preprint, but this looks like it’ll be making a splash soon

for the same reasons as this, not really a thing I'd post, even in jest

the existence of these callcenters (often in india, but hardly only there - much of africa is beset by the same problem) is an outright fucking feature of the years-long capitalist market optimisation hell-loop. and as annoying as their "output" (for lack of a better word) may be in one's daily life, at the end of the day it's still a bunch of people at the bottom rung getting fucked

(e: I mention "callcenters" but "AI support centers"/"data review"/"remote shoppers"/.... - it's all the same fucking exploitation-offshoring dynamic)

some of the first research science on promptfondlers and model-affine dipshits is starting to see the light of day and, in what will surprise probably 0% of our regulars, it confirms some things

(I have grumped about their desire for outsourced thinking in the past myself)

also lol @ the pure Ronald Reagan energy of going “yep obviously drugs just make you murderously insane”

always think of this (which is just multiple kinds of amazing in the current day; that it keeps getting used as a sample in dance tracks is just even better)

fuck your black friday then

the institutionalisation of it is/was also just fucking nuts

and then in recent years it's slowly been creeping out into other countries too, with other vendors in other places aping "black friday deals"

I have no mouth and I must scream

actual fucking anti-monopoly enforcement cannot come goddamn soon enough

literal brigading

hopefully this gets shut down hard at all the places they try to fuck with. we've already had 2 cases too many of jonringer this year

naw bro we've got indexes bro it'll be fine bro

iterm2 update, moving the shit out of the core application (like it probably should've been in the first place):

3.5.1

This release adds some safety valves to eliminate
the risk of private information leaving the
terminal via the AI endpoints. While an API key
and explicit user action were always needed to use
AI features, some users asked for an impenetrable
firewall for safety and regulatory purposes.

To that end, there are three relevant changes:

1. Code that communicates with AI providers such
as OpenAI has been moved into a plugin that you
must install separately. Enterprise system admins
can block bundle id com.googlecode.iterm2.iTermAI
to prevent it from being installed in the first
place.

See here for details:
https://iterm2.com/ai-plugin.html

2. In addition, you must manually enable AI
features in Settings. Doing so requires admin
access.

3. Enterprise administrators who wish to disable
iTerm2's AI access may set the user default
GenerativeAIAllowed to False in their MDM systems.

still never received a reply email from the author to my mail. wonder what they think/have learned of this experience tho

When OpenAI issued a casting call last year for a secret project to endow OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT with a human voice, the flier had several requests: The actors should be nonunion. They should sound between 25 and 45 years old. And their voices should be “warm, engaging [and] charismatic.”

One thing the artificial intelligence company didn’t request, according to interviews with multiple people involved in the process and documents shared by OpenAI in response to questions from The Washington Post: a clone of actress Scarlett Johansson

link (archive]

gotta love the lucy-football here. "no no, we never requested that it sound like her!"

sure leaves out whether it was chosen to be that. of all the voice actors out there, they just happened to stumble over and choose the exact one that had a voice like scarjo? happens to everyone, all the time. just like forgetting your keys as you walk out the front door. perfectly normal. pay no attention to the other attempts to get legal cover on delivery day...

can't just rush in with that kind of newfangled highfallutin' racism, amirite?! /s

As far as I can tell the argument basically boils down to “we’ll just use SO MUCH electricity that the utility will have no choice but to invest in green energy just to keep up”

yep. and I like using the rule 34 defense on them: "if that were desired, someone already would've made it"

these fucking clowns permanently don't want to acknowledge (or just stay willfully ignorant about?) the fact that it's easier to do cost and regulatory arbitrage by hunting for presently-favourable miner locations from which to burn electricity than it is to invest into (and possibly, likely even, invent!) whole-ass new green tech with sufficient output for their preferred ourobouros