Today in excellent cold opens: "I didn't talk to ChatGPT, I never have. Instead, I took a load of edibles and laid down in the driveway with the hose on. I produced nothing of value and wasted a ton of water, but at least I ate three protein bars so I'm so healthy."

Between this shit and the oncoming tech-inflicted recession, my wife and I are both reskilling out of tech. I'm looking into electrician and she's looking into accounting. Two fields that are, at least in theory, sufficiently motivated by accuracy and reality to be at least somewhat protected from the rise and fall of the confabulatron.

We'll see how it goes, but God if that "Burn in hell" doesn't just hit me right in the soul.

I had to try and talk my wife back from the edge a little bit the other night and explain the difference between reading the published evidence of an actual conspiracy and qanon-style baking. It's so easy to try and turn Epstein into Evil George Soros, especially when the real details we have are truly disturbing.

This is a very good story to boost because it's one of the most straightforward replacements for a human worker. Like, there's no fig leaf of "creating tools to enable software developers to-" on it. That means that it's failures directly undercut the story of how these systems become at all profitable, which is the kind of thing that's going to actually hurt the bubble.

NANDA claims that agentic AI — or the thing of that name that they’re selling — will definitely learn real good without training completely afresh.

Given their web3 roots, I feel like we should point out that blockchain storage systems are famously cheap and efficient to update and modify, so this claim actually seems perfectly reasonable to me /s.

Anyone who said this about their product would almost certainly by lying, but these guys are extra lying.

Okay but now I need to once again do a brief rant about the framing of that initial post.

the silicon valley technofascists are the definition of good times breed weak men

You're not wrong about these guys being both morally reprehensible and also deeply pathetic. Please don't take this as any kind of defense on their behalf.

However, the whole "good times breed weak men" meme is itself fascist propaganda about decadence breeding degeneracy originally written by a mediocre science fiction author and has never been a serious theory of History. It's rooted in the same kind of masculinity-through-violence-as-primary-virtue that leads to those dreams of conquest. I sympathize with the desire to show how pathetic these people are by their own standards but it's also critical to not reify the standards themselves in the process.

And I'm sure he's sent several notices explicitly declaring that lack of contract between them that a judge evaluating the lien would be interested in.

Not gonna lie, "enforcing the line between ketchup and tomato sauce" isn't the sort of thing I'd expect the government to be into, but I guess I'm not mad about it?

Why don't they just hire a wizard to cast an anti-tiktok spell over all of Australia instead? It would be just as workable and I know a guy who swears he can do it for cheaper than whatever server costs they're gonna try and push.

First and foremost, the dunce is incapable of valuing knowledge that they don't personally understand or agree with. If they don't know something, then that thing clearly isn't worth knowing.

There is a corollary to this that I've seen as well, and it dovetails with the way so many of these guys get obsessed with IQ. Anything they can't immediately understand must be nonsense not worth knowing. Anything they can understand (or think they understand) that you don't is clearly an arcane secret of the universe that they can only grasp because of their innate superiority. I think that this is the combination that explains how so many of these dunces believe themselves to be the ubermensch who must exercise authoritarian power over the rest of us for the good of everyone.

See also the commenter(s) on this thread who insist that their lack of reading comprehension is evidence that they're clearly correct and are in no way part of the problem.

Another highlight from the actual report is a massive increase in attempts to build AI in-house rather than buy, which highlights existing systems' inability to generate value. We can't find any use case for Clippy 2.0 as part of our existing software but, but the investors (and my bosses) might get spooked if we don't sound like we're on the cutting edge of this tech that everyone says is revolutionary. In the context of 70-90% of software projects failing in whole or in part I can only expect this to go well.

Note that the image here isn't from the AI project, it's from actual Doom. Their own screenshots have weird glitches including a hit splat that looks like a butt in the image I've seen closest to this one.

And when they say they've "run the game" they do not mean that there was a playable version that was publicly compared to the original. Rather they released short video clips of alleged gameplay and had their evaluators try to identify if they were from the AI recreation or from actual Doom.

Even by the abysmal standards of generative AI projects this is a hell of a grift.