lol fandom could have been even worse
TechTakes
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.
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https://www.reddit.com/r/australia/comments/1g3zt5b/hsc_english_exam_using_ai_images/
Post content reproduced here:
autoplag image of some electronics on a table
hello, as a year 12 student who just did the first english exam, i was genuinely baffled seeing one of the stimulus texts u have to analyse is an AI IMAGE. my friend found the image of it online, but that’s what it looked like
for a subject which tells u to “analyse the deeper meaning”, “analyse the composer’s intent”, “appreciate aesthetic and intellectual value” having an AI image in which you physically can’t analyse anything deeper than what it suggests, it’s just extremely ironic 😭 idk, [as an artist who DOESNT use AI]* i might have a different take on this since i’m an artist, what r ur thoughts?
*NB: original post contains the text: "as an artist using AI images" but this was corrected in a later comment:
also i didn’t read over this after typing it out but, meant to say, “as an artist who DOESNT use AI”
In a twisted way, this makes sense as an exercise for English class. Why would someone go to an autoplag image generator, type in a prompt (perhaps something like "laptop and smartphones on a table at a lakefront") and save this image. It's a question I can't easily answer myself. It's hard to imagine the intention behind wanting to synthesize this particular picture, but it's probably something we'll be asking often in the near future.
I can even understand the shrimp Jesus slop or soldiers with huge bibles stuff to an extent. I can understand what the intended emotional appeal is and at least feel something like bewilderment or amusement about the surreality of them. This one would be just banal even if it were a real photo, so why make this? The AI didn't have intent or imbue meaning in the image but surely someone did.
Me, a nuclear engineer reading about "Google restarting six nuclear power plants"
lol, lmao even
Future headline: “Google quietly shuts down six nuclear power plants”
Zitron's given commentary on PC Gamer's publicly pilloried pro-autoplag piece:
He's also just dropped a thorough teardown of the tech press for their role in enabling Silicon Valley's worst excesses. I don't have a fitting Kendrick Lamar reference for this, but I do know a good companion piece: Devs and the Culture of Tech, which goes into the systemic flaws in tech culture which enable this shit.
Musk's twitter is unleashin/g/ the worst posters that the CS world has to offer
Oh I certainly did meet a lot of people employed in auth related stuff that clearly spent only 2 weeks on learning anything about OpenID and I certainly didn't not hate their guts and wished they were replaced by a small shell script
the raw, mediocre teenage energy of assuming you can pick up any subject in 2 weeks because you’ve never engaged with a subject more complex than playing a video game and you self-rate your skill level as far higher than it actually is (and the sad part is, the person posting this probably isn’t a teenager, they just never grew out of their own bullshit)
given how oddly specific “application auth protocol” is, bets on this person doing at best minor contributions to someone else’s OAuth library they insist on using everywhere? and when they’re asked to use a more appropriate auth implementation for the situation or to work on something deeper than the surface-level API, their knowledge immediately ends
twitter gon' have nothin' left but the cranks
Just guys like that and guys like this
[https://x.com/shinboson/status/1846000415793463684?s=46](Roko gets dunked on.)
He had some remarkable tweets a few weeks back about how he was the equal of billionaires or some shit. I wish I had shared it.
Is he some kind of computer fondler irl?
Think this might be the first tweet of Roko I somewhat agree with. At least Roko did something somewhat intellectual in creating pascals wager for nerds. Musks intellectual accomplishments are worse. He thinks the derivative function is some sort of glorious masterpiece of math, and he doesn't seem to understand chess. I think the only things he really created was the handle that sinks into the car, and the look of the cybertruck.
Funny to see the Rationalists start to turn on their glorious savior from AGI doom. (Which has been happening for a while now it seems, some even argue he never actually interacted with anybody from the Rationality community (btw before he blocked people being able to see all people you follow on twitter he followed slatestarcodex)))
Okay but "Elon is not smarter than me" is a universally true statement in the exact same way as "dumb as a rock" is a universally applicable idiom.
Indeed, it isn't that Roko is smart, it is the bar is so low.
If he's so smart, why did he put the car in the asteroid belt and not on a road?
he's a mathematician, is or was a lecturer somewhere i think
Quick sidenote, you cocked up the formatting on the hyperlink - you're supposed to put [text in square brackets and](the link in circle brackets) like this
Thanks!