In lighter news, has anyone else noticed that it's necessary for any kind of Cybersecurity course to open with what is effectively a Tumblr-style DNI for unethical hackers? Like, I'm not criticizing exactly and I certainly don't have any better ideas to prevent people using these skills for evil, but the disclaimer up top fits into a certain kind of pattern that I, for one, find hilarious.
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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AI researchers continue to daub soot on the walls of Plato's cave, scaring themselves witless:
https://www.emergent-values.ai/
At least I've IDd the transmission vector from LW to lobste.rs
it's amazing that the paper site has its own little pretty marketing pictures. easily digestible unseriousness!
D'oh! I missed that connection, although the little infographic amoebas should have tipped me off
seeing dan in the authors list made me realize
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What if we used AI to do De-Ba'athificaiton, but for CIA agents?
I'm sure it will be fine.
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Niko Matsakis wrote a post about how the fucking rust compiler toolchain should include an LLM to explain error messages because teaching the semantics of a language is too hard and that pissed me off so much that instead of linking that piece of shit directly I’m posting this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich that’s also much shorter than Niko’s extended attempt to beg for a promotion at Amazon
Oh no :((
Rust’s emphasis on “reliability” makes it a great target for AI
What?! Aaaaaaahhh! This makes me want to scream. After so many years of C++ misery and increasing frustration with it, and looking into various alternatives for years, I found that Rust is the lanuage which brought me back to actually enjoying programming. If they really ruin it with LLMs now, I don't know where to go anymore in terms of programming languages.
this excellent sneer from Anatol Ulrich
That reply is indeed excellent.
I feel the same way. I program in rust cause I like it, and the feeling of actually liking writing systems code was refreshing coming from C and especially C++. rust is a language I find beautiful — but I won’t for long if its excellent diagnostics and tooling all get deprecated in favor of an LLM. I can’t imagine what pivoting to AI would do to the language’s roadmap.
If the rust community spearheads the downfall of LLMs somehow, I’ll stop using C
The singularity will be a dozen crappy models in a trench coat, and then finally we’ll have Magic Unified Intelligience™
But the llm is like 7 bipartite graphs in a trench coat.
It’s things in trench coats all the way down!
I'll tell you this for free, we gotta do something about all these trenches!
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does anyone know why Venmo has a faux social media presentation? a feed, payments visible to other users (??) by default, etc
Not even venmo knows.
Though if I had to guess: data tagging for data mining.
my related guess is primarily marketing surveillance and secondarily all other types of surveillance. notably Venmo no longer lets you put “hookers and blow” as a transaction note, because it was the default response from most people who didn’t really want to do a social transaction but had to use Venmo cause it’s all their recipient had. Venmo’s social features are all designed to make you leak as much data to Venmo as possible so it can be monetized or otherwise capitalized upon, and that’s about par for the course for how a thielverse paypal mafia offshoot operates. this is surveillance capitalism with a smiley face.
US government tech hellscape roundup part the third (ugh):
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Elon Musk jokes(?) that the government doesn't use SQL ??? (source, note that his tweet has an ableist slur). I don't even know what to think about this. Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
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Article: Elon Musk’s A.I.-Fuelled War on Human Agency -- People here probably already knew all this; but one of the ways the admin thinks they can fire everyone is by replacing people with AI / automating everything. Some of the social media responses from federal workers are pretty great:
Really excited to see AI put on some waders and unclog a beaver dam from a water structure for me.
If I've learned anything from all this it's about how ~~unfathomably based~~ cool a lot of federal workers are.
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The less fascist / cowed parts of the infosec industry are currently raising the alarm about how insecure this all is. A representative social media post from Gossi The Dog
I definitely recommend posting about what is happening in the US on LinkedIn as you will quickly learn many of the largest security vendors are staffed by people who have no interest in protecting people, while posting with their employers names.
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Some federal workers have been fired via emails calling them [EmployeeFirstName].
Edit:
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~~Elon Musk~~ The US State Department plans to buy $400m worth of armored Cybertrucks from Elon Musk (nytimes) (Edit: may have been ordered under Biden's administration)
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doge.gov has been updated. Mostly just with more useless baby's first website materials; but they promise a "comprehensive, government-wide org chart" and are hiring "software engineers, InfoSec engineers, and other technology professionals".
Aside: I already found ~~two~~ three minor website bugs despite not really looking for them and the website being tiny. But that can't be right... they're IT professionals while I'm DEI.
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Find replace is so hard :( and that's why the government writes about "gay and rights" to avoid saying the... the... the forbidden t-word of which I dare not speak
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So about how I said doge.gov gives baby's first website vibes; it's database was left world writable lol
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doge.gov shares classified information
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Classic Musk "humor": a "tech support" T-shirt to allude to all of this. The dude really likes custom T-shirts (which to be fair custom t-shirts can be awesome when they're less bad)
Is it supposed to be funny or something? Does he actually believe it?
Or: does he even know what it is?
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Look I have nothing against fanfic myself but if there's one powerful corrective it lacks, it is commercial content editorial feedback.
The way the responses talk about "polarization", ugh fucking ghouls.
"AI Alignment" is chiropractic for computer touchers.
so apparently one of the weird creeps went to go shittalk europe (video, transcript (archive))
it's some full-on doublespeak and utterly wild shit. some of the best tho:
The US innovators of all sizes already know what it’s like to deal with onerous international rules.
"waaaaaaaah how dare you have your own rules we need to care about, so hard"
Nothing to see here, just a strong implication that in the minds of these lizards “AI” is a weapon, and the only thing that can stop a bad guy with an AI is a good guy with an AI. Because this precise line of thinking has yielded such good results historically.
Also, think of the GDP growth! Imagine the shareholder value we could create boiling an ocean to predict how many letters “r” there are in “strawberry” and failing after billions in VC funding. This should not be regulated, lest progress is halted!
And don’t fret about safety kids, because once we build the genie we get three wishes for sure, and then Sam Altman’s dad will finally look him in the eye and say “I’m proud of you” for the first time, and all will be well in the world.
nasb, Curtis Yarvin's Cult For Billionaire Morons
the comment around 13:00 onwards, "it was very hard to get people to care about this before". felt in my bones.
Nothing like the ascendancy of fascism in the US triggering a new level of public awareness of my own niche concerns of both the inevitability of fascism via capitalism and how the western tech world breeds a specific ideological mindset that enables said fascism. Of course, it should go without saying that the only effective way to end fascism is to ~~have the ideological opponents of fascism break the fascist country through total war~~ vote blue no matter who
Okey, what is with these dweebs and never taking their leather jackets off? (Talking about the opening still, have not even started the video)
Remember The Matrix? Remember bullet time and leather trench coats? Remember there not being a spoon? Remember taking the red pill and becoming the savior of prophecy? These fucking guys sure do.
still amazing to me that the pillers and "anti-woke" and all went so deep on the matrix, given that it was a trans allegory. way to miss the point, chumps
They think leather jackets are cool but don’t know why, and have never been challenged on their fashion choices. Fuckers need a good mugging to change their ways.
Keeps the stank in, also shaping (I.e. spanx for dudes).
hilariously, also features in the commentary
Peter thiel looks like if nosferatu never hit puberty
This image will now forever live in my head. Thanks, random YT commenter.
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