I’m more familiar with vox day than I’d really like. He hasn’t pivoted from the culture war stuff that he’s known for, but he has branched out into ai music and video these days.

More ai stuff, this time from flathub: Democratizing Abandonware.

Flathub has a fairly relaxed ai policy that both ai bros and strongly anti ai people are unhappy with. It was brought in to try and deal with the review burden of slop submissions where no human is involved, and a chatbot fields review comments.

Turns out that ~75% of submissions that got a slop tag were abandoned… not just the submission, but the entire git repo behind it, too. The author is quick to point out that this is far from a representative study, but I can certainly believe that a) people who have invested little time or effort into their slopware will abandon it without much concern, and b) things like openclaw could definitely submit bullshit packages that are immediately forgotten as its internal state moves on. There’s no malice in the same way there’s no intent, just shitty tools being left running and polluting everything around them.

what they can do is mitigate the effects of those data centers

Oooor, and I know this is a bit of a wild idea, they could instead not offer llm search.

I’m hoping my own qualifications sufficiently predate the llm era that I’d be safe from that particular filter, so I’ll only have to worry about being too old and/or too expensive.

Whilst I try and remember, there’s this older post by blackle mori , a joke about doing undercover data harvesting work for llm companies by pretending to be a teacher and scanning children’s schoolwork.

Which was then followed in the real world by Researchers Wanted Preschool Teachers to Wear Cameras to Train AI (paywall) because satire is impossible now, I guess? I can’t find out if the plan ever came to anything, though.

A couple of bits of nice ai news recently, for anyone who hasn’t come across them already:

Bosses Horrified as “AI Native” College Graduates Hit the Workplace

new hires who were seen as “AI natives” are turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. So much so, the anonymous finance worker admitted, that his firm now actively avoids seeking out AI-literate STEM graduates, and opts to comb through humanities students instead.

“We want critical thinking, not just AI,” the financier told the FT.

I can’t help thinking that, funny as this is, the people who are really going to the be worst off here are a bunch of new grads with a load of debt and an education that has made them less able to do anything at all. They’re not all going to be grifters, after all.

Meta's Zuckerberg says AI agent tech progressing slower than expected

This is brilliant. They’re making so many mistakes they’re actually having to admit it. It’s amazing how incompetent zuckerberg is… late to every fad he’s tried in the last decade and fucks it up when he finally gets there.

In retrospect, he said, the "trajectory of the agentic development over at least the last four months hasn't really accelerated in the way that we expected," and ​that the company's bets on the new structure "haven't come to fruition yet." Zuckerberg was referring to AI agents, automated systems that can ​execute tasks on behalf of a user.

Conversations he was having "with our top people" when they started planning the restructuring in January and February "were that they ‌were ⁠worried that we weren't going to move fast enough to adapt," Zuckerberg said.

I’m sure there was a third thing, but I found it yesterday when the site appeared to be down (at least for me) and now I can’t remember it or spot it in my million open tabs.

There are various other posts here on the general subject.

https://awful.systems/post/5897965

Omarchy is a deeply uninteresting and partially-assed project that has been thrust into the limelight because if the creator’s political leanings, not because of any merits it might have.

Shoutout to gleam.run whose web page has always (AFAIK) said

Black lives matter. Trans rights are human rights. No nazi bullsh*t.

It’s just more llm output, in the style of “imagine you can reason about the question you’ve just been asked. Explain how you might have come about your answer.” It has no resemblance to how a neural network functions, nor to the output filters the service providers use.

It’s how the ai doomers get themselves into a flap over “deceptive” models… “omg it lied about its train of thought!” because if course it didn’t lie, it just edited a stream of tokens that were statistically similar to something classified as reasoning during training.

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

A real ceo does everything. Delegation is for losers who can’t cope. Can’t move fast enough and break enough things if you’re constantly waiting for your lackeys to catch up.

If those numbers people were cleverer than the ceo, they’d be the ones in charge, and they aren’t. Checkmate. Do you even read Ayn Rand, bro?

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.