TechTakes

Today in "I wish I didn't know who these people are", guess who is a source for the New York Times now.

Rainbow, an Italian animation studio known for making Winx Club, is looking to hire a prompt engineer :-) Had I been Italian I would be considering applying if only to stop them from trying to sell NFTs and whitewashing their characters.

Ed Zitron's planning a follow-up to "The Subprime AI Crisis":

(Its gonna be a premium column, BTW)

EDIT: Swapped the image for one that's easier-to-read

I had applied to a job and it screened me verbally with an AI bot. I find it strange talking to an AI bot that gives no indication of whether it is following what I am saying like a real human does with "uh huh" or what not. It asked me if I ever did Docker and I answered I transitioned a system to Docker. But I had done an awkward pause after the word transition so the AI bot congratulated me on my gender transition and it was on to the next question.

A bit of old news but that is still upsetting to me.

My favorite artist, Kazuma Kaneko, known for doing the demon designs in the Megami Tensei franchise, sold his soul to make an AI gacha game. While I was massively disappointed that he was going the AI route, the model was supposed to be trained solely on his own art and thus I didn't have any ethical issues with it.

Fast-forward to shortly after release and the game's AI model has been pumping out Elsa and Superman.

Ed Zitron on bsky: https://bsky.app/profile/edzitron.com/post/3lsukqwhjvk26

Haven't seen a newsletter of mine hit the top 20 on Hackernews and then get flag banned faster, feels like it barely made it 20 minutes before it was descended upon by guys who would drink Sam Altman's bathwater

Also funny: the hn thread doesn't appear on their search.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44424456

Actually burst a blood vessel last weekend raging. Gary Marcus was bragging about his prediction record in 2024 being flawless

Gary continuing to have the largest ego in the world. Stay tuned for his upcoming book "I am God" when 2027 comes around and we are all still alive. Imo some of these are kind of vague and I wouldn't argue with someone who said reasoning models are a substantial advance, but my God the LW crew fucking lost their minds. Habryka wrote a goddamn essay about how Gary was a fucking moron and is a threat to humanity for underplaying the awesome power of super-duper intelligence and a worse forecaster than the big brain rationalist. To be clear Habryka's objections are overall- extremely fucking nitpicking totally missing the point dogshit in my pov (feel free to judge for yourself)

https://xcancel.com/ohabryka/status/1939017731799687518#m

But what really made me want to drive a drill to the brain was the LW brigade rallying around the claim that AI companies are profitable. Are these people straight up smoking crack? OAI and Anthropic do not make a profit full stop. In fact they are setting billions of VC money on fire?! (strangely, some LWers in the comments seemed genuinely surprised that this was the case when shown the data, just how unaware are these people?) Oliver tires and fails to do Olympic level mental gymnastics by saying TSMC and NVDIA are making money, so therefore AI is extremely profitable. In the same way I presume gambling is extremely profitable for degenerates like me because the casino letting me play is making money. I rank the people of LW as minimally truth seeking and big dumb out of 10. Also weird fun little fact, in Daniel K's predictions from 2022, he said by 2023 AI companies would be so incredibly profitable that they would be easily recuperating their training cost. So I guess monopoly money that you can't see in any earnings report is the official party line now?

New blogpost from Iris Meredith: Vulgar, horny and threatening, a how-to guide on opposing the tech industry

Stop killing games has hit the orange site. Of course, someone is very distressed by the fact that democratic processes exist.

New thread from Ed Zitron, gonna focus on just the starter:

You want my opinion, Zitron's on the money - once the AI bubble finally bursts, I expect a massive outpouring of schadenfreude aimed at the tech execs behind the bubble, and anyone who worked on or heavily used AI during the bubble.

For AI supporters specifically, I expect a triple whammy of mockery:

• On one front, they're gonna be publicly mocked for believing tech billionaires' bullshit claims about AI, and publicly lambasted for actively assisting tech billionaires' attempts to destroy labour once and for all.

