TechTakes

Jason Koebler joins the show to chat with Paris and Brian about the looming TikTok ban (that got even less likely after we recorded) and what Mark Zuckerberg is really looking for from the Trump administration. Plus, the new Free the Feeds initiative, John Deere in the FTC’s crosshairs, and more bad AI news.

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

Imagine implementing policies so vile that even Casey Newton stops riding your tech dick and calls you out on your bullshit.

Just listened to him ramble on about AI for an eternity on the radio.

We're all going to die.

Are his advisors all so lacking in knowing anything as to have never spotted a mistake in Google's AI interventions.

We're just on the brink of bankruptcy and he's diving headfirst into what the rest of the world is beginning to realise is a boondoggle.

Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Semi-obligatory thanks to @dgerard for starting this.)

Kate Knibbs reports in Wired magazine:

Against the company’s wishes, a court unredacted information alleging that Meta used Library Genesis (LibGen), a notorious so-called shadow library of pirated books that originated in Russia, to help train its generative AI language models. [...] In his order, Chhabria referenced an internal quote from a Meta employee, included in the documents, in which they speculated, “If there is media coverage suggesting we have used a dataset we know to be pirated, such as LibGen, this may undermine our negotiating position with regulators on these issues.” [...] These newly unredacted documents reveal exchanges between Meta employees unearthed in the discovery process, like a Meta engineer telling a colleague that they hesitated to access LibGen data because “torrenting from a [Meta-owned] corporate laptop doesn’t feel right 😃”. They also allege that internal discussions about using LibGen data were escalated to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg (referred to as "MZ" in the memo handed over during discovery) and that Meta's AI team was "approved to use" the pirated material.

Ed Zitron, Robert Evans, Edward Ongweso Jr. and Gare Davis turn CES into a British panel discussion show.

There are probably other links for it than Apple, I'm sure you can find them if that's an issue.

Claude was being judgy, so I called it out. It immediately caved. Is verbal abuse a valid method of circumventing LLM censorship??