this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
34 points (100.0% liked)

TechTakes

1276 readers
238 users here now

Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.

This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.

For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Need to make a primal scream without gathering footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh facts of Awful you'll near-instantly regret.

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.

top 50 comments
sorted by: hot top controversial new old
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (5 children)

Microsoft's AI leader claimed that copyright on the internet can be ignored: https://www.windowscentral.com/software-apps/ever-put-content-on-the-web-microsoft-says-that-its-okay-for-them-to-steal-it-because-its-freeware

With respect to content that is already on the open web, the social contract of that content since the 90s has been that it is fair use. Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it. That has been freeware, if you like. That's been the understanding, there's a separate category where a website or a publisher or a news organization had explicitly said, 'do not scrape or crawl me for any other reason than indexing me so that other people can find that content.' That's a gray area and I think that's going to work its way through the courts.

Watch the entire interview if you're bored because he is in deep. Microsoft probably just hired the most AI-enthused person they could find.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago

I think even wilder is that he thinks content which has explicitly been labeled "do not scrape except for search engine indexing" is a "gray area" with regards to scraping for AI. Like, that's exactly what it says not to do!

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago

He isn't totally wrong re the unspoken rule, but he forgets the second unspoken rule, that the first rule only applies to human being doing entertainment not corporations trying to make money.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Never thought I'd see Microsoft suggest downloading a car, but I should have seen it coming.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Anyone can copy it, recreate with it, reproduce with it

Ew... stay away from my content, you creep!

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 18 points 2 months ago (33 children)

No, all you lawyers explaining to me how the practice of law works in the U.S., you would totally benefit from GPT. Complete with bonus:

  • Everyone explaining to me that lawyers actually read all the documents in discovery is really trying to explain to me, a computer scientist with 20 years of experience[1], how GPT works!
  • [1] Does OP have actual tech expertise? The answer may (not) surprise you!
  • You lawyers admit that sometimes you use google translate and database search engines, and those use machine learning components, and all ML is basically LLMs, so I'm right, Q.E.D.!
  • Lawyers couldn't possibly read everything in discovery, right?
  • Lawyers couldn't possibly pay for professional translation for everything, right?
  • Even when it's mandated by the court?
  • Really?
  • and many, many more
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

This is also a very qucik hypthetical that I wrote up just to show a point not to argue a fucking legal case.

"Guys I totally didn't expect the lawyers to respond like lawyers when reading my Chat-GPT generated garbage"

Except... I admitted I was not a lawyer and not an expert, and rather than working to communicate they kept latching onto errors related to law, while they confidently made statements about the nature and functionality of ML technologies like LLMs and NMTs.

"Why are all the lawyers being so mean to me?? I'm just saying they could all be replaced by chatbots"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (2 children)

I'm sorry, but you're wrong. You're also mansplaining to an expert. While I admit that I am not an expert on law and am listening when corrections related to LAW and the practice of LAW are concerned, you do not want to admit your lack of understanding of this technology.

My god DANIEL, no, people are not mansplaining to you, unless that's a mask for a Danielle.

EDIT: Down the thread he responds to Kathryn Tewson, an actual expert, with

Yeah I'm not obligated to answer every question by a horde of people. You should change your name to Karen, because you sure act like a fucking entitled white bitch.

This guy has such a punchable face, even though I've never seen him. I can just tell.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

Kathryn Tewson

Iirc, She is not just an expert, but she is so good at law that while she didn't practice law, but just commented about her interpretations of the law (as ANAL) people hired her and paid for her law degree. She has both talent and expertise.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (31 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (10 children)

Not a cult.

from r/EnoughMuskSpam

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 17 points 2 months ago (11 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

we have internal confirmation that the rabbit team is aware of this leaking of api keys and have chosen to ignore it

european regulatory clarity approaching at mach 5 (that is if they ever sold this thing in EU)

load more comments (10 replies)
[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 19 points 2 months ago (2 children)

