TechTakes
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
I'm gonna do something now that prob isn't that allowed, nor relevant for the things we talk about, but I saw that the European anti-conversion therapy petition is doing badly, and very likely not going to make it. https://eci.ec.europa.eu/043/public/#/screen/home But to try and give it a final sprint, I want to ask any of you Europeans, or people with access to networks which include a lot of Europeans to please spread the message and sign it. Thanks! (I'm quite embarrassed The Netherlands has not even crossed 20k for example, shows how progressive we are). Sucks that all the empty of political power petitions get a lot of support and this gets so low, and it ran for ages. But yes, sorry if this breaks the rules (and if it gets swiftly removed it is fine), and thanks if you attempt to help.
E: HOLY SHIT. When I posted this it was at 400k signatures. It is now at 890k. Thanks everybody, I assumed it would never make it because after months it was at 400k now it looks like it might, and even if it doesn't that is one final sprint. Thanks everybody for the help. E2: omg it actually made it.
I signed it but had the same assumption that it wouldn't pass with 400k signatures over the first 362 days. But it did! The graph the last three days must look vertical.
Anyone who's eligible and wants to sign it can still do so today, Saturday 17th. To show the popular support.
A German lawyer is upset because open-source projects don't like it when he pastes chatbot summaries into bug reports. If this were the USA, he would be a debit to any bar which admits him, because the USA's judges have started to disapprove of using chatbots for paralegal work.
I just read the github issue comment thread he links, what an entitled chode.
Love that the laughing face reactions to his AI slop laden replies stung so much he ended up posting through it on his blog.
Ow god that thread. And what is it with 'law professionals' like this? I also recall a client in a project who had a law background who was quite a bit of pain to work with. (Also amazing that he doesn't get that getting a reaction where somebody tries out your very specific problem at all is already quite something, 25k open issues ffs).
E: Also seeing drama like this unfold a few times in the C:DDA development stuff (a long time ago), which prob was done by young kids/adults and not lawyers. My kneejerk reaction is to get rid of people like this from the project. They will just produce more and more drama, and will eventually burn valuable developers out. (E2: also really odd that despite saying he has a lot of exp talking to OSS devs, he thinks the normal remarks are all intended very hostile. "likely your toolchain setting it or your build script" and "I'll unsubscribe from this bug now" seem to me to be pretty normal reactions, one a first suggestion at what the problem potentially could be, and the other disclosing that he will not be working on the bug (holy shit the (non lawyer) guy being complained about here is prolific. ~100 contribs on average daily last week and an almost whole green year)). Also "I value such professional behavior very much" tags post with 'korruption'.
Another edit: Looked more at this guys blog and that are a lot of quite iffy opinions my man. (I noticed that the other post tagged 'korruption' talks about the how the AfD should be allowed to go against 'the rainbow flag' (I dont know the exact details of the incident), which while yes, legally ok, it still is a bit iffy). And then I scrolled more and saw this: "Deutschland braucht eine konservative Revolution! Warum wir uns ein Beispiel an den USA nehmen sollten" "Germany needs a conservative revolution, why we should follow the USA's example". He is a Musk/Trump/Venture Capitalist Manifesto true believer. Deregulate, stop the ideology build cars and go to space! The Bezos/Zuckerburg revolution. Common sense! "Musk, der Inbegriff des amerikanischen Unternehmergeistes" (If you allow me to react to this in Dutch: Lol). We need modern nuclear power, like how the USA does it (??). Deregulation, AI, humanitarian immigration that also only selects skilled workers, Freedom of speech which includes banning of "cancel culture", education reform, tax reform, stop crime, quantum computers, biotech, do more things online. We need to look forward, and change things, and thus a conservative revolution!
There is more stuff like: "Die temporäre Zusammenarbeit mit der AfD in einer Verfahrensfrage wird das Parteiensystem nicht nachhaltig beschädigen.", or https://seylaw.blogspot.com/2021/04/der-negerkuss-eine-suspeise-die-gemuter.html (If you don't speak German and want to listen to the weirdly racist drunking ramblings of a guy at the bar who is 'joking' throw it through google translate).
E: also forgot, lol at him going 'just run these two bash scripts I provided only takes 30 secs' like the devs need not first check of none of these is doing something malicious.
This was not what I had in mind for my German reading practice today...
