this post has been making the rounds on Mastodon, for good reason. it’s nominally a post about the governance and community around C++, but (without spoiling too much) it’s written as a journey packed with cathartic sneers at a number of topics and people we’ve covered here before. as a quick preview, tell me this isn’t relatable:

This is not a feel good post, and to even call it a rant would be dismissive of the absolute unending fury I am currently living through as 8+ years of absolute fucking horseshit in the C++ space comes to fruition, and if I don’t write this all as one entire post, I’m going to physically fucking explode.

fucking masterful

an important moderator note for anyone who comes here looking to tone police in the spirit of the Tech Industry Blog Social Compact: lol

this article is about how and why four of the world’s largest corporations are intentionally centralizing the internet and selling us horseshit. it’s a fun and depressing read about crypto, the metaverse, AI, and the pattern of behavior that led to all of those being pushed in spite of their utter worthlessness. here’s some pull quotes:

Web 3.0 probably won’t involve the blockchain or NFTs in any meaningful way. We all may or may not one day join the metaverse and wear clunky goggles on our faces for the rest of our lives. And it feels increasingly unlikely that our graphic designers, artists, and illustrators will suddenly change their job titles to "prompt artist” anytime soon.

I can’t stress this point enough. The reason why GAMM and all its little digirati minions on social media are pushing things like crypto, then the blockchain, and now virtual reality and artificial intelligence is because those technologies require a metric fuckton of computing power to operate. That fact may be devastating for the earth, indeed it is for our mental health, but it’s wonderful news for the four storefronts selling all the juice.

The presumptive beneficiaries of this new land of milk and honey are so drunk with speculative power that they'll promise us anything to win our hearts and minds. That anything includes magical virtual reality universes and robots with human-like intelligence. It's the same faux-passionate anything that proclaimed crypto as the savior of the marginalized. The utter bullshit anything that would have us believe that the meek shall inherit the earth, and the powerful won't do anything to stop it.

after the predictable failure of the Rabbit R1, it feels like we’ve heard relatively nothing about the Humane AI Pin, which released first but was rapidly overshadowed by the R1’s shittiness. as it turns out, the reason why we haven’t heard much about the Humane AI pin is because it’s fucked:

Between May and August, more AI Pins were returned than purchased, according to internal sales data obtained by The Verge. By June, only around 8,000 units hadn’t been returned, a source with direct knowledge of sales and return data told me. As of today, the number of units still in customer hands had fallen closer to 7,000, a source with direct knowledge said.

it’s fucked in ways you might not have seen coming, but Humane should have:

Once a Humane Pin is returned, the company has no way to refurbish it, sources with knowledge of the return process confirmed. The Pin becomes e-waste, and Humane doesn’t have the opportunity to reclaim the revenue by selling it again. The core issue is that there is a T-Mobile limitation that makes it impossible (for now) for Humane to reassign a Pin to a new user once it’s been assigned to someone.

as I was reading through this one, the quotes I wanted to pull kept growing in size until it was just the whole article, so fuck it, this one’s pretty damning

here’s a thin sample of what you can expect, but it gets much worse from here:

Internal conversations at Nvidia viewed by 404 Media show when employees working on the project raised questions about potential legal issues surrounding the use of datasets compiled by academics for research purposes and YouTube videos, managers told them they had clearance to use that content from the highest levels of the company.

A former Nvidia employee, whom 404 Media granted anonymity to speak about internal Nvidia processes, said that employees were asked to scrape videos from Netflix, YouTube, and other sources to train an AI model for Nvidia’s Omniverse 3D world generator, self-driving car systems, and “digital human” products. The project, internally named Cosmos (but different from the company’s existing Cosmos deep learning product), has not yet been released to the public.

so Andreessen Horowitz posted another manifesto just over a week ago and it’s the most banal fash shit you can imagine:

Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain.

Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence.

does this shit ever get deeper than Regulation Bad? fuck no it doesn’t. is this Horowitz’s attempt to capitalize on the Supreme Court’s judiciary coup? you fucking bet.

here’s some more banal shit:

We find there are three kinds of politicians:

Those who support Little Tech. We support them.

Those who oppose Little Tech. We oppose them.

Those who are somewhere in the middle – they want to be supportive, but they have concerns. We work with them in good faith.

I find there are three kinds of politicians:

• those who want hamburger. I give them hamburger.
• those who abstain from hamburger. I do not give them hamburger.
• those who have questions about hamburger. I refer them to the shift supervisor in good faith.

who could have seen this coming, other than everyone who told the homebrew tree inverter guy this was a bad idea they absolutely shouldn’t do

(via https://hachyderm.io/@jbcrawford/112202942593125987, archive: https://archive.is/VnqRZ)

surprise, Amazon’s godawful surveillance grocery stores were just exploiting hidden labor and calling it innovation, and even that was too expensive

even worse, the few times I’ve seen one of these fucking things in the wild, it still had 1-2 employees hovering near the entrance to make sure nobody did the utterly obvious (fuck with the payment system and get free shit), a job that’s also known as a fucking cashier, but with much worse pay, much harder labor (physically stopping shoplifters), and no counter to lean on or opportunity to even sit down

