Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking "they can be very useful" (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:
Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd's having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he's getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.
New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble's aftermath
Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google's AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):
TL;DR: They're a boutique video game company who scam video game collectors with overpriced physical releases of video games, and dress up their entire operation in the guise of video game preservation.
Recently, their inner workings have been exposed, showing the company to be an abusive hellscape roughly on par with Activision-Blizzard (minus the rampant misogyny), with employee abuse at basically every level and widespread financial misconduct.
Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.
Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:
I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.
If every please and thank you speeds up the inevitable financial death spiral of this abominable industry then it’s actively reducing the overall harm
"Please" and "thank you" are only 1-3 tokens, so they only have a major impact on ChatGPT in aggregate.
The ending monologue of Atlas Shrugged, on the other hand
New piece from Brian Merchant: The fury at 'America's Most Powerful'
The piece primarily focuses around a parody of the "Iraqi Most Wanted" playing cards that were made for the invasion of Iraq, which feature the faces and home addresses of various tech billionaires (well, the "art" decks do - the "merch" decks feature their publicly listed office addresses instead), and uses that to talk about the boiling rage against the elites that has become a defining feature of the current American political climate.
That ain't clickbait, Xe Iaso's personally-made anti-scraping measure (originally made to deal with Amazon overloading their git server) has ended up being used by the literal United Nations.
I recommend reading the full blogpost, its a wild ride.
I imagine a lotta people will be doing the same now, if not dismissing any further stuff from SciShow/Crash Course altogether.
Active distrust is a difficult thing to exorcise, after all.