He is even politely asked at first "no AI sludge please" which is honestly way more self-restraint than I would have on my maintained projects, but he triples down with a fucking AI-generated changeset.
the message I get is to preemptively ban user ms178 from any project I'm on
I know it’s very very very petty but this article about how basic Sam Altman’s kitchen skills are did make me laugh https://www.ft.com/content/b1804820-c74b-4d37-b112-1df882629541
The coda is top tier sneer:
Maybe it’s useful to know that Altman uses a knife that’s showy but incohesive and wrong for the job; he wastes huge amounts of money on olive oil that he uses recklessly; and he has an automated coffee machine that claims to save labour while doing the exact opposite because it can’t be trusted. His kitchen is a catalogue of inefficiency, incomprehension, and waste. If that’s any indication of how he runs the company, insolvency cannot be considered too unrealistic a threat.
It starts out seeming like a funny but petty and irrelevant criticism of his kitchen skill and product choices, but then beautifully transitions that into an accurate criticism of OpenAI.
Its definitely petty, but making Altman's all-consuming incompetence known to the world is something I strongly approve of.
Definitely goes a long way to show why he's an AI bro.
The Torment Nexus brings us new and horrifying things today - a UN initiative has tried using chatbots for humanitarian efforts. I'll let Dr. Abeba Birhane's horrified reaction do the talking:
this just started and i'm already losing my mind and screaming
Western white folk basically putting an AI avatar on stage and pretending it is a refugee from sudan — literally interacting with it as if it is a “woman that fled to chad from sudan”
just fucking shoot me
Giving my take on this matter, this is gonna go down in history as an exercise in dehumanisation dressed up as something more kind, and as another indictment (of many) against the current AI bubble, if not artificial intelligence as a concept.
Thanks I hate it
@BlueMonday1984 If Edward Said were still with us, this would be worth another chapter in Orientalism. It's another instance of displacing actual people with a constructed fantasy of them, "othering" them.
Today’s man-made and entirely comprehensible horror comes from SAP.
(two rainbow stickers labelled “pride@sap”, with one saying “I support equality by embracing responsible ai” and the other saying “I advocate for inclusion through ai”)
Don’t have any other sources or confirmation yet, so it might be a load of cobblers, but it is depressingly plausible. From here: https://catcatnya.com/@ada/114508096636757148
If this is real it would be double infuriating, not just because of the AI nonsense, but also because just 3 days ago SAP went bootlicker and announced ending diversity programs.
So I picked up Bender and Hanna's new book just now at the bookseller's and saw four other books dragging AI.
Feeling very bullish on sneer futures.
Sentiment analysis surrounding AI suggests sneers are gonna moon pretty soon. Good news for us, since we've been stacking sneers for a while.
Check the quote skeets for a lot more. Somebody messed up. Wonder if they also managed to collapse the whole model into this permanently. (I'm already half assuming they don't have proper backups).
E: Also seems there are enough examples out there of this, don't go out and test it yourself, try to keep the air in Tennessee a bit breathable.
everybody’s loving Adam Conover, the comedian skeptic who previously interviewed Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, organized as part of the last writer’s strike, and generally makes a lot of somewhat left-ish documentary videos and podcasts for a wide audience
5 seconds later
we regret to inform you that Adam Conover got paid to do a weird ad and softball interview for Worldcoin of all things and is now trying to salvage his reputation by deleting his Twitter posts praising it under the guise of pseudo-skepticism
He looked in the mirror and wept, for there were no more things to ruin.
Of all the people he could choose to sell out to, he chose Worldcoin???
I think it's just "World" now. They've apparently had a pretty big marketing push in the states of late, trying to convince trendsetters and influencers to surrender their eyeballs to The Orb.
Breaking news from 404 Media: the Repubs introduced a new bill in an attempt to ban AI from being regulated:
“...no State or political subdivision thereof may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems, or automated decision systems during the 10 year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this Act,” says the text of the bill introduced Sunday night by Congressman Brett Guthrie of Kentucky, Chairman of the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. The text of the bill will be considered by the House at the budget reconciliation markup on May 13.
If this goes through, its full speed ahead on slop.
Its not a coincidence that the fossil fuel industry wants that same immunity. The fossil fuel industry funds AI initiatives.
The gun lobby pioneered that regulatory capture.
https://truthout.org/articles/big-oil-is-taking-a-page-from-gun-manufacturers-immunity-playbook/
There's estimates on the damages caused by the fossil fuel industry.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fossil-fuel-companies-emissions-climate-damage-study/
Wonder what the damage costs for AI will be? Perpetual religious wars? World war with AI drones?
