TechTakes

How do we ensure that privacy is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? These are significant and enduring questions that have no single answer. But, for right now on the internet of today, a big part of the answer is online advertising.

How do we ensure that traffic safety is not a privilege of the few but a fundamental right available to everyone? A big part of the answer is drunk driving.

the purestrain corporate non-apology that is “we should have communicated our vision effectively” when your entire community is telling you in no uncertain terms to give up on that vision because it’s a terrible idea nobody wants

@gerikson

Now if it was Brian Johnson from AC/DC, I bet it'd be awesome.

The Network School offers Johnson’s healthy food and a fitness program called the Blueprint Protocol. He claims that after three years of following his blueprint the duration of his night-time erections totals 179 minutes, “better than the average 18-year-old”

Yeah, this is a very normal diet that's advertising itself in very normal ways.

When I was adjusting to a high fiber diet for medical reasons I couldn't figure out why I was so incredibly hungry despite eating enough.

Then I realized "huh, I haven't had any fat at all for the past week" and went and made myself four slices of buttery toast and they were so tasty.

Synthetic Users uses the power of LLMs to generate users that have very high Synthetic Organic Parity. We start by generating a personality profile for each user, very much like a reptilian brain around which we reconstruct its personality. It’s a reconstruction because we are relying on the billions of parameters that LLMs have at their disposal.

They could've worded this so many other ways

But I suppose creepyness is a selling point these days

they put bullshit inside my bullshit industry for generating bullshit?????? the investors are delighted!

Reduce your time-to-insight

I do not think that word means what they think it means.

the only positive is that their carousel pitch is at least honest about the desire

and that list of companies who’ve supposedly used it is telling, I guess

the rest of this….oh dear god

Emily Bender devoted a whole episode of Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 to this.

I have nothing to add, save the screaming.

Definitely saw an ad today for an AI-powered workout machine. It looks like if Bowflex was made by Tesla and promises to "optimize your workout with every rep" or some such nonsense.

I tried to remember the name of it by googling "AI exercise equipment" and despite the slick branding (it's called Tonal btw) it was like 5th on the list. Do you think it's awkward having all these overlapping grifts? In the pre-internet days I'm imagining like 10 unique traveling snake oil salesmen trying very hard to sell their bullshit over everyone else's in the same tiny frontier town without inviting anyone to look too closely at any of them.

yet another way to write shitty python

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

They're reeeaallly leaning into the fact that some of the math involved is also used in statistical physics. And, OK, we could have an academic debate about how the boundaries of fields are drawn and the extent to which the divisions between them are cultural conventions. But the more important thing is that the Nobel Prize is a bad institution.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c62r02z75jyo

It’s going to be like the Industrial Revolution - but instead of our physical capabilities, it’s going to exceed our intellectual capabilities ... but I worry that the overall consequences of this might be systems that are more intelligent than us that might eventually take control

😩

This work getting the physics nobel for “using physics” is reeeeeeal fuckin tangential

and also speaking of Godot — does anyone doing game dev right now have a good source for placeholder assets? I just finished all the introductory tutorials for the engine and now I want to flex what I’ve learned a bit

chef's kiss, no notes

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