TechTakes

My current hyperfixation is Ecosia, maker of “the greenest search engine” (already problematic) implementing a wrapped-chatgpt chat bot and saying it has a “green mode” which is not some kind of solar-powered, ethically-sound, generative AI, but rather an instructive prompt to only give answers relating to sustainable business models etc etc.

See my thread here https://xcancel.com/fasterandworse/status/1837831731577000320

I’m starting to reach out to them wherever I can because for some reason this one is keeping me up at night.

from the (current?) prick-in-chief at YC in this post:

and everyone in our industry owes a debt to open source builders

nice of you to admit it. now maybe pay down some of that debt by using sending of your piles of money to those projects

oh, what's that, you only want to continue taking from it and then charging other people service rent, without ever contributing back? oh okay then

nasb, fedi is for losers

been feeling this for a while too and wondering how to put it into words. especially in light of all the techfash, pressing climate and general market problems, etc

one of the things I've been holding onto (hoping in?) is my estimation/belief that I don't think the current state of all the deeply-fucked systems is inherently stable, or viable. as I've said here before, that very instability is part of why so many of them are engaged in trying to set things up to protect those self-same systems, as they know the swingback is coming and they want to make it as hard as possible to claw things back from them

but how long until it breaks, and with how much splash damage, are things I haven't really been able to estimate

as seen via jwz, the tail wagging the dog continues (archive) at mozilla

"if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" but the wrong way around. I guess they got tired of begging google for money?

And, for the foreseeable future at least, advertising is a key commercial engine of the internet

this tracks analogously to something I've been saying for a while as well, but with some differences. one of the most notable is the misrepresentation here of "the internet", in the stead of "all the entities playing the online advertising game to extract from everyone else"

r/SubredditDrama's watching shit go down in r/EffectiveAltruism, and there's a lotta sneers going on

(Another post so soon? Another post so soon.)

"Gen AI competes with its training data, exhibit 1,764":

Also got a quick sidenote, which spawned from seeing this:

This is pure gut feeling, but I suspect that "AI training" has become synonymous with "art theft/copyright infringement" in the public consciousness.

Between AI bros publicly scraping against people's wishes (Exhibit A, Exhibit B, Exhibit C), the large-scale theft of data which went to produce these LLMs' datasets, and the general perception that working in AI means you support theft (Exhibit A, Exhibit B), I wouldn't blame Joe Public for treating AI as inherently infringing.

New piece from Ars Technica: Meta smart glasses can be used to dox anyone in seconds, study finds:

Two Harvard students recently revealed that it's possible to combine Meta smart glasses with face image search technology to "reveal anyone's personal details," including their name, address, and phone number, "just from looking at them."

In a Google document, AnhPhu Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio explained how they linked a pair of Meta Ray Bans 2 to an invasive face search engine called PimEyes to help identify strangers by cross-searching their information on various people-search databases. They then used a large language model (LLM) to rapidly combine all that data, making it possible to dox someone in a glance or surface information to scam someone in seconds—or other nefarious uses, such as "some dude could just find some girl’s home address on the train and just follow them home,” Nguyen told 404 Media.

This is all possible thanks to recent progress with LLMs, the students said.

Putting my off-the-cuff thoughts on this:

1. Right off the bat, I'm pretty confident AR/smart glasses will end up dead on arrival - I'm no expert in marketing/PR, but I'm pretty sure "our product helped someone dox innocent people" is the kind of Dasani-level disaster which pretty much guarantees your product will crash and burn.

2. I suspect we're gonna see video of someone getting punched for wearing smart glasses - this story's given the public a first impression of smart glasses that boils down to "this person's a creep", and its a lot easier to physically assault someone wearing smart glasses than some random LLM

3. This is a gut feeling I've had since Baldur talked about AI's public image nearly three months ago, but this gives me further reason to expect the public are gonna be outright hostile to the tech industry once the AI bubble pops.