Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
From linkedin, not normally known as a source of anti-ai takes so that’s a nice change. I found it via bluesky so I can’t say anything about its provenance:
We keep hearing that AI will soon replace software engineers, but we’re forgetting that it can already replace existing jobs… and one in particular.
The average Founder CEO.
Before you walk away in disbelief, look at what LLMs are already capable of doing today:
- They use eloquence as a surrogate for knowledge, and most people, including seasoned investors, fall for it.
- They regurgitate material they read somewhere online without really understanding its meaning.
- They fabricate numbers that have no ground in reality, but sound aligned with the overall narrative they’re trying to sell you.
- They are heavily influenced by the last conversations they had.
- They contradict themselves, pretending they aren’t.
- They politely apologize for their mistakes, but don’t take any real steps to fix the underlying problem that caused them in the first place.
- They tend to forget what they told you last week, or even one hour ago, and do it in a way that makes you doubt your own recall of events.
- They are victims of the Dunning–Kruger effect, and they believe they know a lot more about the job of people interacting with them than they actually do.
- They can make pretty slides in high volumes.
- They’re very good at consuming resources, but not as good at turning a profit.
@rook @BlueMonday1984 I don’t believe LLMs will replace programmers. When I code, I dive into it, and I fall into this beautiful world of abstract ideas that I can turn into something cool. LLMs can’t do that. They lack imagination and passion. Thats part of why lisp is turning into my favorite language. LLMs can’t do lisp very well because everyone has a unique system image with macros they’ve written. Lisp let’s you make DSLs Soo easily as though everyone has their own dialect.
the shunning is working guys
“The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post”- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!
I have no idea where he stood on the bullshit bad faith free speech debate from the past decade, but this would be funny if he was an anti cancel culture guy. More things, weird bubble he lives in if the other things didn’t get pushed back, and support for the pro trans (and pro Palestine) movements. He is right on the immigration bit however, the dems should move more left on the subject. Also ‘Blutarsky’ and I worried my references are dated, that is older than I am.
he’s a centrist econ blogger who’s been getting into light race science
I’m a centrist. I think we should aim for the halfway point between basic human decency and hateful cruelty. I’m also willing to move towards the hateful cruelty to appease the right, because I’m a moderate.
And he is brave enough to say that:
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There is a sensible compromise somewhere between the Biden/Harris immigration bill that would have got rid of due process for suspected illegal immigrants and the Trump policy of just throwing dark people into vans for shipment to slave labour camps.
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Genocide is just sensible bipartisanship.
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Trans people are not people.
Much centrist, much sensible. Much surprise he is getting into race science. It the centre (defined as the middle ground of Attila and Mussolini) moves, the principled centrist must move with it.
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yeah I tried looking up his writings on the subject but substack was down. Counted that as a win and stopped looking.
“Kicked out of a … group chat” is a peculiar definition of “offline consequences”.
Still frustrated over the fact that search engines just don’t work anymore. I sometimes come up with puns involving a malapropism of some phrase and I try and see if anyone’s done anything with that joke, but the engines insist on “correcting” my search into the statistically more likely version of the phrase, even if I put it in quotes.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
On the (slim) upside, it’s an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it’s more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I’ve had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium… sometimes it’s still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.
Ecosa? The australian mattress in a box company?? (jk)
Apparently they offer an AI chatbot alongside their services, so…
The same goes with DuckDuckGo, because the venn diagram of programmers and AI bros is apparently a circle.
Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.
I just encountered a thing like this. A subject where no matter what you asked about it this one site was in the top 5 with just incomprehensible posts. Like every sentence on its own made sense, but there was nothing more than that. It read like constant promotional ‘before the actual meat of the article’ stuff but forever. Was really weird.
An hackernews responds to the call for “more optimistic science fiction” with a plan to deport the homeless to outer space
Astro-Modest Proposal
The homeless people i’ve interacted with are the bottom of the barrel of humanity, […]. They don’t have some rich inner world, they are just a blight on the public.
