TechTakes

Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052

@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.

For your delectation, here are the HN comments

I'm in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.

Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.

There's not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.

Here's the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk

Hopefully this doesn’t break the rules. But where can I find some educational podcasts that aren’t overly capitalist, reactionary, rationalist, or otherwise right-leaning or authoritarian in nature.

I want to specifically avoid content like Lex Friedman, Huberman, Joe Rogan, Sam Harris. That sounds good on the surface but goes down a rabbit hole of affirming reactionary bias.

I’m not amazing with words, so I hope what I’m saying makes sense. Thanks.

I got this AMAZING OPPORTUNITY in my inbox, because once your email appears on a single published paper you're forever doomed to garbage like this (transcript at the end):

Highlights:

• Addresses me as Dr. I'm not a doctor. I checked, and apparently Dr. Muhhamad Imran Qureshi indeed has a PhD and is a lecturer at Teesside University International Business School (link to profile). His recent papers include a bunch of blockchain bullshit. Tesside University appears to be a legit UK university, although I'm not sure how legit the Business School is (or how legit any Business School can be, really).
• Tells us their research is so shit that using wisdom woodchippers actually increases their accuracy.
• One of the features is "publication support", so this might be one of those scams where you pay an exorbitant fee to get "published" in some sketchy non-peer-reviewed journal.
• One of the covered AI tools is Microsoft Excel. If you were wondering if "AI" had any meaning.
• Also, by god, are there so many different ChatGPT clones now? I haven't heard most of those names. I kinda hope they're as AI as Excel is.

I'm not sure which would be worse, this being a scam, or them legit thinking this brings value to the world and believing they're helping anyone.

A redditor has a pinned post on /r/technology. They claim to be at a conference with Very Important Promptfondlers in Berlin. The OP feels like low-effort guerilla marketing, tbh; the US will dominate the EU due to an overwhelming superiority in AI, long live the new flesh, Emmanuel Macron is on board so this is SUPER SERIOUS, etc.

PS: the original poster, /u/WillSen, self-identifies as CEO of a bootcamp/school called "codesmith," and has lots of ideas about how to retrain people to survive in the longed-for post-AI hellscape. So yeah, it's an ad.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fufbfm/im_a_tech_ceo_at_the_berlin_global_dialogue_w/

The central problem of 21st century democracy will be finding a way to inoculate humanity against confident bullshitters. That and nature trying to kill us. Oh, and capitalism in general, but I repeat myself.