TechTakes

Morning lads, let's have a big week 💪

This orange thread is about San Francisco banning certain types of landlord rent collusion. I cannot possibly sneer better than the following in-thread comment explaining why this is worthwhile:

While I agree that the giant metal spikes we put on all the cars aren't the exclusive reason that cars are lethal, I would hope we both agree that cars are less lethal when we don't cover them in giant metal spikes.

Riffing on this fun subthread:

• Will AI invent the Philosopher's Stone?
• Can AI duck the Zuck?
• WIll AI divide by zero?
• Can AI give you diarrhea?
• Will AI make "fetch" happen?
• Will AI have a second helping?
• Does AI unlock the secret to making the Moon happy again?
• Can AI stop eating after only one marshmallow?

Band I like accidentally purchases a poster design from a probable AI grifter. Here's their apology/acknowledgement post:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C98X_6huBOJ

The poster in question:

https://www.instagram.com/p/C95H8MQuVI6

I do not blame the band. I blame the AI person for being shit and passing off AI-generated shit as his own.

babe wake up Gamers Nexus is absolutely cooking Intel rn

google continuing on their crusade to force ads down everyone’s eyeballs

not that it’s surprising, just “good” to see this playing out exactly as predicted

more of a nsfw, a post on pointing and laughing at the fash. figured y'all may also enjoy reading it

a long AI sneer on gabi belle's channel

the comments also have some bangers. a quick selection:

My mom used to transcribe calls for companies as work, but then her work implemented AI to transcribe the calls, leading to work calls having sentences in them such as: “Thanks for watching!” “This venue has the best beat” and putting in random websites that DONT EXIST into the calls, when the caller said nothing like that.

imagine this in financial or medical services

had a survey from my university about how staff feel about AI implementation for our university. One question that concerned me was "how do you feel about AI being used for grading?"

The issue with AI grading assignments is that students will most likely get the mindset that if the professor or TA doesn't care enough to put in the effort to look at my work to give me feedback to do better, why the hell should I put in the effort and spend thousands to do this?

please come to our university, it costs 500k for a year and we pinky promise that the prof/TA won't get more than 10% of it, your learning is our "top priority"

My friend and I entered an art contest a few months ago and she lost to very obvious ai “art”. She spent months on a self portrait oil painting that even when putting my bias aside was amazingly beautiful and definitely deserved to win. There was ai competing in the charcoal category with me too but luckily someone looked at competing pieces before the judges actually scored anything and bombarded the hosts of the competition to remove the piece and they did eventually. It’s incredibly frustrating especially considering part of the first place prize was a scholarship that my friend definitely deserves and needs, and the contest hosts were very hesitant to remove the ai “art”.

it's weird how a chunk the art world continues being bad at handling fakes

For additional context, training ChatGPT-3 took enough energy to propel the titanic at full speed for 37 hours. Or around 920 tons of coal.

just absolutely mental

Google Pulls “Dear Sydney” Olympics Ad After Backlash To Its Portrait Of A Young Girl Using AI

The ad itself is just fucked - its like something you'd find in a shitty cyberpunk novel.

Presented without comment: this utter crankery about hacking the Matrix (HN)

Given the highly speculative subject of this paper, we will attempt to give our work more gravitas by concentrating only on escape paths which rely on attacks similar to those we see in cybersecurity [37-39] research (hardware/software hacks and social engineering) and will ignore escape attempts via more esoteric paths such as:, meditation [40], psychedelics (DMT [41-43], ibogaine, psilocybin, LSD) [44, 45], dreams [46], magic, shamanism, mysticism, hypnosis, parapsychology, death (suicide [47], near-death experiences, induced clinical death), time travel, multiverse travel [48], or religion.

Among the things they've already tried are torture, touching grass, and declining all cookies:

Unethical behavior, such as torture, doesn’t cause suffering reducing interventions from the simulators.

Breaking out of your routine, such as by suddenly traveling to a new location [199], doesn’t result in unexpected observations.

Saying "I no longer consent to being in a simulation" [200].

PURE PROMO: we're doing a Pivot to AI patrons’ video Q&A on Thursday August 8, at 16:00 UTC

also taking cryptocurrency questions

like you know I answer any of you guys' questions anyway, but this is in a much l33t3r format