Mike Masnick coping about Bluesky (de) centralization again.

In a moment of weakness, I took the bait.

Didn't get banned yet, but here's hoping. He be mostly posting cringe lately anyway and my timeline could use some cleaning up.

to say nothing of the violence that necessarily follows a boots-on-the-ground occupation

I doubt there are going to be boots-on-the-ground. Not for any good reasons, just because Trump lacks the commitment (or even capability of commitment).

I love* how the AI stans never get tired of proselytizing.

The result was about 25,000 lines of Rust, and the entire port took about two weeks. The same work would have taken me multiple months to do by hand.

*Love, as in: "I love to get my eyelids scraped with a cheesegrater.

The article tries to fact check Asha Sharma's (the new CEO) claim that

fertility rates are declining, the average birthrate in the ’90s when we were growing up was, like, 3, and now it’s 2.3, and in 2050 it’s estimated to be below replacement

Unfortunately, they forgot that other countries than the US exist and didn't occur to them that she could be talking about global fertility rates. In which case the claim is pretty much correct.

Embarrasing.

Broke: The METR studies are the best research on impacts of AI productivity available today.

Woke: The METR studies are hot garbage.

Bespoke: Both. It's both.

Apparently some of our AI Safety cult "friends" are planning a protest in London on 28th of February.

Is it going to be something worth critically supporting instead of the usual criti-hype? Possible, but not likely.

The AI Safety movement is finally changing by ~~Sillyconversations~~ Siliconversations.

Who?

I used to be a quantum scientist and now I'm a YouTuber. My parents are thrilled.

Oh, okay.

Also curious that they're not protesting Anthropic on the thumbnail. A cynic would say they're giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.

They're giving them free pass because they say the right shibboleths.

Oh I get it now. I thought there's some backstory that either Nathan Baschez or Simon Willison lied about having a CS degree.

You have a level of faith in humanity that is completely unwarranted.

Your mum is an antique.

Wait, wait, wait. I didn't realize this before. Who the F needs to lie about not having a CS degree? Being a code monkey is (or at least used to be) something, where you can get away with not having a degree.

I unfortunately do understand. I think there are severe tradeoffs between living a good life and living a virtuous life. Most people usually compromise to lesser or greater degree and find ways to cope with that. Nihilism is one way.

That article gave me a whiplash. First part: pretty cool. Second part: deeply questionable.

For example these two paragraphs from sections 'problem with code' and 'magic of data':

“Modular and interpretable code” sounds great until you are staring at 100 modules with 100,000 lines of code each and someone is asking you to interpret it.

Regardless of how complicated your program’s behavior is, if you write it as a neural network, the program remains interpretable. To know what your neural network actually does, just read the dataset

Well, "just read the dataset bro" sound great sounds great until you are staring at a dataset with 100 000 examples and someone is asking you to interpret it.