TechTakes

An excellent post by Ludicity as per usual, but I need to vent two things.

John Mulaney gets paid by prompt fondlers to tell jokes at a party. He spends 45 minutes telling them that they are idiots, which is nice.

Bro really tried to sell his subscribers a “50$ a year” subscription to a “wallpaper” app.

archive: archive.fo/zNRet

“stepping away because I want to create the time and space to do my own exploration.”

Do you look at the possibility of political turbulence ahead of November’s US presidential election and think: democracy could be in trouble? So does a group of tech entrepreneurs backed by big Silicon Valley money. And they love it.

the symbolism is 😗👌

investors include Saudi Arabia, the country whose wealth rests on fossil fuels

None of what I write in this newsletter is about sowing doubt or “hating,” but a sober evaluation of where we are today and where we may end up on the current path. I believe that the artificial intelligence boom — which would be better described as a generative AI boom — is (as I’ve said before) unsustainable, and will ultimately collapse. I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.

cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/25239919

Perhaps there will be some quality sneers, perhaps not. But in this moment the orange site becomes sentient and asks if the emperor is really wearing clothes

The benefits of crypto are self evident, thus it is necessary to build an elaborate faux education system to demonstrate them.

I will say I’m not much of a fan of mysqls but uhhhhh this seems bad

another valiant attempt to get “promptfonder” into more common currency

Revered friends. I wrote a thing. Mainly because I had a stack of stuff on Joseph Weizenbaum on tap and the AI classroom thing was stuck in my head. I don’t know if it’s good, but it’s certainly written.

saw this kicking around on the lobsters frontpage

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

reuters.com/…/openai-co-founder-sutskevers-new-sa…

“Total demand for electricity last year grew by 4.4pc, or 1.3 terawatts (TW), but 80pc of that increase, or 1.1TW, was from data centre growth.”

We also want to be clear in our belief that the categorical condemnation of Artificial Intelligence has classist and ableist undertones, and that questions around the use of AI tie to questions around privilege."

Got the pointer to this from Allison Parrish who says it better than I could:

School student tells AI to put 20 other students’ faces on nude pictures, shares them in chat; it takes months for anyone including the school administrators to act because of some extremely, uh, dubious loophole.

I guess self-driving cars are not killing people fast enough and they're diversifying.

After a decade of cryptofascism and failed political activism, our dear friend jart is realizing that they don't really have much of a positive legacy. If only there was something they could have done about that.

Hello all. People were very kind when I originally posted the start of this series. I've refrained from spamming you with every part but I thought I'd post to say the very final installment is done.

think I forgot this one

Looks like it might actually have happened.

Here's the list: