presented without comment:

(via @Colophonscrawl)

imagine one day buying some shitpost novelty stickers from that one site you heard a friend mention sometime, and then getting them and laughing about it and forgetting it

all too rapidly the years pass: young trees shoot up, older trees start boughing their way past electrical lines, the oldest all already in their position of maximum comfort. whole generations of memes have been born and died. you no longer even get to make fun of your weird aunt for still sending the dancing baby gif (these days it’s all about the autotune clips of a decade ago..)

and then one day you get reminded that the shitpost novelty sticker web store exists by receiving an email from them

what the fuck.

Proton, who I use for mail and various other services, has gone against the wishes of the majority of their userbase as measured by their own survey and implemented an LLM writing assistant in protonmail, which is a real laugh given Proton’s main hook is its services are end-to-end encrypted

(supposedly this piece of shit will run locally if you meet these incredibly high system requirements including a high end GPU or recent, high end Apple M chipset and a privacy-violating Chromium-based browser. otherwise it breaks e2e by sending your emails unencrypted to Proton’s servers, and they do a lot to try to talk over that fact)

AI Maxers Thrilled with Trump’s Vice President Pick JD Vance

This isn't really too interesting yet; but something to keep an eye on. As things like blockchain and AI alignment becomes weirdly political it's likely that sneering will get unpleasantly close to politics at times. And yet sneer we must.

Other self-titled techno-optimists highlighted Vance’s ties to venture capital, Thiel, and Andreessen, saying the “Gray Tribe [is] in control.” Gray Tribe is a reference to a term originating from Scott Alexander’s Slate Star Codex blog, which points to a group that is neither red (Republican) or Blue (Democrat), but a libertarian, tech savvy alternative.

Possibly the worst misunderstanding of quantum mechanics I've ever seen. I have no idea how anyone managed to convince themselves that the laws of physics are somehow different for conscious observers.

In the spirit of the fondly-remembered "Cloud-to-Butt" plugin, I propose a new tool that transforms mentions of AI and LLMs to something else. But what shape should our word transformer take? While scatology is good shit, I bet we can come up with something more clever than "ChatGPT-to-Poop"

BTW, take 1d6 psychic damage when you realize that Cloud-to-Butt was released more than ten years ago

Edit: Favorite suggestions so far:

• AI-to-Bob @sc_griffith

• AI-to-DFE (Dumpster Fire Elemental) @YourNetworkIsHaunted

• AI-to-Statistics (HN user bitwize - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40024452)

speaking of technofascism, we’re at the stage where supposed Democrat billionaires like the Andreesen Horowitz fuckers suddenly come out in support of Trump:

Marc Andreessen, the co-founder of one of the most prominent venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, says he’s been a Democrat most of his life. He says he has endorsed and voted for Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton.

However, he says he’s no longer loyal to the Democratic Party. In the 2024 presidential race, he is supporting and voting for former President Donald Trump. The reason he is choosing Trump over President Joe Biden boils down primarily to one major issue — he believes Trump’s policies are much more favorable for tech, specifically for the startup ecosystem.

none of this should be surprising, but it should be called out every time it happens, and we’re gonna see it happen a lot in the days ahead. these fuckers finally feel secure in taking their masks off, and that’s not good.

maybe we should have a social/off topic thread too

Hey, good news for a change: https://ca.news.yahoo.com/the-workers-at-bethesda-game-studios-have-fully-unionized-163024914.html

Insert the Sickos meme

"Learning Nate Silver works for Peter Thiel is one of those things that would have shocked me in 2016 and made me wonder why I hadn't already been assuming it in 2024." He now works for the betting market polymarket (using cryptocurrencies of course).

xcancel, twitter

Mumsnet becomes the latest company to sue OpenAI for copyright infringement.

Why AI bros are scraping TERF Island's Finest I'm not sure, but it'll be fun to watch the two of them slapfight each other.

HN: I am starting an AI+Education company called Eureka Labs.

Their goal: robo-feynman:

For example, in the case of physics one could imagine working through very high quality course materials together with Feynman, who is there to guide you every step of the way. Unfortunately, subject matter experts who are deeply passionate, great at teaching, infinitely patient and fluent in all of the world's languages are also very scarce and cannot personally tutor all 8 billion of us on demand. However, with recent progress in generative AI, this learning experience feels tractable.

NGL though mostly just sharing this link for the ~~concept art~~ concept fart which features a three-armed many fingered woman smiling at an invisible camera.

comment from friend:

Slightly related: now I know when the AI crash is going to happen. Every bottomfeeder recruiter company on LinkedIn is suddenly pushing 2-month contract technical writer positions with AI companies with no product, no strategy, and no idea of how to proceed other than “CEO cashes out.” I suspect the idea is to get all of their documentation together so they can sell their bags of magic beans before the beginning of the holiday season.

sickos.jpg

I have asked if he can send me links to a few of these, I'll see what I can do with 'em

https://xcancel.com/creatine_cycle/status/1814711919171014997#m

It is happening again.

Does anyone here know what Justine Tunney’s deal is? I’d been following her redbean project for a time but came across an article that left me rather startled