TechTakes

KDE showing how it should be done:

https://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kde-www/2025-October/009275.html

Question:

I am curious why you do not have a link to your X social media on your website. I know you are just forwarding posts to X from your Mastodon server. However, I’m afraid that if you pushed for more marketing on X—like DHH and Ladybird do—the hype would be much greater. I think you need a separate social media manager for the X platform.

Response:

We stopped posting on X for several reasons:

1. The owner is a nazi
2. The owner censors non- nazis and promotes nazis and their messages
3. (Hence) most people who remain on X or are clueless and have difficulty parsing written text (one would assume), or are nazis
4. Most of the new followers we were getting were nazi-propaganda spewing bots (7 out of 10 on average) or just straight up nazis.

Our community is not made up of nazis and many of our friendly contributors would be the target of nazi harassment, so we were not sure what we were doing there and stopped posting and left.

We are happy with that decision and have no intention of reversing it.

back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they'd fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.

cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they're going to "invest" one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch's company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they're going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of "compute" from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of "growth" for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn't even fit my face anymore. they don't make cartels like they used to

Ugh. Hank Green just posted a 1-hour interview with Nate Soares about That Book. I'm halfway through on 2x speed and so far zero skepticism of That Book's ridiculous premises. I know it's not his field but I still expected a bit more from Hank.

A YouTube comment says it better than I could:

Yudkowsky and his ilk are cranks.

I can understand being concerned about the problems with the technology that exist now, but hyper-fixating on an unfalsifiable existential threat is stupid as it often obfuscates from the real problems that exist and are harming people now.

Employee at ‘plagiarism company’ defending transition to ‘plagiarism + pushing sex content onto children company’ insists that the reason they are pushing smut slop onto kids is due to their passion for creativity.

S-tier big brain ai safety researcher chimes in:

Masterful gambit, sir. Why didn’t we consider the fact that “automating all labour would produce more revenue”?

I might be behind the curve on this one, but ice are now using halo (the computer game) images in recruitment ads, and referring to immigrants (and people who look like immigrants, i guess) as “the flood”, the all-consuming alien horde who are one of the antagonists of the series.

Given how microsoft are happy to contribute to the development of the epstein ballroom, I can only assume that they’re cool with all this.

https://aftermath.site/microsoft-halo-dhs-ice-trump-flood

Apologies for doing journal club instead of sneer club.

Voiseux, G., Tao Zhou, R., & Huang, H.-C. (Brad). (2025). Accepting the unacceptable in the AI era: When & how AI recommendations drive unethical decisions in organizations. Behavioral Science & Policy, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/23794607251384574

abstract:

In today’s workplaces, the promise of AI recommendations must be balanced against possible risks. We conducted an experiment to better understand when and how ethical concerns could arise. In total, 379 managers made either one or multiple organizational decisions with input from a human or AI source. We found that, when making multiple, simultaneous decisions, managers who received AI recommendations were more likely to exhibit lowered moral awareness, meaning reduced recognition of a situation’s moral or ethical implications, compared with those receiving human guidance. This tendency did not occur when making a single decision. In supplemental experiments, we found that receiving AI recommendations on multiple decisions increased the likelihood of making a less ethical choice. These findings highlight the importance of developing organizational policies that mitigate ethical risks posed by using AI in decision-making. Such policies could, for example, nudge employees toward recalling ethical guidelines or reduce the volume of decisions that are made simultaneously.

so is the moral decline a side effect, or technocapitalism working as designed.

The computer-science section of the arXiv has declared that they can't put up with all your shit any more.

arXiv’s computer science (CS) category has updated its moderation practice with respect to review (or survey) articles and position papers. Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review. When submitting review articles or position papers, authors must include documentation of successful peer review to receive full consideration. Review/survey articles or position papers submitted to arXiv without this documentation will be likely to be rejected and not appear on arXiv.

