[-] mii@awful.systems 4 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Thanks, I thought about something like that as well, but figured it'd be more hassle in the long run. I like to keep my mail in one basket.

But honestly, I feel like there just isn't a good solution anyway. Email comes from simpler times and any encryption is bolted on and either awkward to use or has some problems with functionality. Hell, even Proton's bridge was a pain to get running properly with send-email because for some reason it insisted on reformatting outgoing mails. I honestly wonder if I should even bother at this point, because most of the stuff I use email for isn't even private. It's mostly corporate communication and mailing lists which are public anyway. All private communication goes over other channels (and some of which are arguably even worse than email, like Discord).

Not saying that this is the conclusion everyone should come to and YMMV, but spending the last weeks combing through the email landscape this feels like the realization I'm starting to arrive at, because I want my email to just work.

[-] mii@awful.systems 6 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

Personal rant: in my ongoing search for a replacement for ProtonMail after they pivoted to AI had me almost sign up with Tuta because, hey, they looked good and were on my radar originally anyway, when I found out that they do not offer any IMAP/SMTP access at all.

I mean, I get it, their whole thing is privacy and, yes, storing mail locally on my machine kinda undermines the idea of strong and impenetrable E2E encryption, but I should at least have the choice like I do with Proton Bridge. Because without SMTP Tuta is completely unusable for git send-email. I mean, yes, technically I could copy-paste the output of format-patch into the web client but, first, I am lazy and don't wanna do that, and second, from my experience it rarely works anyway because the clients do some encoding crap so that git am doesn't eat it without cleanup.

Meh. I guess I have to keep looking.

[-] mii@awful.systems 14 points 2 days ago

Wild that "We left OpenAI and founded out own company with alignment and safety"-Anthropic decides to get into bed with Palantir of all companies.

It's almost as if their whole safety shtick is complete bullshit. Hmm.

[-] mii@awful.systems 5 points 2 days ago

Fuck me sideways. Looks like the machine will continue running at least for a while.

That’ll go down well with everyone and not erode the public’s opinion about the shitheads even further, I’m sure, when they’re allowed to ingest everything and make their chatbots even more racist and plagiarize even more stuff.

[-] mii@awful.systems 40 points 1 month ago

This will grant us “the arrival of an alien intelligence.” Those are Schmidt’s literal words.

Speaking of alien intelligences, my new Silicon Valley blood magic startup has come up with the idea of ritually sacrificing virgins in the hope of summoning Great Cthulhu or Azathoth, as they might have some ideas of solving the climate crisis.

Not a cult btw.

[-] mii@awful.systems 29 points 1 month ago

AI is deepening the previously parasocial relationships we had with our favorite anime characters from passive linear media, into powerful new, interactive relationships.

I think this is legitimately the first time that I've seen someone speak about parasocial relationships not only positively, but also suggesting that, hey, we should remove the human element even more from it because it's not creepy enough as it is.

[-] mii@awful.systems 63 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago)

I swear if I hear "being against AI is ableist" one more time I'm gonna lose my shit. Disabled artists have existed for as long as art itself, and the only ableism here is AI-brained fuckwits using disabled people as an escape goat by suggesting they are unable to create things from their own effort and need spicy autocomplete to do so.

Edit: fuck it, I’m keeping the escape goat!

[-] mii@awful.systems 27 points 2 months ago

I’m still waiting for even one argument for the usefulness of AI image generation that isn’t fucked up. Just one.

Grok seems so support nudity and deepfakes too according to some news articles I’ve seen because of course nothing screams more free speech than plastering the face of your favorite actor or political opponent into a porn scene, so now let’s see how long it takes the first bluecheck fucker to try and create CSAM with it, because I suppose that’ll be the point when it gets too hot even for Elon.

[-] mii@awful.systems 24 points 3 months ago

There are many good reasons to be critical of copyright, especially because it has been abused so much. Allowing big tech grifters unlimited access to everything everyone ever puts online because they promise to “democratize art” when all they really do it feed it into their spicy autocomplete engines which then flood the internet with AI sludge is not one of them.

