TechTakes

Interesting (in a depressing way) thread by author Alex de Campi about the fuckery by Unbound/Boundless (crowdfunding for publishing, which segued into financial incompetence and stealing royalties), whose latest incarnation might be trying to AI their way out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

From the liquidator’s proposals:

We are also undertaking new areas of business that require no funds to implement, such as starting to increase our rights income from book to videogaming by leveraging our contacts in the gaming industry and potentially creating new content based on our intellectual property utilizing inexpensive artificial intelligence platforms.

(emphasis mine)

They don’t appear to actually own any intellectual property anymore (due to defaulting on contracts) so I can’t see this ending well.

Original thread, for those of you with bluesky accounts: https://bsky.app/profile/alexdecampi.bsky.social/post/3lqfmpme2722w

New Blood In The Machine: The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses

Loose Mission Impossible Spoilers

The latest Mission Impossible movie features a rogue AI as one of the main antagonists. But on the other hand, the AI's main powers are lies, fake news, and manipulation, and it only gets as far as it does because people allow fear to make themselves manipulable and it relies on human agents to do a lot of its work. So in terms of promoting the doomerism narrative, I think the movie could actually be taken as opposing the conventional doomer narrative in favor of a calm, moderate, internationally coordinated (the entire plot could have been derailed by governments agreeing on mutual nuclear disarmament before the AI subverted them) response against AI's that ultimately have only moderate power.

Adding to the post-LLM hype predictions: I think post LLM bubble popping, "Terminator" style rogue AI movie plots don't go away, but take on a different spin. Rogue AI's strength's are going to be narrower, their weaknesses are going to get more comical and absurd, and idiotic human actions are going to be more of a factor. For weaknesses it will be less "failed to comprehend love" or "cleverly constructed logic bomb breaks its reasoning" and more "forgets what it was doing after getting drawn into too long of a conversation". For human actions it will be less "its makers failed to anticipate a completely unprecedented sequence of bootstrapping and self improvement" and more "its makers disabled every safety and granted it every resource it asked for in the process of trying to make an extra dollar a little bit faster".

So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry on

I hate I'm so terminally online I found out about the rumor that Musk and Stephen Miller's wife are bumping uglies through a horrorfic parody account

https://mastodon.social/@bitterkarella@sfba.social/114593332907413196

OT: Welp. Think interview went well. Just waiting for them to check references (oh god) and I should know whats what by Monday.

Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:

• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
• AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search

Am I the only person not impressed by veo3? Yeah there are more details yada yada, but the details are still wrong.

The view of the garbage fractal isn't improved by zooming deeper into the Bullshit-Mandlebrot Set.

In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/

Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.

Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.

New webbed brief from Heydon

https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

currently reading https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570

this is PsiQuantum, who are hot prospects to build an actually-quantum computer

no, they have not yet factored 35

but they are seriously planning qubits on a wafer and they think they can make a chip with 1m noisy qubits

anyone know more about this? does that preprint (from last year) pass sniff tests?

(my interest is journalistic, and also the first of these companies to factor 35 gets all the VC money ever)

New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:

What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible

LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev

New artcle from Brian Merchant: An 'always on' OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen

Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Device^tm^, I think Merchant's correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Device^tm^ and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.

headlines of Device^tm^ wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian's noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Device^tm^ as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI's public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley's reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Device^tm^ wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.

Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:

Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he's a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed's just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.

OT: just got a job interview and wanted to pass the good vibes on!

time amplifying the nonsense around saltman’s orb grift

features a helluva lot of words while at multiple points remaining entirely incurious about the claims it amplifies

Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/

I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:

It doesn't even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isn't plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldn't do.

NEW ZITRON DROPPED

Tante has a couple of questions for Anthropic:

Do we know if Anthropic named their (technically garbage) "Agentic AI" protocol MCP in refence to the antagonist of the TRON movie?

And if it is: Holy shit can tech dudes just stop showing us how little they understand text or anything? Like, we understand. You can't read.

New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them