TechTakes

Dang that judge was angry.

Here's docket #170: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mied.384571/gov.uscourts.mied.384571.170.0.pdf -- the complaining about not being allowed to use AI is on page 14 and 16 (it's pretty awful reading I almost gave up before reaching that point)

a pro se litigant should not be threatened with per-citation fines before any violation.

lmao

I can see it making sense, what with CPUs moving to integrated RAM, and probably CPU-integrated flash, to maximize speed. The business of RAM and flash drive upgrades will become a very large but shrinking retrocomputing niche probably served by small Chinese fabs.

We are three paragraphs and one subheading down before we hit an Ayn Rand quote. This clearly bodes well.

A couple paragraphs later we're ignoring both the obvious philosophical discussion about creativity and the more immediate argument about why this technology is being forced on us so aggressively. As much as I'd love to rant about this I got distracted by the next bit talking about how micro expressions will let LLMs decode emotions and whatever. I'd love to know this guy's thoughts on that AI-powered phrenologist features a couple weeks ago.

i hereby propose a new metric for a popular publication, the epstein number (Ē), denoting the number of authors who took flights to epstein's rape island. generally, credible publications should have Ē=0. this one, after a very quick look, has Ē=2, and also hosts sabine hossenfelder.

it's some copium of tremendous potency to misidentify public sentiment (https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/04/03/how-the-us-public-and-ai-experts-view-artificial-intelligence/) for movement (ignore the "AI experts" these are people surveyed at a certain machine learning conference, really could be substituted by 1000 clones of Sutskever)

I like this. Kinda wish it was either 10x longer and explained things a bit, or 10x shorter and was more shitposty. Still, good

article is informing me that it isn't X - it's Y

This would be worrying if there was any risk at all that the stuff Anthropic is pumping out is an existential threat to humanity. There isn't so this is just rats learning how the world works outside the blog bubble.

If rationalists could benefit from just one piece of advice, it would be: actions speak louder than words. Right now, I don't think they understand that, given their penchant for 10k word blog posts.

One non-AI example of this is the most expensive fireworks show in history, I mean, the SpaceX Starship program. So far, they have had 11 or 12 test flights (I don't care to count the exact number by this point), and not a single one of them has delivered anything into orbit. Fans generally tend to cling on to a few parlor tricks like the "chopstick" stuff. They seem to have forgotten that their goal was to land people on the moon. This goal had already been accomplished over 50 years ago with the 11th flight of the Apollo program.

I saw this coming from their very first Starship test flight. They destroyed the launchpad as soon as the rocket lifted off, with massive chunks of concrete flying hundreds of feet into the air. The rocket itself lost control and exploded 4 minutes later. But by far the most damning part was when the camera cut to the SpaceX employees wildly cheering. Later on there were countless spin articles about how this test flight was successful because they collected so much data.

I chose to believe the evidence in front of my eyes over the talking points about how SpaceX was decades ahead of everyone else, SpaceX is a leader in cheap reusable spacecraft, iterative development is great, etc. Now, I choose to look at the actions of the AI companies, and I can easily see that they do not have any ethics. Meanwhile, the rationalists are hypnotized by the Anthropic critihype blog posts about how their AI is dangerous.

Cory Doctorow has plugged this on his blog, which is usually a good signal for me.

He came by campus last spring and did a reading, very solid and surprisingly well-attended talk.

Always thought she should have stuck to acting.

(I know, Hayek just always reminds me of how people put his quotes over Hayeks image, and people just get really mad at her, and not at him. Always wonder if people would have been just as mad if it was Friedrichs image and not Salmas due to the sexism aspect).

At work, i watched my boss google something, see the "ai overview" and then say "who knows if this is right", and then read it and then close the tab.

It made me think about how this is how like a rumor or something happens. Even in a good case, they read the text with some scepticism but then 2 days later they forgot where they heard it and so they say they think whatever it was is right.

Sadly web search, and the web in general, have enshittified so much that asking ChatGPT can be a much more reliable and quicker way to find information. I don't excuse it for anything that you could easily find on wikipedia, but it's useful for queries such as "what's the name of that free indie game from the 00s that was just a boss rush no you fucking idiot not any of this shit it was a game maker thing with retro pixel style or whatever ugh" where web search is utterly useless. It's a frustrating situation, because of course in an ideal world chatbots don't exist and information on the web is not drowned in a sea of predatory bullshit, reliable web indexes and directories exist and you can easily ask other people on non-predatory platforms. In the meanwhile I don't want to blame the average (non-tech-evangelist, non-responsibility-having) user for being funnelled into this crap. At worst they're victims like all of us.

Oh yeah and the game's Banana Nababa by the way.

"they call this “training” but i try to avoid anthropomorphising chatbots"

You can train animals, you can train a plant, you can train your hair. So it's not really anthropomorphising.

Yes i know the kid in the omelas hole gets tortured each time i use the woe engine to generate an email. Is that bad?

Is there any search engine that isn't pushing an "AI mode" of sorts? Some are more sneaky or give option to "opt out" like duckduckgo, but this all feels temporary until it is the only option.

I have found it strange how many people will say "I asked chatgpt" with the same normalcy as "googling" was.

Help, I asked AI to design my bathroom and it came with this, does anyone know where I can find that wallpaper?

The follow-up is also funny:

I don't see the problem, that looks like a typical McMansion to me.

Also, it's nice the AI included a dedicated room for snorting cocaine (powder room).

I really enjoy the bingo card. Let's see when I can find an opportunity to use it...