Especially when the same fucking people then do a 180 and want protection for the shit their roided Clippy puked out.

[-] mii@awful.systems 23 points 3 months ago

That place is an absolute fucking cesspool.

May I suggest /r/artisthate which is Sneer Club for artists sneering at exactly this type of content, and it’s hilarious sometimes (albeit quite large at this point, so your fair share of doomsday rats have sneaked in trying to co-opt the movement).

[-] mii@awful.systems 31 points 3 months ago

Same, tbh. I went on their subreddit expecting a shitstorm but the announcement sits at like 85% upvotes with mostly positive replies.

What kind of bizarro world have I stumbled into?

At least the top-level comments seem to be split.

[-] mii@awful.systems 31 points 4 months ago

As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.

Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.

2
submitted 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) by mii@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

Wake up honey, new Zitron just dropped.

Looks like Sammy boy has a crush on Scarlett Johansson and wanted to model his sexy chatbot after her role in the movie Her. The damage control is actually hilarious.

Altman subsequently claimed that the actress for Sky was cast before the company reached out to Johansson.

“Yeah, I don’t want to go out with you anyway. Also, I already have a girlfriend but she goes to a different school, so you wouldn’t know her. And no, I won’t tell you who it is!”

I mean, we all knew that OpenAI is a fucking clown show of a company run by wannabe nerd frat boys with way too much money, but I didn’t think we’d get high school level relationship drama this season.

1
submitted 7 months ago by mii@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

It was honestly only a matter of time before someone thought we could try that thing where they identify a license plate from a reflection in some dude’s pupil for realsies.

Puloka’s lawyers reportedly used an “expert” in creative video production who’d never worked on a criminal case before to “enhance” the video. The AI tool this unnamed expert used was developed by Texas-based Topaz Labs, which is available to anyone with an internet connection.

You wouldn’t know this expert though. He goes to a different school.

Large language models like ChatGPT have convinced otherwise intelligent people that these chatbots are capable of complex reasoning when that’s simply not what’s happening under the hood.

And at least the judge here had more than five brain cells and shut that circus down. Let’s hope this sets a precedent.

1
submitted 7 months ago by mii@awful.systems to c/techtakes@awful.systems

It seems like in the proceeds of building their alleged Star Trek utopia with robots and holodecks, tech bros have discovered that they’d rather be the Borg than Starfleet and have begun shilling the pros of getting yourself assimilated at SXSW of all places.

“I actually think that AI fundamentally makes us more human.”

I think it makes us more brain damaged, with this guy being exhibit A, but I guess you could argue that’s a fundamental human property (unless you count hallucinating LLMs).

Those folks sure seem bullish on artificial intelligence, and the audiences at the Paramount — many of whom are likely writers and actors who just spent much of 2023 on the picket line trying to reign in the potentially destructive power of AI — decided to boo the video. Loudly. And frequently.

Stop resisting the tech utopia they’re trying to build for you, or you’re literally doomers. Never mind that the people building said tech utopia are also doomers, but that’s different, because they worry about the real dangers like acausal robot basilisks torturing them for all eternity and not about petty shit like unemployment and poverty.

Speaking of stopping resisting, another, more critical article about this conference has some real bangers they left out in the other one -- I wonder why. It has some sneers, too.

[…] tech journo Kara Swisher—saying stuff like “you need to stop resisting and starting learning” about AI […].

Yep, that's an actual quote. I'm filing that one under examples of being completely tone-deaf alongside "Do you guys not have phones?".

[…] every company will use AI to “figure out how” to become “more efficient.”

I’m sure the toxic productivity community on YouTube will gobble that shit up. It reminds me of that clown who made a video on how to consume media more efficiently by watching anime on 2x speed and skipping the "boring parts". I guess when we eliminate all human value from entertainment products, that might become a valid strategy.

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mii

joined 8 months ago