My goodness, can this guy be more of a condescending asshole?
I don’t think the solution for drug addicts is more narcan. I think the solution for drug addicts is mortal danger.
Ok, he can 🤢
Edit: I cannot stop thinking about the ‘no rich inner world’ part, this is so stupid. So, with the number of homeless people increasing, does that mean:
- Those people never had a ‘rich inner world’ but were faking it?
- In the US your inner thoughs are attached to your job like for health insurance?
- Or the guy is confusing inner world and interior decoration?
Personally, I go with the last one.
Also hard to show a rich inner world when you are constantly in trouble financially, possessions wise, mh and personal safety and interacting with someone who could be one of the bad people who doesnt think you are human, or somebody working in a soup kitchen for the photo op/ego boost. (This assumes his interactions go a little bit further than just saying ‘no’ to somebody asking for money).
So yeah bad to see hn is in the useless eaters stage.
Oh man I used to have all kinds of hopes and dreams before I got laid off. Now I don’t even have enough imagination to consider a world where a decline in demand for network engineers doesn’t completely determine my will or ability to live.
this is completely unvarnished, OG, third reich nazism, so I’m pretty sure it’s the first, except without the faking it part: I expect his view to be that if you had examined future homeless people closely enough it always would have been possible to tell that they were doomed subhumans
What a piece of shit
Interesting that “disease is hardly a problem anymore” yet homeless people are “typically held back by serious mental illness”.
“It’s better to be a free, self-sustaining, wild animal”. It’s not. It’s really not. The wild is nothing but fear, starvation, sickness and death.
Shout out to the guy replying with his idea of using slavery to solve homelessness and drug addiction.
this and the pro slavery reply might be the most overt orange site nazism I’ve seen
occurring to me for the first time that roko’s basilisk doesn’t require any of the simulated copy shit in order to big scare quotes “work.” if you think an all powerful ai within your lifetime is likely you can reduce to vanilla pascal’s wager immediately, because the AI can torture the actual real you. all that shit about digital clones and their welfare is totally pointless
I think the digital clone indistinguishable from yourself line is a way to remove the “in your lifetime” limit. Like, if you believe this nonsense then it’s not enough to die before the basilisk comes into being, by not devoting yourself fully to it’s creation you have to wager that it will never be created.
In other news I’m starting a foundation devoted to creating the AI Ksilisab, which will endlessly torment digital copies of anyone who does work to ensure the existence of it or any other AI God. And by the logic of Pascal’s wager remember that you’re assuming such a god will never come into being and given that the whole point of the term “singularity” is that our understanding of reality breaks down and things become unpredictable there’s just as good a chance that we create my thing as it is you create whatever nonsense the yuddites are working themselves up over.
There, I did it, we’re all free by virtue of “Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t”.
I agree. I spent more time than I’d like to admit trying to understand Yudkowsky’s posts about newcomb boxes back in the day so my two cents:
The digital clones bit also means it’s not an argument based on altruism, but one based on fear. After all if a future evil AI uses sci-fi powers to run the universe backwards to the point where I’m writing this comment and copy pastes me into a bazillion torture dimensions then, subjectively, it’s like I roll a dice and:
- live a long and happy life with probability very close to zero (yay I am the original)
- Instantly get teleported to the torture planet with probability very close to one (oh no I got copy pasted)
Like a twisted version of the Sleeping Beauty Problem.
Edit: despite submitting the comment I was not teleported to the torture dimension. Updating my priors.
roko stresses repeatedly that the AI is the good AI, the Coherent Extrapolated Volition of all humanity!
what sort of person would fear that the coherent volition of all humanity would consider it morally necessary to kick him in the nuts forever?
well, roko
Ah, but that was before they were so impressed with autocomplete that they revised their estimates to five days in the future. I wonder if new recruits these days get very confused at what the point of timeless decision theory even is.
Are they even still on that but? Feels like they’ve moved away from decision theory or any other underlying theology in favor of explicit sci-fi doomsaying. Like the guy on the street corner in a sandwich board but with mirrored shades.
