mii

joined 8 months ago
[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 hours ago

I'd say lol but I'm like 72% sure this is straight out of the video game industry's playbook and very much intentional to create hype because everyone has forgotten this shit even exists.

Also, I'm still waiting for just one use case for video-generating autoplag that is, even in theory, not either morally reprehensible or outright criminal.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 19 hours ago (1 children)

So there's apparently a memecoin site with the not-at-all suspicious name pump.fun and Coffeezilla made a video about it on his second channel.

Also: Epilepsy warning for that site. It's full of flashing colors and moving elements like late 90s Geocities.

I have no idea what the fuck is even going on there, but apparently people threaten to kill themselves or their animals if you don't invest in their shitcoin there, or run actual cockfights where they murder the chickens live on stream if the line doesn't go up.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 days ago (1 children)

This is fucked even without the hallucinating Clippy in the backend.

If your desktop is idle for more than 30-60 seconds (no "meaningful" mouse & keyboard movement), you get a red flag

People getting ~~flogged~~ flagged for being lazy for a few seconds reminds me of something …

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 days ago

That was a great read.

The point of all of this is to say: the tech utopia fantasy is truly dead to me. The image of the cool, hippie, leftist Silicon Valley tech is wrong.

I feel this in my soul, because I was that leftist hippie who got into tech because he believed all this shit and getting disillusioned over time was just fucking painful and made me hate those goons with a passion.

The straw I have left is that I’m not alone and that more people realize this and we make our own communities again that don’t suck. There’s still a long way to go, and Fedi has its own problems, especially when it comes to kick out the racists, sexists, and other bigots, but I try to stay positive that we’ll get there. At least to a degree.

(I mean, we have Awful and it’s an example that you can keep the bar nazi-free if you want to.)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 days ago (1 children)

Seems like they've actually done this now. There's a preface note now.

This topic was chosen based on the technical merit of the project before we were aware of its author's political views and controversies. Our coverage of technical projects is never an endorsement of the developers' political views. The moderation of comments here is not meant to defend, or defame, anybody, but is in keeping with our longstanding policy against personal attacks. We could certainly have handled both topic selection and moderation better, and will endeavor to do so going forward.

Which is better than nothing, I guess, but still feels like a cheap cop-out.

Side-note: I can actually believe that they didn't know about Justine being a fucking nazi when publishing this, because I remember stumbling across some of her projects and actually being impressed by it, and then I found out what an absolute rabbit hole of weird shit this person is. So I kinda get seeing the portable executables project, thinking, wow, this is actually neat, and running with it.

Not that this is an excuse, because when you write articles for a website that should come with a bit of research about the people and topic you choose to cover and you have a bit more responsibility than someone who's just browsing around, but what do I know.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 weeks ago (3 children)

So, ethics and legality are strategic liabilities? Jesus fucking Christ, that’s not even sneer-worthy. This guy is completely fucking insane.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 weeks ago

Such meme. Much wow. I see we’re continuing with giving dumb names to everything the Muskrat is involved in. Glad that hasn’t changed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (1 children)

Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it'd be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.

But honestly, I feel like there just isn't a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton's bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn't even private. It's mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).

Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I'm starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago) (3 children)

Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.

I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don't wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn't eat it without cleanup.

Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago

Wild that "We left OpenAI and founded out own company with alignment and safety"-Anthropic decides to get into bed with Palantir of all companies.

It's almost as if their whole safety shtick is complete bullshit. Hmm.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 weeks ago

Fuck me sideways. Looks like the machine will continue running at least for a while.

That’ll go down well with everyone and not erode the public’s opinion about the shitheads even further, I’m sure, when they’re allowed to ingest everything and make their chatbots even more racist and plagiarize even more stuff.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

For anyone who wants a belated Halloween scare:

Mental diarrhea from Donald Trump

https://xcancel.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1852033244729860397

Spoiler: The real kicker is in the hash tags.

 

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

 

It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.

Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.

You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.

Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.

And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.

 

It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.

“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”

I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).

Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.

Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.

[…] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].

Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".

[…] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”

I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.

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