TechTakes
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.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Bari Weiss, IDW star, founder of The Free Press and author of "How to Fight Anti-Semitism" publishes and then approvingly tweets excerpts from not-very-convincingly-ex white supremacist Richard Hanania explaining that
These stiff-armed salutes are not expressions of sincere Nazism but an oppositional culture that, like a rebel band that keeps wearing fatigues after victory, has failed to realize it's no longer in the opposition.
Quite uncharacteristically, she deleted her tweet in shame, but not before our friend TracingWoodgrains signal boosted it, adding "Excellent, timely article from Hanania." His favorite excerpt, unsurprisingly, is Hanania patiently explaining that open Nazism is not "a winning political strategy." Better to insinuate your racism with sophistication!
Shortly after, realizing he needed to even out his light criticism of his fascist comrades, Woodgrains posted about "vile populism to right of me, vile populism to left of me", with the latter being the Luigi fandom (no citation that this is leftist, and contrary to the writings of Luigi). To his mind the latter is worse "because there is a vanishingly short path between it and more political murders in the short-term future", whereas open Nazism at the highest levels of the American conservative movement doesn't hurt anyone [important].
Read here a worthwhile deconstruction of Hanania's bullshit by John Ganz: https://www.unpopularfront.news/p/enough
US techno-fascism roundup part the fourth:
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DOGE is reportedly using AI to assess the "what did you do last week" bullet points form all federal workers
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Their privacy impact assessment for this had this to say
The individual federal government employees can opt out simply by not responding to the email
But Mr. Musk apparently forgot about this as he threatens to fire everyone who won't respond (stuff like maternity leave be damned I guess)
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A particularly unhappy person got an AI generated video of Trump sucking Musk's toes to display on TVs in government buildings.
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Hey firing people is hard. I know, what if we got the computers to fire people for us!
Starting the week with yet another excellent sneer about Dan Gackle on HN. The original post is in reply to a common complaint: politics shouldn't be flagged so quickly. First, the scene is set:
The story goes, at least a few people don't like hearing about Musk so often, and so we need to let all news about the rapid strip-mining of our government and economy be flagged without question.
The capital class are set to receive trillions in tax breaks off the gutting of things like Medicaid and foreign aid to the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world. The CEO of YC and Paul Graham are cheer-leading the provably racist and inexperienced DOGE team. That dozens of stories about their incredibly damaging antics are being flagged on HN is purely for the good of us tech peasants, and nothing to do with the massive tax breaks for billionaires.
But this sneer goes above and beyond, accusing Gackle of steering the community's politics through abuse of the opaque flagging mechanism and lack of moderator logs:
Remember, dang wants us all to know that these flags are for the good of the community, and by our own hand. All the flaggers of these stories that he's seen are 'legit'. No you can't look at the logs.
And no, you can't make a thread to discuss this without it getting flagged; how dare you even ask that. Now let Musk reverse Robin Hood those trillions in peace, and stop trying to rile up the tech-peasantry.
I'm not really surprised to see folks accusing the bartender of the Nazi Bar of being a member of the Nazi Party; it's a reasonable conclusion given the shitty moderation over there. Edit: Restored original formatting in quote.
I'm honestly impressed to see anyone on HN even trying to call out the problem. I had assumed that they were far enough down the Nazi Bar path that the non-nazi regulars had started looking elsewhere and given up on it.
Gentlemen, you can't have spirited discussions here about the techbros breaking the world, this is the forum were we move fast and break things.
lol wow, I'm cackling at Gackle. Perhaps we can call his brand of caping for polo-shirt fascism "gackin' off"
Isn't that his full-time job? (derogatory)
In todays ACX comment spotlight, Elon-anons urge each other to trust the plan:
image text
Just had a weird thought. Say you're an eccentric almost-trillionare, richest person in history. You have a boyhood dream you cannot shake: get to Mars. As much as you've accomplished, this goal still eludes you. You come to the conclusion that only a nation-state -- one of the big ones -- can accomplish this.
Wouldn't co-opting a superpower nation-state be your next move?
Did Daniel B. Miller forget to type a whole paragraph or was completing that thought with even the tiniest bit of insight or slightly useful implications just too much thinking? Indeed, maybe people don't usually take over governments just for the sake of taking over governments. Maybe renowned shithead Elon Musk wants to use his power as an unelected head of shadow government to accomplish a goal. Nice job coming up with that one, dear Daniel B. Miller.
What could be the true ambition behind his attempt to control the entire state apparatus of the wealthiest nation state in the world? Probably to go to a place really far away where the air is unbreathable, it's deathly cold, water is hard to get and no life is known to exist. Certainly that is his main reason to perform weird purges to rid the government of everyone who knows what a database is or leans politically to the left of Vidkun Quisling.
On one hand I wish someone were there to "yes-and?" citizen Miller to add just one more sentence to give a semblance of a conclusion to this coathook abortion of an attempted syllogism, but on the other I would not expect a conclusion from the honored gentleperson Danny Bee of the house of Miller to be any more palatable than the inanity preceding.
