TechTakes

What the fuck did I just read? I had to double check the year.

I thought even the grifters had finally admitted that upscaling the chatbots won’t lead to anything, and suddenly we’re back at spontaneous emergence of intelligence if we just throw enough shit at the wall?

He highlighted the need for Google’s employees to use more of its A.I. for coding, saying the A.I.’s improving itself would lead to A.G.I.

What even is this? Hitting autocomplete on every word hoping it vomits out AGI by accident? That is certainly an opinion.

Did Sergey hit his head or something? He can’t seriously expert anyone to believe this at this point.

I used to cry wolf. I still cry wolf, but I used to, too

also that bluesk (idk what the bluesky equivalent of a tweet is) is sign-in walled, I can’t read it

offering sora will only make them sore-er

Oh god, Sabine "capitalism is when people buy things and academia is basically communism" Hossenfelder has opinions about AI now.

Man, I'm so glad I checked out on that whole environment and always so so sad when anything from that group escapes containment. It's such a reductive and myopic view of what science is and what people are capable of.

I feel like there's both an underlying value judgement underlying the way these studies are designed that leads to yet another example of AI experiments spitting out the exact result they were told to. This was most obvious in the second experiment described in the article about generating ideas for research. The fact that both AI and human respondents had to fit a format to hide stylistic tells suggests that those tells don't matter. Similarly these experiments are designed around the assumption that reddit posts are a meaningful illustration of empathy and that there's no value in actually sharing space and attention with another person. While I'm sure they would phrase it as trying to control for extraneous factors (i.e. to make sure that the only difference perceivable is in the level of empathy), this presupposes that style, affect, mode of communication, etc. don't actually have any value in showing empathy, creativity, or whatever, which is blatantly absurd to anyone who has actually interacted with a human person.

Well, how do you feel about robotics?

On one hand, I fully agree with you. AI is a rebranding of cybernetics, and both fields are fundamentally inseparable from robotics. The goal of robotics is to create artificial slaves who will labor without wages or solidarity. We're all ethically obliged to question the way that robots affect our lives.

On the other hand, machine learning (ML) isn't going anywhere. In my oversimplification of history, ML was originally developed by Markov and Shannon to make chatbots and predict the weather; we still want to predict the weather, so even a complete death of the chatbot industry won't kill ML. Similarly, some robotics and cybernetics research is still useful even when not applied to replacing humans; robotics is where we learned to apply kinematics, and cybernetics gave us the concept of a massive system that we only partially see and interact with, leading to systems theory.

Here's the kicker: at the end of the day, most people will straight-up refuse to grok that robotics is about slavery. They'll usually refuse to even examine the etymology, let alone the history of dozens of sci-fi authors exploring how robots are slaves or the reality today of robots serving humans in a variety of scenarios. They fundamentally don't see that humans are aggressively chauvinist and exceptionalist in their conception of work and labor. It's a painful and slow conversation just to get them to see the word robota.

was just in a chat room with an anthropic employee and she said, "if you have a solution for x, we are hiring" and before I could even say, "why would I want to work for a cult?" she literally started saying "some people underestimate the super exponential of progress"

To which I replied, "the only super exponential I'm seeing rn is Anthropic's negative revenue." She didn't block me, so she's a good sport, but yeah, they are all kool-aid drinkers for sure.

I thought about the "anthro pic" too, but it feels like a low hanging fruit since the etymological relation of anthropic and anthropomorphic (from ancient Greek ἄνθρωπος) is so obvious.

The corporate dickriding over at Reddit about this is exhausting.

When you use Firefox or really any browser, you're giving it information like website addresses, form data, or uploaded files. The browser uses this information to make it easier to interact with websites and online services. That's all it is saying.

How on Earth did I use Firefox to interact with websites and services in the last 20+ years then without that permission?

Luckily the majority opinion even over there seems to be that this sucks bad, which might to be in no small part due to a lot of Firefox's remaining userbase being privacy-conscious nerds like me. So, hey, they're pissing on the boots on even more of their users and hope no one will care. And the worst part? It will probably work because anything Chromium-based is completely fucking useless now that they've gutted uBlock Origin (and even the projects that retain Manifest v2 support don't work as well as Firefox, especially when it comes to blocking YouTube ads), and most Webkit-based projects have either switched to Chromium or disappeared (RIP Midori).

did some digging and apparently the (moz poster) it's this person. check the patents.

mega groan

related, but tonight I will pour one out for Conkeror

NGL I always wanted to use IceWeasel just to say I did, but now it might be because it's the last bastion!