Bonus: He also appears to think LLM conversations should be exempt from evidence retention requirements due to ‘AI privilege’ (tweet).
Hot take of the day: Clankers have no rights, and that is a good thing
Sidenote: The rats should count themselves extremely fucking lucky they’ve avoided getting skewered by South Park, because Parker and Stone would likely have a fucking field day with their beliefs
Apparently linkedin’s cofounder wrote a techno-optimist book on AI called Superagency: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future.
This sounds like its going to be horrible
Zack of SMBC has thoughts on it:
Ah, good, I’ll just take his word for it, the thought of reading it gives me psychic da-
the authors at one point note that in 1984, Big Brother’s listening device means there is two way communication, and so the people have a voice. He wonders why Orwell didn’t think of this.
The closest thing I have to a coherent response is that Boondocks clip of Uncle Ruckus going “Read, nigga, read!” (from Stinkmeaner Strikes Back, if you’re wondering) because how breathtakingly stupid do you have to be to miss the point that fucking hard
“biological civilization is about to create artificial superintelligence” is it though?
I’m gonna give my quick-and-dirty opinion on this, don’t expect a lengthy defence.
Short answer, no. Long answer: no, intelligence cannot be created by blindly imitating it with mere silicon
Nitpicking, but at what point do we start calling it race pseudoscience?
“Hating Black People” would be a more fitting name.
“Music is just like meth, cocaine or weed. All pleasure no value. Don’t listen to music.”
(Considering how many rationalists are also methheads, this joke wrote itself)
As a matter of fact, someone’s noted Ed Zitron had called this back in September:
Ed Zitron’s planning a follow-up to “The Subprime AI Crisis”:
(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)
EDIT: Swapped the image for one that’s easier-to-read
This is pure speculation, but I get the feeling Microsoft’s gonna significantly downsize, if not collapse, by the decade’s end.
This recent move’s gonna kneecap Microsoft’s ability to function as a company, and their heavy investment into AI mean they’ll likely take the brunt of the impact when the bubble bursts.
New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry
New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:
Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it’s giving them a moderate advantage
That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery (“nuts”, “shove your concern up your ass”) and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects
Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists
But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is “like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw”
Whatever
EDIT: Found out where Baldur got the “table saw” quote from - added it accordingly.
Artificial intelligence and cheating/lying: two great tastes that go together
New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:
You want my opinion, Zitron’s on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.
For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:
On one front, they’re gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires’ bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires’ attempts to destroy labour once and for all.
On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.
On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, “literally cannot tell good from bad”.
Dr. Abeba Birhane got an AI True Believertm email recently, and shared it on Bluesky:
You want my opinion, I fully support acausal robot deicide, and think AI rights advocates can go fuck themselves.
Alright that’s it: anime streaming needs to return to fansubbing
Fansubs are openly doing it for the love of the anime, so chances are they’d avoid AI slop like the plague (though the CHUDs would be okay with ChatGPT subs if it meant avoiding The Woketm)
(note: this link contains a skintight anime bosom so don’t open it in front of your boss unless your boss is chill)
Good thing I’m a fucking NEET, then
…Lotus, you clever bastard.
In other news, someone tried selling a vibe-coded ytp-dl wrapper and got publicly called out for it:
Not to mention, these discussions partially enabled the rise of technofascism, making Yudkowsky and friends outright complicit in this shit.
Found a piece which caught my attention: Resisting the Techno-Fascist Takeover: Are We Ready for Decomputing?
You want my personal opinion, the basic idea of “decomputing” that author Dan McQuillan is putting forward is likely gonna gain plenty of traction. The Trump administration more generally and DOGE more specifically have thoroughly undermined any notion of tech being an apolitical force, so arguing against the politics inherent to AI is gonna be an easier sell.
My only hope for this is that the GPUs in these CDO spiritual successors become dirt cheap afterwards.
They hopefully will, since the end of the AI bubble will kill AI for good and crash GPU demand.