Alas, I cannot be quite as kind to comrade anomie, whose curt yet vapid reply serves only to flaunt the esteemed responder's vocabulary of rat jargon and refute the saying "brevity is the soul of wit". Leave it to old friend of Sneer Club Niklas Boström to coin a heptasyllabic latinate compound for the concept that sometimes a thing can help you do multiple different other things. A supposed example of this phenomenon is that a machine programmed to consider making paperclips important and not programmed to consider humans existing important could consider making paperclips important and not consider humans existing important. I question whether this and other thought experiments on the linked Wikipedia page — fascinating as they are in a particular sense — are necessary or even helpful to elucidate the idea that political power could potentially be useful for furthering certain goals, possibly including interplanetary travel. Right.
Don't forget that the soil is incredibly toxic and that what little atmosphere exists smells like getting continuously Dutch Ovened forever
at some point I read an article comparing the difficulty of settling antarctica with that of settling mars (mars is... much harder), and pointing out that settling antarctica would be so difficult that we have no reason to believe it will ever happen. found that pretty decisive
Yeah, Antarctica is a cakewalk compared to Mars. The temperature is maybe in a comparable ballpark if you squint. Everything else is way easier. You can breathe the air as is instead of living in a pressure vessel with an artificial atmosphere 24/7. You have water everywhere you can simply melt or desalinate and you don't have to even go to the even colder polar ice cap region for it because you're already there. You have a magnetic field allowing for an ozone layer which is nice because the sun is a deadly lazer. There are organisms around you can eat for nutrition, and whatever resources you lack can be brought over with a boat or aeroplane instead of a spaceship. You can get to Antarctica from any human settlement (with the possible exception of space stations) or vice versa in a matter of hours. You can have near-instantaneous communication with other humans on earth at any time, whereas one-way trip between Earth and Mars will take a radio wave anywhere between 3 and 14 minutes, assuming there's not some opaque body (such as a moon or a star) in the way. I'm probably missing a lot of other stuff but that's the ones off the top of my head.
ozone layer
Sadly that isnt there on Antarctica, the ozone hole never was fixed, it just stopped growing. (And now due to somebody tossing aluminum sats in the atmos to burn up it will start growing again, which if there ever was a terraforming mars colony (there isnt going to be) would also not be great for any attempts there to fix the atmosphere).
from what i've looked up in five minutes (and knowing a bit of atmospheric chemistry) i'd guess the problem is chlorine and nitric oxide, not aluminum part. chlorine comes in as hydrogen chloride from ammonium perchlorate, and nitric oxide just appears when you heat up air enough, this means it also is generated during reentry and would also happen with oxygen/hydrogen rockets or any other for that matter. normally hydrogen chloride would be washed down, but when it's high enough this doesn't work. (there's also soot idk about this one)
there's alternative that does not introduce chlorine, and it's even a bit higher performance, but it's more expensive. (ammonium dinitramide) it's also more of matter of interest for military, because it leaves less smoke
slightly related: in 2019 there was discovered an illegal CFC manufacture in China, by way of CFC emissions being higher than expected. i think it was spotted remotely and only later traced to China. by 2021 it was shut down, and it's impressive because in CFCs, you're working with very friendly things like carbon tetrachloride, hydrogen fluoride, chlorine, antimony trifluoride and not at rt, but like, 70 atm 450C, not exactly something you can run in a bucket, everything is corrosive or at least would destroy your liver. in order for this to make sense they had to set up entire factory with capable chemical engineers, and they had to know they'll have customers that would violate Montreal protocol
I think it isnt just toxic but also sharp, and some of the toxics might be water soluble, so could contaminate whatever water they bring, and contaminate the air. (And iirc the moon is worse but at least they are not planning a base there. Right?).
I mean, the moon doesn't smell like the craft trailer, I'll grant you that, but the dirt is made of razor blades, which is bad.
Miners lung on the moon.
People must believe there is a plan, as the alternative 'I was conned by some asshole' is too much to bear.
Can you blame someone for hoping that maybe Musk might plan to yeet himself to Mars. I'd be in favor, though I'd settle for cheaper ways to achieve similar results.
Yeah, sadly looking more and more like a lowtax / bunker while the commies close in speedrun.
Ran across a piece of AI hype titled "Is AI really thinking and reasoning — or just pretending to?".
In lieu of sneering the thing, here's some unrelated thoughts:
The AI bubble has done plenty to broach the question of "Can machines think?" that Alan Turing first asked in 1950. From the myriad failures and embarrassments its given us, its given plenty of evidence to suggest they can't - to repeat an old prediction of mine, I expect this bubble is going to kill AI as a concept, utterly discrediting it in the public eye.
On another unrelated note, I expect we're gonna see a sharp change in how AI gets depicted in fiction.
With AI's public image being redefined by glue pizzas and gen-AI slop on one end, and by ethical contraventions and Geneva Recommendations on another end, the bubble's already done plenty to turn AI into a pop-culture punchline, and support of AI into a digital "Kick Me" sign - a trend I expect to continue for a while after the bubble bursts.
