Yeah my favorite historian on ActivityPub made a similar point:

Don’t waste time arguing with the people telling us that’s not what happened. They’re not mistaken, they are engaged in propaganda. […] “He’s just exuberantly greeting the people!” Yes. He is exuberantly greeting the people by doing the Nazi salute.

deleted by creator

I’m pretty sure it’s impossible for a TV show called Cadillacs and Dinosaurs to suck even if they tried.

(oh no it’s politics)

Trump’s new cryptocurrency scheme is surprisingly forthright about being a pump & dump:

CIC Digital LLC, an affiliate of The Trump Organization, and Fight Fight Fight LLC collectively own 80% of the Trump Cards, subject to a 3-year unlocking schedule. CIC Digital LLC and Celebration Cards LLC, the owners of Fight Fight Fight LLC, will receive trading revenue derived from trading activities of Trump Meme Cards.

Essentially according to their own website, they started by selling 20%* of the tokens to the public, and over the next few years will… sell another 80% of the tokens to the public. To the moon!

* half of that they describe as “liquidity” instead of public distribution – whatever that means.

I read about this gross Robo Anne Frank LLM by a company called “School AI”: Bluesky post (looks like via an activitypub bridge, but I can’t be bothered to find the canonical link), News Article, School AI’s website.

Gee it sure is weird how all these digital clones the AI companies keep coming up with all have the exact same (lack of a) personality.

We all know the real use case is chatbots tricking people into embarrassing themselves. Ideally in court documents.

Does creating a cover of Get Low called “Z-Pain” for your wife, or commissioning the creation of a giant green statue for your wife strike you as the sorts of things someone in an unhealthy marriage would do? I think not!

After this post I went back and read all the fallout from when they added and subsequently “paused” AI Explain and it was as entertaining as I remember (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

This has some real “furbies talking to eachother” energy.

Computer understanders, click this link for some psychic damage! :D (aside: I tried to upload this as an image but it didn’t work)

Trick question; it’s both an economic move and an ideological move.

SEOs match quality websites to those users trying to find them. As much as Google and Bing like to pretend that they’re perfect there are very real indexing issues that crop up and need experts to debug, mitigate, and prevent; so in a very real way the SEOs do make the web better for users.

[comment continues below the ad]

For example let’s say there was a user who wanted to read a website full of LLM written articles and ads but they keep stumbling across low quality websites with poor SEO practices like Wikipedia instead, why that would be terrible. In order to prevent this terrible possiblity it is the noble duty of SEOs to buy well respected high ranking domain names so that users get a brand they can trust. Like Forbes. Or Radioshack.

[comment continues below the ad]

Sincerely, the myseonews.now “staff”.

Well that was amusing

Asking “what is blockchain good for other than cryptocurrencies” is like asking “what is internet good for other than websites” pre-broadband

Days since last “bitcoin is like the early internet”: zero :(

I’d like to go back to 1988 and ask “Is anyone actually using the Internet?”

Days since last “bitcoin is like the early internet”: zero :(

So therefore, email will never become as popular as sending envelope mails. I rest my case.

Days since last “bitcoin is like the early internet”: zero :(

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it’s much worse:

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

[Do not post} Insults, including those about […] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click “Jan 8, 2025” and yeah it’s a doozy.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn’t really concentrate on work. It’s hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn’t dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I’m not sure fascists know how to use words right.

Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. That’s like the exact opposite of dental care.

Edit: I have been made aware that Candy Floss is another name for cotton candy, which is delicious. Though my point kind of still stands.

It’s not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!

Zuck wants to get back to his roots

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.

I’d be surprised if Eliezer hasn’t mentioned it at some point, maybe more in the way that you’re after. Can’t find any examples though.

In his Times article the only place he mentions nukes is what we should do to countries that have too many GPUs: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Edit: Not Mr. Yudkowski but see https://futureoflife.org/document/policymaking-in-the-pause/

“The time for saying that this is just pure research has long since passed. […] It’s in no country’s interest for any country to develop and release AI systems we cannot control. Insisting on sensible precautions is not anti-industry. Chernobyl destroyed lives, but it also decimated the global nuclear industry. I’m an AI researcher. I do not want my field of research destroyed. Humanity has much to gain from AI, but also everything to lose.”

“Let’s slow down. Let’s make sure that we develop better guardrails, let’s make sure that we discuss these questions internationally just like we’ve done for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Let’s make sure we better understand these very large systems, that we improve on their robustness and the process by which we can audit them and verify that they are safe for the public.”

A notable article from our dear friend Nick Bostrom mentions the atmospheric auto-ignition story:

https://nickbostrom.com/papers/vulnerable.pdf

Type-0 (‘surprising strangelets’): In 1942, it occurred to Edward Teller, one of the Manhattan scientists, that a nuclear explosion would create a temperature unprecedented in Earth’s history, producing conditions similar to those in the center of the sun, and that this could conceivably trigger a self-sustaining thermonuclear reaction in the surrounding air or water (Rhodes, 1986).

(this goes on for a number of paragraphs)

This whole article has some wild stuff if you haven’t seen it before BTW, so buckle up. He also mentions this story in https://nickbostrom.com/existential/risks and https://existential-risk.com/concept.pdf if you want older examples.

“we’re cancelling the annual base salary increase”

Subject: Looking back on an amazing year

Body: Fellow Microsofties, at this time of year I like to look back on the accomplishments and challenges of the past year in a moment of quiet contemplation. A year ago I couldn’t have imagined that we could have launched copilot+ for enterprise dogs in one short year. I am tremendously proud of the work our company has done. This sort of nimbleness. This hunger for excellence is what makes me excited for the future of Microsoft.

The other week in my office with my adopted labradoodle [insert picture of spacious meticulously cleaned office filled with many unread books here]. I remembered one summer hining the Alps when someone shared their water with me. This comes to me when I consider the holiday season because I think it embodies all of Microsoft’s values. To do our best at Microsoft I realized it’s best to ocassionally step back from work so as to return all the more refreshed. To pay it forward I decided to volunteer handing out boxed lunches to adorable hungry orphans.

Likewise I would encourage all our valued Microsoft employees to also embody the spirit of the company values. Build bridges with your community. Do good work, but have fun. This spirit of humbleness is all the more important in the tough economic times of the covid-19 pandemic. As you know we are raking in money hand over fist, but we’re doing so slightly less efficiency than in past quarters. Because of this Microsoft had to reevaluate some of the discretionary compensation for a fraction of our employees in the upcoming year. I know that we as a company will do great work and I look forward to another amazing year in 2025, when our focus will be on Cloud AI integrations for customer-centric AI sidebar panels across our many products.

And above all remember, have fun while cherishing your community!