to the playlist
ICYI here's me getting a bit ranty about generative ai products https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5MQb-uNf2U
replacing all prior search engines with shitty chatbots is continuing to prove a remarkably good idea
...wait did I say good idea? I meant the other thing
the C-levels were promised intelligence! and it’s now a personal failing of the peons that intelligence is not present!
Apple’s Siri Chief Calls AI Delays Ugly and Embarrassing, Promises Fixes
it’s not the delays that people seem to hate, it’s that the shipped features barely fucking work and nobody’s excited to burn battery life or buy new phones for any of them
this article will most likely be how I (hopefully very rarely) start off conversations about rationalism in real life should the need once again arise (and somehow it keeps arising, thanks 2025)
but also, hoo boy what a painful talk page
it's not actually any more painful than any wikipedia talk page, it's surprisingly okay for the genre really
remember: wikipedia rules exist to keep people like this from each others' throats, no other reason
In other news, BlueSky's put out a proposal on letting users declare how their data gets used, and BlueSky post announcing this got some pretty hefty backlash - not for the proposal itself, but for the mere suggestion that their posts were scraped by AI. Given this is the same site which tore HuggingFace a new one and went nuclear on ROOST, I'm not shocked.
Additionally, Molly White's put out her thoughts on AI's impact on the commons, and recommended building legal frameworks to enforce fair compensation from AI systems which make use of the commons.
Personally, I feel that building any kind of legal framework is not going to happen - AI corps' raison d'etre is to strip-mine the commons and exploit them in as unfair a manner as possible, and are entirely willing to tear apart any and all protection (whether technological or legal) to make that happen.
As a matter of fact, Brian Merchant's put out a piece about OpenAI and Google's assault on copyright as I was writing this.
So I enjoy the Garbage Day newsletter, but this episode of Panic World with Casey Newton is just painful, in the way that Casey is just spitting out unproven assertions.
Got to a point in this where Casey Newton enumerated his "only two sides" of AI and well, fuck Casey Newton.
Was he the one who wrote that awful "real and dangerous vs fake and sucks" piece? The one that pretended that critihype was actually less common than actual questions about utility and value?
Yeah, and a lot of the answers he gave seemed to originate from that point.
One particularly grating thing was saying that the left needs to embrace AI to fight facism because "facism embraced AI and they are doing well!" which is just so grating a conclusion to jump to.
fascism also embraced fascism and is doing well, so by that logic the left needs to embrace fascism