When I hear about tech companies going all in on AI as a hedge against the future, I'm reminded of this scene from Ice Age:
TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Actual message I got while renewing my insurance plan last night. Thank you for adding a shitty chat bot which will give me false information about my life and death decisions, bravo.
~~Kendrick~~ Zitron dropped - its mainly focusing on Prabhakar Raghavan's recent kicking upstairs, and Google's bleak future.
Main highlight was this snippet:
I am hypothesizing here, but I think that Google is desperate, and that its earnings on October 30th are likely to make the street a little worried. The medium-to-long-term prognosis is likely even worse. As the Wall Street Journal notes, Google's ad business is expected to dip below 50% market share in the US in the next year for the first time in more than a decade, and Google's gratuitous monopoly over search (and likely ads) is coming to an end. It’s more than likely that Google sees AI as fundamental to its future growth and relevance.
Really enjoying watching Ed level up from week to week. The Zingularity is Near.
Man, it's almost like hollowing out the core value centers of a company in search of short-term growth will leave an empty dying husk that can neither serve in new markets nor continue to exist in their previous niche.
If only there had been some kind of warning about the consequences of this management style. Hey, how's GE doing these days again?
I think this is the second or third time that either Ed or somebody on his Discord reminded me about Shingy
In other news, there's been a statement on AI training that's racked up over 10k signatures, which is unsurprisingly lambasting the rampant stealing that went into creating the autoplag machines:
Now, I'm way too much of a fan of sidenotes, so I'll whip one out:
Beyond simple content theft being publicly lambasted, I suspect that even licensed use of artists' work for gen-AI will ignite some controversy - if Eagan Tilghman's run-in with controversy last year is any indication, any usage of gen-AI, regardless of context, will be met with hostility.
I don’t go here but seeing these two posts come up within an hour on lobsters feels telling
https://devenv.sh/blog/2024/10/22/devenv-is-switching-nix-implementation-to-tvix/
https://determinate.systems/posts/announcing-determinate-nix/
the Determinate Nix move was such an obvious next step I was convinced they had already done it; I guess they can let the mask fall off now that they’ve consolidated their control over the community. as was pointed out on mastodon, Determinate Systems previously promised this wasn’t their goal, which goes to show how much a promise from a fascist is worth.
fortunately it seems like Lix has a NixOS fork on the horizon? I only know about it because the “just fork it or shut up” assholes are now complaining that a fork’s happening (which they seem to only know about by obsessively monitoring Lix’s git forge — I don’t think there’s been an announcement yet)
Parents Sue School That Gave Bad Grade to Student Who Used AI to Complete Assignment
An old and powerful force has entered the fraught debate over generative AI in schools: litigious parents angry that their child may not be accepted into a prestigious university.
The tabloids are gonna be going nuts over this.
poor Musky lost custody. Couldn’t handle Grimes, now he mangles rhymes.
just imagining what happens the day his companies get taken away from him
"Life, it never die
Women are my favorite guy."
Wonder what is up with the folks and them getting into rhymes/poetry. Jordan B Peterson does something simple (his pinned tweet as example here. But we know he fried parts of his brain using the russian coma rehab method.
And it isn't even the Sinterklaas period yet. No need for bad rhymes. (I'm also suddenly reminded of all the people who tried to 'rap' their messages in the late 90s).
Well my name is Jordan and I’m here to say/ we’re just like lobsters in a major way
"cooked, and (politically) red as fuck"?
I can pull finer bars out my arse than this fucking farce
This is probably Grok - creativity from him's pretty sparse
Choom thinks he's DOOM, but he won't beat him any time soon
With how much crack this whack goes through, he'll forget this before noon
(I'm no MF DOOM, but anything I can put out will beat this artless twat any day)
Religion is the opium of the masses
And I'm increasingly scared they're gonna kick our asses
Maybe it's time for all those mugs
To shut up and start hitting drugs
guest star of recent sneers kache is at it again
Update: The QRTs are mainly sneering, but this one's particularly good
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more "master copy" or "master recording" than "master of a slave". This isn't IDE. Who names their VCS branch "slave"?
Well, I guess that guy does.
the thing is that the git branch naming was only one of the places among many where this was changed, and in many databases (and often other server-subsystem architectures) master/slave terminology was quite present. iirc there are still some that stick by it today (mostly out of direct choice by project maintainers)
it’s the same thing as whitelist/blacklist, vs allowlist/denylist (or others) - when there’s bad shit linked in baggage, and the cost of changing it (by habit and choice) isn’t all that much, there’s not really any reason to hold by the the old loaded shit
harm reduction comes in many forms
Note that I was specifically talking about branch names in Git, where it's debatable if the default name "master" even originated from the master/slave nomenclature.
The problematic nature of the term is a lot more evident in other contexts where a counterpart of the "master" is in fact called a "slave". Whether that's reason enough to change the names in any particular instance is not something I'll comment on.
Yeah. I remember when the company I used to work for switched our style guide to allowlist/denylist and apart from That One Guy the overall reaction was a big "eh? sure, whatever". Nobody is out here pretending that this kind of change is going to completely end racism or even that it's going to have a major impact, but past a certain point continuing to casually throw the memory of chattel slavery around is just cringe.
I found the git master branch naming controversy a bit misguided, since to my mind the analogy was more “master copy” or “master recording” than “master of a slave”. This isn’t IDE. Who names their VCS branch “slave”?
In a better world, this would've probably been a solid argument for letting the master/slave naming convention stick around. We don't live in a better world.
This guy would be a lot happier if someone had given him a pound of weed when he was 12 then introduced him to college football fandom.
Dude is about 3 years too late but I guess it's always 8 o'clock in the outrage store.
For reference, HN went wild on this submission from a pretty obvious 4chan troll (the self-described "Black developer" just so happened to include references to a Stormfront post (since removed)):
just imagine the kinda thinking that goes into even "I can make this post for fun, that'll be a gas"
This is both old news and kinda… not that surprising when you think about it, but I searched and didn’t see any commentary on this here.