TechTakes

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it's much worse:

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

[Do not post} Insults, including those about [...] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click "Jan 8, 2025" and yeah it's a doozy.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn't really concentrate on work. It's hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn't dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I'm not sure fascists know how to use words right.

Zuck wants to get back to his roots

It's time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here's what we're going to do: [...] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.

the worst Nix project has finally been announced: behold crypto NixOS

I’m starting a paradigm shifting, open and new human / computer interface system that is global, multi device and privacy focused.

[…]

DISCLAIMER: You are not my exit liquidity, I have the best performing long term spot crypto portfolio in the world - I’m a early adopter with 100% hit rate on geniuses. So, I don’t have to work, I’m not building this to become rich. I want to build something paradigm changing - truly mind-blowing, because now we have the tech and I’m annoyed how computer work. It is a lot of work, but it will reward us all.

my “this isn’t a grift and I’m not a grifter” disclaimer is prompting a lot of questions already answered by the disclaimer. but speaking of prompting, what goes with crypto?

ChatGPT-1o thinks, after some reinforced asking, that the MC of such a coin can reach 300-1000M; I think it could easily go higher - it solves so fundamental problems in a much more elegant way. In my opinion, it will be the same step as the command line to the windowed systems was. Or dump phone to smart phone. It will just span devices and span users while keeping the data under control and of companies.

of course. after some reinforced asking, gpt told me you’re all haters if you don’t think I’m as important as Xerox PARC!

there’s lots more in the OP to sneer at, but here’s the worst part of the thread:

Mod note: I’m glad to see doubt and scepticism about crypto-based claims. However, that point has now been made; please avoid any further posts in that vein to avoid a pile-on dunkfest, and leave the thread for any potential on-topic discussion.

thanks for nothing as usual NixOS discourse!

e: via mastodon, archive

Just want to share this great term & definition "hyperkludge" coined by Jonathan Korman (@miniver on bsky and masto)

https://miniver.blogspot.com/2023/01/hyperkludge-n.html

Thiel has fully lost it, and as I assume nobody around him has warned him about how crazy this ~~manifesto found after the shooting~~ oped in the ft makes him sound, so do the people around him.

Starting off with a weapons-grade sneer: How to Dehumanize Accessibility with AI

[Fiction] [Comic] Effective Altruism and Rationality meet at a Secular Solstice afterparty

When the very first thing you say about a character is that they "have money in crypto", you may already be doing it wrong

My favorite quote from flipping through LessWrong to find something passingly entertaining:

You only multiply the SAT z-score by 0.8 if you're selecting people on high SAT score and estimating the IQ of that subpopulation, making a correction for regressional Goodhart. Rationalists are more likely selected for high g which causes both SAT and IQ

(From the comments for "The average rationalist IQ is about 122".)

we regret to inform you that mullenweg is still posting through it

no matter how unhinged you may expect this to be on starting to read it, you're probably guessing low

Reading through announcements of new hardware from CES and the endless series of products containing "AI" is so tiring. Not suprising, but still... ugh. Claims of AI in everything.

My favourite so far: USB controller with "AI enhancements" because... uuh... if I understand it right, you could theoretically use it to connect an external GPU and use that for AI, so that's why "AI" is in the marketing for the USB controller...?

Molly White on one of the more obvious problems with betting markets

Tried to add the screenshot in the post but it won't work for some reason.

"The Publisher of the Journal "Nature" Is Emailing Authors of Scientific Papers, Offering to Sell Them AI Summaries of Their Own Work", by Maggie Harrison Dupré at Futurism:

Springer Nature, the stalwart publisher of scientific journals including the prestigious Nature as well as the nearly 200-year-old magazine Scientific American, is approaching the authors of papers in its journals with AI-generated "Media Kits" to summarize and promote their research.

In an email to journal authors obtained by Futurism, Springer told the scientists that its AI tool will "maximize the impact" of their research, saying the $49 package will return "high-quality" outputs for marketing and communication purposes. The publisher's sell for the package hinges on the argument that boiling down complex, jargon-laden research into digestible soundbites for press releases and social media copy can be difficult and time-consuming — making it, Springer asserts, a task worth automating.