rhamph

Disney is looking to buy up all the staff and assets of suicide-as-a-service provider Character.AI, conveniently leaving behind its bankrupt husk to cover all the liability in multiple ongoing lawsuits.

Before AI Doomer Coxon’s ‘hilbertspaess’ account was made this year, an account by that name had previously been created and deleted at least two times prior. And, according to the Internet Archive, the first display name on that account was ‘Jacob Coxon’. So it’s reasonable to say that it was his account then too, and thus its posts are his unfiltered intellect.

Someone on Twitter by the name Dugan Nash put together a dedicated archive of hilbertspaess’s old tweets from the internet archive, hosted at https://hilbertspaess.pages.dev/

The things a rationalist doomer bro was posting on twitter in 2022 might surprise you! If you somehow weren’t expecting to see anything about IQ, the Holocaust, AI, or NFTs.

Via Futurism, via Reddit SneerClub

Mozilla once again notices that, in spite of the lavish salaries they heap upon their techbro executives, Firefox’s userbase continues to dwindle. Could this be because they don’t operate a monolithic surveillance advertising racket? Or maybe it’s because the corners in the UI aren’t round enough.

https://www.firefox.com/en-US/whatsnew/157/

Choice quote from that interview, which was important enough to get a big box in the release notes too:

We are bringing back compact mode as well

We removed it for absolutely no goddamn fucking reason, despite numerous objections, and now we’re bringing it back! This is called ‘listening’, you see. We are very dependable can definitely be relied upon to provide a stable browser that you won’t have to worry about.

Somehow those executives just can’t work out that unless you can advertise Firefox in all of the search engines and youtubes and gmails and docs and drives and whatever the fuck and preinstall it on all the phones, the Chrome users will not come. “Ooh shiny” is the least of anyone’s concerns.

Good coverage of our friends, their many interconnected networks and less-than-savoury beliefs – no particularly glaring omissions like that ‘sex cult’ thread that was doing the rounds (although its author is cited towards the end).

There are some little factual or phrasing concerns, like saying Aella ‘taught herself statistics’ in any meaningful sense, but overall I think this is a good summary and introduction to the sphere.

I’ve seen this posted or alluded to in a few places; not sure whether it made one of the stubsacks but certainly not yet a top-level sneerpost.

It was fine when I was free to foist slop upon my coworkers, but now everyone is returning the favour?? What the hell. This sucks.

Naturally commenters are careful to note that they of course use the chatbot with care and precision, it’s those insidious others taking the easy approach and not having the moral fortitude to apply a little thought