nightsky

404 media: I Tested The AI That Calls Your Elderly Parents If You Can't Be Bothered

It's a service that makes an AI voice chatbot call your parents daily, so you don't have to, and then it even sends you a notification to your phone with an AI summary of what your parent told the AI.

I really didn't think that people can come up with new AI-based ideas anymore that would astonish me, but there, I was wrong, they did it. This is so cold and fundamentally alienating to me, it reminds me of that recently much-quoted Miyazaki phrase, "an insult to life itself".

I hope that either way the opportunity will be taken to move this all to a safer/independent footing.

No more CVEs, so I guess that means no more vulnerabilities, the computer security crisis is solved, who knew it would be that easy!

It's a complete shitshow and very scary, even just looking at it from the outside, can't imagine what it must feel like from the inside. I keep having to remind myself that all these things that currently happen are real.

Yes, that's true. Indirectly it costs them all dearly with ransomware. Likewise, I think the overall damage that AI will do to society as a whole will be much, much greater than just rotting some tech companies from the inside (most of which I wouldn't be sad anyway if they went away...).

What I meant is that with blockchain the big tech companies at least didn't willingly destroy their products, their processes, their decision making etc. I.e. they didn't put blockchain into absolutely everything, all the way to MS Notepad. What I find staggering about this hype is the depth of the delusion, the willingness to not just experiment with it but really go all-in.

That text is painful to read (I wonder how much of it is slop)... ugh, what is chatgpt doing to the brains of people? (And I've had the bad luck of reading some pretty unhinged pro-AI stuff from management at my employer too, although not as bad as this mail from shopify).

Is there a precedent for this hype? For the extent of damage that it will cause? Most tech industry hype is a waste of resources, but otherwise mostly harmless. Like that time when everyone believed that XML is the holy grail, that was silly, and although we still have to deal with some unfortunate data formats from those days, it passed. There were worse ones, most notably blockchain was almost catastrophic, but most companies hesitated to go all-in and pursued it more on the side, so when that hype faded, they simply buried their involvement and that was that.

But "AI"... it has such potential to create significant and long term damage to the companies adopting it. The slop code alone might haunt them forever, in ways that even the worst excesses of 90s enterprise java couldn't. There's nothing to learn from resulting failure, except "don't use AI".

In this case, given shopify's general behaviour, I won't be sad at all though if they crash and fail.

60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler

Now I wonder, is this a) the most extreme case of "young developer hybris" ever seen, or b) they don't actually plan to implement the existing functionality anyway because they want to drastically cut who gets money, or c) lol whatever, Elon said so.

But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this: [...]

Labrador retrievers ;_; You're getting too good at this...

sam altman is greentexting in 2025

Ugh. Now I wonder, does he have an actual background as an insufferable imageboard edgelord or is he just trying to appear as one because he thinks that's cool?

That's much better!

Damn, I should also enrich all my future writing with a few paragraphs of special exceptions and instructions for AI agents, extraterrestrials, time travelers, compilers of future versions of the C++ standard, horses, Boltzmann brains, and of course ghosts (if and only if they are good-hearted, although being slightly mischievous is allowed).

The article already starts great with that picture, labeled:

An artist's illustration of a deceptive AI.

what

Good one!