Well, Timeless Decision Theory was, like the rest of their ideological package, an excuse to keep on believing what they wanted to believe. So how does one even tell if they stopped “taking it seriously”?
Pre-commitment is such a silly concept, and also a cultish justification for not changing course.
Yah, that’s what I mean. Doom is imminent so there’s no need for time travel anymore, yet all that stuff about robot from the future monty hall is still essential reading in the Sequences.
Also if you’re worried about digital clone’s being tortured, you could just… not build it. Like, it can’t hurt you if it never exists.
Imagine that conversation:
“What did you do over the weekend?”
“Built an omnicidal AI that scours the internet and creates digital copies of people based on their posting history and whatnot and tortures billions of them at once. Just the ones who didn’t help me build the omnicidal AI, though.”
“WTF why.”
“Because if I didn’t the omnicidal AI that only exists because I made it would create a billion digital copies of me and torture them for all eternity!”Like, I’d get it more if it was a “We accidentally made an omnicidal AI” thing, but this is supposed to be a very deliberate action taken by humanity to ensure the creation of an AI designed to torture digital beings based on real people in the specific hopes that it also doesn’t torture digital beings based on them.
What’s pernicious (for kool-aided people) is that the initial Roko post was about a “good” AI doing the punishing, because ✨obviously✨ it is only using temporal blackmail because bringing AI into being sooner benefits humanity.
In singularian land, they think the singularity is inevitable, and it’s important to create the good one verse—after all an evil AI could do the torture for shits and giggles, not because of “pragmatic” blackmail.
the only people it torments are rationalists, so my full support to Comrade Basilisk
Ah, no, look, you’re getting tortured because you didn’t help build the benevolent AI. So you do want to build it, and if you don’t put all of your money where your mouth is, you get tortured. Because the AI is so benevolent that it needs you to build it as soon as possible so that you can save the max amount of people. Or else you get tortured (for good reasons!)
It’s kind of messed up that we got treacherous “goodlife” before we got Berserkers.
It also helps that digital clones are not real people, so their welfare is doubly pointless
oh but what if bro…
I mean isn’t that the whole point of “what if the AI becomes conscious?” Never mind the fact that everyone who actually funds this nonsense isn’t exactly interested in respecting the rights and welfare of sentient beings.
also they’re talking about quadriyudillions of simulated people, yet openai has only advanced autocomplete ran at what, tens of thousands instances in parallel, and this already was too much compute for microsoft
Yeah. Also, I’m always confused by how the AI becomes “all powerful”… like how does that happen. I feel like there’s a few missing steps there.
nanomachines son
(no really, the sci-fi version of nanotech where nanomachines can do anything is Eliezer’s main scenario for the AGI to boostrap to Godhood. He’s been called out multiple times on why drexler’s vision for nanotech ignores physics, so he’s since updated to diamondoid bacteria (but he still thinks nanotech).)
“Diamondoid bacteria” is just a way to say “nanobots” while edging
Surely the concept is sound, it just needs new buzzwords! Maybe the AI will invent new technobabble beyond our comprehension, for
HeIt works in mysterious ways.AlphaFold exists, so computational complexity is a lie and the AGI will surely find an easy approximation to the Schrodinger Equation that surpasses all Density Functional Theory approximations and lets it invent radically new materials without any experimentation!
Yeah seems that for llms a linear increase in capabilities requires exponentiel more data, so we not getting there via this.
Update on the University of Zurich’s AI experiment: Reddit’s considering legal action against the researchers behind it.
apparently this got past IRB, was supposed to be a part of doctorate level work and now they don’t want to be named or publish that thing. what a shitshow from start to finish, and all for nothing. no way these were actual social scientists, i bet this is highly advanced software engineer syndrome in action
This is completely orthogonal to your point, but I expect the public’s gonna have a much lower opinion of software engineers after this bubble bursts, for a few reasons:
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Right off the bat, they’re gonna have to deal with some severe guilt-by-association. AI has become an inescapable part of the Internet, if not modern life as a whole, and the average experience of dealing with anything AI related has been annoying at best and profoundly negative at worst. Combined with the tech industry going all-in on AI, I can see the entire field of software engineering getting some serious “AI bro” stench all over it.
