TechTakes

New webbed brief from Heydon

https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/

Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.

Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.

New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:

What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible

LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev

I regret to inform you that, once again, aella (via this)

fucked that this is at least moderately honest

New artcle from Brian Merchant: An 'always on' OpenAI device is a massive backlash waiting to happen

Giving my personal thoughts on the upcoming OpenAI Device^tm^, I think Merchant's correct to expect mass-scale backlash against the Device^tm^ and public shaming/ostracisation of anyone who decides to use it - especially considering its an explicit repeat of the widely clowned on Humane AI Pin.

headlines of Device^tm^ wearers getting their asses beaten in the street to follow soon afterwards. As Brian's noted, a lot of people would see wearing an OpenAI Device^tm^ as an open show of contempt for others, and between AI's public image becoming utterly fouled by the bubble and Silicon Valley's reputation going into the toilet, I can see someone seeing a Device^tm^ wearer as an opportunity to take their well-justified anger at tech corps out on someone who openly and willingly bootlicks for them.

currently reading https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.17570

this is PsiQuantum, who are hot prospects to build an actually-quantum computer

no, they have not yet factored 35

but they are seriously planning qubits on a wafer and they think they can make a chip with 1m noisy qubits

anyone know more about this? does that preprint (from last year) pass sniff tests?

(my interest is journalistic, and also the first of these companies to factor 35 gets all the VC money ever)