Dang that judge was angry.

Here’s docket #170: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.384571/gov.uscourts.mied.384571.170.0.pdf – the complaining about not being allowed to use AI is on page 14 and 16 (it’s pretty awful reading I almost gave up before reaching that point)

a pro se litigant should not be threatened with per-citation fines before any violation.

lmao

It’s the McMindfulness guy, nice to see that he is still kicking around.

In Empire of AI, she shows how CEO Sam Altman cloaks monopoly ambitions in humanitarian language—his soft-spoken, monkish image (gosh, little Sammy even practices mindfulness!)

lol ofc he does

article is informing me that it isn’t X - it’s Y

I like this. Kinda wish it was either 10x longer and explained things a bit, or 10x shorter and was more shitposty. Still, good

Computer scientist Louis Rosenberg argues that dismissing AI as a “bubble” or mere “slop” overlooks the tectonic technological shift that’s reshaping society.

“Please stop talking about the bubble bursting, I haven’t handed off my bag yet”

i hereby propose a new metric for a popular publication, the epstein number (Ē), denoting the number of authors who took flights to epstein’s rape island. generally, credible publications should have Ē=0. this one, after a very quick look, has Ē=2, and also hosts sabine hossenfelder.

We are three paragraphs and one subheading down before we hit an Ayn Rand quote. This clearly bodes well.

A couple paragraphs later we’re ignoring both the obvious philosophical discussion about creativity and the more immediate argument about why this technology is being forced on us so aggressively. As much as I’d love to rant about this I got distracted by the next bit talking about how micro expressions will let LLMs decode emotions and whatever. I’d love to know this guy’s thoughts on that AI-powered phrenologist features a couple weeks ago.

it’s some copium of tremendous potency to misidentify public sentiment (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/) for movement (ignore the “AI experts” these are people surveyed at a certain machine learning conference, really could be substituted by 1000 clones of Sutskever)

From the replies

I wonder what prompted it to switch to Elon being worth less than the average human while simultaneously saying it’d vaporize millions if it could prolonged his life in a different sub-thread

It’s odd to me that people still expect any consistency from chatbots. These bots can and will give different answers to the same verbatim question. Am I just too online if I have involuntarily encountered enough AI output to know this?

Does this mean calibre’s use case is a digital equivalent of a shelf of books you never read?

https://awful.systems/post/5776862/8966942 😭

also this guy is a bit of a doofus, e.g. https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/853934, where he is a dick to someone reporting a bug, and https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/885027, where someone points out that you can execute anything as root because of a security issue, and he argues like a total shithead

You mean that a program designed to let an unprivileged user
mount/unmount/eject anything he wants has a security flaw because it allows
him to mount/unmount/eject anything he wants? I’m shocked.

Implement a system that allows an appilcation to mount/unmount/eject USB
devices connected to the system securely, then make sure that system is
universally adopted on every linux install in the universe. Once you’ve done that, feel free to
re-open this ticket.

i would not invite this person to my birthday

The result is, in technical terms, four pictures of a schoolgirl waifu in fetishwear.

I try to avoid having to even see the outputs of these fucking systems, but you just made me realize that there’s going to be more than a few of them that will “leak” (read: preferentially deliver, by way of training focus) the kinks of its particular owner. I mean it’s already happening for the textual replies on twitter, soothing felon’s ever so bruised ego. the chance of it not Shipping beyond that is pretty damn zero :|

god I hate all of this

He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.

Cory Doctorow has plugged this on his blog, which is usually a good signal for me.

Always thought she should have stuck to acting.

(I know, Hayek just always reminds me of how people put his quotes over Hayeks image, and people just get really mad at her, and not at him. Always wonder if people would have been just as mad if it was Friedrichs image and not Salmas due to the sexism aspect).

Nice rant in the entry on OSNews about this… love the phrase “MLMs for unimpressive white males”.

I can see it making sense, what with CPUs moving to integrated RAM, and probably CPU-integrated flash, to maximize speed. The business of RAM and flash drive upgrades will become a very large but shrinking retrocomputing niche probably served by small Chinese fabs.

This seems like a bit of a desperation pivot while the bubble money is still flowing. I’ve heard they struggled a bit with shipping PCIE CXL memory that’s capable of memory sharing between rackmount nodes, so they’re probably taking everything from the consumer channel and cramming it into the enterprise channel in a bid to be the low-cost/high-volume provider. I would expect them to eventually come limping back into the consumer market to much marketing fanfare, alongside trying to set a higher price floor there, similar to Taco Bell bringing back the Mexican pizza.

Bleugh, I’ve been using crucial ram and flash for a hell of a long time, and they’ve always been high quality and reasonably priced. I dislike having to find new manufacturers who don’t suck, especially as the answer seems to be increasingly “lol, there are no such companies”.

Thanks to the ongoing situation in the us, it doesn’t look like the ai bubble is going to pop soon, but I can definitely see it causing more damage like this before the event.

just one rationalist got lost in the wilderness? that’s nothing, tell me when all of them are gone

Most insane part about this is after he assaulted the treasurer(?) of his foundation trying to siphon funds for an apparent terror act, the naive chuckle fucks still went and said “we dont think his violent tendencies are an indication he might do something violent”

Like idk maybe update on the fact he just sent one of his own to the hospital??