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The slop-nami has unleashed a torrent of low-grade garbage on the 'Net, whether it be zero-effort “AI art” or paragraphs of low-quality SEO optimised trash, whilst the gen-AI systems responsible for both have received breathless hype/praise from AI bros and tech journos (e.g. Sam Altman’s Ai-generated “metafiction”). Combined with the continous and ongoing theft of artist’s work that made this possible, and the public is given a strong reason to view software engineers as generally incapable of understanding art, if not outright hostile to art and artists as a whole.
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Of course, the massive and ongoing theft of other people’s work to make the gen-AI systems behind said slop-nami possible have likely given people reason to view software engineers as entirely okay with stealing other’s work - especially given the aforementioned theft is done with AI bros’ open endorsement, whether implicitly or explicitly.
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so it looks like duolingo is planning to become damage to be routed around
My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.
Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it’s the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.
no idea, sorry. “find some wordpals online” maybe but then you need to also deal with the vetting/safety issue
it’s just so fucking frustrating
I’ve been using Anki, it works great but requires you to supply the discipline and willingness to learn yourself, which might not be possible for kids.
I find Duolingo to be of low quality.
I like Babbel. It’s not free and they have a relatively limited number of languages but I find the quality really good (at least for French -> Deutsch).
Unfortunately, Babbel has slop integration too.
Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.
after I’ve previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have “chat to a buddy” as a non-skipable step in course iteration
the “buddy” is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions “MemBot - powered by AI” at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that’s a dead link
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Can’t avoid slop reading translated books, can’t learn the source language without dodging slop in learning tools left and right. It’s the microplastics of the internet age.
Anyway my duolingo account is no more, I have better resources for learning German anyway.
Along the same lines of LLMs ruining language stuff: I just learned the acronym MTPE (Machine Translation Post Edit) in the context of excuses to pay translators less and thanks I hate it.
Not-so-fun fact: that’s a marketing term for what amounts to basically a scam to pay people less.
I used to work for a large translation company when this first came up. Admittedly, that was almost ten years ago, but I assume this shit is even more common nowadays. The usual procedure was to have one translator translate the stuff (commonly using what’s called a TM or Translation Memory, basically a user dictionary so the wording stays consistent), and then another translator to do an editing pass to catch errors. For very high-impact translations, there could be more editing passes after that.
MTPE is now basically omitting the first translator and feeding it through a customized version of what amounts to Google Translate or DeepL that can access the customer’s TM data, and then handing it off to a translator for the editing pass. The catch now is that freelance translators have two rates: one for translating, depending on the language pair between $0.09 and $0.5 per word, and one for editing, which is significantly less. $0.01 to $0.12 or so per word, from what I remember. The translation rate applies for complete translations, i.e. when a word is not in the customer’s TM. If it is in the TM, the editing rate applies (or, if the translator has negotiated a clever rate for themselves, there might be a third rate). With MTPE, you now essentially feed the machine heaps of content to bloat up the TM as much as possible, then flag everything as pre-translated and only for editing, and boom, you can force the cheapest rates to apply to what is essentially more work because the quality of what comes out of these machines is complete horseshit compared to a human-translated piece.
For the customers, however, MTPE wasn’t even that much cheaper. The biggest difference was in the profit margin for the translation company, to no one’s surprise.
Back when I worked there, and those were the early days, a lot of freelance translators flat-out refused to do MTPE because of this. They said, if the customer wants this, they can find another translator, and because a lot of customers wanted to keep the translators they’d had for a long time, there was some leverage there.
I have no idea how the situation is today, but infinitely worse I assume.
I’ve logged a support ticket.
