nfultz @ nfultz @awful.systems

Posts

5

Comments

21

Joined

2 yr. ago

For those of you in the (West) LA area, there's a panel with Brian Merchant happening tomorrow. Probably no food this school year but still looks good.

https://law.ucla.edu/events/democracy-technology-salon

If anyone does turn up, codeword is banana bread, otherwise I'll assume you're a lawyer (not derogatory).

When Prophecy Fails is worth the read just for the narrative, he literally had his grad students join a UFO / Dianetics cult and take notes in the bathroom and kept it going for months. Really impressive amount of shoe leather compared to most modern psych research.

Excerpt from the new Bender / Hanna book, AI Hype Is the Product and Everyone’s Buying It :

OpenAI alums cofounded Anthropic, a company solely focused on creating generative AI tools, and received $580 million in an investment round led by crypto-scammer Sam Bankman-Fried.

Just wondering, but what ever happened to those shares of Anthropic that SBF bought? Was it part of FTX (and the bankruptcy), or did he buy it himself and still holds them in prison? Or have they just been diluted to zero at this point anyway?

EDIT:

Found it; It was owned by FTX and part of the estate bankruptcy; 2/3 went to Abu Dhabi + Jane Street1, and the remainder went at $30 / share to a bunch of VC2.

In April 2021, AI Dungeon implemented a new algorithm for content moderation to prevent instances of text-based simulated child pornography created by users. The moderation process involved a human moderator reading through private stories.[49][41][50][51] The filter frequently flagged false positives due to wording (terms like "eight-year-old laptop" misinterpreted as the age of a child), affecting both pornographic and non-pornographic stories. Controversy and review bombing of AI Dungeon occurred as a result of the moderation system, citing false positives and a lack of communication between Latitude and its user base following the change.[40]

Haha. Good find.

In a similar train of thought:

A.I. as normal technology (derogatory) | Max Read

But speaking descriptively, as a matter of long precedent, what could be more normal, in Silicon Valley, than people weeping on a message board because a UX change has transformed the valence of their addiction?

I like the DNF / vaporware analogy, but did we ever have a GPT Doom or Duke3d killer app in the first place? Did I miss it?

It’ll probably earn a lot of users if and when Github goes down the shitter.

I'd argue GH is well on it's way, probably jumped around the time Hacktoberfest morphed into a DDoS on maintainers. Or maybe more recently, when they handed peoples repos (and API keys lol) over to Copilot. Or maybe earlier, when they started calling their users "maintainers" instead of "developers". Sometime in the last 6 years though.

There have been a number of contenders over the years - gitlab, gitea but none of them have been able to brand/market well enough to really to really impact GH or to compete with the subsidized free storage and Actions credits plus switching costs. Even Atlassian / BB is largely irrelevant.

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/your-review-the-astral-codex-ten lol but good for lore:

The most toxic the comments section has ever got (beyond the very early days) was on the post Gupta on Enlightenment. I feel like the comments section on this post should be part of the ACX main canon because it is so cosmically hilarious. It concerns a man name Vinay Gupta (founder of a blockchain-based dating website) and his claims to have reached enlightenment. Some people in the comments are sceptical that Vinay Gupta is indeed an enlightened being, citing that enlightened people don’t typically found blockchain-based dating websites. A new forum poster with the handle ‘Vinay Gupta’, claiming to be Vinay Gupta and writing in a very similar style to the actual Vinay Gupta, turns up and starts arguing with everyone in an extremely toxic way (in the objective sense that his comments score very highly on the toxic-bert scoring system), which provokes more merriment that a self-described enlightened being would deploy such classic internet tough-guy approaches as ‘I don’t think much of a four-on-one face off against untrained opponents’ (link) and ‘this board is filled with self-satisfied assholes who feel free to hold forth on whatever subject crosses their minds, with the absolute certainty that they’re the smartest people in the room’

I try to talk to ChatGPT for 2 straight hours but go crazy and have to stop | Daniel Hentschel

I'm here to help in whatever way I can. Just let me know what you'd like to do next.

What I'd like to do next is fucking hang myself. Oh shit I shouldn't have said that. No, I'm joking. That was a joke. I was joking about that. Joking.

Not sure if this was already posted here but saw it on LI this morning - AI for Good [Appearance?] - sometimes we focus on the big companies and miss how awful the sycophantic ecosystem gets.

Nikhil's guest post at Zitron just went up - https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-remarkable-incompetence-at-the-heart-of-tech/

EDIT: the intro was strong enough I threw in $7. Second half is just as good.

I liked his stuff on wework back in the day. Funny how he could see one tech grift really clearly and fall for another. Then again, WeWork is in the black these days. Anyway I think Galloway pivoted (apologies) to Mens Rights lately; and he also gave some money to UCLA Extension (ie not the main campus) which is a bit hard to interpret.

https://www.profgalloway.com/ice-age/ Good post until I hit the below:

Instead of militarizing immigration enforcement, we should be investing against the real challenge: AI. The World Economic Forum says 9 million jobs globally may be displaced in the next five years. Anthropic’s CEO warns AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white-collar jobs. Imagine the population of Greece storming the shores of America and taking jobs (even jobs Americans actually want), as they’re willing to work 24/7 for free. You’ve already met them. Their names are GPT, Claude, and Gemini.

Having a hard time imagining 300 but AI myself, Scott. Could we like, not shoehorn AI into every other discussion?

One of the subjects in the MER study posted that too: https://x.com/QuentinAnthon15/status/1943948796414898370

Aella popped up on doomscroll - https://youtu.be/r7WL6kaTJnw

E: oh man the comments are great

E2:

1:08:02 There's a lot of discussions among the rationalist community about the uneven distribution of IQ and its correlation with race. Why is this a topic that people fixate on if they're also convinced that this ultra intelligence an AGI that's like smarter than every human on the planet why are these marginal differences so important to people?

Sure, done.

Another response to Ptacek. "Vibe coding as contempt for materiality" part is particularly good.

https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/material_girl

AI powered lie detectors spotted in the wild - https://pimagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/100.png => https://eyecanknow.com/

Brought to you by researchers at the University of Utah. smh.

https://thedailywtf.com/ is still going

In the spirit of "worse is better", here is a ublock filter I just threw together to highlight all the comments less than a day old:

    
! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text("hours ago"):style(background-color:#7700AA)
 
  

EDIT: fix bug with 1 hour and 20 minutes ago. regex is even worse is better.

    
! Jul 31, 2024 https://awful.systems
awful.systems##.comment article.comment-node :has-text(/(hour|minute)s? ago/):style(background-color:#7700AA)

  

I have LLMs translate novels, I can tell when they run over the window because they forget characters' gender half way through, things like that. Lots of legal documents are even longer, maybe.