Grokipedia just dropped: https://grokipedia.com/

It's a bunch of LLM slop that someone encouraged to be right wing with varying degrees of success. I won't copy paste any slop here, but to give you an idea:

• Grokipedia's article on Wikipedia uses the word "ideological" or "ideologically" 23 times (compared with Wikipedia using it twice in it's Wikipedia article).
• Any articles about transgender topics tend to mix in lots of anti-transgender misinformation / slant, and use phrases like "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" or "biological males". The last paragraph of the article "The Wachowskis" is downright unhinged.
• The articles tend to be long and meandering. I doubt even Grokipedia proponents will ultimately get much enjoyment out of it.

Also certain articles have this at the bottom:

The content is adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.

https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/OgV-chad-ide-the-first-brainrot-ide

wat

And on the subject of microsoft, this is a splendid way to describe the both that specific company, the us tech sector as a whole and entire us government for that matter:

“We will build the tools of genocide, but never a sex bot” is such a condemnation of American society lolsob

https://xoxo.zone/@Ashedryden/115452105359019979

It was posted in reference to this article on the MIT technology review site, which gets an archive link because it has two overlapping cookie opt-out popups: https://archive.is/KhMqT

It is an interview with microsoft’s mustafa suleyman, their head of ai. For all he claims to think that chatbots pretending to be people is bad, I don’t see him actually doing a whole lot about it.

To start this spooky Stubsack off, there's signs Framework are being slow on the refunds:

Just a heads up I haven't gotten a refund from my cancelled FW12 order. Framework seems to be having trouble figuring it out.

I don't know why, maybe it is Canada or maybe it is a high volume of similar requests, but it is a sign I always find concerning in a company I am worried about the financial stability of.

Could be nothing, but if you have been wavering on a cancellation I figured you might want a heads up.

This comes two weeks after Framework's public fash turn, and just a few days after their latest double down. "Go fash, lose cash" proves itself again.

long hand of casey newton (by proxy) outputs a weird hit piece on ed zitron in wired https://archive.is/chsCw so far bluesky in shambles with no other effects

Oreo has shoved 40 million in wads of cash between two sloppy biscuits. You see, if they don’t do it, then Hydrox is gonna partner with DeepSeek. This is just business, it’s not a bubble

any of y'all watch a good movie or tv show lately? what was it

https://www.1x.tech/neo

Oh look, my delivery from the Nightmare Factory arrived!

Seriously tho, thats not a "tendon," that's a nylon rope on a pulley, and thats not a robot, thats some kind of skinny feller in knitted gimp suit. This is just insulting.

Also, imagine the factorial number of germs it would absorb from scrubbing the toilet. You'd need to invent some kind of new branch of farticle physics to describe the bacterial load that thing would develop. Do you suppose that it takes off its own skin to wash ala Hooty from The Owl House?

Edit: orange site loves it https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45736457

Wsj reviewed it, looks nothing like the ad imo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3c4mQty_so

If these plugs are too much, please let me know: the second episode of our podcast on historical bigoted/misogynist texts is out now. "Woman, thy name is russia."

https://bsky.app/profile/odiumsymposium.bsky.social/post/3m4cjzttdek2f

It is sunday, so time to make some posts almost nobody will see. I generated a thing:

Found out about a new space junk startup today.

One bold new startup is looking to cash in on the frenzy with a particularly bizarre approach: a massive array of space mirrors meant to reflect the Sun’s light down to paying subscribers.

The company has yet to launch any of the 4,000 satellite mirrors it sold in its far-out pitch. However, the startup recently applied for a license with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to launch a 60-by-60 foot demo craft in April of 2026, Space.com reported this week. That’s after winning a $1.25 million contract from the US Air Force, of all places, on top of a $20 million Series A funding round to build out its “sunlight on demand” service, which Reflect says will “strengthen the national defense of the United States of America.”

Astronomers, however, aren’t so gung-ho about the idea of a massive space mirror blinding the Earth with Sunlight.
“The reflectors will be directing their light [even after they pass their target] because obviously they can’t shut that off,” John Berentine, an astronomer at the Silverado Hills Observatory told Space.com. “The beam reflected by these satellites is very intense, four times brighter than the full moon, and they will be flying multiple satellites in a formation. That will have an effect on wildlife in the directly illuminated area, but also, through atmospheric scattering, on the surrounding areas as well.”