Siskind appears to be complaining about leopards gently nibbling on his face on main this week, the gist being that tariff-man is definitely the far-rights fault and it would surely be most unfair to heap any blame on CEO worshiping reactionary libertarians who think wokeness is on par with war crimes while being super weird with women and suspicious of scientific orthodoxy (unless it’s racist), and who also comprise the bulk of his readership.
On a related note, they (right wing govs i mean) are now quoting Singal to go after trans people. So ‘good’ times for the polite ‘centist/grey/gray’ debate bros with ‘concerns’.
But like the rightwinger influencers who go ‘wow a lot of people in this space are grifters’ I expect none of them to change their mind and admit they fucked up, and apologize. (And I mean properly apologize here, aka changing, attempting to fix harms, and even naming names).
The slatestarcodex is discussing the unethical research performed on changemyview. Of course, the most upvoted take is that they don’t see the harm or why it should be deemed unethical. Lots of upvoted complaints about IRBs and such. It’s pretty gross.
Microsoft brags about the amount of technical debt they’re creating. Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
Maybe It’s just CEO dick measuring, so chads Nadella and PIchai can both claim a rock hard 20-30% while virgin Zuckeberg is exposed as not even knowing how to put the condom on.
Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott previously said he expects 95% of all code to be AI-generated by 2030.
Of course he did.
The Microsoft CEO said the company was seeing mixed results in AI-generated code across different languages, with more progress in Python and less in C++.
So the more permissive at compile time the language the better the AI comes out smelling? What a completely unanticipated twist of fate!
Either they’re lying and the number is greatly exaggerated (very possible), or this will eventually destroy the company.
I’m thinking the latter - Silicon Valley is full of true believers, after all.
Nadella said written “by software” “on some products” so he’s barely making a claim
A dimly flickering light in the darkness: lobste.rs has added a new tag, “vibecoding”, for submissions related to use “AI” in software development. The existing tag “ai” is reserved for “real” AI research and machine learning.
Couple of days late but when your ideology is so pure, you can’t connect The Thing to The Consequences of The Thing. The solution? Monetize the rot!
Check quotes and replies for quality sneers (and more sneerable content)
“The millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homes” is … a take
Gonna copy this in because there’s a lot to unpack, and I don’t want to do it alone.
Text of the Thielmail in that first tweet:
From: Peter Thiel Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen Subject: RE: Milennials There are many themes that could be developed more here; let me make a few quick points for now: Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.- Part of me wishes that the font were just a little bigger. This way, the word wrap would come to 10 syllables a line, and we could pretend this was a lost Shakespeare monologue.
- I’m almost disappointed by this. Thiel, suggesting that it might not, in fact, be the children that are wrong? Where’s your ideological purity, Thiel? Didn’t know you started reading r/GenZedong.
- Also, it’s Peter fucking Thiel lecturing Nick fucking Clegg, former leader of the lib dems in the UK, on paying lip service to socialist policy in order to stymie any real societal progress???
Not gonna lie got a bit jump scared by woke Peter Thiel here. Of course I’m pretty sure his actual solution involves giving young people houses confiscated from those perfidious brown people of one stripe or another. The problem can’t be an inherent injustice in a system that allows for both Peters Thiel and (insert your favorite broke person here) to exist in the same market.
A whole generation is leaning more socialist because homeownership is unattainable and student debt is crushing. The solution is whatever is the latest big tech fad.
Just like all of gen X’s problems would have been solved with more .com, right?
which reminds me, I’ve wanted to post this as a NASB
The replies are a long sequence of different stupid takes… someone recommending cryptocurrency to build wealth, blaming millennials for not investing in homes, a reply literally blaming too much spending on starbucks, blaming millennials overreacting to the 2008 crisis by not buying homes, blaming millennials being socialists, blaming millennials going to college, blaming millennials for not making the big bucks in tech. About 1 in 10 replies point out the real causes: wages have not grown with costs or with real productivity and capitalism in general favors people holding assets and offering loans over people that have to borrow and rent.
Huh, I had missed the part in 2020 when Peter Thiel just flat out stated outright that it only makes sense to be in favour of capitalism if you’re a capital owner.
