This FT post about the VC ghouls getting blindsided by daddies Elon and Trump fighting is pretty entertaining
https://www.ft.com/content/df15f13d-310f-47a5-89ed-330a6a379068
David Friedberg, a co-host of the All-In podcast that often features Musk and that has become a sounding board for the Trump-aligned tech world, suggested there was a broader cost to America from the spat between the US president and the Tesla boss. “China just won,” he posted.
Behind the scenes, prominent Silicon Valley figures were desperately trying to prevent Musk from appearing on an emergency episode of the podcast, according to two people familiar with the matter, out of concern that the billionaire would make the dispute even worse and poison the relationship with tech’s most powerful ally in Washington, vice-president JD Vance.
L. O. L.
I wonder if the US is closing in on the “imprison inconvenient billionaires for tax evasion” stage of managed democracy
there's no anime avatar, how do we know it's really Elon?
"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)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Good luck! I'm rooting for you.
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
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
why is robot lady in queue with springy legs so darn sexy
seriously though, good piece. Hopefully the fever breaks soon (yeah right)
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 botheredgot 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.
LWer asks: "what if property-based suffrage, but with crypto?"
Oh man this is peak venture capitalism crossed with Factorio - valuations are actually cash, and a factory is a black box where you just upload new software and other stuff comes out.
Let's take your average holder of car manufacturer stock. You're holding the stock because you believe the car manufacturer will continue making competitive products, and you'll get either dividends or higher valuations. Then OpenAI pitches up and offers you - what? They don't even have stock! Even if they did, you're exchanging a stake in something known for stake in an enterprise that have never made any cars, and when asked what kind of business plan they have they look shifty. No fucking way anyone will sell their stake for less than double what they have, especially if they find out the factory they're selling is gonna produce machines that will kill us all.
Wow he looks even dorkier in video than in photos.
Stupid sexy robot judge...
One thing an adversarial judicial system like the American one is that if one party sloppily use GenAI to write their documents, they can lose, because the other party can point that out. A lot of the excuses to use LLMs in software development is that modern software development is terrible anyway, so if you can get your slop to market faster than some other schlub, you probably won't lose customers. When there's a balanced incentive to point out hallucinations, they (hopefully) won't get that far.
"Free speech" is now a rightwing dogwistle, at least for me.
I have downloaded the relevant page from an open tab in Firefox ("Save as HTML), but it doesn't contain the latest craziness. If anyone is interested, let me know the best way to host such content.
What's scary is the raw number of upvotes he got for basically admitting to defrauding a FLOSS maintainer.
current difficulties
- Day 21 - Keypad Conundrum: 01h01m23s
- Day 17 - Chronospatial Computer: 44m39s
- Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
- Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
- Day 20 - Race Condition: 15m58s
- Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
- Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
- Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
- Day 22 - Monkey Market: 12m15s
- Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
- Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
- Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
- Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
- Day 18 - RAM Run: 05m55s
- Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
- Day 23 - LAN Party: 05m07s
- Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
- Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
- Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
- Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
- Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
- Day 19 - Linen Layout: 03m16s
- Day 01 - Historian Hysteria: 02m31s
Problem difficulty so far (up to day 16)
- Day 15 - Warehouse Woes: 30m00s
- Day 12 - Garden Groups: 17m42s
- Day 14 - Restroom Redoubt: 15m48s
- Day 09 - Disk Fragmenter: 14m05s
- Day 16 - Reindeer Maze: 13m47s
- Day 13 - Claw Contraption: 11m04s
- Day 06 - Guard Gallivant: 08m53s
- Day 08 - Resonant Collinearity: 07m12s
- Day 11 - Plutonian Pebbles: 06m24s
- Day 04 - Ceres Search: 05m41s
- Day 02 - Red Nosed Reports: 04m42s
- Day 10 - Hoof It: 04m14s
- Day 07 - Bridge Repair: 03m47s
- Day 05 - Print Queue: 03m43s
- Day 03 - Mull It Over: 03m22s
- 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
Razzlekhan, who conspired to launder tens of thousands of bitcoin, told attendees she was searching for work as a crypto consultant.
After Arkham Intelligence announced a $150,000 bounty for anyone who could prove the identity of the person behind a Donald Trump memecoin called $DJT, blockchain sleuth zachxbt quickly rose to the occasion. He submitted evidence that Martin Shkreli, the "pharma bro" who spent years in federal priso...
This season's showrunners are so lazy, just re-using the same old plots and antagonists.
Trump: Donald Trump promised to commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online illegal drug marketplace Silk Road, in a raucous speech before the Libertarian National Convention on Saturday night. “And if you vote for me, on Day One, I will commute the sentence of Ross Ulbricht,” t...
“The problem with AI is the people who use AI. They don't respect the written word,” the founder of Bards and Sages said.
> “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 U.S. government must move “decisively” to avert an “extinction-level threat" to humanity from AI, says a government-commissioned report
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.
Elon Musk’s greatest legacy will be as a provider of inane law school exam hypotheticals.
Yes, I know it's a Verge link, but I found the explanation of the legal failings quite funny, and I think it's "important" we keep track of which obscenely rich people are mad at each other so we can choose which of their kingdoms to be serfs in.
Biden's challenger model shot down despite super PAC support
Apologies for the link to The Register...
Dean Phillips is your classic ratfucking candidate, attempting to siphon off support from the incumbent to help their opponent. After a brief flare of hype before the (unofficial) NH primary, he seems to have flamed out by revealing his master plan too early.
Anyway, apparently some outfit called "Delphi" tried to create an AI version of him via a SuperPAC and got their OpenAI API access banned for their pains.
Quoth ElReg:
> Not even the presence of Matt Krisiloff, a founding member of OpenAI, at the head of the PAC made a difference.
> The pair have reportedly raised millions for We Deserve Better, driven in part by a $1 million donation from hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman, who described his funding of the super PAC as "the largest investment I have ever made in someone running for office."
So the same asshole who is combating "woke" and DEI is bankrolling Phillips, supposed to be the new Bernie. Got it.
Anyone else have this problem? It’s been bothering me for a while and is the last thing keeping me using mobile Chrome.
On the login page , after entering username and password, the “login” button does nothing. It might slightly change color but I am not directed to the site logged in, nor do I get an error.
platform: iOS
The username and password are entered automatically via either Firefox’s password store, or iOS’.
Years ago (we're talking decades) I ran into a small program that randomly generated raytraced images (think transparent orbs, lens flares, reflection etc), suitable for saving as wallpapers. It was a C/C++ program that ran on Linux. I've long since lost the name and the source code, and I wonder if there's anything like that out there now?
Rules: no spoilers.
The other rules are made up as we go along.
Share code by link to a forge, home page, pastebin (Eric Wastl has one here) or code section in a comment.
The wider community is still on Reddit, I wonder if there’s an interest to have a small alternative?
If not, what’s a good Lemmy instance for these things?
"All you do is cause boardroom drama, and maybe some other things I’m forgetting..."
In a since deleted thread on another site, I wrote
> For the OG effective altruists, it’s imperative to rebrand the kooky ultra-utilitarianists as something else. TESCREAL is the term adopted by their opponents.
Looks like great minds think alike! The EA's need to up their google juice so people searching for the term find malaria nets, not FTX. Good luck on that, Scott!
The HN comments are ok, with this hilarious sentence
> I go to LessWrong, ACX, and sometimes EA meetups. Why? Mainly because it's like the HackerNews comment section but in person.
What's the German term for a recommendation that's the exact opposite?
[this is probably off-topic for this forum, but I found it on HN so...]
Edit "enjoy" the discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38233810
