TechTakes

Sunday afternoon slack period entertainment: image generation prompt “engineers” getting all wound up about people stealing their prompts and styles and passing off hard work as their own. Who would do such a thing?

https://bsky.app/profile/arif.bsky.social/post/3mahhivnmnk23

@Artedeingenio

Never do this: Passing off someone else's work as your own.

This Grok Imagine effect with the day-to-night transition was created by me — and I'm pretty sure that person knows it. To make things worse, their copy has more impressions than my original post.

Not cool 👎

Ahh, sweet schadenfreude.

I wonder if they’ve considered that it might actually be possible to get a reasonable imitation of their original prompt by using an llm to describe the generated image, and just tack on “more photorealistic, bigger boobies” to win at imagine generation.

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share

Ryanair now makes you install their app instead of allowing you to just print and scan your ticket at the airport, claiming it's "better for our environment (gets rid of 300 tonnes of paper annually)." Then you log in into the app and you see there's an update about your flight, but you don't see what it's about. You need to open an update video, which, of course, is a generated video of an avatar reading it out for you. I bet that's better for the environment than using some of these weird symbols that I was putting into a box and that have now magically appeared on your screen and are making you feel annoyed (in the future for me, but present for you).

Rewatched Dr. Geoff Lindsey's video about deaccenting in English language and how "AI" speech synthesizers and youtubers tend to get it wrong. In the case of latter, it's usually due to reading from a script or being an L2 English speaker whose native language doesn't use destressing.

It reminded me of a particular line in Portal

Popular RPG Expedition 33 got disqualified from the Indie Game Awards due to using Generative AI in development.

Statement on the second tab here: https://www.indiegameawards.gg/faq

When it was submitted for consideration, representatives of Sandfall Interactive agreed that no gen AI was used in the development of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. In light of Sandfall Interactive confirming the use of gen AI art in production on the day of the Indie Game Awards 2025 premiere, this does disqualify Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 from its nomination.

Today in autosneering:

KEVIN: Well, I'm glad. We didn't intend it to be an AI focused podcast. When we started it, we actually thought it was going to be a crypto related podcast and that's why we picked the name, Hard Fork, which is sort of an obscure crypto programming term. But things change and all of a sudden we find ourselves in the ChatGPT world talking about AI every week.

https://bsky.app/profile/nathanielcgreen.bsky.social/post/3mahkarjj3s2o

Why is my home directory gone Claude?

See that ~/ at the end? That's your entire home directory.

This just keeps happening...

Previously, Previously Previously

More on datacenters in space

https://andrewmccalip.com/space-datacenters

N.B. got this via HN, entire site gives off "wouldn't it be cool" vibes (author "lives and breathes space" IRONIC IT'S A VACUUM

Also this is the only thermal mention

Thermal: only solar array area used as radiator; no dedicated radiator mass assumed

riiiiight....

This is old news but I just stumbled across this fawning 2020 Elon Musk interview / award ceremony on the social medias and had to share it: https://www.youtube.com/live/AF2HXId2Xhg?t=2109

In it Musk claims synthetic mRNA (and/or DNA) will be able to do anything and it is like a computer program, and that stopping aging probably wouldn't be too crazy. And that you could turn someone into a freakin' butterfly if you want to with the right DNA sequence.

Eliezer is mad OpenPhil (EA organization, now called Coefficient Giving)... advocated for longer AI timelines? And apparently he thinks they were unfair to MIRI, or didn't weight MIRI's views highly enough? And doing so for epistemically invalid reasons? IDK, this post is a bit more of a rant and less clear than classic sequence content (but is par for the course for the last 5 years of Eliezer's content). For us sane people, AGI by 2050 is still a pretty radical timeline, it just disagrees with Eliezer's imminent belief in doom. Also, it is notable Eliezer has actually avoided publicly committing to consistent timelines (he actually disagrees with efforts like AI2027) other than a vague certainty we are near doom.

link

Some choice comments

I recall being at a private talk hosted by ~2 people that OpenPhil worked closely with and/or thought of as senior advisors, on AI. It was a confidential event so I can't say who or any specifics, but they were saying that they wanted to take seriously short AI timelines

Ah yes, they were totally secretly agreeing with your short timelines but couldn't say so publicly.