• On another front, their past/present support for AI will be used as grounds to flip the bozo bit on them, dismissing whatever they have to say as coming from someone incapable of thinking for themselves.

• On a third front, I expect their future art/writing will be immediately assumed to be AI slop and either dismissed as not worth looking at or mocked as soulless garbage made by someone who, quoting David Gerard, "literally cannot tell good from bad".

Managers: "AI will make employees more productive!"

WaPo: "AI note takers are flooding Zoom calls as workers opt to skip meetings" https://archive.ph/ejC53

Managers: "not like that!!!!"

New thread from Baldur Bjarnason publicly sneering at his fellow programmers:

Anybody who has been around programmers for more than five minutes should not be surprised that many of them are enthusiastically adopting a tool that is harmful, destroying industries, sabotaging education, and hindering the energy transition because they feel it's giving them a moderate advantage

That they respond to those pointing some of this out with mockery ("nuts", "shove your concern up your ass") and that their peers see this mockery as reasonable discourse is also not surprising. Tech is entirely built on the backs of workers with no regard for externalities or second order effects

Tech is also extremely bad at software. We habitually make fragile, insecure, complex, and hard to maintain code that backs poor UIs. The best case scenario is that LLMs accelerate already broken software dev processes in an industry that is built around monopolies and billionaire extremists

But, sure, feeling discouraged by the state of the industry is "like quitting carpentry as a career thanks to the invention of the table saw"

Whatever

EDIT: Found out where Baldur got the "table saw" quote from - added it accordingly.

In other news, someone tried selling a vibe-coded ytp-dl wrapper and got publicly called out for it:

So two weeks ago I linked titotal's detailed breakdown of what is wrong with AI 2027's "model" (tldr; even accepting the line goes up premise of the whole thing, AI 2027's math was so bad that they made the line always asymptote to infinity in the near future regardless of inputs). Titotal went to pretty extreme lengths to meet the "charitability" norms of lesswrong, corresponding with one of the AI 2027 authors, carefully considering what they might have intended, responding to comments in detail and depth, and in general not simply mocking the entire exercise in intellectual masturbation and hype generation like it rightfully deserves.

But even with all that effort, someone still decided make an entire (long, obviously) post with a section dedicated to tone-policing titotal: https://thezvi.substack.com/p/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027?open=false#%C2%A7the-headline-message-is-not-ideal (here is the lw link: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5c5krDqGC5eEPDqZS/analyzing-a-critique-of-the-ai-2027-timeline-forecasts)

Oh, and looking back at the comments on titotal's post... his detailed elaboration of some pretty egregious errors in AI 2027 didn't really change anyone's mind, at most moving them back a year to 2028.

So, morale of the story, lesswrongers and rationalist are in fact not worth the effort to talk to and we are right to mock them. The numbers they claim to use are pulled out of their asses to fit vibes they already feel.

And my choice for most sneerable line out of all the comments:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/KgejNns3ojrvCfFbi/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models?commentId=XbPCQkgPmKYGJ4WTb

And I therefore am left wondering what less shoddy toy models I should be basing my life decisions on.

Aella popped up on doomscroll - https://youtu.be/r7WL6kaTJnw

E: oh man the comments are great

E2:

1:08:02 There's a lot of discussions among the rationalist community about the uneven distribution of IQ and its correlation with race. Why is this a topic that people fixate on if they're also convinced that this ultra intelligence an AGI that's like smarter than every human on the planet why are these marginal differences so important to people?

This titbit by Molly White about how whales have captured Polymarket's "dispute resolution" mechanism had me chuckling

https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/114779592623569008

LWronger posts article entitled

"Authors Have a Responsibility to Communicate Clearly"

OK, title case, obviously serious.

The context for this essay is serious, high-stakes communication: papers, technical blog posts, and tweet threads.

Nope he's going for satire.

And ladies, he's available!