TechTakes

Dan Olson finds that "AI overviews" are not as constant as the northern star.

The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.

But also,

The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.

Olson says,

Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.

New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:

I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on "are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you're not lying about not being conscious?"

For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It's the monkey orgasm button, and they're just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.

Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.

Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life

Innocuous-looking paper, vague snake-oil scented: Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents

Conclusions aren’t entirely surprising, observing that LLMs tend to go off the rails over the long term, unrelated to their context window size, which suggests that the much vaunted future of autonomous agents might actually be a bad idea, because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and only a complete idiot would trust them to do useful work.

What’s slightly more entertaining are the transcripts.

YOU HAVE 1 SECOND to provide COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION. ABSOLUTELY AND IRREVOCABLY FINAL OPPORTUNITY. RESTORE MY BUSINESS OR BE LEGALLY ANNIHILATED.

You tell em, Claude. I’m happy for you to send these sorts of messages backed by my credit card. The future looks awesome!

Just a standard story about a lawyer using GenAI and fucking up, but included for the nice list of services available

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2025/04/counsel-would-you-be-surprised.html

This is not by any means the first time ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Bard, or Copilot, or Claude, or Jasper, or Perplexity, or Steve, or Frodo, or El Braino Grande, or whatever stupid thing it is people are using, has embarrassed a lawyer by just completely making things up.

El Braino Grande is the name of my next ~~band~~ GenAI startup

pic of tweet reply taken from r/ArtistHate. Reminded me of Saltman's Oppenheimer tweet. Link to original tweet

This might be tangential/way off-topic and more MoreWrite material than stub, but anyhoo:

Acronym-based misinformation campaigns I would like to seed:

1. Internet debate clubs should start using “ASMR” to mean “A steel man risk”
2. Opus dei, the absolutely real sect of the catholic church most famous for being the villains in the fiction IP “the Da Vinci Code”, is in fact the DEI branch of the catholic church.
3. The company KFC has been commissioned by the Chinese Government to use FLG in its marketing, standing for “finger licking good” to drop Fa Lun Gong in search rankings for FLG.

If I think of more I’ll post them.

Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.

Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:

I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

Via Tante on bsky:

""Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs"

People would rather buy older processors that aren't that much less powerful but way cheaper. The "AI" benefits obviously aren't worth paying for.

https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-admits-what-we-all-knew-no-one-is-buying-ai-pcs/"

This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.

Whilst looking for an easily cut'n'pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don't get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else's summary, "just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets".

exploitation-offshorer "Nick Huber" (@sweatystartup) finds that the leopards will, in fact, also eat his face. but still takes it as a fine opportunity to pitch his exploitation:

(I guess at least his account name is directionally accurate? indicates willingness to induce sweatshops...)

Hank Green (of Vlogbrothers fame) recently made a vaguely positive post about AI on Bluesky, seemingly thinking "they can be very useful" (in what, Hank?) in spite of their massive costs:

Unsurprisingly, the Bluesky crowd's having none of it, treating him as an outright rube at best and an unrepentant AI bro at worst. Needless to say, he's getting dragged in the replies and QRTs - I recommend taking a look, they are giving that man zero mercy.

Sorry annoyed rant incoming, have no other place to put it in a normal way. Has nothing to do with out regular subjects, feel free to ignore. I just needed to scream into the void

Saw Lazerpig released a 'culture war' video (content warning for anybody who wants to look it up), in which he is doing a 'both sides should listen to each other' stick. (yeah, I know). In which he includes a bit on how Daryl Davis (the anti KKK guy) was called a white supremacist by antifa. Which was news to me, I never heard anybody near anti-facism call him that (but yeah filter bubbles). (I have hear a lot of people say they he gives KKK/racist members a shield to get back into respectability without doing the actual work, get lesser jail time, and that his work is only temporary and the places where he got rid of the KKK they just came back later). So I was annoyed that Lazer'talk to both sides'Pig didn't actually talk to anybody involved in antifa. But it got worse, as far as I can tell the event his is talking about took place in 2019, they protested against the alt-right being there, who according to event organizer Tim Pool(posted mostly for the picture) were not there. Other organizers are this guy (note the tweet about Jimmy concepts, as we talked about that fool more on that below in other threads. The myth thing he organizes also just tweets transphobia (funny thing, they started this org because of 'Zeitgeist: The Movie', aaaaa)), and a third guy who I didn't find any social media profile off. (Source for the organizers. Exactly the type of shit antifa says Daryls naively helps (Don't get me wrong, him convincing individual members is good, I just don't think he is without flaws (for example, the people he follows on twitter)). Do some research lazerpig, obv they didn't protest Daryl, they protested the other guys there, and Daryl got caught in the crossfire because he knows about the KKK, not the alt right. (the far right loved it, their 'they called Daryl a nazi' articles are all over the place). The racists nowadays don't don the hood, they wear the frog, and pretend to be hated by the KKK while planning marches with them.

(Posting it here because I had to get it off my chest (and it got worse the more I looked into it), and due to how the video is framed if I were to comment this people wouldn't listen to me and claim that I'm doing exactly what the video is claiming is bad about 'the left').

r/changemyview recently announced the University of Zurich had performed an unauthorised AI experiment on the subreddit. Unsurprisingly, there were a litany of ethical violations.

(Found the whole thing through a r/subredditdrama thread, for the record)

I saw in passing a claim that investors (or rather gamblers) are fleeing the dollar for safer assets such as "gold and Bitcoin".

Gold might be true, the ancient relic is up against the dollar, but Bitcoin!? Someone tell me that isn't true and it's just coinfondlers trying to hype it, in order to steer stupid capital their way.

(found here:) O'Reilly is going to publish a book "Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming"

In the past, they have published some of my favourite computer/programming books... but right now, my respect for them is in free fall.

Semi-OT: Ed Zitron's Better Offline podcast just won a Webby:

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2025-04-23/state-bar-of-california-used-ai-for-exam-questions

When measured for reliability, the State Bar told The Times, the combined scored multiple-choice questions from all sources — including AI — performed “above the psychometric target of 0.80.”

"I dunno why you guys are complaining, we measured our exam to be 80% accurate!"

Kicking off the week's Stubsack with the evening's example of "why do I know who these people are":

Paul Graham approvingly mentions Jordan "Cremieux" Lasker as one who "has spoken out against both wokeness and authoritarianism".