Does creating a cover of Get Low called “Z-Pain” for your wife, or commissioning the creation of a giant green statue for your wife strike you as the sorts of things someone in an unhealthy marriage would do? I think not!

After this post I went back and read all the fallout from when they added and subsequently “paused” AI Explain and it was as entertaining as I remember (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).

This has some real “furbies talking to eachother” energy.

Computer understanders, click this link for some psychic damage! :D (aside: I tried to upload this as an image but it didn’t work)

Trick question; it’s both an economic move and an ideological move.

SEOs match quality websites to those users trying to find them. As much as Google and Bing like to pretend that they’re perfect there are very real indexing issues that crop up and need experts to debug, mitigate, and prevent; so in a very real way the SEOs do make the web better for users.

[comment continues below the ad]

For example let’s say there was a user who wanted to read a website full of LLM written articles and ads but they keep stumbling across low quality websites with poor SEO practices like Wikipedia instead, why that would be terrible. In order to prevent this terrible possiblity it is the noble duty of SEOs to buy well respected high ranking domain names so that users get a brand they can trust. Like Forbes. Or Radioshack.

[comment continues below the ad]

Sincerely, the myseonews.now “staff”.

Well that was amusing

Asking “what is blockchain good for other than cryptocurrencies” is like asking “what is internet good for other than websites” pre-broadband

Days since last “bitcoin is like the early internet”: zero :(

I’d like to go back to 1988 and ask “Is anyone actually using the Internet?”

Days since last “bitcoin is like the early internet”: zero :(

So therefore, email will never become as popular as sending envelope mails. I rest my case.

Days since last “bitcoin is like the early internet”: zero :(

An update to my post about facebook from yesterday; turns out it’s much worse:

https://transparency.meta.com/policies/community-standards/hateful-conduct/

[Do not post} Insults, including those about […] Mental characteristics, including but not limited to allegations of stupidity, intellectual capacity, and mental illness, and unsupported comparisons between PC groups on the basis of inherent intellectual capacity. We do allow allegations of mental illness or abnormality when based on gender or sexual orientation, given political and religious discourse about transgenderism and homosexuality and common non-serious usage of words like “weird.”

You can see the full diff from last version if you click “Jan 8, 2025” and yeah it’s a doozy.

Like many here on awful.systems I have a pretty thick skin, but reading the above put me in a really weird mood all day. I couldn’t really concentrate on work. It’s hard to believe that they published this with a straight face, and harder to believe that the media isn’t dunking on them for it.

On the bright side the policy technically lets you go around calling people insane for being straight or cisgender* if anyone is still on there and wants to get banned from that platform in a blaze of glory.

* or indeed simply having a gender and I’m not sure fascists know how to use words right.

Fascist virtue signalling aside, candy floss should not exist. That’s like the exact opposite of dental care.

Edit: I have been made aware that Candy Floss is another name for cotton candy, which is delicious. Though my point kind of still stands.

It’s not. Surprise! All of Silicon Valley has gone mask off in preparation for the new administration in Washington!

Zuck wants to get back to his roots

It’s time to get back to our roots around free expression and giving people voice on our platforms. Here’s what we’re going to do: […] 5/ Move our trust and safety and content moderation teams out of California, and our US content review to Texas. This will help remove the concern that biased employees are overly censoring content.

Narrator: this announcement did not, in fact, ease concerns about bias.

I’d be surprised if Eliezer hasn’t mentioned it at some point, maybe more in the way that you’re after. Can’t find any examples though.

In his Times article the only place he mentions nukes is what we should do to countries that have too many GPUs: https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/

Edit: Not Mr. Yudkowski but see https://futureoflife.org/document/policymaking-in-the-pause/

“The time for saying that this is just pure research has long since passed. […] It’s in no country’s interest for any country to develop and release AI systems we cannot control. Insisting on sensible precautions is not anti-industry. Chernobyl destroyed lives, but it also decimated the global nuclear industry. I’m an AI researcher. I do not want my field of research destroyed. Humanity has much to gain from AI, but also everything to lose.”

“Let’s slow down. Let’s make sure that we develop better guardrails, let’s make sure that we discuss these questions internationally just like we’ve done for nuclear power and nuclear weapons. Let’s make sure we better understand these very large systems, that we improve on their robustness and the process by which we can audit them and verify that they are safe for the public.”

“Yes judge I downloaded Shrek 2 to train my neural net for my startup”

“The name of my neural net? Sailor Sega Saturn’s brain I guess…”

“Oh my startup? That’s what I call trying to get out of bed in the morning!”

Within 5 minutes of my first hike, the trees smiled at me and whispered their simple wisdom.

This probably only sounds profound to people who haven’t been outside in 7 years. Don’t get me wrong hiking is good for the soul. But if it hits you that hard after five minutes you’re probably terminally online.

Also why can’t trees have complex wisdom gosh darn it?

Now this is a fun blog.

Dan asked me “what’s the fastest Big O notation?” and hey, to my credit despite not having a college degree, I knew the answer from self studying! “Oh, I know this. O(1) Constant time”, I said over the phone. “No, see it’s O(0). The fastest program is the one that never runs. It’s clear you don’t have enough experience for this role. So let’s test you on your sysadmin capabilities. Maybe you can redeem yourself there”. I wasn’t interviewing for sysadmin.

Silicon Valley was a mistake. What the hell.

Alternative headline for this Washington Post opinion piece from Jeff Bezos: We’re all trying to find the guy who did this!

^{more US politics I know. There is sadly no escape from the fiery vortex that is the U.S. election.}

His comment history is a weird mix of programming language discussion, terrible takes, simping for Musk, simping for Musk even harder (just in case you didn’t realize how much he liked Musk the first time).

Musk is the sane one. It’s the rest of us that are insane.

Holy hell.

I had a mini identity crisis when i realized I’m more aware of techno-fascist writing than Elon Musk of all people.

That anti David Gerard Wikipedia nontroversy from awhile back has made it to Elon Musk’s twitter feed: https://xcancel.com/elonmusk/status/1849862303614894223