TechTakes

Found a Bluesky thread you might be interested in:

On a Sci Fi authors’ panel at Comicon today, every writer asked about AI (as in LLM / algorithmic modern gen AI) gave it a kicking, drawing a spontaneous round of applause.

A few years ago, I don’t think that would have happened. People would have said “it’s an interesting tool”, or something.

Bearing in mind these are exactly the people who would be expected to engage with the idea, I think the tech turds have massively underestimated the propaganda faux pas they made by stealing writers’ hard work and then being cunts about it.

Tying this to a previous post of mine, I'm expecting their open and public disdain for gen-AI to end up bleeding into their writing. The obvious route would be AI systems/characters exhibiting the hallmarks of LLMs - hallucinations/confabulations, "AI slop" output, easily bypassable safeguards, that sort of thing.

Tired: Ned Ludd

Wired: Joe Butlerian

I watched most of the first season of Silicon Valley with a friend who recommended it to me. I liked it. Every single character with a speaking role so far (with the possible exception of an exotic dancer and a graffiti artist) deserves death by nuclear weaponry. SFBA delenda est.

It looks like twitter was down for 2.5h. [hn] Previously there was a fire in twitter server farm which caused some availability issues. Gee i wonder how well these gas turbines are serviced

Rick Rubin collaborated with Anthropic to bring us this quality piece of cringe.

New piece from Tante: On "Vibe Coding" - take a wild guess what its about.

Seeing a lot of talk about OpenAI acquiring a company with Jony Ive and he's supposedly going to design them some AI gadget.

Calling it now: it will be a huge flop. Just like the Humane Pin and that Rabbit thing. Only the size of the marketing campaign, and maybe its endurance due to greater funding, will make it last a little longer.

It appears that many people think that Jony Ive can perform some kind of magic that will make a product successful, I wonder if Sam Altman believes that too, or maybe he just wants the big name for marketing purposes.

Personally, I've not been impressed with Ive's design work in the past many years. Well, I'm sure the thing is going to look very nice, probably a really pleasingly shaped chunk of aluminium. (Will they do a video with Ive in a featureless white room where he can talk about how "unapologetically honest" the design is?) But IMO Ive has long ago lost touch with designing things to be actually useful, at some point he went all in on heavily prioritizing form over function (or maybe he always did, I'm not so sure anymore). Combine that with the overall loss of connection to reality from the AI true believers and I think the resulting product could turn to be actually hilarious.

The open question is: will the tech press react with ridicule, like it did for the Humane Pin? Or will we have to endure excruciating months of critihype?

I guess Apple can breathe a sigh of relief though. One day there will be listicles for "the biggest gadget flops of the 2020s", and that upcoming OpenAI device might push Vision Pro to second place.

OK completely off topic but update on my USA angst from earlier this year: I'm heckin' moving to Switzerland next month holy hell.

Back on topic: Duolingo continues to circle the drain. I kind of hate that I'm linking to this because it's exactly what that marketing-run company wants; but they posted these two videos to TikTok in response to the AI backlash: https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7506578962697456939?lang=en https://www.tiktok.com/@duolingo/video/7507337734520868142?lang=en

I uh... I don't think it's going to change anyone's minds. Half the comments on the videos go something like:

EVERYONE LISTEN UP!!!! 🚨 - starting from today, we are gonna start ignoring duolingo. We will not like the video it posts, or view it. - BASICALLY WE WILL IGNORE DUO!!💔 💔 ON EVERYBODY SOUL WE IGNORING DUO!! 💔 (copy this and share this to every duo related video)

Adam Conover's put out an apology on YouTube regarding his milkshake duck-ing himself with Worldcoin, after his public apology on Bluesky. Seems his reputation's gonna make a full recovery.

EDIT: Found a banger comment after taking a quick peek:

I know r/singularity is like shooting fish in a barrel but it really pissed me off seeing them misinterpret the significance of a result in matrix multiplication: https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1knem3r/i_dont_think_people_realize_just_how_insane_the/

Yeah, the record has stood for "FIFTY-SIX YEARS" if you don't count all the times the record has been beaten since then. Indeed, "countless brilliant mathematicians and computer scientists have worked on this problem for over half a century without success" if you don't count all the successes that have happened since then. The really annoying part about all this is that the original announcement didn't have to lie: if you look at just 4x4 matrices, you could say there technically hasn't been an improvement since Strassen's algorithm. Wow! It's really funny how these promptfans ignore all the enormous number of human achievements in an area when they decide to comment about how AI is totally gonna beat humans there.

How much does this actually improve upon Strassen's algorithm? The matrix multiplication exponent given by Strassen's algorithm is log~4~(49) (i.e. log~2~(7)), and this result would improve it to log~4~(48). In other words, it improves from 2.81 to 2.79. Truly revolutionary, AGI is gonna make mathematicians obsolete now. Ignore the handy dandy Wikipedia chart which shows that this exponent was ... beaten in 1979.

I know far less about how matrix multiplication is done in practice, but from what I've seen, even Strassen's algorithm isn't useful in applications because memory locality and parallelism are far more important. This AlphaEvolve result would represent a far smaller improvement (and I hope you enjoy the pain of dealing with a 4x4 block matrix instead of 2x2). If anyone does have knowledge about how this works, I'd be interested to know.

In other news, the ghost of Dorian has haunted an autoplag system:

Revealing just how forever online I am, but due to talking about the 'I like to watch' pornographic 9/11 fan music video from the Church of Euthanasia (I'm one of the two people who remembers this it seems) I discovered that the main woman behind this is now into AI-Doom. On the side of the paperclips. General content warnings all around (suicide, general bad taste etc), Chris was banned from a big festival (lowlands) in The Netherlands over the 9/11 video, after she was already booked (we are such a weird exclave of the USA, why book her, and then get rid of her over a 9/11 video in 2002?). Here is one of her conversations with chatgpt about the Churches anti-humanist manifesto. linked here not because I read it but just to show how AI is the idea that eats everything and I was amused by this weird blast from the past I think nobody recalls but now also into AGI.