this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2024
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TechTakes
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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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a screenshot of a bluesky post from Tim Dawson:
lot of negativity towards Al lately, but consider :
are these tools ethical or environmentally sustainable? No.
but do they enable great things that people want? Also no.
but are they being made by well meaning people for good reasons? Once again, no.
maybe you're not being negative enough
Continuing on from this nugget that Lex Fucking Fridman will be "analyzing" the Roman Empire, some nutter in the xhitter thread hoped the real reason the Empire fell would be "inflation"
https://awful.systems/comment/4649129
Looking forward to some chuds referencing the coming 1,000 hour podcast as proof the Roman Empire fell because woke
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One to keep an eye on… you might all know this already, but apparently Mozilla has an “add ai chatbot to sidebar” in Firefox labs (https://blog.nightly.mozilla.org/2024/06/24/experimenting-with-ai-services-in-nightly/ and available in at least v130). You can currently choose from a selection of public llm providers, similar to the search provider choice.
Clearly, Mozilla has its share of AI boosters, given that they forced “ai help” onto MDN against a significant amount of protest (see https://github.com/mdn/yari/issues/9230 from last July for example) so I expect this stuff to proceed apace.
This is fine, because Mozilla clearly has time and money to spare with nothing else useful they could be doing, alternative browsers are readily available and there has never been any anti-ai backlash to adding this sort of stuff to any other project.
I told one of my college professors I'd been having issues with some software I had to learn to use for another class, and he said "can I give you a tip? try using chat-gpt to explain how to use it" and without thinking I said "why would I use chat-gpt? It's rubbish" and his face fell. Sorry, Prof, I know you were trying to help.
This was after he'd said to the class that he knew we would all be using chat-gpt for assignments.
Phase 3: Reality Distortion (2041-2050)
2041-2043: Financial Multiverse Modeling
- Quantum computers simulate multiple financial realities simultaneously
- Development of "Schrödinger's Ledger" prototype, allowing superposition of financial states
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/roadmap-quantum-accounting-milestones-evolution-garrett-irmsc
2026-2027: Blockchain Revolution
- Widespread adoption of blockchain for secure, transparent financial transactions
- Development of industry-specific blockchain solutions
- Smart contracts automate complex financial agreements
ah good, we're still on schedule for that I guess
I have to admit that I wasn't expecting LinkedIn to become a wretched hive of "quantum" bullshit, but hey, here we are.
Tangentially: Schrödinger is a one-man argument for not naming ideas after people.
Somebody played cookie clicker.
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new idea: get the morewrongers to work themselves up about "ontologically, is 'superhuman prediction' the same class as superintelligence?"
why? oh, y'know, just things:
I've clowned on Dan before for personal reasons, but my god, this is the dumbest post so far. If you had a superhuman forecasting model, you wouldn't just hand it out like a fucking snake oil salesman. You'd prove you had superhuman forecasting by repeatably beating every other hedge fund in the world betting on stock options. The fact that Dan is not a trillionaire is proof in itself that this is hogwash. I'm fucking embarrassed for him and frankly seething at what a shitty, slimily little grifter he is. And he gets to write legislation? You, you have to stop him!
You have to let it predict things that will happen before 2019, duh.
BRB training an LLM to be a super-goalpost-mover
Percentages are cheating, especially percentages below 50.
I'll predict a 49% chance Mont Blanc erupts tomorrow, covering half of Europe in chocolate.
As zero cannot exist as a chance, there is a chance this will happen.
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Ok this might be a bit petty of me but, yes this HN comment right here officer.
A group pwns an entire TLD with a fair amount of creativity, and this person is like (paraphrasing) "if you think that's bad news just wait until you hear AIs can find trivial XSS and SQL injections 😱".
Aside: have I ever mentioned here that you should really stick with .com / .net / .org / certain country domains? Because this sort of stuff is exactly why. Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
quoted because this is fucking gold and paraphrasing isn’t doing it:
Do you have any references/examples of this?
tons
rapid7 for example use LLMs to analyze code and identify vulnerabilities such as SQL injection, XSS, and buffer overflows.
Can you point me to a blog or feature of them that does this? I used to work at R7 up until last year and there was none of this functionality in their products at the time and nothing on the roadmap related to this.
must've been another company then which i got confused with the name
Good thing you have tons of examples.
Right?
e: you’ll never guess what a bunch of DEI Steve’s other posts are about
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Awful.systems can get a pass since the domain name is just that good.
a new source of anxiety has formed
in all seriousness, a backup domain name might not be the worst idea one day. I don’t think Lemmy’s federation particularly likes being ripped out of one FQDN and migrated to another, but it’s probably preferable to shutting down cause the owners of our TLD thoroughly shit the bed
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the original post is fucking amazing
here in the future, nothing fucking works
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Turns out purging your ranks of wokes and furries is more fun than, you know, actually developing a working Linux distro: Nix 2.24+ is vulnerable to (remote) privilege escalation.
