TechTakes

can't wait to see what fresh horrors this shit unleases

Will probably repost this in the next sack. A redditor over at r/philosophy tries to argue that AI bans are ideological and therefore bad, after a 3 day ban for posting slop.

E: OP is an EA/LWer. lol

Simple way of messing with the dumbest robot ignoring scrapers. Html bomb.

New case popped up in medical literature: A Case of Bromism Influenced by Use of Artificial Intelligence, about a near-fatal case of bromine poisoning caused by someone using AI for medical advice.

In more low-key news, the New Yorker's given public praise to Blood in the Machine, pulling a year-old review back into the public spotlight.

Its hardly anything new (the Luddites' cultural re-assessment has been going on since 2023), but its hardly a good sign for the tech industry at large (or AI more specifically) that a major newspaper's decided to give some positive coverage to 'em.

With that out the way, here's a sidenote:

When history looks back on the Luddites' cultural re-assessment, I expect the rise of generative AI will be pointed to as a major factor.

Beyond being a blatant repeat of what the Luddites fought against (automation being used to fuck over workers and artisans), its role in enabling bosses to kill jobs and abuse labour in practically every field imaginable (including fields that were thought safe from automation) has provided highly fertile ground for developing class solidarity.

Found someone trying to fire back at the widespread sneering against promptfondlers:

Emphasis on "trying" here - they're getting cooked in the replies and QRTs. Here's a couple highlights - one from someone running an escape room, and one which allegedly ended in someone meeting a baseballer:

More publicity for or longtime friends: Sunday at the garden party for Curtis Yarvin and the new, new right, apparently the parties DJ was, as is tradition, a weird nerd: https://bsky.app/profile/alt-text.bsky.social/post/3lvxlb4migv2w (I linked to the alt text which was collected from the image, scroll up for the image itself).

I’m excited that Silicon Valley tech has finally managed to invent thinking. Makes this book obsolete at long last.

In other news, the mainstream press has caught on to "clanker" (originally coined for use in the Star Wars franchise) getting heavy use, with Rolling Stone, Gizmondo and Axios putting out articles on it, and NPR featuring it in Word of the Week.

You want my take, I expect it will retain heavy usage going forward - as I've stated before (multiple times at least), AI is no longer viewed as a "value-neutral" tool/tech, but as an enemy of humanity, whose use expresses a contempt for humanity.

A nice long essay by Freddie deBoer for our holiday week: the release of GPT-5; I wholly recommend reading the whole thing!

https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/the-rage-of-the-ai-guy

Choice snippet to whet your appetites:

"With all of this, I’m only asking you to observe the world around you and report back on whether revolutionary change has in fact happened. I understand, we are still very early in the history of LLMs. Maybe they’ll actually change the world, the way they’re projected to. But, look, within a quarter-century of the automobile becoming available as a mass consumer technology, its adoption had utterly changed the lived environment of the United States. You only had to walk outside to see the changes they had wrought. So too with electrification: if you went to the top of a hill overlooking a town at night pre-electrification, then went again after that town electrified, you’d see the immensity of that change with your own two eyes. Compare the maternal death rate in 1800 with the maternal death rate in 2000 and you will see what epoch-changing technological advance looks like. Consider how slowly the news of King William IV’s death spread throughout the world in 1837 and then look at how quickly the news of his successor Queen Victoria’s death spread in 1901, to see truly remarkable change via technology. AI chatbots and shitty clickbait videos choking the social internet do not rate in that context, I’m sorry. I will be impressed with the changes wrought by the supposed AI era when you can show me those changes rather than telling me that they’re going to happen. Show me. Show me!"