(here’s a Verge article about the Waymo car getting burned during a Chinese New Year celebration)

a self-driving car got destroyed (to a round of applause from the crowd) in San Francisco! will the robot car fans on the orange site take this opportunity to explore why the tech seems to be extremely unpopular among the populations of the cities where it’s deployed?

of course the fuck not, time to spin the wheel of racist dog whistles and see which one we land on! a note to the roving orange site fans (hi, fuck off), these replies are either heavily upvoted or have broad agreement in the thread (or I’m posting them here cause I want to laugh at some stupid shit, you don’t dictate the terms of my enjoyment)

This isn't a revolt against AI. SF attracts anarchist mobs and they'll vandalize buses, trains, police cars, bikes, whatever is around.

we’re off to a strong start with some bullshit straight from musk’s twitter (which he stole from the fever dreams of the conservatives on his platform)

Alternatively: this is San Francisco where on a good day the locals don’t need much excuse to set fire to a car (although I usually associate it with the Giants winning a World Series) and this poor dumb stupid driverless Waymo drove into a celebratory and by the looks of it somewhat drunken crowd on the Streets of Chinatown during the Chinese New Year where in following its prime directive to do no harm, it got itself stuck up the creek without a paddle so to speak. Waymo probably should have accounted for that ahead of time and told their cars not to go near Chinatown this evening.

remember that no matter what, the robot car is the victim here. there’s no chance Waymo was doing anything dangerous or assholeish in the area; much like robocop, the car is an innocent victim of its fucking prime directives??? and you wouldn’t set fire to robocop, would you?

This is a hilarious take. A few youths went bonkers and defaced private property. Has nothing to do with philosophical beliefs or a Big Tech agenda. You should debate the finer points of the Big Tech agenda with them while they run up to you in a maddened rage.

yeah! I can’t wait until these angry mobs set fire to your robot car body! then you’ll see!

Arguments about driverless cars aside, the youth in this country are seriously lost. It only takes one generation of poor parenting and poor civic policies to ruin a culture.

this one is downvoted, but this reply isn’t:

Sounds like they were right. The youth at that point was lost, and are now raising people who will literally burn down a waymo for fun, or because of some horrifically ignorant idea about fairness.

oh you poor woke kids don’t like when shitty dangerous robot cars are on the streets? are you gonna start crying about how it’s “unfair” they’re covering up pedestrian injuries and traffic accidents now? your grandpa would never stand for this

from the linked github thread:

Your project is in violation of the AGPL, and you have stated this is intentional and you have no plans to open source it. This is breaking the law, and as such I've began to help you with the first steps of re-open sourcing the plugin.

the project author (who gets paid for violating the AGPL via patreon) responds like a mediocre crypto grifter and insists their violation of the law be debated on the discord they control (where their shitty community can shout down the reporter):

While keeping code private doesn't guarantee security, it does make it harder for bad actors to keep up with changes. You are welcome to debate this matter in the MakePlace discord: https://discord.com/invite/YuvcPzCuhq If you are able to convince the MakePlace community that keeping the code open-source is better, I will respect the wishes of the community.

aaaand the smackdown:

Respectfully, I won't attempt to "debate" or "convince" anyone; I'm leaving this pull request and my fork here for others to see and use. It is not a matter of "better"; you are violating a software license and the law. It does not "make it harder" for anyone; Harmony hooking exists, IL modification exists, you can modify plugins from other plugins.

The problem is that today's state of the art is far too good for low hanging fruit. There isn't a testable definition of GI that GPT-4 fails that a significant chunk of humans wouldn't also fail so you're often left with weird ad-hominins ("Forget what it can do and results you see. It's "just" predicting the next token so it means nothing") or imaginary distinctions built on vague and ill defined assertions ( "It sure looks like reasoning but i swear it isn't real reasoning. What does "real reasoning" even mean ? Well idk but just trust me bro")

a bunch of posts on the orange site (including one in the linked thread with a bunch of mask-off slurs in it) are just this: techfash failing to make a convincing argument that GPT is smart, and whenever it’s proven it isn’t, it’s actually that “a significant chunk of people” would make the same mistake, not the LLM they’ve bullshitted themselves into thinking is intelligent. it’s kind of amazing how often this pattern repeats in the linked thread: GPT’s perceived successes are puffed up to the highest extent possible, and its many(, many, many) failings are automatically dismissed as something that only makes the model more human (even when the resulting output is unmistakably LLM bullshit)

This is quite unfair. The AI doesn't have I/O other than what we force-feed it through an API. Who knows what will happen if we plug it into a body with senses, limbs, and reproductive capabilities? No doubt somebody is already building an MMORPG with human and AI characters to explore exactly this while we wait for cyborg part manufacturing to catch up.

drink! “what if we gave the chatbot a robot body” is my favorite promptfan cliche by far, and this one has it all! virtual reality, cyborgs, robot fucking, all my dumbass transhumanist favorites

There's actually a cargo cult around downplaying AI.

The high level characteristics of this AI is something we currently cannot understand.

The lack of objectivity, creativity, imagination, and outright denial you see on HN around this topic is staggering.

no, you’re all the cargo cult! I asked my cargo and it told me so