(linking to the lobste.rs discussion because I feel it does a decent job curating related links around disclosure timelines etc.)
how's the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?
we have some dedicated Nix threads on FreeAsm, our community for open source stuff that might give you a good recap of the latest stuff. where I’m sitting as a former Nix contributor and advocate is — nothing is fixed, all this obvious fash shit worked so well it’s being tried in other open source communities, and I really would like a nice alternative to NixOS so I can finally release a lot of the Nix stuff I’ve been sitting on (and also because nixpkgs keeps breaking — so many maintainers left that some of the further corners of the package set I use are already showing a lot of rot)
Lix fixed it last month of course
found a quality sneer in the wild https://mander.xyz/post/17910623
From the reactions:
“With enough garbage the model will become sentient”
"I mean thats how humans are raised tho"
AAAAAAAAAAAA
(There is a tendency among promtfondlers to, in their attempt to hype up their objects of affection, diminish humans and humanity).
As my little 2 year old said, after listening to a white noise generator for days. "Holy shit, I think therefore I am!"
diminish humans and humanity
AKA tell on themselves
My heuristic is basically: until we can easily control the environment of earth, terraforming will not be on the horizon. Given that we are hell-bent on driving off of as many cliffs as we can, I’m pretty happy to continue thinking that we’ll never get off this rock proper within the ol’ lifespan
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Cohost going readonly at the end of this month, and shutting down at the end of the year: https://cohost.org/staff/post/7611443-cohost-to-shut-down
Their radical idea of building a social network that did not require a either VC funding or large amounts of volunteer labour has come to a disappointing, if not entirely surprising end. Going in without a great idea on how to monetise the thing was probably not the best strategy as it turns out.
To be clear: Cohost did take funding from an anonymous angel, and as a result will not be sharing their source code; quoting from your link:
Majority control of the cohost source code will be transferred to the person who funded the majority of our operations, as per the terms of the funding documents we signed with them; Colin and I will retain small stakes so we have some input on what happens to it, at their request.
We are unable to make cohost open source. the source code for cohost was the collateral used for the loan from our funder.
Somebody paid a very small amount of money to get a cleanroom implementation of Tumblr and did not mind that they would have to build a community and then burn it to the ground in the process. It turns out that angels are not better people than VCs.
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i used (and use, until the shutdown) cohost as my primary social media site. i'm not surprised, but i can't say it hasn't been disappointing. for all the issues it has (and it did have a lot) it was pretty much the only site that felt somewhat cozy to use for me. stings quite a bit
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Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.
The most black mirror part for me is where he's selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future "AI", represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn't a parody, they're literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.
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Taylor Swift is on the side of humans* in the battle against the AIs (instagram).
Recently I was made aware that AI of ‘me’ falsely endorsing Donald Trump’s presidential run was posted to his site. It really conjured up my fears around AI, and the dangers of spreading misinformation. It brought me to the conclusion that I need to be very transparent about my actual plans for this election as a voter. The simplest way to combat misinformation is with the truth.
I'm sure everyone remembers what this is referring to, y'know with the rest of the US election being so low-key and boring, but just in case here's an article with screenshots (Guardian).
Anyway I'm not here to talk politics. SwiftOnSecurity (spoiler: probably not actually Taylor Swift) thinks Taylor Swift will be a "cultural linchpin" against deepfakes.
As I've said before, Taylor Swift may be the cultural lynchpin for addressing abusive AI imitation and I think this was her personal opening salvo. Taylor Swift was previously driven to political advocacy partly by right-wing memes of her aping Hilter on genetic purity. I think she takes INCREDIBLE personal exception to herself being used as a puppet and this directly aligns with it. Directly addressed to political leaders.
Indeed that Donald Trump post isn't the first time she's been targeted. There was Deepfake Swift Porn in January that prompted Microsoft to add more safeguards**. A scam involving fake Le Creuset cookware (nytimes), and on a lighter note: fake Taylor Swift teaching Math on TikTok (Petapixel, whatever the heck a petapixel is).
The January incident prompted some legislatures to introduce the No AI Fraud Act, though looking at it it looks like it hasn't made it far through congress.
* Maybe not on the side of humans against climate change. With the private jet and all. God the US needs trains then at least all the celebrities could ride in luxurious rail cars like the olden days.
** Not sure about Microsoft but these safeguards aren't effective in general, I found a subreddit of people sharing AI image generator prompt tips to get around filters and it was pretty disturbing. But that's another story.
Tennessee has a new law against making LLM clones of performers without permission. It would be great to see our bullshit strike a blow for the side of righteousness, for once!
Yes, it is called the ELVIS Act. I'm sorry.
https://www.tn.gov/governor/news/2024/3/21/photos--gov--lee-signs-elvis-act-into-law.html
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Why are you saying that LLMs are useless when they're useless only most of the time
I'm sorry but I've been circling my room for an hour now seeing this and I need to share it with people lest I go insane.
Some ok anti-AI voices in that thread. But mostly a torrent of shit
Criticizing others for not being perfectly exacting with their language and then jumping in front of the LLM headlights all at once, truly the human mind has no limits.
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