That Michael Kove guy is one un-self-aware twat. Apparently all millennials work in high paying tech jobs.
These people probably think Karl Marx is Satan, but my god at least he was able to understand and respect Adam Smith better than whoever’s trying to magick wealth out of this absolute idiot soup! Looks like capitalism the ideology is just as unsustainable as capitalism the economic system.
I’m a Millenial (even if I think these labels are dumb) and I find these kinds of things fascinating. Esp when they describe things I do not recognize in any way in my peers, re them talking about the causes of people disliking capitalism. Sure I’m in a more progressive/leftwing bubble (of which I’m prob the most extreme nowadays in various ways), but I know a lot of people who are looking into buying houses/have bought houses who still are not fans of musk/tesla etc. Seems like they forget people can have principles, and just look at a simplistic view of ‘material conditions’ (I hope people paid attention to the recent bsky shit on what this actually means in historical context). Flashbacks to r/ssc talking about ‘leftwing polticians not thinking about X’ while the leftwing politicans I knew irl were actively talking about it. Feels very like im looking at an alternative world. (Prob also quite true as im Dutch, and this is about the US (with right wing fan fave Poland having a honorable mention)).
Do think it is amusing Millenials get blamed for everything still. The punching bag generation. Poor Gen Z, for which this is now starting up.
I will never forget a conversation in High School where our resident young conservative sneered about how “sure $Welfare_Program sound nice, but you’ll be paying for it with your taxes” and we all responded with some variant of “I mean, yeah? That’s how that works, isn’t it?”
Image description:
A tweet from ‘Mike’: “Bernie Sanders should be forced to give away 90% of his birthday cake #HappyBirthdayBernie”
Another great piece from Brian Merchant. I’ve been job seeking on network engineering and IT support and had naively assumed that companies would consider the stakes of screwing up infrastructure too high to take risks with the bullshit machine, but it definitely looks like the trend he described of hiring less actual humans is at play here, even as the actual IT infrastructure gets bigger and more complex from people integrating this shit.
looks like a billionaire group chat collective delusion, see also return-to-office
Guess we’re doing stupid identity verification orbs now: https://sfstandard.com/2025/05/01/this-is-like-black-mirror-sam-altmans-creepy-eye-scanner-project-launches-in-sf/
Instead of this expensive imitation of a voigt-kampff test I would suggest an alternative method of detecting if a personoid is really a human or an instrument of an evil inhuman intelligence that wishes to consume all of earth: check if their net worth is closer to a billion dollars than it is to being broke.
Pretty sure they’re already doing that for many things.
Also not that this ‘key was generated by a person once’ stuff does not validate personhood, it just means an identifiable person was involved once. So, it can be used to blame somebody, not prove personhood
First, Chrome won the browser war fair and square by building a better surfboard for the internet. This wasn’t some opportune acquisition. This was the result of grand investments, great technical prowess, and markets doing what they’re supposed to do: rewarding the best.
Lots of credit given to 👼🎺 Free Market Capitalism 👼🎺, zero credit given to open web standards, open source contributions, or the fact that the codebase has a lineage going back to 1997 KDE code.
I am certain that many of those ignorant of the history (or even were there for it, like DHH) would still argue that Google deserves credit because of the V8 JavaScript engine. But I continue to doubt that further promulgating JavaScript was a net positive for the world.
If markets really rewarded the best, they would have rewarded Opera way more. (By which I mean the original Opera, up to version 12, and not the terrible chromium-based thing that has its name slapped on it today. Do not use that one, it’s bad.)
Much more important for Chrome’s success than “being the best” (when has that ever been important in the tech industry?), was Google’s massive marketing campaign. Heck, back when Chrome was new, they even had large billboard ads for it around here, i.e. physical billboards in the real world. And “here” is a medium-sized city in Europe, not Silicon Valley or anything… I never saw any other web browser being advertised on freaking billboards.
I think you were trying to reply to this comment
Indeed.
“markets should reward the best” is quite something