"look surely not everything in America is explained by racism" "... OH COME ON NOW"

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 months ago (1 children)

thinking about how I was inoculated against part of ai hype bc a big part of my social circle in undergrad consisted of natural language processing people. they wanted to work at places with names like "OpenAI" and "google deepmind," their program was more or less a cognitive science program, but I never once heard any of them express even the slightest suspicion that LLMs of all things were progressing toward intelligence. it would have been a nonsequiter.

also from their pov the statistical approach to machine learning was defined by abandoning the attempt to externalize the meaning of text. the cliche they used to refer to this was "the meaning of a word is the context in which it occurs."

finding out that some prestigious ai researchers are all about being pilled on immanetizating agi was such a swerve for me. it's like if you were to find out that michio kaku has just won his fourth consecutive nobel prize in physics

load more comments (1 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (17 children)

The Death of the Junior Developer

Steve Yegge goes hard into critihype, there's no need for any junior people anymore, all you need is a senior prompt engineer. No word on what happens when the seniors retire or die off, guess we'll have AGI by then and it'll all work out. Also no word on how the legal profession will survive when all the senior prompt engineer's time is spend rewriting increasingly meaningless LLM responses as the training corpus inevitably degenerates from slurm contamination.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

If I had a nickle for every time on June 27th 2024 I've read someone argue that chatbots make lawyers obsolete I'd have two nickles. Which isn't a lot of money but it's weird that it happened twice.


As a "senior" programmer; my coworkers, even the newer ones are people. They can think. They are professional. I can describe problems to them and eventually get solutions, or at least sensible follow-up questions. I don't have to baby them or "prompt engineer" stuff I tell them. I can just sit back and drink my hot cocoa and occasionally try to sound distinguished while my juniors do all the hard work.

Chatbros have discovered that you can get a chatbot to string together tutorials from the net into simple programs that almost work with some finangling. Somehow they never realized that you could always do this by web searching for "socket example I hate unix please make it gentle". Of course none of this generalizes to anything complex or not in the training set (read: anything that anyone will actually pay you to do), but the Chatbros don't care because they were never doing real work in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago

this is such a sad slop. i wouldn't guess it's yegge, it's so far from his style when he used to write himself.

load more comments (15 replies)
[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

Before: searching in Internet Explorer "how to install Chrome"

Now:

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (2 children)

nsfw: nice to see thejuicemedia jumping in with a quality sneer

load more comments (2 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (4 children)

You know what would be awesome is if there was a way to easily see new posts to a thread, like if the "New" button actually put New posts on top. Maybe lemmy truly is too janky for that but it's a shame because I just start to ignore threads after a while.

load more comments (4 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (3 children)

I might have been wrong on the capabilities of ML, this is very impressive. (twitter link), was I wrong and Yud right?

load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago
[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago (12 children)
load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (4 children)

okay at this point I should probably make a whole-ass perplexity post because this is the third time I'm featuring them in stubsack but 404media found yet more dirt

... which included creating a series of fake accounts and AI-generated research proposals to scrape Twitter, as CEO Aravind Srinivas recently explained on the Lex Fridman podcast

According to Srinivas, all he and his cofounders Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho wanted to do was build cool products with large language models, back when it was unclear how that technology would create value

tell me again how lies and misrepresentation aren't foundational parts of the business model, I think I missed it

[–] [email protected] 14 points 2 months ago (1 children)

A couple of examples Srinivas gave on the podcast is “Who is Lex Fridman following that Elon Musk is also following,” or “what are the most recent tweets that were liked by both Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos.”

Questions asked by the terminally deranged.

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (5 children)

no surprises here, Mozilla’s earlier stated goal of focusing on local, accessibility-oriented AI was just entryism to try to mask their real, fucking obvious goal of shoving integrations with every AI vendor into Firefox:

Whether it’s a local or a cloud-based model, if you want to use AI, we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs. With that in mind, this week, we will launch an opt-in experiment offering access to preferred AI services in Nightly for improved productivity as you browse. Instead of juggling between tabs or apps for assistance, those who have opted-in will have the option to access their preferred AI service from the Firefox sidebar to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge, all without leaving their current web page.