For an actual prediction, I predict AI is gonna pop up a lot less in science fiction going forward. Even assuming this bubble hasn't turned audiences and writers alike off of AI as a concept, the bubble's likely gonna make it a lot harder to use AI as a plot device or somesuch without shattering willing suspension of disbelief.
OK I sped read that thing earlier today, and am now reading it proper.
The best answer — AI has “jagged intelligence” — lies in between hype and skepticism.
Here's how they describe this term, about 2000 words in:
Researchers have come up with a buzzy term to describe this pattern of reasoning: “jagged intelligence." [...] Picture it like this. If human intelligence looks like a cloud with softly rounded edges, artificial intelligence is like a spiky cloud with giant peaks and valleys right next to each other. In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other, but AI can be great at one thing and ridiculously bad at another thing that (to us) doesn’t seem far apart.
So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the "intelligence" part of it, to suggest that "AI can be great". The article just boils down to "use AI for the things that we think it's good at, and don't use it for the things we think it's bad at!" As they say on the internet, completely unserious.
The big story is: AI companies now claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning — the type of thinking you and I do when we want to solve a problem. And the big question is: Is that true?
Demonstrably no.
These models are yielding some very impressive results. They can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write flawless code on the first try.
Fuck right off.
Yet they also fail spectacularly on really easy problems. AI experts are torn over how to interpret this. Skeptics take it as evidence that “reasoning” models aren’t really reasoning at all.
Ah, yes, as we all know, the burden of proof lies on skeptics.
Believers insist that the models genuinely are doing some reasoning, and though it may not currently be as flexible as a human’s reasoning, it’s well on its way to getting there. So, who’s right?
Again, fuck off.
Moving on...
The skeptic's case
vs
The believer’s case
A LW-level analysis shows that the article spends 650 words on the skeptic's case and 889 on the believer's case. BIAS!!!!! /s.
Anyway, here are the skeptics quoted:
- Shannon Vallor, "a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh"
- Melanie Mitchell, "a professor at the Santa Fe Institute"
Great, now the believers:
- Ryan Greenblatt, "chief scientist at Redwood Research"
- Ajeya Cotra, "a senior analyst at Open Philanthropy"
You will never guess which two of these four are regular wrongers.
Note that the article only really has examples of the dumbass-nature of LLMs. All the smart things it reportedly does is anecdotal, i.e. the author just says shit like "AI can do solve some really complex problems!" Yet, it still has the gall to both-sides this and suggest we've boiled the oceans for something more than a simulated idiot.
So basically, this term is just pure hype, designed to play up the “intelligence” part of it, to suggest that “AI can be great”.
people knotting themselves into a pretzel to avoid recognising that they've been deeply and thoroughly conned for years
The article just boils down to “use AI for the things that we think it’s good at, and don’t use it for the things we think it’s bad at!”
I love how thoroughly inconcrete that suggestion is. supes a great answer for this thing we're supposed to be putting all of society on
it's also a hell of a trip to frame it as "believers" vs "skeptics". I get it's vox and it's basically a captured mouthpiece and that it's probably wildly insane to expect even scientism (much less so an acknowledgement of science/evidence), but fucking hell
new zitron dropped https://www.wheresyoured.at/wheres-the-money/
Bruh, Anthropic is so cooked. < 1 billion in rev, and 5 billion cash burn. No wonder Dario looks so panicked promising super intelligence + the end of disease in t minus 2 years, he needs to find the world's biggest suckers to shovel the money into the furnace.
As a side note, rumored Claude 3.7(12378752395) benchmarks are making rounds and they are uh, not great. Still trailing o1/o3/grok except for in the "Agentic coding benchmark" (kek), so I guess they went all in on the AI swe angle. But if they aren't pushing the frontier, then there's no way for them to pull customers from Xcels or people who have never heard of Claude in the first place.
On second thought, this is a big brain move. If no one is making API calls to Clauderino, they aren't wasting money on the compute they can't afford. The only winning move is to not play.
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
there’s a post where they claim that secure boot is worthless on linux (other than fedora of course) and it’s not because secure boot itself is worthless but because someone can just put malware in your .bashrc and, like, chef’s kiss
They're really fond of copypasta:
The issue with Arch isn't the installation, but rather system maintenance. Users are expected to handle system upgrades, manage the underlying software stack, configure MAC (Mandatory Access Control), write profiles for it, set up kernel module blacklists, and more. Failing to do this results in a less secure operating system.
The Arch installation process does not automatically set up security features, and tools like Pacman lack the comprehensive system maintenance capabilities found in package managers like DNF or APT, which means you'll still need to intervene manually. Updates go beyond just stability and package version upgrades. When software that came pre-installed with the base OS reaches end-of-life (EOL) and no longer receives security fixes, Pacman can't help—you'll need to intervene manually. In contrast, DNF and APT can automatically update or replace underlying software components as needed. For example, DNF in Fedora handles transitions like moving from PulseAudio to PipeWire, which can enhance security and usability. In contrast, pacman requires users to manually implement such changes. This means you need to stay updated with the latest software developments and adjust your system as needed.
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