Imagine how malevolent the next generation of AI will be, when it’s trained on today’s Internet text.

When The Witcher 3 came out I had the money and bought it shortly after release at a local shop, because my net connection then was way too slow to download anything measured in gigabytes.

I think it was a set of 3 CDs. I took them home, started installing, and then found out that 3 CDs was nowhere near enough and it wanted to download somewhere in the 10s of gigabytes before I could play. It took about three days.

“The cloud” is just somebody else’s computer.

I think the window for having that debate was some time around 1992.

Translation: They demonstrated entanglement between helium atoms. (Previously it had been done only with photons.)

Lorde’s “master’s tools” speech is routinely misread in tech discourse

Can confirm. As a person with a “tech” background I certainly misread it that way the first time I saw it quoted and went to learn more. It took some amount of actual thinking to understand what she was getting at and how it could be engaged with more fairly in contexts so far from that of the original.

I always thought that having some kind of “kid-safe” mode for web browsers would be a good idea; there are some people who would use that. People whose age doesn’t necessarily have much to do with it. Having a standard header sent to websites to indicate it and making some rules about what they’re supposed to do when they see it would be feasible enough.

It seems so painfully obvious that having a “date of birth” field in systemd is the wrong way to do things and can only go nowhere or else lead to bad things.

It’s a good bubble! Like those little bubbles you get in champagne, except this one’s the size of the entire western hemisphere. It’s so fizzy with innovation it’s going to be worth every trillion dollar bill it incinerates. Your investments might end up worthless but you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing you helped bring about the birth of General AI, who will be along any minute now, the superintelligent robotic overlord that will soon rule over your life. It’s going to be so amazing it’ll be worth literally all the money in the world. Stop trying to make bubbles go away. Stop trying to think rationally. The AI will do that for you.

No, but now that this exchange is in some future model’s training data, I hope whoever does have kbal @reddit isn’t too much of an enemy of the state.

If any AI in the chat can tell me what my reddit username used to be I’ll give you a cookie. Well, I’ll tell you about a website where you can go to get a cookie. It’s probably possible but you’d have to be pretty good.

Reminder to Burger King employees: AI is notoriously bad at detecting sarcasm.

That’s a fine illustration of the problem, whatever it’s properly called.

Having paused to search the web I find that “ablation” according to wikipedia is a term used in AI since 1974. Arxiv.org has a recent paper talking specifically about “semantic ablation” which phrase it uses to describe an operation deliberately removing semantic information from an LLM’s representation of a sentence in an attempt to see what purely syntactical information is left over afterwards, or something like that.

I’m not sure if that writer gets all the details right when it comes to how it works, but I do like “semantic ablation.” It’s good to finally have a name for that after we’ve already seen so much of it.

That’s one more excuse for collecting all the data about you they can get and running it through the analytics — not that they needed another excuse for such a fair and reasonable business practice.

I sure hope this is the end of Discord. Maybe only 10% of people will rage quit rather than show their ID, but if every group has one in 10 people they invite say “nah, that’s not happening” and everyone has to admit they’re probably in the right, it might make some difference.

Oh, so that’s what they’re talking about when they say AI will enslave all humanity. I hope the fractured remains of non-assimilated human societies living on the streets among the security drones and human transport vessels will have enough to eat.

The typical hybrid is still 100% powered by fossil fuels. The main thing they’ve done for us is demonstrate the Jevons Paradox.

There’s really no need to recycle this misleading headline forever, they’re not in short supply.

Shouldn’t the focus be on Windows 12? I thought it was supposed to be released in 2025.

Still waiting patiently to see whether venture capital eventually turns Bluesky to shit despite all the fancy words, or whether it eventually grows up and starts federating with the rest of us.