TechTakes

https://www.gauntletai.com/

10 weeks of 100h work weeks so you can have a 98% (publically disclosed) chance of being denied a Golden Ticket to the AI factory.

This is very weird but not particularly notable, other than that these guys have apparently been YC funded in 2017, and I can't find anything about the company in the directory: https://www.ycombinator.com/companies?batch=Summer+2017... until I looked at the CEO's name. ~~Lambda School~~ ~~Bloom Institute~~ GauntletAI's latest pivot is asking for 1000 hours of voluntary unpaid labour.

e: apologies for the vaguepost, I could've sworn I put down the name, but in any case, it's the return of PG's favourite guy not named Sam Altman, Austen Allred

SRD suspects a Palantir psyop

i googled for discussion around how a VPN can protect (or not) against a MITM attack, and came across this:

We are a small team of men trained through stoicism, currently, as newcomers to cybersecurity, we’ve taken the biggest risk by betting everything on ourselves and the leverage we can gain by sacrificing everything that is not essential.

and while the technical parts seem fine based on a surface-reading, this thick as molasses STOIC MANLINESS of their red-teaming is the silliest shit ever

(ps: read their website in the voice of foghorn leghorn, it's pretty fun)

LLMs are the Borg, but dumb

https://zeroes.ca/@maleve/114659111863714334

https://lemmy.ml/post/31490862 pretty interesting article linked in this post, tl;dr researchers tried to get AI agents to run a simulated vending machine (which, let's be clear, is a solved problem and can be done with a normal algorithm better and cheaper) and it didn't go that great. Even if some of the test runs actually managed to earn money, they mostly devolved into the AI becoming convinced that the system doesn't work and desperately trying to email someone about it (even FBI, one memorable time). I think it illustrates quite well just how badly things would go if we left anything to AI agents. What are the odds anyone involved with pushing autoplag into everything actually reads this though...

And back on the subject of builder.ai, there’s a suggestion that it might not have been A Guy Instead, and the whole 700 human engineers thing was a misunderstanding.

https://blog.pragmaticengineer.com/builder-ai-did-not-fake-ai/

I’m not wholly sure I buy the argument, which is roughly

• people from the company are worried that this sort of new will affect their future careers.
• humans in the loop would have exhibited far too high latency, and getting an llm to do it would have been much faster and easier than having humans try to fake it at speed and scale.
• there were over a thousand “external contractors” who were writing loads of code, but that’s not the same as being Guys Instead.

I guess the question then is: if they did have a good genai tool for software dev… where is it? Why wasn’t Microsoft interested in it?

Just watched MI: Final Reckoning. Spoiler free comments: I didn’t know that this and the previous film featured an AI based plot. AI doomers feature in a funny way, seemingly inspired by LW doomers, tho definitely not.