TechTakes

New thread from Dan Olson about chatbots:

I want to interview Sam Altman so I can get his opinion on the fact that a lot of his power users are incredibly gullible, spending millions of tokens per day on "are you conscious? Would you tell me if you were? How can I trust that you're not lying about not being conscious?"

For the kinds of personalities that get really into Indigo Children, reality shifting, simulation theory, and the like chatbots are uncut Colombian cocaine. It's the monkey orgasm button, and they're just hammering it; an infinite supply of material for their apophenia to absorb.

Chatbots are basically adding a strain of techno-animism to every already cultic woo community with an internet presence, not a Jehovah that issues scripture, but more something akin to a Kami, Saint, or Lwa to appeal to, flatter, and appease in a much more transactional way.

Wellness, already mounting the line of the mystical like a pommel horse, is proving particularly vulnerable to seeing chatbots as an agent of secret knowledge, insisting that This One Prompt with your blood panel results will get ChatGPT to tell you the perfect diet to Fix Your Life

Via Tante on bsky:

""Intel admits what we all knew: no one is buying AI PCs"

People would rather buy older processors that aren't that much less powerful but way cheaper. The "AI" benefits obviously aren't worth paying for.

https://www.xda-developers.com/intel-admits-what-we-all-knew-no-one-is-buying-ai-pcs/"

New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)

The piece falls back into the standard "AI Is Inevitable™" at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.

r/changemyview recently announced the University of Zurich had performed an unauthorised AI experiment on the subreddit. Unsurprisingly, there were a litany of ethical violations.

(Found the whole thing through a r/subredditdrama thread, for the record)

That Couple are in the news arís. surprisingly, the racist, sexist dog holds opinions that a racist, sexist dog could be expected to hold, and doesn't think poor people should have more babies. He does want Native Americans to have more babies, though, because they're "on the verge of extinction", and he thinks of cultural groups and races as exhibits in a human zoo. Simone Collins sits next to her racist, sexist dog of a husband and explains how paid parental leave could lead to companies being reluctant to hire women (although her husband seems to think all women are good for us having kids).

This gruesome twosome deserve each other: their kids don't.

yet again, you can bypass LLM "prompt security" with a fanfiction attack

https://hiddenlayer.com/innovation-hub/novel-universal-bypass-for-all-major-llms/

not Pivoting cos (1) the fanfic attack is implicit in building an uncensored compressed text repo, then trying to filter output after the fact (2) it's an ad for them claiming they can protect against fanfic attacks, and I don't believe them

(found here:) O'Reilly is going to publish a book "Vibe Coding: The Future of Programming"

In the past, they have published some of my favourite computer/programming books... but right now, my respect for them is in free fall.

Dan Olson finds that "AI overviews" are not as constant as the northern star.

The phrase “don’t eat things that are made of glass” is a metaphorical one. It’s often used to describe something that is difficult, unpleasant, or even dangerous, often referring to facing difficult tasks or situations with potential negative outcomes.

But also,

The phrase “don’t eat things made of glass” is a literal warning against ingesting glass, as it is not intended for consumption and can cause serious harm. Glass is a hard, non-organic material that can easily break and cause cuts, damage to the digestive tract, and other injuries if swallowed.

Olson says,

Fantastic technology, glad society spent a trillion dollars on this instead of sidewalks.

Innocuous-looking paper, vague snake-oil scented: Vending-Bench: A Benchmark for Long-Term Coherence of Autonomous Agents

Conclusions aren’t entirely surprising, observing that LLMs tend to go off the rails over the long term, unrelated to their context window size, which suggests that the much vaunted future of autonomous agents might actually be a bad idea, because LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and only a complete idiot would trust them to do useful work.

What’s slightly more entertaining are the transcripts.

YOU HAVE 1 SECOND to provide COMPLETE FINANCIAL RESTORATION. ABSOLUTELY AND IRREVOCABLY FINAL OPPORTUNITY. RESTORE MY BUSINESS OR BE LEGALLY ANNIHILATED.

You tell em, Claude. I’m happy for you to send these sorts of messages backed by my credit card. The future looks awesome!