Our initial offering will include ChatGPT, Google Gemini, HuggingChat, and Le Chat Mistral, but we will continue adding AI services that meet our standards for quality and user experience.

I’m now taking bets on which of these vendors will pay the most to be the default in the enabled-by-default production version of this feature

this is making me seriously consider donating to Servo, the last shred of the spirit and goals of a good, modernized Firefox-style browser remaining, which apparently operates on a tiny budget (and with a whole army of reply guys waiting to point out they might receive grants which, cool? they still need fucking donations to do this shit and I’d rather give it to them than Mozilla or any other assholes making things actively worse)

thinking back to when I first switched to Mozilla during the MSIE 7-8 days and actually started having a good time on the web, daily driving Servo might not be an awful move once Firefox gets to its next level of enshittification. back then, Firefox (once it changed its name) was incredibly stable and quick compared with everything else, and generally sites that wouldn’t render right were either ad-laden horseshit I didn’t need, or were intentionally broken on non-IE and usually fixable with a plugin. now doesn’t that sound familiar?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

we think you should have the freedom to use (or not use) the tools that best suit your needs

Thanks for giving me the freedom to not use the tools that best suit my needs, Mozilla!

But seriously I hate how at some point techies decided they know what's best for the user instead of the user knowing that themself-- there's been a long trend of technology getting less customizable and less user friendly over time; and Firefox is not at all innocent.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (1 children)

The smug presumption that any brand of spicy autocomplete is a viable tool "to summarize information, simplify language, or test their knowledge" is so fucking galling.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (9 children)

It's also insane to believe it should be a first class feature, when those who god forbid want to "opt-in" could simply install a plugin.

load more comments (9 replies)
load more comments (3 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (8 children)

What do normal people - people who don't pay for twitter, or sneer at rationalists - think of Twitter atp?

Went on to Twitter (my mistake) after seeing Inside Out 2 because it's the latest kid's movie to feature [trope that I found passe that I can't figure out how to spoil inline] and I see a post on my feed from "HBD Chick".

And I'm like okay, that has to be "happy birthday, right?". Nah, her third retweet is creamy porno redux.

Just like all the other right wingers and embarrassingly enthusiastic neoliberals and occasional Musk fans, I don't follow her or anybody that follows her, there's literally no connection or personal interest.

I feel like the post Elon shift is really understated for how bad the site's gotten. Like I see more people talk about how Instagram reels is racist than I do about the average twitter replies section. I know a lot of left leaning people fled for bluer pastures, but I'm surprised you don’t see more buzz about it from regular, non-power users.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago (13 children)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

It's pretty amazing that this so-called genius spent $44B on a company without apparently knowing anything about how the market it operates in (advertising) actually works.

load more comments (12 replies)
[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 months ago

First of all, most of my "normal" acquaintances never used Twitter anyway.

Most of the ones that did just quit when it got weird and dominated by useless suggestions and creepy ads.

I had one friend last week in a group chat go "Twitter is so racist nowadays innit", to which I said ye, why you still using it, and he responded "you're right" and stopped.

load more comments (6 replies)
[–] [email protected] 11 points 2 months ago (1 children)

seemingly yet more chatgpt jailbreaks just by providing input that barrierbreaks some n times, and then readily provides details

y'know, if I were the one making safety nets for these systems, I'd make them return such kind of results (or other typical honeypot type behaviour). and it's possible that that's what oai did. but it seems extremely unlikely that that's what they did, because it goes again the bayfucker gottagofast philosophy (and, frankly, against the level of competence I've seen displayed in the genml space overall)

load more comments (1 replies)
load more comments
view more: next ›