samvines

Tonight's pivot article? 😊

Matt Clifford, Snake oil salesman, founder of Entrepreneur First startup incubator and chair of the UK's ARIA research committee (that hands out money to researchers) quietly doing a fascism* by joining anthropic whilst also continuing to be a civil servant. Other high profile anthropic ~~bribe~~ salary receivers include Rishi Sunak the former Prime Minister and George Osbourne the former Chancellor.

*from Wikipedia: Corporatism became a main tenets of Italian fascism, and Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime in Italy advocated the total integration of divergent interests into the state for the common good

Marcus is not anti-AI. He is anti Scam Altman and Dario - or more specifically anti-llm. He relentlessly witters on about how "well aktually if you did it my way it would be good AI..." he is still an AI maximalist that wants to bring about AGI. He is one of the most frustrating people whose work I've read because he is soooo close to making a good point the majority of the time and then spoils it by saying "but guise we should totally still do AGI and we should do it my way".

In the addendum to his essay he defends his use of anthropomorphizing language because it makes it easier to understand...

"quantum physics is hard so here's a fairy tale about the mysterious proton and his three children: the quark triplets"

I enjoyed one of the comments comparing Zitron to a fire and brimstone priest.. like dude, Big Yud and Dario are right there

Ed Zitron says water is wet but he didn't properly quantity wetness or indeed how long it would take me to be soaked through if I touch water... Checkmate atheists!

"you can run them at higher temperatures, in the dark, and all these things [that we'd gladly subject humans to if we thought we could get away with it]"

Except that curfew is zero and by screen time we mean both time he's allowed to use screens and time he's allowed to appear on screens.

Marketed as "vibe code all your own tools" and one of the suggestions is 1Password/Bitwarden. I mean they can feel free to fafo with that one and let me know when you've been fired because all your passwords were 1) lost when Claude apologetically deleted the prod db or 2) got exfiltrated and used to steal all your ip because your vibe coded password app is insecure as all hell...

This reminds me of that copypasta/rumour about how some quake 3 arena bots had become sentient because a server was left running for years and the bits simply decided to stop playing and remain frozen (because of course emergent intelligence in deterministically programmed bots is much more likely than a bug in the logic that only manifests after very long sessions 🙃🙃)

I am personally deeply offended that an independent vegan restaurant in my town recently banned meat eaters from bringing in their burgers from next door and passively aggressively eating them in the restaurant whilst making eye contact with the other customers. Whilst I appreciate that there are a huge number of burger joints that cater to meat eaters, I am troubled by the idea that a young fledgling meat eater who accidentally stumbled into the vegan restaurant with a double quarter pounder and bacon meal under his arm could be berated and asked to leave. That might upset him and put him off eating burgers which would be a terrible outcome. I don't think I'm being unreasonable here. I'm no carnivore. I don't work for the beef industry. In fact, I am an omnivore and I have a friend who sometimes eats salads. I'm just saying that if little Timmy wants to enjoy a burger in the middle of a private space owned by people that hate burgers, that should be his god-given right.

*This post is about indie code forges banning slop

Between doing marketing for OpenAI and Anthropic whilst pretending to be "impartial" and wasting massive amounts of time and energy having clankers generate twee pictures of pelicans on bicycles, I thought SimonW would be too busy to even notice this story.