gerikson

joined 2 years ago
[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 7 hours ago

there's no anime avatar, how do we know it's really Elon?

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 9 points 9 hours ago

This post is gold.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 13 hours ago (1 children)

"Mr. Burns" -- too on the nose. Try better, scriptwriters.

Using Runaway’s AI technology, the studio can avoid a pricy film shoot that would cost millions and take a few days and use AI to create the shot for about $10,000.

"I have been in this business long enough to become vice chairman. What is this "CGI" you speak of?"

(not sure you can get that sort of shot for less than $10K but you don't have to literally go out an shoot on film/digital actors and shit)

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 13 hours ago

This piece, although in a way defeatist, also gives me hope because there's at least one other person who has the same general feeling about LLMs that I do, and is a better writer.

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

I'm gonna think that the latest drumbeat of pro-LLM posts (tpacek's screed, this excrescense) is a last gasp of a system running in midair like the Coyote, before the VC money dries up.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 13 points 3 days ago (4 children)

Lobsters went down a VC financing rabbit hole the other day (thanks to me and @dgerard) and a user horked up this absolutely bonkers defense of OpenAI losing a galactic sum of money:

https://lobste.rs/s/wjb9ox/minio_removes_web_ui_features_from#c_rgatzz

(reproduced below in case it is removed in shame)


OpenAI is very different. They mainly lose money on ChatGPT, but it’s not really lost money, because they in turn accumulate fresh daha to further train their models. Data that none of their competitors have access to.

OpenAI is also different because AI is a major geopolitical factor at the moment and unless you’ve been living in a cave lately, you must have noticed that geopolitics is much more important than money these days. ChatGPT is an incredible intelligence gathering channel and cutting access to AI APIs would make US sanctions hurt that much more. The only other country that can compete with US companies when it comes to bulk training data access is China, via their social media alternatives like TikTok and RedNote. You can imagine the geopolitical implications of that too.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 3 days ago (5 children)

Maybe... like I mentioned, Nokia's S60 application stack was a mess. The underlying phone software and platform might have been there, but the 3rd party ecosystem wasn't. This was a huge part of the success of the iPhone, that 3rd party developers had a stable platform to develop for, and a steady financial partner (Apple) paying them.

No offense against Nokia but I really don't think the company had the mentality to offer that.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 18 points 5 days ago* (last edited 5 days ago) (10 children)

Nokia had great hardware, but crappy software (and I say that as a heavy Series 60 user back in the day). In a parallel world, Windows Mobile could have ridden that hardware to a glorious future, but it was transparent that Elop's acquisition was just part of a Byzantine internal Microsoft play.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 5 points 5 days ago

Good luck! I'm rooting for you.

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 5 days ago (1 children)

I hate I'm so terminally online I found out about the rumor that Musk and Stephen Miller's wife are bumping uglies through a horrorfic parody account

https://mastodon.social/@bitterkarella@sfba.social/114593332907413196

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 7 points 5 days ago

My pocket take: the chickens from 45 years of effective neoliberalism coming home to roost, coupled with Brexit hangover, has led the reactionary elements of UK society to retreat to rancid culture war positions

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 11 points 1 week ago (3 children)

why is robot lady in queue with springy legs so darn sexy

seriously though, good piece. Hopefully the fever breaks soon (yeah right)

[–] gerikson@awful.systems 6 points 1 week ago

Anecdata: if you're working in IT in Sweden you can get away with just English. I know a guy living in Berlin who hasn't ~~bothered~~got around to learning German yet, he also manages with English.

But it's a big Community and different parts have different requirements and of course different expectations.

 

current difficulties

  1. Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
  2. Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
  3. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  4. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  5. Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
  6. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  7. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  8. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  9. Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
  10. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  11. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  12. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  13. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  14. Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
  15. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  16. Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
  17. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  18. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  19. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  20. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  21. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  22. Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
  23. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
 

Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)

  1. Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
  2. Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
  3. Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
  4. Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
  5. Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
  6. Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
  7. Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
  8. Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
  9. Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
  10. Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
  11. Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
  12. Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
  13. Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
  14. Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
  15. Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
  16. Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
 

The previous thread has fallen off the front page, feel free to use this for discussions on current problems

Rules: no spoilers, use the handy dandy spoiler preset to mark discussions as spoilers

 

This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.

 

“It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same. No character personality comes through,” she said. Generated text also tends to lack a strong sense of place, she’s observed; the settings of the stories are either overly-detailed for popular locations, or too vague, because large language models can’t imagine new worlds and can only draw from existing works that have been scraped into its training data.

 

The grifters in question:

Jeremie and Edouard Harris, the CEO and CTO of Gladstone respectively, have been briefing the U.S. government on the risks of AI since 2021. The duo, who are brothers [...]

Edouard's website: https://www.eharr.is/, and on LessWrong: https://www.lesswrong.com/users/edouard-harris

Jeremie's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremieharris/

The company website: https://www.gladstone.ai/

 

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the "obscene energy demands of AI" with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm??????

Maybe it's just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what's arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

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