TechTakes

let's see how things are going on twitter

The once and future king + ol' muskrat give their most sensible total nuclear annihilation takes. Fellas, are we cooked?

I found the most HN comment of all time:

What sort of mating strategy are you optimizing for?

The wikipedia page for TESCREAL is "disputed", always a good sign when the online right launches skirmish actions against front-line trenches

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TESCREAL

Post from July, tweet from today:

It’s easy to forget that Scottstar Codex just makes shit up, but what the fuck “dynamic” is he talking about? He’s describing this like a recurring pattern and not an addled fever dream

There’s a dynamic in gun control debates, where the anti-gun side says “YOU NEED TO BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS, YOU KNOW, THE ONES THAT COMMIT ALL THE SCHOOL SHOOTINGS”. Then Congress wants to look tough, so they ban some poorly-defined set of guns. Then the Supreme Court strikes it down, which Congress could easily have predicted but they were so fixated on looking tough that they didn’t bother double-checking it was constitutional. Then they pass some much weaker bill, and a hobbyist discovers that if you add such-and-such a 3D printed part to a legal gun, it becomes exactly like whatever category of guns they banned. Then someone commits another school shooting, and the anti-gun people come back with “WHY DIDN’T YOU BAN THE BAD ASSAULT GUNS? I THOUGHT WE TOLD YOU TO BE TOUGH! WHY CAN’T ANYONE EVER BE TOUGH ON GUNS?”

Embarrassing to be this uninformed about such a high profile issue, no less that you're choosing to write about derisively.

• https://xcancel.com/js_thrill/status/1823351942896062910
• https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/highlights-from-the-comments-on-mentally (I ain't reading all that)

It's amazing to watch them flock together like this, nature is beautiful 😍

This came up in a podcast I listen to:

WaPo: "OpenAI illegally barred staff from airing safety risks, whistleblowers say "

archive link https://archive.is/E3M2p

OpenAI whistleblowers have filed a complaint with the Securities and Exchange Commission alleging the artificial intelligence company illegally prohibited its employees from warning regulators about the grave risks its technology may pose to humanity, calling for an investigation.

While I'm not prepared to defend OpenAI here I suspect this is just to shut up the most hysterical employees who still actually believe they're building the P(doom) machine.

ah, jeez, AI bros are trying to make deepfakes even fucking worse:

Deep-Live-Cam is trending #1 on github. It enables anyone to convert a single image into a LIVE stream deepfake, instant and immediately

Most of the replies are openly lambasting this shit like it deserves, thankfully

Who had Trump accusing the Harris campaign of using AI to inflate crowd size photos on their Election ‘24 bingo card? Anyway, I’m sure that being associated with fraud and fakes is Good For AI.

Picked up an oddly good sneer from a gen-AI CEO, of all people (thanks to @ai_shame for catching it):

Not a sneer, but something that'll inspire plenty of schadenfreude:

Brian Merchant: The artists fighting to save their jobs and their work from AI are gaining ground

Brian's done plenty of good sneers on AI, I'd recommend checking him out

Babe, new AI doom vector just dropped: AGI will corrupt knitting sites so crafters make Langford visual hack patterns![1]

https://www.zdnet.com/article/how-ai-scams-are-infiltrating-the-knitting-and-crochet-world/

[1] doom scenario is my interpretation, not actually included in ZDnet article.

Sadly, Langford hacks seem to have never achieved memetic takeoff. Having an internet legally enforced on pain of death to be text-only would probably be a good thing.

comp.basilisk.faq

https://www.reddit.com/r/CharacterAI/comments/1eqsoom/guys_we_have_to_do_somthing_about_this_fi%D3%8Ft%D0%B5r/

This community pops up on /r/all every so often and each time it scares me.

Sometimes I see kids games (and all games really) have ultra-niche, super-online protests that are like "STOP Zooshacorp from DESTROYING K-Smog vs. Batboy Online", and when I look closer it's either even more confusing or it's about something people didn't like in the latest update. This is like that, but with an awful twist where it's about people getting really attached to these AI girlfriend/sex roleplay apps. The spelling and sentences make it seem like it's mostly kids, too.

edit: here's a terrible example!

yall might want to take notice of this thing https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/20460779

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2024-08-14/Recent_research

STORM: AI agents role-play as "Wikipedia editors" and "experts" to create Wikipedia-like articles, a more sophisticated effort than previous auto-generation systems

ai slop in extruded text form, now longer and worse! and burns extra square kilometers of rainforest

this will probably become a NotAwfulTech post after I explore a bit more, but here’s a quick follow-up to my post last stubsack looking for language learning apps:

the open source apps for the learning system I want to use do exist! that system is essentially an automation around reading an interesting text in Spanish (or any other language), marking and translating terms and phrases with a translation dictionary, and generating flash cards/training materials for those marked terms and phrases. there’s no good name for the apps that implement this idea as a whole so I’m gonna call them the LWT family for reasons that will become clear.

briefly, the LWT family apps I’ve discovered so far are:

• LWT (Learning With Texts) is the original open source system that implemented the learning system I described above (though LWT itself originated as an open source clone of LingQ with some ideas from other learning systems). the Hugo Fara fork is the most recently-maintained version of LWT, but it’s generally considered finished (and extraordinarily difficult to modify) software. I need to look into LWT more since it’s still in active use; I believe it uses an Anki exporter for spaced repetition training. it doesn’t seem to have a mobile UI, which might be a dealbreaker since I’ll probably be doing a lot of learning from my phone
• Lute (Learning Using Texts) is a modernized LWT remake. this one is being developed for stability, so it’s missing features but the ones that exist are reputedly pretty solid. it does have a workable mobile UI, but it lacks any training framework at all (it may have an extremely early Anki plugin to generate flash cards)
• LinguaCafe is a completely reworked LWT with a modern UI. it’s got a bunch of features, but it’s a bit janky overall. this is the one I’m using and liking so far! installing it is a fucking nightmare (you have to use their docker-compose file only, with docker not podman, and absolutely slaughter the permissions on your bind mounts, and no you can’t fire it up native) but the UI’s very modern, it works well on mobile (other than jank), and it has its own spaced repetition training framework as well as (currently essentially useless) Anki export. it supports a variety of freely available translation dictionaries (which it keeps in its own storage so they’re local and very fast) and utterly optional DeepL support I haven’t felt the need to enable. in spite of my nitpicks, I really am enjoying this one so far (but I’m only a couple days in)

Capitalist blames lazy workers for not putting in the hours to make themselves obsolete.

WSJ: Eric Schmidt Says Google Is Falling Behind on AI—And Remote Work Is Why

Archive: https://archive.is/JXvtV

Another front in the war of the sexes has opened, and men are on the back foot!

HN: Women are using ChatGPT to catch men lying about their height

The counterattacks are planned!

"They" all lie:

I personally take my job as Photo Detective very seriously, a trait I only acquired from too many dates with people who did not look as good as their photos in real life.

Double standards!!

I'm pretty sure if men would use ChatGPT to catch women lying about their body this conversation would be in a completely different tone.

For some reason The Internet decided that 6 feet was an arbitrary limit, under which men could be just ignored.

Imagine men deciding that any woman with smaller than (insert random body measurement we can't affect) could just be filtered out?

Both sides!

Women will hate finding out that it can guess their age and weight! It can even guess their socioeconomic group, and if they dye their hair.

Great, guys can use it too. We'll see how these chicks react...