TechTakes

Tante fires off about web search:

There used to be this deal between Google (and other search engines) and the Web: You get to index our stuff, show ads next to them but you link our work. AI Overview and Perplexity and all these systems cancel that deal.

And maybe - for a while - search will also need to die a bit? Make the whole web uncrawlable. Refuse any bots. As an act of resistance to the tech sector as a whole.

On a personal sidenote, part of me suspects webrings and web directories will see a boost in popularity in the coming years - with web search in the shitter and AI crawlers being a major threat, they're likely your safest and most reliable method of bringing human traffic to your personal site/blog.

Mastodon post linking to the least shocking Ars lede I have seen in a bit. Apparently "reasoning" and "chain of thought" functionality might have been entirely marketing fluff? :shocked pikachu:

I have not tried it yet, but apparently there is an open source alternative for github called https://codeberg.org/. Might be useful.

New Blood in the Machine about GPT-5's dumpster fire launch: GPT-5 is a joke. Will it matter?

"The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends," Ser Jorah told her. "It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace." He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

- George R. R. Martin

I'm still thinking about the article about the NRx party from last week and just how classless (who pours champagne wrong?) and sad it showed them to be, while still being obsessed with their image. Such a sad bunch, their ideas have reached the higher ups of American power and still they obsess about how a journalist (who is dating one of them (he is into the 'we live in a simulation', break up with him, you are in danger)) might write something bad about them. (See also how many of these sad sacks got fired/blackballed for just having no internal filter (dressing up gay people as the KKK really?)). The creme de la creme of intellectual thought and they talk and act like a bunch of 4channers. (Yarvin must know this, his shit about how billionaires act must be a bit of projection). I'm talking about this piece: https://archive.ph/gm3Za Sorry to repost it, I just had a 'layer 2 well done' reminder and cringed again, fucking larpers (No shade to people who actually larp, seems fun, just cringe to do it irl).

So... apparently Peter Thiel has taken to co-opting fundamentalist Christian terminology to go after Effective Altruism? At least it seems that way from this EA post (warning, I took psychic damage just skimming the lunacy). As far as I can tell, he's merely co-opting the terminology, Thiel's blather doesn't have any connection to any variant of Christian eschatology (whether mainstream or fundamentalist or even obscure wacky fundamentalist), but of course, the majority of the EAs don't recognize that, or the fact that he is probably targeting them for their (kind of weak to be honest) attempts at getting AI regulated at all, and instead they charitably try to steelman him and figure out if he was a legitimate point. ...I wish they could put a tenth of this effort into understanding leftist thought.

Some of the comments are... okay actually, at least by EA standards, but there are still plenty of people willing to defend Thiel

One comment notes some confusion:

I’m still confused about the overall shape of what Thiel believes.

He’s concerned about the antichrist opposing Jesus during Armageddon. But afaik standard theology says that Jesus will win for certain. And revelation says the world will be in disarray and moral decay when the Second Coming happens.

If chaos is inevitable and necessary for Jesus’ return, why is expanding the pre-apocalyptic era with growth/prosperity so important to him?

Yeah, its because he is simply borrowing Christian Fundamentalists Eschatological terminology... possibly to try to turn the Christofascists against EA?

Someone actually gets it:

I'm dubious Thiel is actually an ally to anyone worried about permanent dictatorship. He has connections to openly anti-democratic neoreactionaries like Curtis Yarvin, he quotes Nazi lawyer and democracy critic Carl Schmitt on how moments of greatness in politics are when you see your enemy as an enemy, and one of the most famous things he ever said is "I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible". Rather I think he is using "totalitarian" to refer to any situation where the government is less economically libertarian than he would like, or "woke" ideas are popular amongst elite tastemakers, even if the polity this is all occurring in is clearly a liberal democracy, not a totalitarian state.

Note this commenter still uses non-confrontational language ("I'm dubious") even when directly calling Thiel out.

The top comment, though, is just like the main post, extending charitability to complete technofascist insanity. (Warning for psychic damage)

Nice post! I am a pretty close follower of the Thiel Cinematic Universe (ie his various interviews, essays, etc)

I think Thiel is also personally quite motivated (understandably) by wanting to avoid death. This obviously relates to a kind of accelerationist take on AI that sets him against EA, but again, there's a deeper philosophical difference here. Classic Yudkowsky essays (and a memorable Bostrom short story, video adaptation here) share this strident anti-death, pro-medical-progress attitude (cryonics, etc), as do some philanthropists like Vitalik Buterin. But these days, you don't hear so much about "FDA delenda est" or anti-aging research from effective altruism. Perhaps there are valid reasons for this (low tractability, perhaps). But some of the arguments given by EAs against aging's importance are a little weak, IMO (more on this later) -- in Thiel's view, maybe suspiciously weak. This is a weird thing to say, but I think to Thiel, EA looks like a fundamentally statist / fascist ideology, insofar as it is seeking to place the state in a position of central importance, with human individuality / agency / consciousness pushed aside.

As for my personal take on Thiel's views -- I'm often disappointed at the sloppiness (blunt-ness? or low-decoupling-ness?) of his criticisms, which attack the EA for having a problematic "vibe" and political alignment, but without digging into any specific technical points of disagreement. But I do think some of his higher-level, vibe-based critiques have a point.

We're at the point of 100xers giving themselves broken sleep schedules so they can spend tokens optimally.

Inevitably, Anthropic will increase their subscription costs or further restrict usage limits. It feels like they're giving compute away for free at this point. So when the investor bux start to run dry, I will be ready.

This has to be satire, but oh my god.

Thomasaurus has given their thoughts on using AI, in a journal entry called "I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid)". Unsurprisingly, the whole thing is one long sneer, with a damning indictment of its effectiveness at the end:

If I lose my job due to AI, it will be because I used it so much it made me lazy and stupid to the point where another human has to replace me and I become unemployable.

I shouldn't invest time in AI. I should invest more time studying new things that interest me. That's probably the only way to keep doing this job and, you know, be safe.