Jesus, it could be like the Zizians all over again. These guys are all such fucking clowns right up until they very much are not.

Is it better for these people to be collected in one place under the singularity cult, or dispersed into all the other religions, cults, and conspiracy theories that they would ordinarily be pulled into?

This would be worrying if there was any risk at all that the stuff Anthropic is pumping out is an existential threat to humanity. There isn’t so this is just rats learning how the world works outside the blog bubble.

If rationalists could benefit from just one piece of advice, it would be: actions speak louder than words. Right now, I don’t think they understand that, given their penchant for 10k word blog posts.

One non-AI example of this is the most expensive fireworks show in history, I mean, the SpaceX Starship program. So far, they have had 11 or 12 test flights (I don’t care to count the exact number by this point), and not a single one of them has delivered anything into orbit. Fans generally tend to cling on to a few parlor tricks like the “chopstick” stuff. They seem to have forgotten that their goal was to land people on the moon. This goal had already been accomplished over 50 years ago with the 11th flight of the Apollo program.

I saw this coming from their very first Starship test flight. They destroyed the launchpad as soon as the rocket lifted off, with massive chunks of concrete flying hundreds of feet into the air. The rocket itself lost control and exploded 4 minutes later. But by far the most damning part was when the camera cut to the SpaceX employees wildly cheering. Later on there were countless spin articles about how this test flight was successful because they collected so much data.

I chose to believe the evidence in front of my eyes over the talking points about how SpaceX was decades ahead of everyone else, SpaceX is a leader in cheap reusable spacecraft, iterative development is great, etc. Now, I choose to look at the actions of the AI companies, and I can easily see that they do not have any ethics. Meanwhile, the rationalists are hypnotized by the Anthropic critihype blog posts about how their AI is dangerous.

tl;dr: AI! Agents! AI! Agents! AI! Agents! AI…

Just one thing that caught my attention:

AI code review helps developers. We … found that 72.6% of developers who use Copilot code review said it improved their effectiveness.

Only 72.6%? So why the heck are the other almost 30% of devs using it? For funsies? They don’t say.

You’d think due to self selection effects most people who wouldn’t find using Copilot effective wouldn’t use it.

The only way that number makes sense to me is if people were force to use Copilot and… no, wait, that checks out.

I know it is a bit of elitism/priviledge on my part. But if you don’t know about the existence of google translate(*), perhaps you shouldn’t be doing vibe coding like this.

*: this of course, could have been a LLM based vibe translation error.

E: And I guess my theme this week is translations.

The documentation for “Turbo mode” for Google Antigravity:

Turbo: Always auto-execute terminal commands (except those in a configurable Deny list)

No warning. No paragraph telling the user why it might be a good idea. No discussion on the long history of malformed scripts leading to data loss. No discussion on the risk for injection attacks. It’s not even named similarly to dangerous modes in other software (like “force” or “yolo” or “danger”)

Just a cool marketing name that makes users want to turn it on. Heck if I’m using some software and I see any button called “turbo” I’m pressing that.

It’s hard not to give the user a hard time when they write:

Bro, I didn’t know I needed a seatbelt for AI.

But really they’re up against a big corporation that wants to make LLMs seem amazing and safe and autonomous. One hand feeds the user the message that LLMs will do all their work for them. While the other hand tells the user “well in our small print somewhere we used the phrase ‘Gemini can make mistakes’ so why did you enable turbo mode??”

yeah as I posted on mastodong.soc, it continues to make me boggle that people think these fucking ridiculous autoplag liarsynth machines are any good

but it is very fucking funny to watch them FAFO

After the bubble collapses, I believe there is going to be a rule of thumb for whatever tiny niche use cases LLMs might have: “Never let an LLM have any decision-making power.” At most, LLMs will serve as a heuristic function for an algorithm that actually works.

Unlike the railroads of the First Gilded Age, I don’t think GenAI will have many long term viable use cases. The problem is that it has two characteristics that do not go well together: unreliability and expense. Generally, it’s not worth spending lots of money on a task where you don’t need reliability.

The sheer expense of GenAI has been subsidized by the massive amounts of money thrown at it by tech CEOs and venture capital. People do not realize how much hundreds of billions of dollars is. On a more concrete scale, people only see the fun little chat box when they open ChatGPT, and they do not see the millions of dollars worth of hardware needed to even run a single instance of ChatGPT. The unreliability of GenAI is much harder to hide completely, but it has been masked by some of the most aggressive marketing in history towards an audience that has already drunk the tech hype Kool-Aid. Who else would look at a tool that deletes their entire hard drive and still ever consider using it again?

The unreliability is not really solvable (after hundreds of billions of dollars of trying), but the expense can be reduced at the cost of making the model even less reliable. I expect the true “use cases” to be mainly spam, and perhaps students cheating on homework.