TechTakes

Re: beef tallow fries. I tried some tonight. I liked them. They taste exactly as you’d expect: beefy. Is it worth fascism? Definitely not.

Found a sneer in the wild, made in response to another piece of Deportee Slop™:

Searching through the quotes, I also found someone openly accusing AI of contributing to fascism:

Apparently MIT is teaching a vibe coding class:

How will this year’s class differ from last year’s? There will be some major changes this year:

• Units down from 18 to 15, to reflect reduced load
• Grading that emphasizes mastery over volume
• More emphasis on design creativity (and less on ethics)
• Not just permission but encouragement to use LLMs
• A framework for exploiting LLMs in code generation

New eugenics conference just dropped

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8ZExgaGnvLevkZxR5/attend-the-2025-reproductive-frontiers-summit-june-10-12

"Chatham House rules" so they can happily be racist without anyone pointing fingers at them.

Update on my comment from yesterday: it seems I fell for satire (?). (I don't know the people involved, so no idea, but it seems plausible.)

OT: Estonia (and Helsinki) were very nice, but I did not see a single delivery robot running around. Stayed across from the MalwareBytes HQ tho, I thought that was cool.

Artist notices that his horror creations get listed by AI bots as real. Decides to troll. It works. 2 hours, 1 source. We are so cooked.

Science writer Philip Ball observes,

Just watched Eric Schmidt (former Google CEO) say "We believe as an industry... that within 3-5 years we'll have AGI, which can be defined as a system that is as smart as [big deal voice] the smartest mathematician, physicist, [lesser deal voice] artist, writer, thinker, politician ... I call this the San Francisco consensus, because everyone who believes this is in San Francisco... Within the next year or two, this foundation gets locked in, and we're not going to stop it. It gets much more interesting after that...There will be computers that are smarter than the sum of humans"

"Everyone who believes this is in San Francisco" approaches "the female orgasm is a myth" levels of self-own.

Ran across a Bluesky thread which caught my attention - its nothing major, its just about how gen-AI painted one rando's views of the droids of Star Wars:

Generative AI has helped me to understand why, in Star Wars, the droids seem to have personalities but are generally bad at whatever they're supposed to be programmed to do, and everyone is tired of their shit and constantly tells them to shut up

Threepio: Sir, the odds of successfully navigating an asteroid field are 3720 to one!

Han Solo (knowing that Threepio just pulls these numbers out of Reddit memes about Emperor Palpatine's odds of getting laid): SHUT THE FUCK UP!!!!!!

"Why do the heroes of Star Wars never do anything to help the droids? They're clearly sentient, living things, yet they're treated as slaves!" Thanks for doing propaganda for Big Droid, you credulous ass!

With that out the way, here's my personal sidenote:

There's already been plenty of ink spilled on the myriad effects AI will have on society, but it seems one of the more subtle effects will be on the fiction we write and consume.

Right off the bat, one thing I'm anticipating (which I've already talked about before) is that AI will see a sharp decline in usage as a plot device - whatever sci-fi pizzazz AI had as a concept is thoroughly gone at this point, replaced with the same all-consuming cringe that surrounds NFTs and the metaverse, two other failed technologies turned pop-cultural punchlines.

If there are any attempts at using "superintelligent AI" as a plot point, I expect they'll be lambasted for shattering willing suspension of disbelief, at least for a while. If AI appears at all, my money's on it being presented as an annoyance/inconvenience (as someone else has predicted).

Another thing I expect is audiences becoming a lot less receptive towards AI in general - any notion that AI behaves like a human, let alone thinks like one, has been thoroughly undermined by the hallucination-ridden LLMs powering this bubble, and thanks to said bubble's wide-spread harms (environmental damage, widespread theft, AI slop, misinformation, etcetera) any notion of AI being value-neutral as a tech/concept has been equally undermined.

With both of those in mind, I expect any positive depiction of AI is gonna face some backlash, at least for a good while.

(As a semi-related aside, I found a couple of people openly siding with the Mos Eisley Cantina owner who refused to serve R2 and 3PO [Exhibit A, Exhibit B])

Polymarket on the new pope skeet

Also there already is a bsky user with the username leoxiv, who makes from what I can tell final fantasy poses, some nsfw. Lol.

Got a nice and lengthy sneer from film blog That Final Scene: the uncanny valet is not your friend (and other AI stories)

Beyond being an utter castigation of AI bros' "attempts" at aping art, its also wonderfully written from start to finish. Go check it out.

Derek Lowe comes in with another sneer at techbro-optimism of collection of AI startup talking points wearing skins of people saying that definitely all medicine is solved, just throw more compute at it https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/end-disease (it's two weeks old, but it's not like any of you read him regularly). more relevantly he also links all his previous writing on this topic, starting with 2007 piece about techbros wondering why didn't anyone brought SV Disruption™ to pharma: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/andy-grove-rich-famous-smart-and-wrong

interesting to see that he reaches some of pretty much compsci-flavoured conclusions despite not having compsci background. still not exactly there yet as he leaves some possibility of AGI

Found a rando making a very safe prediction on Bluesky:

And by "very safe", I mean "its technically already happened". Personally, I expect marketing things as AI-Free™ will explode after the bubble bursts - the hype will die alongside the bubble, but the hatred will live on for quite a while, and hate is real easy to exploit.