TechTakes

‘Algorithms lack the spark of humanity’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VCWgoIrRCo&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261005-anthropic-could-ai-be-conscious-pope-leo-lol-no - podcast

time: 7 min 58 sec

Anthropologist Gutsick Gibbon, with guest population-geneticist Alex Hancock, dismantles professional bigot Vox Day's creationist claims and then proceeds to dismantle the rest of his history and public appearances.

Sorry if that title causes psychic damage. Content warning: math.

when you can’t fiddle the numbers any more

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20VYK0-Q-3o&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261001-anthropic-ipo-filing-the-disaster-in-numbers - podcast

time: 6 min 56 sec

APRS and helping local communities fight back

https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261002-kat-jones-how-scotland-is-winning-against-the-data-centres - podcast

time: 41 min 10 sec

Transcript for patrons coming shortly

Nice excuse, I guess.

Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/

Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:

We are bringing back compact mode as well

We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.

Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

A series of events almost got us to armageddon, not caused by “rogue, superintelligent AI”, but by government reliance on error-prone systems that are marketed by their manufacturers as being close to superintelligent.

A CNN report published on 18 September, which hasn’t been verified by other major outlets, describes how the US “almost started a war” with China, based on an intelligence report that claimed a Chinese ship was transporting components of nuclear weapons. Military personnel made plans to intercept the Chinese vessel, complete with aircraft and soldiers ready to board the ship. A military skirmish of this kind between China and the US could quickly escalate and spiral into world war three.

It was only moments before executing on the plan that American officials further investigated the intelligence report and found that it had been generated with the use of a chatbot and contained erroneous information about the vessel’s contents.

This is why this crap is dangerous, it isn't because it works it is because it is broken in ways that are so dangerous they have already almost caused a nuclear war with China....

what if we made a computer you just couldn’t rely on

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3D5_no4quNQ&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260930-new-ai-jailbreak-get-your-chatbot-drunk - podcast

time: 7 min 02 sec

even the AI that works doesn’t work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QEMoNIuamg&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260929-ai-surveillance-trial-costs-320k-catches-zero-crooks - podcast

time: 4 min 10 sec

Took a peek at what our good friends the rationalists are talking about. That's gonna teach me not to gaze into the abyss.

Apparently some AI related bigshot CEO is telling Stuart Russell that our best hope for survival is an "AI Chernobyl" which would royally piss everyone off even more.

Our "leaders" are quaking in their boots and hoping a bunch of us would die so we the people take the reins and lead them somehow out of a peril of their own construction. That's whole another level of completely fucked up.

You all know I'm the last person to expect this shit to get 3 vegetables across the river without going back, and yet the latest evolution of their bullshit is making me feel rather doomer-y.

Reading between the lines, Chornobyl = chain reaction = forkbomb = agents hacking their own company to launch more agents with the same prompt. Do I think this is possible? Sure as shit I think its possible. their cybersecurity is terrible. And LLMs did turn out great at finding exploits: humans screw up in stereotypical ways and there's a gazillion "fixed blah blah" git commits to train on.

Okay, so we got a tremendous cluster fuck. Ideally all that happens is another "human coding appreciation day", whatever.

Except as can be told from their recent hacking leaks, what happens when a clusterfuck like this runs, with the context full of hacking, it would keep trying to hack whatever, until stopped. Hopefully, "whatever" is other AI companies, but it's not like they can't train or fine tune to diversify the whatever.

Other bit that is very disturbing to me is that they are talking about a billion deaths scenario, instead of talking about outright extinction. Why the sudden modesty?

My cynical take is at the core their concerns are still insincere, but this time they actually think something serious might happen, not just having fun with fantasies of infinite importance. And so they are inventing new scenarios that would make that serious thing seem like we got off lightly, or perhaps turn it into a regulatory capture opportunity.

Which is just an escalation, or perhaps de-escalation, of their old game of talking over any realistic concerns with "existential risk".

‘the only form that this kind of product can take is a botnet factory’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HytNZfilDJs&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260928-metas-muse-ai-agent-a-hilarious-security-disaster - podcast

time: 6 min 59 sec

One of the dumbest reasons to create a Dystopia.

The two judges who ruled against Anthropic were both appointed by Trump and served in the first Trump administration. Judge Gregory Katsas was previously deputy counsel to the president, and Judge Neomi Rao served in the Trump administration’s Office of Management and Budget.

surprisedpikachu.jpg

(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

(The spooks shall soon be upon us.)

Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.

Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.

If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.

The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)

Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.

(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)

I don't understand why Bill Gates still feels the need to do marketing work, he is already rich he doesn't need to do commercials and blatantingly shill for a product for money like this.

Also the ides that anyone should listen to Bill Gates about needing or not needing government regulation, nationalization or trustbusting is actually insane.

Why? Why do this? For what? So we can cut funding to human researchers and studies?

An OpenAI spokesperson said the company was “proud” to ensure “the AI models of today preserve the world’s historical knowledge for the future”.

AI cannot and does not preserve anything, the Internet Archive and Wikipedia are entities that preserve the world's historical knowledge for the future, OpenAI steals from those types of entities and mutilates the data into opaque, obtuse and untrustable quips from an AI.

Oracle and Blue Owl are going just great

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj3MYXaR4nA&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260925-oracle-invokes-force-majeure-on-openai-data-centre-contract - podcast

time: 4 min 50 sec

For the ideologues of the billionaire class, the favoured strategy to hold on to power is to rile the masses into genocidal hate, to whip up fear, anything to stop them from joining the dots and turning on the billionaires who are expropriating our present and future and profiting from permanent war.

It is a time of nightmares. We must wake up.

Nothing revolutionary in this article, but I appreciate the common thread it weaves in explaining how we have gotten to such a desperate point and I also appreciate how much the writer despises Peter Thiel.

I am so tired of having endless discussions about the sky falling with our attention span and about how the problem these days is social media rots our brains blah blah blah and no one will address the blatant crime that we have ceded control of our digital lives to dumb, fascist wannabe fuedal rightwing edgelord billionaires and that maybe that is the actual problem...

Sam Altman: ‘whoops sorry lol’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w5dnkwAjuPs&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260924-openai-hacks-australian-government-health-data - podcast

time: 4 min 45 sec

It was fine when I was free to foist slop upon my coworkers, but now everyone is returning the favour?? What the hell. This sucks.

Naturally commenters are careful to note that they of course use the chatbot with care and precision, it’s those insidious others taking the easy approach and not having the moral fortitude to apply a little thought

As a former donor to KDE I love nothing more than being called mere rabble.