TechTakes

In more low-key news, the New Yorker's given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.

Its hardly anything new (the Luddites' cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper's decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.

With that out the way, here's a sidenote:

When history looks back on the Luddites' cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.

Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.

More publicity for or longtime friends: Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right, apparently the parties DJ was, as is tradition, a weird nerd: https://bsky.app/profile/alt-text.bsky.social/post/3lvxlb4migv2w (I linked to the alt text which was collected from the image, scroll up for the image itself).

Sorry to talk about this couple again, but people are discovering the eugenicists are also big time racists

Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called "GreenDildoCoin" and they've thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.

Polymarket even had a "prediction" on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn't be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it

None of this is particularly surprising if you've followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women's sports by the sorts of losers who make "jokes" about no one watching WNBA games.

OpenAI is food. You can tell because it's washed, rinsed, and cooked.

ChatGPT-5 is having a day on r/ChatGPT.

Fate, it seems, is not without a sense of irony.

I’m excited that Silicon Valley tech has finally managed to invent thinking. Makes this book obsolete at long last.

Found a good sneer recently: The LLM In The Room, about LLMs' deeply-lacking usefulness for programming

Only taste tester I trust dropped his verdict

can't wait to see what fresh horrors this shit unleases

At my big tech job after a number of reorgs / layoffs it's now getting pretty clear that the only thing they want from me is to support the AI people and basically nothing else.

I typed out a big rant about this, but it probably contained a little too much personal info on the public web in one place so I deleted it. Not sure what to do though grumble grumble. I ended up in a job I never would have chosen myself and feel stuck and surrounded by chat-bros uggh.