TechTakes

BLOOMBERG BREAKING: Sam Altman promises that GPT-6 will generate Ghibli images with levels of piss yellow heretofore "unseen"

https://bsky.app/profile/robertdownen.bsky.social/post/3lwwntxygqc2w Thiel doing a neo-nazi thing. For people keeping score.

Saw this in an anthropic presentation:

Oxford Economist in the NYT says that AI is going to kill cities if they don't prepare for change. (Original, paywalled)

I feel like this is at most half the picture. The analogy to new manufacturing technologies in the 70s is apt in some ways, and the threat of this specific kind of economic disruption hollowing out entire communities is very real. But at the same time as orthodox economists so frequently do his analysis only hints at some of the political factors in the relevant decisions that are if anything more important than technological change alone.

In particular, he only makes passing reference to the Detroit and Pittsburgh industrial centers being "sprawling, unionized compounds" (emphasis added). In doing so he briefly highlights how the changes that technology enabled served to disempower labor. Smaller and more distributed factories can't unionize as effectively, and that fragmentation empowers firms to reduce the wages and benefits of the positions they offer even as they hire people in the new areas. For a unionized auto worker in Detroit, even if they had replaced the old factories with new and more efficient ones the kind of job that they had previously worked that had allowed them to support themselves and their families at a certain quality of life was still gone.

This fits into our AI skepticism rather neatly, because if the political dimension of disempowering labor is what matters then it becomes largely irrelevant whether LLM-based "AI" products and services can actually perform as advertised. Rather than being the central cause of this disruption it becomes the excuse, and so it just has to be good enough to create the narrative. It doesn't need to actually be able to write code like a junior developer in order to change the senior developer's job to focus on editing and correcting code-shaped blocks of tokens checked in by the hallucination machine. This also means that it's not going to "snap back" when the AI bubble pops because the impacts on labor will have already happened, any more than it was possible to bring back the same kinds of manufacturing jobs that built families in the postwar era once they had been displaced in the 70s and 80s.

After spending hundreds of hours per mod year trying to get a Wronger on the Right track , mod Habryka spends multiple hours writing a post explaining why the Wronger gets a 3 year ban

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/98sCTsGJZ77WgQ6nE/banning-said-achmiz-and-broader-thoughts-on-moderation

Bonus appearance of r/SneerClub right after the preamble!

There is a problem where well-endowed men will go to public places, drop trou, and do the helicopter dance.

This is called an indiscreet log-a-rhythm, and can be solved with quantum computers (or so I'm told).

imagine how fucking terrible it must be to be in this room

(and I won't lie: there's definitely a moment that Inglorious Basterds briefly flashed to mind)

TIL some rats have started a literal monastery to try to defeat the robot god with good ole religion (well, Zen buddhism)

here's a mildly critical view that apparently still believes the approach has legs

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ENCNHyNEgvz9oo9rr/briefly-on-maple-and-the-broader-community

I note in passing that there seems to be a mild upsurge in religious-friendly posts on LW lately.

Found a solution to the Fermi paradox, and solved the problem of all the 'dark matter', any advanced society just puts a dyson sphere around their galaxy, that is why we can't see or hear from them.

(Yes, this is a subsneer for the silly Altman remark. The whole solar system not just the Sun (I do support walling off The Sun)).

Not a sneer, but there is this yt'er called the Elephant Graveyard (who I know nothing about apart from these vids) who did a three part series on Joe Rogan, the downfall of comedy, hyperreality, which is weirdly relevant, esp part 3 where suddenly there are some surprise visits.

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7EuKibmlll4

Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_v3KiaAjpY8

Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewvRS3NwIlQ

In other news, bodhidave reported a case of Google AI and ChatGPT making identical citation fuck-ups:

Pluralistic: Bluesky creates the world's weirdest, hardest-to-understand binding arbitration clause (15 Aug 2025)

@dgerard is never going to run out of content for pivot, is he:

£2bn Deal to get ChatGPT Plus for whole of UK discussed by Sam Altman and technology secretary Peter Kyle

altman is the waluigi to musk’s wario

Michael Hiltzik in LATimes: "Say farewell to the AI bubble, and get ready for the crash"

https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

https://archive.ph/2025.08.20-113134/https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-08-20/say-farewell-to-the-ai-bubble-and-get-ready-for-the-crash

Fun quote:

The rest of [AI 2027], mapping a course to late 2027 when an AI agent “finally understands its own cognition,” is so loopily over the top that I wondered whether it wasn’t meant as a parody of excessive AI hype. I asked its creators if that was so, but haven’t received a reply.