TechTakes

Interesting (in a depressing way) thread by author Alex de Campi about the fuckery by Unbound/Boundless (crowdfunding for publishing, which segued into financial incompetence and stealing royalties), whose latest incarnation might be trying to AI their way out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

From the liquidator’s proposals:

We are also undertaking new areas of business that require no funds to implement, such as starting to increase our rights income from book to videogaming by leveraging our contacts in the gaming industry and potentially creating new content based on our intellectual property utilizing inexpensive artificial intelligence platforms.

(emphasis mine)

They don’t appear to actually own any intellectual property anymore (due to defaulting on contracts) so I can’t see this ending well.

Original thread, for those of you with bluesky accounts: https://bsky.app/profile/alexdecampi.bsky.social/post/3lqfmpme2722w

Loose Mission Impossible Spoilers

The latest Mission Impossible movie features a rogue AI as one of the main antagonists. But on the other hand, the AI's main powers are lies, fake news, and manipulation, and it only gets as far as it does because people allow fear to make themselves manipulable and it relies on human agents to do a lot of its work. So in terms of promoting the doomerism narrative, I think the movie could actually be taken as opposing the conventional doomer narrative in favor of a calm, moderate, internationally coordinated (the entire plot could have been derailed by governments agreeing on mutual nuclear disarmament before the AI subverted them) response against AI's that ultimately have only moderate power.

Adding to the post-LLM hype predictions: I think post LLM bubble popping, "Terminator" style rogue AI movie plots don't go away, but take on a different spin. Rogue AI's strength's are going to be narrower, their weaknesses are going to get more comical and absurd, and idiotic human actions are going to be more of a factor. For weaknesses it will be less "failed to comprehend love" or "cleverly constructed logic bomb breaks its reasoning" and more "forgets what it was doing after getting drawn into too long of a conversation". For human actions it will be less "its makers failed to anticipate a completely unprecedented sequence of bootstrapping and self improvement" and more "its makers disabled every safety and granted it every resource it asked for in the process of trying to make an extra dollar a little bit faster".

New Blood In The Machine: The "AI jobs apocalypse" is for the bosses

So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry on

OT: Welp. Think interview went well. Just waiting for them to check references (oh god) and I should know whats what by Monday.

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/@[email protected]/114593332907413196

Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:

• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
• AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search

OT: just got a job interview and wanted to pass the good vibes on!

Curtis Yarvin:

Girls think the "eu" in "eugenics" means EW. Don't get the ick, girls! It literally means good.

So if you're not into eugenics, that means you must be into dysgenics. Dissing your own genes! OMG girl what

dr. caitlin m. green:

... how is this man still able to post from inside the locker he should be stuffed in 24/7

A new LLM plays pokemon has started, with o3 this time. It plays moderately faster, and the twitch display UI is a little bit cleaner, so it is less tedious to watch. But in terms of actual ability, so far o3 has made many of the exact same errors as Claude and Gemini including: completely making things up/seeing things that aren't on the screen (items in Virdian Forest), confused attempts at navigation (it went back and forth on whether the exit to Virdian Forest was in the NE or NW corner), repeating mistakes to itself (both the items and the navigation issues I mentioned), confusing details from other generations of Pokemon (Nidoran learns double kick at level 12 in Fire Red and Leaf Green, but not the original Blue/Yellow), and it has signs of being prone to going on completely batshit tangents (it briefly started getting derailed about sneaking through the tree in Virdian Forest... i.e. moving through completely impassable tiles).

I don't know how anyone can watch any of the attempts at LLMs playing Pokemon and think (viable) LLM agents are just around the corner... well actually I do know: hopium, cope, cognitive bias, and deliberate deception. The whole LLM playing Pokemon thing is turning into less of a test of LLMs and more entertainment and advertising of the models, and the scaffold are extensive enough and different enough from each other that they really aren't showing the models' raw capabilities (which are even worse than I complained about) or comparing them meaningfully.

Im sure this is fine https://infosec.exchange/@paco/114509218709929701

"Paco Hope #resist @[email protected]

OMG. #Microsoft #Copilot bypasses #Sharepoint #security so you don’t have to!

“CoPilot gets privileged access to SharePoint so it can index documents, but unlike the regular search feature, it doesn’t know about or respect any of the access controls you might have set up. You can get CoPilot to just dump out the contents of sensitive documents that it can see, with the bonus feature* that your access won’t show up in audit logs.”

The S in CoPilot stands for Security! https://pivotnine.com/the-crux/archive/remembering-f00fs-of-old/"

Veering semi-OT: the guy behind the godawful Windows 11 GUI has revealed himself:

Looking at his Twitter profile, its clear he's a general dumpster fire of a human being - most of his feed's just him retweeting AI garbage or fash garbage.

New piece from Iris Meredith: Keeping up appearances, about the cultural forces that gave us LLMs and how best to defeat them

I was trying out free github copilot to see what the buzz is all about:

It doesn't even know its own settings. This one little useful thing that isn't plagiarism, providing natural language interface to its own bloody settings, it couldn't do.

Hey look, it's this meme for the n-th time

NEW ZITRON DROPPED