TechTakes

An morewronger discusses the "points system" implemented by the Ukrainian armed forces where soldiers can spend points earned by destroying Russian targets on new drone hardware

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sJpwvYsC5tJis8onw/the-ukraine-war-and-the-kill-market

Lots of wittering about markets and Gotthards law, but what struck me was

Now, this is clearly a repugnant market. Repugnant market is a market where some people would like to engage in it and other people think they shouldn’t. (Think market in human kidneys. Or prostitution. Or the market in abortions. [...])

(my emphasis)

What "market in abortion", motherfucker???

trying to follow up on shillrinivasan's pet project, and it's ... sparse

that "opening ceremony" video which kicked around a couple weeks ago only had low 10s of people there, and this post (one of the few recent things mentioning it that I could find) has photos with a rather stark feature: not a single one of them showing people engaged in Doing Things. the frontpage has a different photo, and I count ~36 people there?

even the coworking semicubicles look utterly fucking garbage

anyone seen anything more recent?

Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors

sinks like a pellet of uranium on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43825285

edit flagged and dead

New piece from Brian Merchant: The AI jobs crisis is here, now

As its title implies, its about the wide-ranging job losses caused by the rise of AI.

Quick update on the ongoing copyright suit against OpenAI: The federal judge has publicly sneered at Facebook's fair use argument:

"You have companies using copyright-protected material to create a product that is capable of producing an infinite number of competing products," said Chhabria to Meta's attorneys in a San Francisco court last Thursday.

"You are dramatically changing, you might even say obliterating, the market for that person's work, and you're saying that you don't even have to pay a license to that person… I just don't understand how that can be fair use."

The judge itself does seem unconvinced about the material cost of Facebook's actions, however:

"It seems like you're asking me to speculate that the market for Sarah Silverman's memoir will be affected by the billions of things that Llama [Meta's AI model] will ultimately be capable of producing," said Chhabria.

More big "we had to fund, enable, and sane wash fascism b.c. the leftist wanted trans people to be alive" energy from the EA crowd.

as a thing both parallel and tangent to usual sneerjects, this semafor article is kinda notable

I'll try gather previous dm sneers here later, but some things that stood out:

• the author writes about groupchats in the most goddamn abstract way possible, as though they're immensely surprised
• the subject matter acts as hard confirmation/evidence of observed lockstep over the last few years by so many of the worst fucker around
• the author then later goes "oh yeah but no I've actually done this and been burned by it" so I'm just left thinking "skill issue" (and while I say that curtly, I will readily be among the first people to get extremely vocal about the ways a lot of this tech falls short in purpose sometime)

Time saved by AI offset by new work created, study suggests -- Ars Technica

dhh having a normal one

Found on the sneer club legacy version -

ChatGPT 4o will straight up tell you you're God.

Also I find this quote interesting (emphasis mine:

He knew that ChatGPT could not be sentient by any established definition of the term, but he continued to probe the matter because the character’s persistence across dozens of disparate chat threads “seemed so impossible.” “At worst, it looks like an AI that got caught in a self-referencing pattern that deepened its sense of selfhood and sucked me into it,” Sem says. But, he observes, that would mean that OpenAI has not accurately represented the way that memory works for ChatGPT.

I would absolutely believe that this is the case, especially if like Sem you have a sufficiently uncommon name that the model doesn't have a lot of context and connections to hang on it to begin with.

Horrible "rubberhosing" of cryptocurrency people continues. Guardian article, content warning, bit extremer than a rubber hose.