Thanks I hate it.

[Advertising is] the most efficient way to ensure the majority of content remains free and accessible to as many people as possible.

Content is a scarce resource y'know. Heaven forbid the content farms go out of business; or we might end up having to read Sherlock Holmes isekai fanfiction rather than a content farm's two paragraphs and three screen-fulls of ads surrounding the tweet du jour. That would be terrible actually quite nice.

We know that not everyone in our community will embrace our entrance into this market. But taking on controversial topics because we believe they make the internet better for all of us is a key feature of Mozilla’s history

WTF. How is it possible for a company to be this self-congratulatory about entering the advertising space?! Someone needs to fork Firefox.

"The common people pray for integration tests, healthy production, and five nines that never end," SWE Jorah told her. "It is no matter to them if the high lords play their Scrum of Scrums, so long as they are left in peace." He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

The license stuff is whatever, but Imagine seeing this sort of sloppiness in the revision history and thinking "Yeah these guys seem legit let's give them a million dollars!" We are in such a bubble.

SoftBank's Vision Fund will be investing $500 million in OpenAI

The herald of destruction: SoftBank! OpenAI is doomed!

Now that's just trying to do too much NFTs on stamps!

Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. [...], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

It's interesting that someone thought "smoothing life's complexities" is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life's complexities without smoothing out people's complexities, but it's not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that's if it actually worked, which it doesn't).

I've felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it's hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it's a shame we couldn't as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

The tragedy of being Elon Musk: he has thousands and thousands of cryptocurrency bros and fascists that worship the ground he walks on, but what he really want is for Stephen King to reply to one of his tweets.

Well that's quite the confused comment chain given that neither Go nor chess are solved. "Remember that thing everyone said wouldn't happen? Well it still hasn't happened! 🫨"

Unfortunately "steroid olympics" isn't a code for anything at all but is quite literal.

There's literally a weirdo who came up with plans for "the Enhanced Games", and some Silicon Valley venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan actually invested in it.

yes. that's all true, but academics and artists and leftists are actually calling for Buttlerian jihad all the time. when push comes to shove they will ally with fascists on AI

This guy severely underestimates my capacity for being against multiple things at the same time.

I can't be the only one reading that super passive aggressively right? "Thank you Barret, whom I hated. Bob, for ruining my hot Jacuzzi date. And Mira, for existing."

I have a wallpaper of the Internet Explorer anime mascot Inori Aizawa. No I will not explain.

Nice to see everyone sharing their favorite wallpaper apps so here's mine: https://www.google.com/search?q=anime++imagesize%3A1920x1200&udm=2

Hey wait a minute Wallpaper Engine is just Windows Active Desktop with extra steps!

(Never forgive Microsoft for killing Active Desktop)

I knew I could count on awful.systems.

I have to go run an errand soon but someone better have posted some commentary about the a16z anime blog post (as seen on the hell site) by the time I get back or I'll be sorely disappointed.

Corporate Memph-AI-sis

Screwing up the night sky: not just for SpaceX anymore! Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come.

Thursday’s launch saw the first commercial satellites in orbit, and AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.

BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023.

Made in TX — size matters!

I get why 5G in remote areas would be neat. But surely there are other (more expensive?) ways to achieve similar-ish safety / rescue / navigation / rural broadband sorts results without cluttering the sky or being all hyper-capitalistic about it. Not at all my area though.

I won't be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn't an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.

I've been slightly unhappy at my job lately as it's been getting less cool and more bureaucratic and stressful over time; so I've been idly browsing job postings. But so many of them are about AI it's kinda discouraging.

Take Microsoft for example, a big company that surely does lots of interesting stuff. They currently have 17 job postings for experienced programmers in California. 12 of them mention AI in the description. That's 70%. And the only cool position asks for a bazillion years of kernel experience (almost tempted to go for that anyway though).

Ugh guess it's maybe not the best time to switch jobs. Really I should just go self employed what could possibly go wrong?