TechTakes

How do I find product-market fit for my terminators?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41825473

Google looks to be fully shutting down unsupported extensions and ad blockers in Chrome – which might push some folks to switch to Firefox

Google finally did it, they made Chrome completely unusable

PC Gamer put out a pro-AI piece recently - unsurprisingly, Twitter tore it apart pretty publicly:

I could only find one positive response in the replies, and that one is getting torn to shreds as well:

I did also find a quote-tweet calling the current AI bubble an "anti-art period of time", which has been doing pretty damn well:

Against my better judgment, I'm whipping out another sidenote:

With the general flood of AI slop on the Internet (a slop-nami as I've taken to calling it), and the quasi-realistic style most of it takes, I expect we're gonna see photorealistic art/visuals take a major decline in popularity/cultural cachet, with an attendant boom in abstract/surreal/stylised visuals

On the popularity front, any artist producing something photorealistic will struggle to avoid blending in with the slop-nami, whilst more overtly stylised pieces stand out all the more starkly.

On the "cultural cachet" front, I can see photorealistic visuals becoming seen as a form of "techno-kitsch" - a form of "anti-art" which suggests a lack of artistic vision/direction on its creators' part, if not a total lack of artistic merit.

Any mild pushback to the claims of LLM companies sure bring out the promptfondlers on lobste.rs

https://lobste.rs/s/qcppwf/llms_don_t_do_formal_reasoning_is_huge

Plenty of agreement, but also a lot of "what is reasoning, really" and "humans are dumb too, so it's not so surprisingly GenAIs are too!". This is sure a solid foundation for multi-billion startups, yes sirree.

Today's entry in the wordpress saga: seizing plugins from devs. The author of this one appears to be affiliated with wpengine, which possibly signals more events like this in the future.

We have been made aware that the Advanced Custom Fields plugin on the WordPress directory has been taken over by WordPress dot org.

A plugin under active development has never been unilaterally and forcibly taken away from its creator without consent in the 21 year history of WordPress.

More details here: https://furry.engineer/@cendyne/113296240801713427

25071 + Oct 12 GitHub ( 20K) Your free GitHub Copilot access is ending soon

lol

oooh how I'm looking forward to frog-boiler api adjustment pricing season, there's going to be so much cope

neil turkewitz coming in with a wry comment about AI's legal issues:

And, because this is becoming so common, another sidenote from me:

With the large-scale art theft that gen-AI has become thoroughly known for, how the AI slop it generates has frequently directly competed with its original work (Exhibit A), the solid legal case for treating the AI industry's Biblical-scale theft as copyright infringement and the bevvy of lawsuits that can and will end in legal bloodbaths, I fully expect this bubble will end up strengthening copyright law a fair bit, as artists and megacorps alike endeavor to prevent something like this ever happening again.

Precisely how, I'm not sure, but to take a shot in the dark I suspect that fair use is probably gonna take a pounding.

This week's Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 really hit home. It's about a startup trying to sell "The AI Scientist." It even does reviews!

Can “AI” do your science for you? Should it be your co-author? Or, as one company asks, boldly and breathlessly, “Can we automate the entire process of research itself?”

Major scientific journals have banned the use of tools like ChatGPT in the writing of research papers. But people keep trying to make “AI Scientists” a thing. Just ask your chatbot for some research questions, or have it synthesize some human subjects to save you time on surveys.

Alex and Emily explain why so-called “fully automated, open-ended scientific discovery” can’t live up to the grandiose promises of tech companies. Plus, an update on their forthcoming book!

https://peertube.dair-institute.org/w/s1Eyp5R4cdSZVm3y2q58xq

speaking of the Godot engine, here’s a layered sneer from the Cruelty Squad developer (via Mastodon):

In other news, Hindenburg Research just put out a truly damning report on Roblox, aptly titled "Roblox: Inflated Key Metrics For Wall Street And A Pedophile Hellscape For Kids", and the markets have responded.

Mark Zuckerberg says the quiet part out loud:

i wouldn't want to sound like I'm running down Hinton's work on neural networks, it's the foundational tool of much of what's called "AI", certainly of ML

but uh, it's comp sci which is applied mathematics

how does this rate a physics Nobel??

Don't know how much this fits the community, as you use a lot of terms I'm not inherently familiar with (is there a "welcome guide" of some sort somewhere I missed).

Anyway, Wikipedia moderators are now realizing that LLMs are causing problems for them, but they are very careful to not smack the beehive:

The purpose of this project is not to restrict or ban the use of AI in articles, but to verify that its output is acceptable and constructive, and to fix or remove it otherwise.

I just... don't have words for how bad this is going to go. How much work this will inevitably be. At least we'll get a real world example of just how many guardrails are actually needed to make LLM text "work" for this sort of use case, where neutrality, truth, and cited sources are important (at least on paper).

I hope some people watch this closely, I'm sure there's going to be some gold in this mess.

Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:

https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919

They're basically admitting they didn't pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.

But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!

the mozilla PR campaign to convince everyone that advertising is the lifeblood of commerce and that this is perfectly fine and good (and that everyone should just accept their viewpoint) continues

We need to stare it straight in the eyes and try to fix it

try, you say? and what's your plan for when you fail, but you've lost all your values in service of the attempt?

For this, we owe our community an apology for not engaging and communicating our vision effectively. Mozilla is only Mozilla if we share our thinking, engage people along the way, and incorporate that feedback into our efforts to help reform the ecosystem.

are you fucking kidding me? "we can only be who we are if we maybe sorta listen to you while we keep doing what we wanted to do"? seriously?

Another upcoming train wreck to add to your busy schedule: O’Reilly (the tech book publisher) is apparently going to be doing ai-translated versions of past works. Not everyone is entirely happy about this. I wonder how much human oversight will be involved in the process.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/parisba_publications-activity-7249244992496361472-4pLj

https://mastodon.social/@Meyerweb/113267932851356871

The Internet Archive's been hacked and had a data breach