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)

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

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.

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!

This might be tangential/way off-topic and more MoreWrite material than stub, but anyhoo:

Acronym-based misinformation campaigns I would like to seed:

1. Internet debate clubs should start using “ASMR” to mean “A steel man risk”
2. Opus dei, the absolutely real sect of the catholic church most famous for being the villains in the fiction IP “the Da Vinci Code”, is in fact the DEI branch of the catholic church.
3. The company KFC has been commissioned by the Chinese Government to use FLG in its marketing, standing for “finger licking good” to drop Fa Lun Gong in search rankings for FLG.

If I think of more I’ll post them.

pic of tweet reply taken from r/ArtistHate. Reminded me of Saltman's Oppenheimer tweet. Link to original tweet

Just a standard story about a lawyer using GenAI and fucking up, but included for the nice list of services available

https://www.loweringthebar.net/2025/04/counsel-would-you-be-surprised.html

This is not by any means the first time ChatGPT, or Gemini, or Bard, or Copilot, or Claude, or Jasper, or Perplexity, or Steve, or Frodo, or El Braino Grande, or whatever stupid thing it is people are using, has embarrassed a lawyer by just completely making things up.

El Braino Grande is the name of my next ~~band~~ GenAI startup

Ran across a piece from Jan Wildeboer: Botnet Part 2: The Web is Broken, which focuses on the "residential proxy" services which he discovered to be a likely source of the AI slop scrapers that are DDoSing the 'Net.

Ending paragraph is pretty notable IMO, so I'm dropping it here:

I am now of the opinion that every form of web-scraping should be considered abusive behaviour and web servers should block all of them. If you think your web-scraping is acceptable behaviour, you can thank these shady companies and the “AI” hype for moving you to the bad corner.

exploitation-offshorer "Nick Huber" (@sweatystartup) finds that the leopards will, in fact, also eat his face. but still takes it as a fine opportunity to pitch his exploitation:

(I guess at least his account name is directionally accurate? indicates willingness to induce sweatshops...)

This is an absolutely fascinating selection of people to have speaking at your event.

Whilst looking for an easily cut'n'pasted list for alt-text purposes, I discover it is even worse than it looks, because there are folk like Gad Saad too who don't get an entry on the poster for whatever reason. To steal someone else's summary, "just look at this fucking parade of grifters, scammers and out-and-out Russian assets".