TechTakes

small domino: Paul Graham's "Hackers and Painters" (2003)

....

big domino: "AI" "art" "realism"

please excuse me while I make incoherent screaming noises (archive)

A few years ago, maybe a few months after moving to the bay area, a guy from my high school messaged me on linkedin. He was also in the bay, and was wanting to network, I guess? I ghosted him, because I didn’t know him at all, and when I asked my high school friends about him, he got some bad reviews. Anyway today linkedin suggests/shoves a post down my throat where he is proudly talking about working at anthropic. Glad I ghosted!

PS/E: Anthro Pic is definitely a furry term. Is that anything?

any of y'all running short on your supply of really tortured sentences? no worries, I've got a supply drop

What will count, he says, is industrial revolution-style irreversible growth.

While AI is improving fast, it remains wildly flawed

Moreover, a recent Eye on the Market [PDF] report by Michael Cembalest, chairman of Market and Investment Strategy for JP Morgan Asset Management, questions whether the immense investments in AI and the infrastructure required to support it, already made or committed by the tech giants, will ever pay off

that paragraph doesn't punch very hard, but the (2024) pdf that it links to starts out with this as a bolded title line:

A severe case of COVIDIA: prognosis for an AI-driven US equity market

which, well, 1) immensely tortured sentence, 2) "aww poor baby, etc etc"

entertained by the rapid fire "hmm, shit, is all this worth it?" that's Ever So Suddenly boiling up everywhere. bet it's entirely unrelated to people working on quarterly portfolio reviews, tho

I stumbled upon this poster while trying to figure out what linux distro normal people are using these days, and there’s something about their particular brand of confident incorrectness. please enjoy the posts of someone who’s either a relatively finely tuned impolite disagreement bot or a human very carefully emulating one:

• weirdly extremely into everything red hat
• outrageously bad takes, repeated frequently in all the Linux beginner subs, never called out because “hey fucker I know you’re bullshitting and no I don’t have to explain myself” gets punished by the mods of those subs
• very quickly carries conversation into nested subthreads where the downvotes can’t get them
• accuses other posters of using AI to generate the posts they disagree with
• when called out for sounding like AI, explains that they use it “only to translate”
• just the perfect embodiment of a fucking terrible linux guy, I swear this is where the microsoft research money goes

So they had the new Claude hooked up to some tools so that it could play Pokemon red. Somewhat impressive (at least to me!) It was able to beat lt surge after several days of play. They had a stream demo'ing it on twitch and despite the on paper result of getting 3 gym badges, poor fellas got stuck in Viridian forest trying to find the exit to the maze.

As far as finding the exit goes... I guess you could say he was stumped? (MODS PLEASE DONT BAN)

strim if anyone is curious. Yes, i know this is clever advertising for anthropic, but i do find it cute and maybe someone else will?

https://www.twitch.tv/claudeplayspokemon

Enjoy this MoreWronger cosplaying as Barney Stinson

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/a4tPMomzHhCunwqLX/you-can-just-wear-a-suit