TechTakes

I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy's public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I've been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

It really looks like it's on an awful trajectory.

In my teens I read about how Leo Szilard took a train out of Germany the day after the Nazis took power. Passed the border before border checks had time to come into force. Seemed obvious then, now I am all to aware of the problems of such a "simple" plan and the ties that binds you, not least family. And of course not knowing in advance how bad it will be, until after. And not knowing if you jump from the ashes and land in the fire, lots of countries are on the same trajectory but further back. Fascism is yet again the choice, the owners choice in the face of climate change.

I'm rambling and it's late. Sympathies and solidarity.

Yeah, it is fucking scary. My sympathies and solidarity. Small thing, perhaps a good reminder for everybody to check their opsec (esp if you are an administrator of things, check which data you do not need, or should not fall into the current (or future) us/other fascist administrations hands. And remember while spying on Americans by the various orgs is illegal, trading for information on them with other countries is not. Don't forget backups). It is horrible that it has come to this. One small point of light is that they are fools and can't shut up or be subtle. At least that has a chance to motivate more people to do something, which if it gets to the worst (and it is getting close) more people will actually resist (sadly a lot of people will have to realize that the point becomes not to win, but to impose costs/friction, and any wins are a bonus, which is a horrible realization in itself). Really hope this doesn't make things worse mentally btw.

I can only offer my solidarity and sympathies. If I were still living in the US, I’d probably have started taking firearms training and bought some by now.

Solidarity from TN

Word of advice to the press: Stop 👏 giving 👏 natalists 👏 free 👏 platforms 👏

Getting in early on targeting the vibe coder demographic.

Yeah that copy paste commands that give control over your pc shit is pretty nasty. Also over a year old at least. So it isnt specifically an attack at vibe coders. Not sure what the initial targets were but these usually try to target people not that knowledgeable in computer matters so lol that this now includes vibe coders.

“why not pay experiences machinists to videotape what they’re doing os their work can be automated”

none of these people had a job in manufacturing, or even possibly any real job, it's called CNC and there are way better tools for making it work than stochastic parrot

e: ok at least op is a machinist

Interestingly, many of these models also score at or above the level of some human experts on visual reasoning benchmarks like MMMU. That which is easy to measure often doesn't correlate with real world usefulness.

benchmarks could be perhaps possibly fucked with? say it aint so!

My high level impression when reading the response is “someone who can parrot textbook knowledge but doesn’t know what they’re talking about”.

with corpus consisting of toy problems only, and with solutions that depending on field can kill whoever uses these

eric adams should change his platform to “I’m not cuomo”

Orange site really is out here reinventing hard behaviorism.

"We can't directly observe internal states beyond our own subjectivity" -> Let's try to ignore them and see what we get" -> "We've developed a model that doesn't feature internal states as a meaningful element of cognition" -> "there are no internal states" -> "I know I'm a stochastic parrot but what are you?"

some parrots are more stochastic than others

These people need to sit through a college level class on linguistics or something like that. This is a demonstration of why STEM majors need general higher education.

I can see tante's point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.

On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.

I mean, what has crypto left over? All of that is only useful for sanctions busting and money laundering

If OpenAI’s funding round with Softbank goes as planned, it’ll raise the equivalent of the entire GDP of Estonia — a fairly wealthy country itself, and one that’s also a member of Nato and the European Union. That alone should give you a sense of the truly insane scale of this.

so not only saltman is capable of burning enough power to be comparable to middle-sized euro country, he can also burn small euro country gdp

they are not serious people. damn if i only started grifting instead of getting socially useful skillset

I've repeated this prediction a bajillion times, but I suspect this bubble's discredited the idea of artificial intelligence, and expect it to quickly die once this bubble bursts.

Between the terabytes upon terabytes of digital mediocrity the slop-nami's given us, LLMs' countless and relentless failures in logic and reason, the large-scale enshittification of daily life their mere existence has enabled, and their power consumption singlehandedly accelerating the climate crisis, I feel that the public's come to view computers as inherently incapable of humanlike cognition/creativity, no matter how many gigawatts they consume or oceans they boil.

Expanding on this somewhat, I suspect AI as a concept will likely also come to be seen as an inherently fascist concept.

With the current bubble's link to esoteric fascism, the far-right's open adoration of slop, basically everything about OpenAI's Studio Ghibli slopgen, and God-knows-what-else, the public's got plenty of reason to treat use or support of AI as a severe indictment of someone's character in and of itself - a "tech asshole signifier", to quote Baldur Bjarnason.

And, of course, AI as a concept will probably come to be viewed as inherently anti-art/anti-artist as well - considering how badly the AI bubble's shafted artists, and artists specifically, that kinda goes without saying.

I think we're going to see an ongoing level of AI-enabled crapification for coding and especially for spam. I'm guessing there's going to be enough money from the spam markets to support a level of continued development to keep up to date with new languages and whatever paradigms are in vogue, so vibe coding is probably going to stick around on some level, but I doubt we're going to see major pushes.

One thing that this has shown is how much of internet content "creation" and "communication" is done entirely for its own sake or to satisfy some kind of algorithm or metric. If nobody cares whether it actually gets read then it makes economic sense to automate the writing as much as possible, and apparently LLMs represent a "good enough" ability to do that for plausible deniability and staving off existential dread in the email mines.