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
Starting August 13th, YouTube will detect underage users in the US based on their activity and the age of their account, allowing the platform to automatically apply restrictions.
Welp, I guess I have two weeks to download all the YouTube videos I will ever want to watch again.
(pauses, thinks)
The once-lost Evangelion AIDS PSA it is, then
Stumbled across a particularly odd case of AI hype in the wild today:
I will say it certainly does look different than standard AI slop, but like AI slop, its nothing particularly impressive - I can replicate something like this pretty easily, and without boiling an ocean to do it. Anyways, here's a sidenote:
In the wake of this bubble, part of me suspects physical media (e.g. photographic film) will earn a boost in popularity, alongside digital formats which LLMs struggle to generate. In both cases, the reason will be the same - simply by knowing something came on physical media or "slop-hardened media", you already have strong reason to believe the piece is human-made.
Oh FFS, that couple have managed to break into Sweden's public broadcasting site
That couple update: That couple are being platformed again, this time on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
Is it just me or does she look tired? With how often they are in the news this is now something we can track. (Not a suprise btw, as she seems to do the cooking, the childcare, is pregnant again, and is playing dressup to troll the left).
Before I met Malcolm, I would do things like base jumping and skydiving ...
Also note it looks like the kitchen is too small, not sure the oven door can open all the way. Poor kids, esp as they want to get even more.
I cannot speak from experience, but I imagine having, raising, and face-slapping 4 (soon 5) kids is going to have some kind of toll on your general well-being.
Edit: also shit troll. Oh, you wear cosplay for media appearances? How anti-left. How will I ever recover
Yeah, esp when you live in a too small space, have to do most of the work, are getting death threats, and had to give up your hobbies. While your husband seems to do most of the ranting (but that could also be because of the patriarchal attitudes of the interviewers).
E: the troll has a bit of that cartoon where the guy is being laughed at for pissing himself and then goes 'ha, rentfree'.
the Nazi bar distributing leaflets about indie Nazi feature nights is Concerned about this “accidental” distribution coming from their own printers and being handled by their own towncriers
(the context, in case you haven’t seen it)
This is sort of OT, but since we discuss race science and dogwhistles so much:
A jeans manufacturer has put out an ad featuring Sydney Sweeney and is saying “Sydney Sweeney has great jeans”. People are interpreting this as a racist dogwhistle (it is). Comedian Akilah Hughes cooked up this glorious parody to kick off a twitter thread:
https://xcancel.com/AkilahObviously/status/1950224586278154577#m
Btw, people have noticed that while the ad isnt great this is massively being pushed as a culture war subject from the right. To distract from all the other shit. (Gaza, the fascism, Epstein, the corruption, etc etc).
And Sydney is a massive obsession for the online far right. So best to not give them what they want.
(All this isnt helped by the media never giving agency to the right, the right gets weird about budweiser, keurig, gillette, jaguar (less so because none of them actually own luxury cars to destroy), it is treated as somewhat normal vs people going 'eurgh' over this in tweets causes a massive media shitstorm).
Because I read Yudkowsky being interviewed about writing HPMoR, and you should suffer too.
Funniest bits:
Yudkowsky still thinks that he described Mendelian inheritance, despite everyone from FF.net commenters on pointing out his mistake.
Wandering off into "the multiverse" and algorithmic information theory to fumble at explaining that magic works the way it does in a book because the writer made it that way.
This paragraph:
So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?
This comment:
My own belief about why so many people didn't want to believe Quirrell was Voldemort is that Eliezer is nearly incapable of writing characters that people actually dislike (perhaps due to, as mentioned: "make every character awesome," "give characters understandable flaws drawn from real life").
Make All the Characters Awesome.
Looks at draco, looks at ron. Wtf.
Psssh. We all know Ron wasn't a character, because the only people capable of character are smarmy fascists and those capable of becoming smarmy fascists after one points out how their whole life is actually dumb.
Everyone else is just an NPC. You know, like in real life.
Who could possibly dislike the smarmy fascist main villain of the story? Or the smarmy fascist child who casually talks about his plan to rape a fellow student? Or the smarmy fascist main character? Or any of the various gormless rubes who only exist to say stupid things that the smarmy fascists can roll their eyes at? Nearly incapable of writing these characters in a dislikeable way.
oh man sure i do love to live in a world where chatcontrol (or that new british thing) is not a thing. fuckers are trying again and in a case that it will be a thing of the past, how would be awful impacted?
Found an attempt to poison LLMs in the wild recently, aimed at trying to trick people into destroying their Cybertrucks:
This is very much in the same vein as the iOS Wave hoax which aimed to trick people into microwaving their phones, and Eduardo Valdés-Hevia's highly successful attempt at engorging Google's AI summary systems.
Poisoning AI systems in this way isn't anything new (Baldur Bjarnason warned about it back in 2023), but seeing it used this way does make me suspect we're gonna see more ChatGPT-powered hoaxes like this in the future.
ugh and the disease is spreading
I guess they couldn’t find enough marks ^W “investors” in the US
I think Norway's fossil fuels probably play a role too. They produce around 2 million barrels of oil a day, with a population of 5.5 million people. The US produces 13 million barrels a day with a population of 340 million. Tons of natural gas too.
Edit: Nevermind Norway uses hydroelectric for like 95% of their electricity. Maybe power is just cheap there