TechTakes

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I see Google's deal with Reddit is going just great...

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240517214034/https://www.404media.co/here-is-what-axons-bodycam-report-writing-ai-looks-like-draft-one/

tl;dr ai will write up officer reports used to help convict people, based on bodycam audio. of course we can expect it to display the usual features of fictionalizing, bias and diffusion of accountability

special highlight: end of the article includes a comment from the EFF, imploring municipalities not to purchase this tech. company responds with a statement pitching the product to prosecutors. make your own inference about who has control over this decision

Many magazines have closed their submission portals because people thought they could send in AI-written stories.

For years I would tell people who wanted to be writers that the only way to be a writer was to write your own stories because elves would not come in the night and do it for you.

With AI, drunk plagiaristic elves who cannot actually write and would not know an idea or a sentence if it bit their little elvish arses will actually turn up and write something unpublishable for you. This is not a good thing.

cross-posted from: https://infosec.pub/post/12406642

Body of the toot:

Absolutely unbelievable but here we are. #Slack by default using messages, files etc for building and training #LLM models, enabled by default and opting out requires a manual email from the workspace owner.

https://slack.com/intl/en-gb/trust/data-management/privacy-principles

What a time to be alive in IT. 🤦‍♂️

archive https://archive.ph/is57b

Ilya tweet:

After almost a decade, I have made the decision to leave OpenAI. The company’s trajectory has been nothing short of miraculous, and I’m confident that OpenAI will build AGI that is both safe and beneficial under the leadership of @sama, @gdb, @miramurati and now, under the excellent research leadership of @merettm. It was an honor and a privilege to have worked together, and I will miss everyone dearly. So long, and thanks for everything. I am excited for what comes next — a project that is very personally meaningful to me about which I will share details in due time.

Jan tweet:

I resigned

this comes precisely 6mo after Sam Altman's job at OpenAI was rescued by the Paperclip Maximiser. NYT: "Dr. Sutskever remained an OpenAI employee, but he never returned to work." lol

orange site discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40361128

lesswrong discussion: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JSWF2ZLt6YahyAauE/ilya-sutskever-and-jan-leike-resign-from-openai

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

from @fasterandworse of this parish

Thank you sir, I didn’t know the way to fix ailing welfare states was to make ChatGPT available to all.

It is truly the ultimate technofix.

hell yeah, keep up the good work, fuck the police.

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

“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.

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid!

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post, there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

Matt Mullenweg is the CEO of WordPress. He recently had a bout of extreme shitheadry and massively transphobic behaviour on his product fucking Tumblr of all the fucking places to be a transphobe. Nobody there is delighted with him at present. His own staff are publicly posting what a shithead he is on the official Tumblr staff account!

So it turns out Mullenweg’s been like this for more than a few years now, it’s just the maggots are finally bursting through the skin.

The linked post is the tale of how wordpress.com was completely fucked around in 2019 for a signup increase of 0.1 percent!!!

This change also increase free account churn by 20 percent. But that officially didn’t matter, free users weren’t worth a lot.

Everything became about growth hacking. Everything became thinly-veiled dark patterns. In our private dev slack channels, we joked that since it was impossible to make it smaller or less conspicuous, the next thing the growth team was going to ask us to do was to make the ‘free plan’ button flee away from the mouse pointer when the user tried to click it. We kept making our product worse, we kept consciously crippling the cheaper versions so we could force people to move to the more expensive options.

The dude asked to move from wordpress.com to Tumblr. Guess what?

So I requested to move to tumblr, because I thought the pastures were greener over there. But it was all the same: Adding login walls to what we were pretending to be “the last bastion of the free internet”, cramping in embarrasingly obvious money-making schemes disguised as features, and making them silently opt-out instead of opt-in so the less people the possible would deactivate them, having to fend off the pressure from the CEO to make everything algorithmic timelines because, you know, tiktok makes a lot of money and why aren’t we, etc etc.

that CEO was of course Matt Mullenweg.

All platforms are grass. Tomorrow we die. Shitpost the day.

But remember the enshittifiers responsible. They really fucking hate being named.

Google responded to Ed, Ed responds.

I've suggested the orange site changes the title to "In response to Google?" to keep up with latest practices around there. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40164393

courtesy @self

• preprint: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2309.02926
• blackhat abstract: https://www.blackhat.com/asia-24/briefings/schedule/index.html#llmshell-discovering-and-exploiting-rce-vulnerabilities-in-real-world-llm-integrated-frameworks-and-apps-37215
• Tong Liu's related research: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=egWPi_IAAAAJ

can't wait for the crypto spammers to hit every web page with a ChatGPT prompt. AI vs Crypto: whoever loses, we win