TechTakes

STOP FINDING THINGS

• WEB PAGES WERE NOT MEANT TO BE FOUND
• YEARS OF SEARCHING yet NO REAL-WORLD USE FOUND for PAGES of SEO-OPTIMISED AI SLOP
• Wanted to find things anyway for a laugh? We had a tool for that: it was called WIKIPEDIA "RANDOM PAGE"
• "Yes please give me ONE HUNDRED AND TEN MILLION of my search. Please give me TEN ADS and A PARAGRAPH OF SLOP FIRST" - Statements dreamed up by the utterly Deranged

LOOK at what Search engines have been demanding your Respect for all this time, with all the ad views we gave them

(This is REAL Search results, given by REAL search engines)

• "None of Africa's 54 recognized countries start with the letter 'K'."
• "Add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce"
• "Understood. No more templates—just direct answers, hyper-focused on exactly what you need."

"Hello Something went wrong and an AI response wasn't generated"

They have played us for absolute fools

Spring is in the air, and someone presenting themselves as interested in fucking rationalist males has authored a piece about how said men can dress a bit better and maybe, just maybe, get laid:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vHtouRBd8JNm2tNLH/basic-principles-for-dressing-better

as usual, the real comedy is in the comments

• I dress like a schlub specifically to avoid advertising my sexual availability - https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vHtouRBd8JNm2tNLH/basic-principles-for-dressing-better?commentId=RLdXtcStz9wdAvb4d
• "The item that I currently wear that expresses the most about me is my Oura ring followed by barefoot shoes." - strangely not the same as the commenter above
• "When it comes to slim fit jeans I have the impression that fashion changed. Five years ago they were seen as great and now they don't? Is that accurate?"
• "Overall, I think it makes the most sense to go to the pareto frontier here. You can spend 300-400 total getting some nice looking earth tone button-ups, well-fitting pants that aren't blue jeans, trim your beard, get regular haircuts from an actual salon, shower daily, and make sure you smell decent."
• "[...] when I look at the examples, what occurs to me is that dressing like the example would cause me to stick out and make it obvious to others I am making a special effort, and I'd rather not do that."
• "I was hoping for more fashion theory; the why. "
• "It is fascinating to receive such communiqués of strange news from another star. I would not know, without your saying so, that the set of 10 pictures are intended to be good examples and not bad examples."
• "[...] it is far more important that whatever my spouse wears be a pleasant texture to put my face on, most buttondown material fails this criterion but linen passes" - actually this is just cute

SpaceX has chosen a ~~sacrificial~~ ~~disposable~~ ~~naive~~ crypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451

The mission is expected to take two years and here's what he has to say about that:

I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.

Feeling robbed of my path to citizenship right now after grinding a PhD and contributing to foundational AI + computing technologies for the United States for the past ~ 10 years. Feels like robbing top and technologists like me of the opportunity to achieve the American Dream

oh boohoo Beff let me play a sad song for you on the world's smallest violin

in which our dearest friend DHH has become an unpaid shill for the novel Camp of the Saints

https://xcancel.com/dhh/status/2046982319353778391

nevertheless, the finest minds at hackernews and elsewhere have assured me that he's just a normal, sensible center right kind of guy! nothing untoward going on here, i advise every boutique computer manufacturer known to man to financially support him and his hyprland reskin wankfest.

FTX investor the Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan is a major investor in SpaceX. This seems to be part of the Teachers’ Innovation Platform from April 2019. Mr. Kipling said it best:

As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began.
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her Mire,
And the burnt Fool's bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire.

Meanwhile the Canadian stock market is up 40% in the past 1 year.

Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg

https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923

It is an impressively bad speech.

Ask HN: Company is rapidly cutting AI tool spend how to prep team?

Company I work for is now rapidly planning to scale down its AI tooling spend. Claude code access is basically getting removed and people are forbidden from using personal plans. Reasoning is cost apparently our monthly Claude bill has become astronomical for the org. Nearly 3x our saas's cloud spend.

Apparently we are going to get limited access to codex at severely reduced plans.

I have tried some local models such as Kimi, however most are barely functional.

I am very concerned as the expectation of amount of work done is to remain consistent. Ignoring the fact teams have made entire workflows around Claude I am very worried and frustrated.

How can I help my team ease this transition? Are their local models that run well on local machines that only have 16gb ram?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189073

AI CEOs Baffled by Hatred of Their Technology

"Why do people hate us so much? We only constantly say the technology we're making is dangerous and then block regulation, suck up resources, commit mass theft and plagiarism, threatened to destabilise the economy, enabled more CSAM, caused widespread mental health issues and multiple suicides, unleashed a barrage of slop, engaged in mass surveillance and mocked people against the tech? Don't they know AI is the future and will create a utopia where we all live in a simulation in space?"

Despite the promise of being uploaded to the computer would free men from the shackles of the flesh, LW still finds time to debate the fine points of what makes a woman want to fuck a man:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3y9G4ybNb3rmTgev/why-physical-attractiveness-matters-for-men-s-dating

A month ago, I went to a sex club for the first time. One big thing I noticed: the classic “your eyes meet” trope absolutely did not happen at that club. And I don’t just mean it didn’t happen to me - every single woman there avoided meeting the eyes of anyone.

gee I wonder why

The promise of physical attractiveness, for men, is that you can pay an upfront cost to get in good shape, dress well, etc. You do it basically once. And then, connecting with new women doesn’t take an enormous amount of time. And you don’t need the absolutely miserable skill of trying to build attraction from scratch. [...] It’s all about making that very first contact easier, because the very first contact is the biggest pain point for guys.

hear me out here, this is just off the top of my head, how about treating women like human beings instead of mysterious creatures who must be seduced into liking you

1 comment, essentially saying if you're not above average height you might as well die alone