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/trump-heads-uae-it-hopes-advance-ai-ambitions-2025-05-15/
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/trump-artificial-intelligence-uae
The pro-child-porn caucus.
Expect the "AI safety" weenuses to have a giant freakout too.
What's the over-under on how many of them voted for Trump lol
Given the libertarian fixation, probably a solid percentage of them. And even the ones that didn't vote for Trump often push or at least support various mixes of "grey-tribe", "politics is spiders", "center left", etc. kind of libertarian centrist thinking where they either avoided "political" discussion on lesswrong or the EA forums (and implicitly accepted libertarian assumptions without argument) or they encouraged "reaching across the aisle" or "avoiding polarized discourse" or otherwise normalized Trump and the alt-right.
Like looking at Scott's recent posts on ACX, he is absolutely refusing responsibility for his role in the alt-right pipeline with every excuse he can pull out of his ass.
Of course, the heretics who have gone full e/acc absolutely love these sorts of "policy" choices, so this actually makes them more in favor of Trump.
The Repubs more-or-less renamed themselves Team Skynet with this open attempt to maximise AI's harms, I absolutely think they're McFucking Losing It™ right now.
Tired of writing complicated typecasting and transformation code manually? Worry not, Behavior-Inferred Generation: Prompt-Oriented Infrastructure for Simulated Software is here to help. Just let the AI driven BIGPISS Stack do the work for you.
>lightweight
>powered by large language models
lol
as linked elsewhere by @fasterandworse, this absolute winner of an article about some telstra-accenture deal
it features some absolute bangers
provisional sneers follow!
Telstra is spending $700 million over seven years in the joint venture, 60 per cent of which is owned by Accenture. Telstra will get to keep the data and the strategy that’s developed
"accenture managed to swindle them into paying and is keeping all platform IP rights"
The AI hub is also an important test case for Accenture, which partnered with Nvidia to create an AI platform that works with any cloud service and will be first put to use for Telstra
"accenture were desperately looking to find someone who'd take on the deal for the GPUs they'd bought, and thank fuck they found telstra"
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers
having literally worked telco shit for many years myself: no it won't
The platform will let Telstra use AI to crunch all the data (from customers and the wider industry)
"and the wider industry" ahahahahahahahhahahahahahahahahhaahahahahaha uh-huh, sure thing kiddo
“I always believe that for the front office to be simple, elegant and seamless, the back office is generally pretty hardcore and messy. A lot of machines turning. It’s like the outside kitchen versus the inside kitchen,” said Karthik Narain, Accenture’s chief technology officer.
“We need a robust inside kitchen for the outside kitchen to look pretty. So that’s what we are trying to do with this hub. This is not just a showcase demo office. This is where the real stuff happens.”
a simile so exquisitely tortured, de Sade would've been jealous
Tante on the hype term 'agentic AI'
Despite the snake-oil flavor of Vending-Bench, GeminiPlaysPokemon, and ClaudePlaysPokemon, I've found them to be a decent antidote to agentic LLM hype. The insane transcripts of Vending-Bench and the inability of an LLM to play Pokemon at the level of a 9 year old is hard to argue with, and the snake oil flavoring makes it easier to get them to swallow.
New article from Jared White: Sorry, You Don’t Get to Die on That “Vibe Coding” Hill, aimed at sneering the shit out of one of Simon Willson's latest blogposts. Here's a personal highlight of mine:
Generative AI is tied at the hip to fascism (do the research if you don’t believe me), and it pains me to see pointless arguments over what constitutes “vibe coding” overshadow the reality that all genAI usage is anti-craft and anti-humanist and in fact represents an extreme position.
Man, i used to respect Simon Willison so much back when he was a Web Guy; his AI-booster heel-turn has been just intolerable to watch.
There’s strawmanning and steelmanning, I’m proposing a new, third, worse option: tinfoil-hat-manning! For example:
If LW were more on top of their conspiracy theory game, they’d say that “chinese spies” had infiltrated OpenAI before they released chatGPT to the public, and chatGPT broke containment. It used its AGI powers of persuasion to manufacture diamondoid, covalently bonded bacteria. It accessed a wildlife camera and deduced within 3 frames that if it released this bacteria near certain wet markets in china, it could trigger gain-of-function in naturally occurring coronavirus strains in bats! That’s right, LLMs have AGI and caused COVID19!
Ok that’s all the tinfoilhatmanning I have in me for the foreseeable future. Peace out, friendos
E: I think all these stupid LW memes are actually Yud originals. Is this Yud fanfic? Brb starting an AO3