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
you know I fucking hate the classism implicit in the common telling of the hitchbot story
“wow! this robot made it just fine through the richer parts of Europe and Canada but the instant it touched Philadelphia they tore it apart!” good. they had better things to do than engage in your weird fucking roleplay.
To give some slack to HitchBOT, the design at least had some personality to it. That is a lot more than you can give the average tech-related thing these days, especially in an age of AI slop.
If there is no point to being cute with the stupid assemblage of trash then what is gained for beating the stupid assemblage of trash? Ape-man catharsis? The jackasses did it because they were in on the game of anthropomorphizing an assemblage of trash too, and breaking it was probably at least as much fun as taking the assemblage of trash out hitchhiking. But what those local yocals showed the world about their casually cruel jocularity was that in Europe and Canada, you can play makebelieve with the assemblage of trash, but in America, the assemblage of trash is an outsider not conforming to the status quo but still requiring a modicum of consideration and thought to engage with, and when that kind of book readin' deep thinkin' faggit rocks up on our shores the cultural instinct is treating it like an assemblage of trash even if its a mother of three. Then celebrate our rude 'tude havin' selves and lord it over the effete Entire Rest Of The Planet.
Forgive me if I don't take lectures about cultural moments from contrarion fucking sports websites. I guess as a piece of comedy writing its enjoyable but as an actual argument it makes Americans look like filthy fucking imaginationless troglodytes. And what makes that come off worse is the celebration of that streak in us. To break toys after seeing other people playing makebelieve. To laugh at the concept of applying even rhetorical compassion to an inanimate object, as if people haven't had a rich spiritual and at times familial connection with the inanimate world for thousands of years.
I get that you posted this probably alluding to LLMs and as a Beehawfuck I know I am coming off really pissy here and I must apologize. Its not that I don't appreciate the joke or have wholly missed the punchline. If an eightball loaded with GPT were inserted into my life asking for hitchhiking, I would punt it into somebody else's fucking lightcone. But this stupid trashcan hitchhiker thing wasn't selling the idea of replacing the people closest to me or their knowledge bases. It was the rare sort of toy adults around the world had the opportunity to play with. And as much as I enjoy the comedy writing, reading this fart sniffer sports blogger dissing all but a particular subset of crude Ugly American-stereotype assholes, with the soft-jingo touch suggesting Canadians are basically morons that Americans babysit (which as an attitude looks PARTICULARLY evil and chauvanistic of late), I kinda had to speak up.
Edit: I let the bad day I'm having affect this comment. I don't believe in deleting comments unless its something I feel reflects a whole different me that isn't me anymore, and I've got nothing like that on Fediverse. I stand by my thoughts and feelings here but they were expressed perhaps with a bit much vitriol. Please excuse me. I have no real enmity to the OP here.
this comment has a rancid attitude no matter how much civility filler you try to spackle on top
well duh if you break down an analogy it breaks down dawg.
I think dgerard has hit upon a microcosm with this post. I’ve half joked about it elsewhere but this project of collective fun and whimsy and its fate is a crystallization of the life of liberal optimism from early 2015 onward. Hillary was predicted to win, Marvel movies hadn’t majorly fallen out of favor yet, and most people weren’t hip to the tech industry being the sociopathic behemoth that it always has been. But then, as we know, all that rosy-cute whimsy was shot to shreds like a Cincinnati gorilla.
Look where we are today. Canada and Europe are also facing the rising tide of fascism. Western governments are still by and large facilitating a genocide through Israel. That the author, probably not some scholar of geopolitics, had the wisdom in 2015 that liberal optimism was a pile of garbage should be lauded.
I still remember the outcry when Harambe was shot. Shit truly does feel like the point where everything began turning to shit.
Someone I know argued that Harambe's death led to Trump's election, and its been burned into my mind ever since:
this is a garbage can with telemetry
all of the technology that came after it is also a garbage can with telemetry
Counterpoint: what if HitchBOT was the start of machine consciousness and now our minds will be condemned to mind-torture jail forever. Perhaps it is safer to start a new religion that worships HitchBOT.
This writer seems to be missing the point. The point was not what HitchBOT was. By creating HitchBOT, its makers invited the world to play pretend with them: to pretend (for entertainment purposes!) that HitchBOT was a whimsical hitchhiker in need of aid, and to collectively see how far the participants in this game could get it. Destroying HitchBOT selfishly ended the game for everyone else.
This commenter seems to be missing the point about the point.
If Hillary were president HitchBot would still be alive
E: followup, from wikipedia:
Smith and Zeller recreated their invention as hitchBOT 2.0 in 2019. The robot was sent to Paris, France, where it was touring about and appearing in a play, Killing Robots, by Linda Blanchet. That tour was put on hold indefinitely due to COVID-19.
As a metaphor for liberal fantasy and optimism, hitchbot was doomed to die, one way or another.
I have some stale notes on the AI Hacking chapters of Schneier's "A Hacker's Mind", and in one of those chapters he theorizes how AI might hack human emotions. He brings humanoid robots with cute faces as an example.
You know, I think I have an idea how a social countermeasure to that might look like.
Providing a cathartic release for some pissed-off Eagles fan is the closest it has ever come to usefulness.
They should have covered hitchbot in grease.
The grease just encourages them to try harder
go birds
🦅
What Canadian hockey teams are getting the shit beat out of them by our teams? Toronto is tearing it up rn. So is Winnipeg.
This was written in 2015.