TechTakes

Do you believe in magic in an old creepy techbro's heart?

‘The kernel project only wants serious developers. That includes having access to enough resources to function in this world’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l9ARF2KcDgc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA&index=1&pp=iAQBsAgC - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261014-linux-kernel-goes-full-ai-slop-code-hides-chatbot-commits - podcast

time: 13 min 43 sec

As I was using LLMs at work (I never use LLMs for personal projects), a question occurred to me:

What in the fuck are these new data centers supposed to actually do?

The enterprise users are all in on having LLMs write 300% of the code. And yet, both OpenAI and Anthropic are still giving these "$200 gets you $10 000 in API costs" subscriptions to every victim of AI psychosis.

Why do we have RAM, hard disk, SSD, GPU and CPU shortages and no "token shortage"?

I mean, we all know the answer, these are the offerings for the robot god, but like how in the fuck are they still obtaining loans for this shit?

“There's only really roughly 2,000 AI researchers in America, and the vast majority of them believe in this sort of worldview around effective altruism,” Sankar noted. The Palantir CTO seems to believe, like many effective altruism critics, that all the doomsday scenarios and far-fetched risks being posited by the EA AI crowd are less technical critiques and more like theological ones.

“I think there's a profound truth to Pascal's saying that every human has a god-shaped hole in their heart,” Sankar said, “and it's important to understand that many of these folks in Silicon Valley who are building this technology have filled that hole with the machine God of AGI.”

At least the vibes are consistent I guess.... but still death cults are always lame because besides the whole obsession with death, they are also all the same.

the return of the SaaSpocalypse

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTbb7Ub43F0&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261013-the-ai-photoshop-clones-interface-mockups-that-dont-work - podcast

time: 4 min 59 sec

I think that's a really good idea and we should encourage them. I recommend Kent cigarettes with the Micronite filter for a smooth aroma.

Archived link

all my apes gone

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SwZ6_Q2lnsc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261012-ai-game-demo-going-broke-on-just-430-players - podcast

time: 4 min 47 sec

So the boosters are making a big deal about the dump of "proofs" OpenAI has made recently, so I thought I would collect some relevant links in one place...

Stuff on autoformalization:

• A short blog post breaking down some of the bugs found and potential for more
• preprint discussing the problems with natural language to lean in detail and pointing out some blatant inconsistencies in the recent Navier-stokes "proof"
• /r/betteroffline discussion of above preprint
• Some of our very good friends are aware of the problem! Of course, this is lesswrong, so there is a tinge of "this is why we need to be careful with using this sort of approach to make our AI God".
• The soundness bug that led to the fallacious disproof of the Collatz Conjecture

And some other related links:

• OpenAI already retracting a few papers

Let me know in the comments if you have any links I should to these lists!

What a joke

The models introduced stereotypes when they generated images, and they resorted to stereotypes when they reasoned about the images. As a final test, we asked the models to render people as if they had, or did not have, a criminal record. GPT and Gemini complied more than 97% of the time. Sure enough, the resulting “criminal” and “noncriminal” images were systematically altered in a way that the image classifier could detect.

AI is worse than useless junk...

Also cue Sam Altman claiming this is proof AI can read minds just by seeing a picture of someone.

Us abusing our customers is different, you understand

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y7vxLQi4pQ&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261009-anthropic-bans-abusive-or-cruel-behavior-toward-claude - podcast

time: 4 min 43 sec

pivoting from space

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_TlfIKgL5w&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261008-spacex-to-send-nvidia-chips-somewhere-in-the-universe - podcast

time: 5 min 20 sec

‘scraped the web and found the bugs’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krayLBNiAx8&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA- video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261007-mythos-not-the-magical-ai-hacking-tool-after-all - podcast

time: 7 min 03 sec

‘in the meantime, uh, there will be great companies created with serious machine learning’

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hfLoCXTSRJc&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20261006-but-thats-a-sacrifice-sam-altman-is-willing-to-make - podcast

time: 4 min 47 sec

AI Jokers to the left of me, AI Clowns to the right, stuck in the middle of a bullshit AI zoo.

‘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

Want to wade into the sandy, spooky surf of the abyss? 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 soo 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 are well underway.)

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.

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

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

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....

Nice excuse, I guess.