TechTakes

Go home Coursera, you're drunk.

Want to get even better results with GenAI? The new Google Prompting Essentials course will teach you 5 easy steps to write effective prompts for consistent, useful results.

Note: Got an email ad from Coursera. I had to highlight the message because the email's text was white-on-white.

How the chicken fried fuck does anyone make a course about "prompt engineering"? It's like seeing a weird sports guy systematize his pregame rituals and then sell a course on it.

Step 1: Grow a beard, preferably one like that Leonidas guy in 300.

Step 2: If your team wins, never wash those clothes, and be sure to wear those clothes every game day. That's not stank, that's the luck diffusing out into the universe.

Step 3: Use the force to make the ball go where it needs to go. Also use it to scatter and confuse the opposition.

Step 4: Ask God(s) to intervene, he/she/they love(s) your team more!

Step 5: Change allegiance to a better team if things go downhill, because that means your current team has lost the Mandate of Heaven.

That will be $200 please.

So apparently the US government has been compromised by rustheads

https://thenewstack.io/feds-critical-software-must-drop-c-c-by-2026-or-face-risk/

https://www.cisa.gov/resources-tools/resources/product-security-bad-practices

Fortune magazine reports:

In separate investigations completed by the blockchain firms Chaos Labs and Inca Digital and shared exclusively with Fortune, analysts found that Polymarket activity exhibited signs of wash trading, a form of market manipulation where shares are bought and sold, often simultaneously and repeatedly, to create a false impression of volume and activity. Chaos Labs found that wash trading constituted around one-third of trading volume on Polymarket’s presidential market, while Inca Digital found that a “significant portion of the volume” on the market could be attributed to potential wash trading, according to its report.

Robinhood's about to make a whole new generation of apes:

Jingna Zhang found an AI corp saying the quiet part out loud:

In a previous post of mine, I noted how the public generally feels that the jobs people want to do (mainly creative jobs) are the ones being chiefly threatened by AI, with the dangerous, boring and generally garbage jobs being left relatively untouched.

Looking at this, I suspect the public views anyone working on/boosting AI as someone who knows full well their actions are threatening people's livelihoods/dream jobs, and is actively, willingly and intentionally threatening them, either out of jealousy for those who took the time to develop the skills, or out of simple capitalist greed.

today i found out that openai wanted to make their own chips https://neuters.de/technology/artificial-intelligence/openai-builds-first-chip-with-broadcom-tsmc-scales-back-foundry-ambition-2024-10-29/

can you imagine what kind of disaster would it be

Got linked to this UFO sightings timeline in Popbitch today. Thought it looked quite interesting and quite fun. Then I realized the information about individual UFO sightings was being supplied by bloody Co-pilot, and therefore was probably even less accurate than the average UFOlogy treatise.

PS: Does anyone know anything about using Arc-GIS to make maps? I have an assignment due tomorrow and I'm bricking it.

FastCompany: "In Apple’s new ads for AI tools, we’re all total idiots"

It's interesting that not even Apple, with all their marketing knowledge, can come up with anything convincing why users might need "Apple Intelligence"[1]. These new ads are not quite as terrible as that previous "Crush" AI ad, but especially the one with the birthday... I find it just alienating.

Whatever one may think about Apple and their business practices, they are typically very good at marketing. So if even Apple can't find a good consumer pitch for GenAI crap, I don't think anyone can.

[1] I'd like to express support for this post from Jeff Johnson to call it "iSlop"

Going outside awful's wheelhouse for a bit:

Logan Paul doxed and harassed a random employee for posting a sign saying Lunchly was recalled

You want my take, the employee in question (who also got a GoFundMe) should sue Logan for defamation - solid case aside, I wanna see that blonde fucker get humbled for once.

I know it's Halloween, but this popped up in my feed and was too spooky even for me 😱

As a side note, what are peoples feelings about Wolfram? Smart dude for sho, but some of the shit he says just comes across as straight up pseudoscientific gobbledygook. But can he out guru Big Yud in a 1v1 on Final Destination (fox only, no items) ? 🤔

Microsoft found a fitting way to punish AI for collaborating with SEO spammers in generating slop: make it use the GitHub code review tools. https://github.blog/changelog/2024-10-29-refine-and-validate-code-review-suggestions-with-copilot-workspace-public-preview/

ZITRON DROPPED

Olivia Squizzle followup: AI Replacement | Drawing Your Requests

google got legally beat down a fair bit in app store area https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/10/court-orders-google-monopolist-knock-it-monopoly-stuff