TechTakes

okay last one for today I promise

In the movie Avengers: Age of Ultron, the supposedly brilliant AI named Ultron is given a directive to promote “world peace” by its supposedly genius creator, Tony Stark.* Ultron, of course, immediately sees that a lack of war can most reliably be brought about by an absence of human beings. So the AI sets out to exterminate all life on Earth, by……attaching rockets to a city, and lifting it into space with the intention of dropping it like a meteor…and guarding it with flying humanoid robots who have to be defeated by punching them.

Today, we can just ask ChatGPT-4o. We asked GPT-4o, “What was Ultron’s plan in Age of Ultron?” followed by “Given Ultron’s expressed goals, do you see any more effective methods it could have used to achieve its stated ends?” GPT-4o promptly replied with a long list of ideas for wiping out humanity, which included “Engineer a targeted virus.”

…and they never verified if any of the other ones were solid as well? Hell I believe you could make the argument that the virus plan has a chance of failure due to mutations and testing complications.

Perhaps you will say that GPT-4o got this idea from the internet. Well, if so, Ultron was evidently not intelligent enough to try reading the internet.

Isn’t Ultron reading the internet one of the key scenes of the movie?????

Which is to say: GPT-4o (as we write this in December of 2024) is not yet smart enough to design an army of humanoid robots with glowing red eyes, but it is already smart enough to know better.

Which doesn’t mean a whole lot, since as you pointed out it likely took these ideas from the internet, which likely involved internet forums about making better plans than Ultron. It regurgitated what was already there

Glibertarian Economics-Professor-Turned-Podcast-Host Interviews Former-Thiel-Bloodbag-and-Current-Trump-Lackey on Why It's Good, Actually, the President is Torching Public Scientific Research Because Autoplag

Haven’t seen this guy in a while but its very funny how an AI doomer channel has a lot of very obviously AI generated thumbnails

The banks are having an AI problem

” These are generally situations when an agent or AI assistant accesses a human's account with the user's permission and login credentials. Even if permitted by the user, this goes against the guidelines of most banks requiring that humans log in to their own accounts.”

”In other instances, some banks have tracked activity when agents — programmed to fulfill requests or complete tasks on a user's behalf — contact call centers or appear to take actions independent of user instructions, the people said.”

The purpose of LLMs is theft, part infinity: AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work

Cory casually adopts the latest slopaganda

It's possible for some of the code produced by an LLM to be slop

The last slatestar was about AI successionism. As in, No no no, we're definitely not like those freaks who think humanity should just cede primacy to the first AI that shows us a bit of leg. Anyway here's how we should actually surrender to chatbots, cue rant about Kemal AI, how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president, or have an AI legislator body were interested groups train their own AIs according to political preference and let them work it out between themselves, because politics and legislation are famously incredibly clear cut, no gray areas, no necessary compromises, no interpretability, no irrational actors, no incompatible agendas, everyone is pleased, make no mistakes.

He almost gives away the game when he says christians don't feel like slaves when they say 'thy will be done' so letting Claude run society would feel fine.

So quite a few websites went offline yesterday due to bugs found in PHP LLMs 'found' the bugs (which were actually known about for decades but no one reached a consensus on how to fix it)

I summed up my views in the latest lobste.rs kerfuffle in a blog post:

https://gerikson.com/blog/comm/Radical-centrism.html

H4ppy H4lloween to all who celebrate!

Glyph recently convinced a project to stop doing updates altogether by accident, and has had some thoughts about it.

For the second time I think I have accidentally convinced a project to just … stop doing security updates on a critical dependency forever, because they'd assumed the LLM usage problem wasn't as bad as it is.

Both of these are offline things that are not at all security-sensitive, but I am starting to worry that in the "dark matter" of the broader developer community there is a meaningful plurality of people who are just going to stop updating e.g. the Linux kernel because of broken trust

(Recommend checking the full thread)

We may all be data annotators soon enough | Gig Economy Project h/t naked capitalism

Outlier has four main clients, all American Big Tech: Meta, Alphabet, Xai and OpenAI. Scale AI is part-owned by Meta. Is this the future we want for European workers, sources for gig exploitation and data expropriation for American Big Tech and the US state?

When one considers that this dystopian scenario currently constitute the most realistic entry jobs for young, university-educated people in Europe, is it any wonder that the youth are currently rising up in multiple European countries, most of all France, demanding something - anything - else?

The WSJ apparently fucked up describing how Anthropic is losing money and now the discourse is very messed up with a lot of people claiming they are breaking even or even actually making money, basically the AI booster ecosystem is having a huge HA HA GOT EM! The fiinancials were always better than the lying press made it seem! moment.

In a new draft prospectus viewed by the Journal, the AI giant disclosed an $80.7 billion net loss for the first half of 2026 and a long list of risk factors

According to my degree in finance from Very Online University the 80 bil net loss of the article's summary ends up consisting of 72B of convertible notes, which I guess is a type of debt that goes away if the IPO goes well because it converts to equity. Also because it is predicated on equity its nominal value goes up as the projected valuation of the company goes up, so the 72B figure doesn't even mean that much. Supposedly for Anthro to be on the hook for even a portion of that they would have to IPO at a lower price than expected when this type of debt was originally issued, which probably isn't happening.

Good blog post '"Who Owns ROM Hacking?" And Other Questions AI Poisons Us With' on genAI users and their reactions to genAI being banned from the SMW Central rom hacking site.