rook @ rook @awful.systems

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2 yr. ago

And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:

“We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob

https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979

It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT

It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.

I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.

Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.

https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood

I can imagine a world where AI becomes extremely good at flipping burgers or driving cars well before it learns how to write software or […] protein folding or playing board games

That’s because despite Moravec’s paradox being noted down in the 80s (y’know, the last ai winter) there’s still a certain kind of asshole who thinks that flipping burgers is an easy task performed by stupid people but playing go is somehow the height of human intellect, despite 40+ years of evidence to the contrary.

But of course they named it “atlas”. Openai is clearly the work randian supermen.

Also, anil sounds like he might be a little out of touch with regards to how people search these days. Careful keyword searching isn’t even as useful as it used to be, given the damage google et al have done to their own products.

(also also, interactive fiction has marched on a little since zork and infocom were the latest and greatest things, but I accept that most people won’t have noticed)

There are various other posts here on the general subject.

https://awful.systems/post/5897965

Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

I see there’s at least one big fan of Moldbug still trying to implement his perfect neofeudal state.

https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-wants-strong-influence-over-the-robot-army-hes-building/

My fundamental concern with regard to how much voting control I have at Tesla is, if I go ahead and build this enormous robot army, can I just be ousted at some point in the future?

If we build this robot army, do I have at least a strong influence over this robot army? Not control, but a strong influence … I don't feel comfortable building that robot army unless I have a strong influence.

I’m sure this is fine, largely because he is an idiot. Probably bad news for other shareholders and customers though.

Anyone else getting “when I die, you’re all joining me in my mausoleum” vibes from musk?

Mmm. There’s certainly nothing else about any of the people or projects involved that’s likely to be a source of fuss, either.

No sir, nothing but apolitical dramaless software development as far as the eye can see.

I know nfts are old news now, but:

lol, decentralisation.

What, are you telling me you’re not prepared to share your most intimate details with elon musk’s edgelord/waifu simulator in order to let it pretend to be you well enough to fool a bunch of professionals who should know better, and let it decide whether you should live or die? With a marketing pitch like that, who could possibly refuse?

Somehow I missed the fact that yesterday paypal’s blockchain operator fucked up and accidentally minted 300 trillion itchy and scratchy coins.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/?id=paxos-accidental-mint

And now apparently it turns out that it was just a sequence of stupid whereby they accidentally deleted 300 million, which would have been impressive all by itself, then tried to recreate it (🎶 but at least it isn’t fiat currency🎶) and got the order of magnitude catastrophically wrong and had to delete that before finally undoing their original mistake. Future of finance right here, folks.

Anyone else know the grisly details? The place I heard it from is a mostly-private account on mastodon which isn’t really shareable here, and they didn’t say where they’d heard it.

Interesting developments reported by ars technica: Inside the web infrastructure revolt over Google’s AI Overviews

I don’t think any of this is actually good news for the people who’re actually suffering the effects of ai scraping and bullshit generation, but I do think it is a good idea that someone with sufficient clout is standing up to google et al and suggesting that they can’t just scrape al the things, all the time, and then screw the source of all their training data.

I’m somewhat unhappy that it is cloudflare doing this, a company who have deeply shitty politics and an unpleasantly strong grasp on the internet already. I very much do not want the internet to be divided into cloudflare customers, and the slop bucket.

Aside from the name being stupid and annoying (and their justifications and comparisons being additionally stupid and annoying) I’m… not entirely against this license? As a less shitty (AFAICT) version of the BUSL, I’d rather companies used this than the BUSL or just going closed-source (which is an option a bunch of firms have chosen, after all).

I’m attempting to get my employer to open-source some of our stuff, and there are several people at the top who are proprietary software folk at heart and this seems like a reasonable way to trick them into relaxing a their grip a little.

Fosstodon does not have a good history in this regard. It took some effort to get them to drop a far-right mod earlier this year, and even with a shuffle of leadership they’re clearly all about the centrist acceptance of the right wing and the repeated assertion that tech isn’t political and that all this is just so much drama.

“If you cannot quit everything you may as well not quit anything” is not a great rallying cry, because there’s a strong risk that people will take you up on your suggestion.

Doing something imperfect is better than doing nothing. Let’s not purity test.

I appreciate that licenses are not magic shields, and that you’re exposed to significant risks that I am not, so apologies if I came across a bit “have you tried googling”, which I was trying to avoid.

Still, even without getting involved yourself it might be worth finding some local radio folk (if there are any) if only to see what they do, and what equipment they use, and whether they’ve got into any trouble over it.

But setting one of these up would definitely get me on a list here

Is that the standard state attitude to amateur radio there, too? I mean, obviously getting an amateur radio license involves actively putting your name on a government list and paying money for the privilege, and I can understand you not wanting to do that, but it looks like the 430 band is available to amateur radio licensees there, and you can get lora devices in that range. Amateur radio folk seem to be mostly viewed as peculiar last century fossils (and to be fair, many of them are) because everyone else (legal and otherwise) has vastly better equipment, which might give you some leeway to experiment with mesh networking?

I suspect we all knew it already, but Bruno Dias offers some receipts: the bluesky crackdown on people suggesting that charlie kirk should rest in piss came several days before the government leaned on social media firms.

September 12th: bluesky mourns kirk: https://aftermath.site/bluesky-charlie-kirk-dead-rest-in-piss

September 15th: whitehouse nastygram : https://bsky.app/profile/chipnick.com/post/3m2k6va63222m

(also, bitter lol at “gentlemen”, because running a tech company is a mans job, don’t you know)

They complied well in advance, because it’s what they wanted to do anyway.

Polyphasic sleep was a thing for a while. Was that it?