TechTakes

Ran across a short-ish thread on BlueSky which caught my attention, posting it here:

the problem with a story, essay, etc written by LLM is that i lose interest as soon as you tell me that’s how it was made. i have yet to see one that’s ‘good’ but i don’t doubt the tech will soon be advanced enough to write ‘well.’ but i’d rather see what a person thinks and how they’d phrase it

like i don’t want to see fiction in the style of cormac mccarthy. i’d rather read cormac mccarthy. and when i run out of books by him, too bad, that’s all the cormac mccarthy books there are. things should be special and human and irreplaceable

i feel the same way about using AI-type tech to recreate a dead person’s voice or a hologram of them or whatever. part of what’s special about that dead person is that they were mortal. you cheapen them by reviving them instead of letting their life speak for itself

Starting things off here with a couple solid sneers of some dipshit automating copyright infringement - one from Reid Southen, and one from Ed-Newton Rex:

If musk gets his own special security feds, they would be Pretorian Guards.

Reuters: Quantum computing, AI stocks rise as Nvidia kicks off annual conference.

Some nice quotes in there.

Investors will focus on CEO Jensen Huang's keynote on Tuesday to assess the latest developments in the AI and chip sectors,

Yes, that is sensible, Huang is very impartial on this topic.

"They call this the 'Woodstock' of AI,"

Meaning, they're all on drugs?

"To get the AI space excited again, they have to go a little off script from what we're expecting,"

Oh! Interesting how this implies the space is not "excited" anymore... I thought it's all constant breakthroughs at exponentially increasing rates! Oh, it isn't? Too bad, but I'm sure nVidia will just pull an endless amounts of bunnies out of a hat!

Update on the Vibe Coder Catastrophe^tm^: he's killed his current app and seems intent to vibe code again:

Personally, I expect this case won't be the last "vibe coded" app/website/fuck-knows-what to get hacked to death - security is virtually nonexistent, and the business/techbros who'd be attracted to it are unlikely to learn from their mistakes.

In other news, IETF 127 (which is being held in November) is facing a boycott months in advance. The reason? Its being held in the United States.

This likely applies to a lot of things, but that would have been unthinkable before the election.

oh dear god

Razer claims that its AI can identify 20 to 25 percent more bugs compared to manual testing, and this can reduce QA time by up to 50 percent as well as cost savings of up to 40 percent

as usual this is probably going to be only the simplest shit, and I don’t even want to think of the secondary downstream impacts from just listening to this shit without thought will be

Here's my audio/video dispatch about framing tech through conservation of energy to kill the magical thinking of generative ai and the like podcast ep: https://pnc.st/s/faster-and-worse/968a91dd/kill-magic-thinking video ep: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NLHmtYWzHz8

TV Tropes got an official app, featuring an AI "story generator". Unsurprisingly, backlash was swift, to the point where the admins were promising to nuke it "if we see that users don't find the story generator helpful".

ya know the Nicole the Fediverse Chick spam? this poster thinks it's a revenge Joe job:

https://transmom.love/@elilla/114178587075613485

Roundup of the current bot scourge hammering open source projects

https://thelibre.news/foss-infrastructure-is-under-attack-by-ai-companies/

Recommending this recent episode of TRASHFUTURE podcast featuring a great interview with film critic A. S. Hamrah about generative AI in film

ZITRON DROPPED