Open Phil decisions were strongly affected by whether they were good according to worldviews where "utter AI ruin" is >10% or timelines are <30 years.

OpenPhil actually did have a belief in a pretty large possibility of near term AGI doom, it just wasn't high enough or acted on strongly enough for Eliezer!

At a meta level, "publishing, in 2025, a public complaint about OpenPhil's publicly promoted timelines and how those may have influenced their funding choices" does not seem like it serves any defensible goal.

Lol, someone noting Eliezer's call out post isn't actually doing anything useful towards Eliezer's goals.

It's not obvious to me that Ajeya's timelines aged worse than Eliezer's. In 2020, Ajeya's median estimate for transformative AI was 2050. [...] As far as I know, Eliezer never made official timeline predictions

Someone actually noting AGI hasn't happened yet and so you can't say a 2050 estimate is wrong! And they also correctly note that Eliezer has been vague on timelines (rationalists are theoretically supposed to be preregistering their predictions in formal statistical language so that they can get better at predicting and people can calculate their accuracy... but we've all seen how that went with AI 2027. My guess is that at least on a subconscious level Eliezer knows harder near term predictions would ruin the grift eventually.)

Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird... So this was the non-existent paper I searched for:

Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.

But the search result I got was a bit different...

Here's the paper I found online:

Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.

Same title but now with a coauthor and in a different journal! Nelli Piattoeva and I have written together before but not this...

And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn't appear, but somwhow on Nelli's it does and ... and ... omg, IT'S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone...

Which makes it especially weird that in the paper I was reviewing today the precise same, totally blandified title is credited in a different journal and strips out the coauthor. Is a new fake reference being generated from the last?...

I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn't make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.

https://kevinmd.com/2025/12/why-ai-in-medicine-elevates-humanity-instead-of-replacing-it.html h/t naked capitalism

Throughout my nearly three decades in family medicine across a busy rural region, I watched the system become increasingly burdened by administrative requirements and workflow friction. The profession I loved was losing time and attention to tasks that did not require a medical degree. That tension created a realization that has guided my work ever since: If physicians do not lead the integration of AI into clinical practice, someone else will. And if they do, the result will be a weaker version of care.

I feel for him, but MAYBE this isn't a technical issue but a labor one; maybe 30 years ago doctors should have "led" on admin and workflow issues directly, and then they wouldn't need to "lead" on AI now? I'm sorry Cerner / Epic sucks but adding AI won't make it better. But, of course, class consciousness evaporates about the same time as those $200k student loans come due.

Today, in fascists not understanding art, a suckless fascist praised Mozilla's 1998 branding:

This is real art; in stark contrast to the brutalist, generic mess that the Mozilla logo has become. Open source projects should be more daring with their visual communications.

Quoting from a 2016 explainer:

[T]he branding strategy I chose for our project was based on propaganda-themed art in a Constructivist / Futurist style highly reminiscent of Soviet propaganda posters. And then when people complained about that, I explained in detail that Futurism was a popular style of propaganda art on all sides of the early 20th century conflicts… Yes, I absolutely branded Mozilla.org that way for the subtext of "these free software people are all a bunch of commies." I was trolling. I trolled them so hard.

The irony of a suckless developer complaining about brutalism is truly remarkable; these fuckwits don't actually have a sense of art history, only what looks cool to them. Big lizard, hard-to-read font, edgy angular corners, and red-and-black palette are all cool symbols to the teenage boy's mind, and the fascist never really grows out of that mindset.

Here’s a substack post (sorry) with a quote I found both neat and pretty funny:

Integrity comes from the Latin "integer," meaning whole or complete. A person with integrity is "whole" in the sense that their words, actions, and values are unified rather than fragmented or contradictory. They understand themselves; they have integrated the warring parts of themselves; and they respect and act on the values that their parts can agree upon.

Rationalists in shambles

Orange site mods retitled a post about a16z funding AI slop farms to remove the a16z part.

The mod tried to pretend the reason was that the title was just too damn long and clickbaity. His new title was 1 character shorter than the original.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46305113

An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:

Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.

So, I’m taking this one with a pinch of salt, but it is entertaining: “We Let AI Run Our Office Vending Machine. It Lost Hundreds of Dollars.”

The whole exercise was clearly totally pointless and didn’t solve anything that needed solving (like every other “ai” project, i guess) but it does give a small but interesting window into the mindset of people who have only one shitty tool and are trying to make it do everything. Your chatbot is too easily lead astray? Use another chatbot to keep it in line! Honestly, I thought they were already doing this… I guess it was just to expensive or something, but now the price/desperation curves have intersected

Anthropic had already run into many of the same problems with Claudius internally so it created v2, powered by a better model, Sonnet 4.5. It also introduced a new AI boss: Seymour Cash, a separate CEO bot programmed to keep Claudius in line. So after a week, we were ready for the sequel.

Just one more chatbot, bro. Then prompt injection will become impossible. Just one more chatbot. I swear.

Anthropic and Andon said Claudius might have unraveled because its context window filled up. As more instructions, conversations and history piled in, the model had more to retain—making it easier to lose track of goals, priorities and guardrails. Graham also said the model used in the Claudius experiment has fewer guardrails than those deployed to Anthropic’s Claude users.

Sorry, I meant just one more guardrail. And another ten thousand tokens capacity in the context window. That’ll fix it forever.

https://archive.is/CBqFs

just came across a wild banger:

(An aside — In their official docs, Apple refers to the menu bar always in lowercase, because it’s just a menu bar. The ‘desktop’ is the same way. This is interesting, because we live in an era where everything is a branded product whose name is a proper noun– see the Dock– and we are not allowed to merely use things, we are forced to experience using them and you legally can’t ‘experience’ a regular ‘ol noun. Everybody knows it’s gotta be a proper noun in order to be experienced. The Las Vegas Demon Orb Experience. The Microsoft Windows Desktop Experience. The ESPN Experience Brought To You By Sports Gambling. The 6th Street Hostel Bathroom Experience. But our friends “menu bar” and “desktop” are just two things, average, normal, unobtrusive. This says something about how the people who created these things thought about them.)

Lol talk about mixed messages.

Mozilla's CEO yesterday:

[Firefox] will evolve into a modern AI browser

Firefox's social media account today:

Firefox is not becoming an AI browser.

The ACM has fallen

https://types.pl/@wilbowma/115733550130706711

https://types.pl/@arjen@idf.social/115736432049018026

a16z funds 1000+ strong phone farm and uses it for mass manufacturing tiktok ai influencers, security turns out to be not good enough https://www.404media.co/hack-reveals-the-a16z-backed-phone-farm-flooding-tiktok-with-ai-influencers/

the usecase is spam:

The hacker also shared a list with me of more than 400 TikTok accounts Doublespeed operates. Around 200 of those were actively promoting products on TikTok, mostly without disclosing the posts were ads, according to 404 Media’s review of them. It’s not clear if the other 200 accounts ever promoted products or were being “warmed up,” as Doublespeed describes the process of making the accounts appear authentic before it starts promoting in order to avoid a ban. 

I’ve seen TikTok accounts operated by Doublespeed promote language learning apps, dating apps, a Bible app, supplements, and a massager.

Introducing the Palantir shit sandwich combo: Get a cover up for the CEO tweaking out and start laying the groundwork for the AGI god's priest class absolutely free!

https://mashable.com/article/palantir-ceo-neurodivergent

TL;DR- Palantir CEO tweaks out during an interview. Definitely not any drugs guys, he's just neurodivergent! But the good, corporate approved kind. The kind that has extra special powers that make them good at AI. They're so good at AI, and AI is the future, so Palantir is starting a group of neurodivergents hand picked by the CEO (to lead humanity under their totally imminent new AI god). He totally wasn't tweaking out. He's never even heard of cocaine! Or billionaire designer drugs! Never ever!

Edit: To be clear, no hate against neurodivergence, or skepticism about it in general. I'm neurodivergent. And yeah, some types of neurodivergence tend to result in people predisposed to working in tech.

But if you're the fucking CEO of Palantir, surely you've been through training for public appearances. It's funnier that it didn't take, but this is clearly just an excuse.

I strongly feel that it's an attempt to start normalizing the elevation of certain people into positions of power based off vague characteristics they were born with.

Lemmy post that pointed me to this: https://sh.itjust.works/post/51704917

John Scalzi:

I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/