TechTakes

Blergh. Just fucking fund public transport and don’t use AI. Easy wins on traffic and efficiency.

~~The predictions of slopworld 2035 are coming true!~~

ah yes the 937 partners of this website and their legitimate interest to scan and own your thoughts forever

i don't expect literally this but there's some potential hidden sleaziness inside

And thus Poker Face joins Sandman in the "no longer interested in Season 2" pile, but for different reasons.

The plot of Uncanny Valley centers on “a teenage girl who becomes unmoored by a hugely popular AR video game in a parallel present.”

So, Tron again, then. But with goggles this time.

I mean I appreciate the attempt to mitigate one of the many problems with genAI, but I would expect the smaller dataset to make a model that confabulates even more and is gonna be even harder to work with than something like Sora. Like, I'm sure a decent director will be able to make something with it but I can't see how it's going to be better results or more time/money/labor efficient than human VFX pipelines even if you pay the poor bastards decently.

In terms of sailing the high seas, an AI data center is worse than a boat too.

In terms of actually being useful, an AI data center is also worse than a boat.

"Kicked out of a ... group chat" is a peculiar definition of "offline consequences".

"The first time I ever suffered offline consequences for a social media post"- Hey Gang, I think I found the problem!

Oh hey just in time to let my subscription lapse.

My kids use Duolingo for extra training of languages they are learning in school, so this crapification hits close to home.

Any tips on current non-crap resources? Since they learn the rules and structure in school it's the repetition of usage in a fun way that I am aiming for.

after I've previously posted this and this, an update: both the memrise browser version and the iOS app now have "chat to a buddy" as a non-skipable step in course iteration

the "buddy" is a chatbot of unclear provenance. this page mentions "MemBot - powered by AI" at the top, which is a link to this zendesk page, but that's a dead link

Also all the top results for most searches are blatant autoplag slop with no informational value now.

I just encountered a thing like this. A subject where no matter what you asked about it this one site was in the top 5 with just incomprehensible posts. Like every sentence on its own made sense, but there was nothing more than that. It read like constant promotional 'before the actual meat of the article' stuff but forever. Was really weird.

On the (slim) upside, it's an opportunity to ditch Google, and maybe it will sooner or later break their monopoly position. I switched my main search engine to Ecosia a while ago, I think it uses Bing underneath (meh), but presumably it's more privacy friendly than Google (or Bing directly). I've had numerous such attempts over the years already to get away from Google, but always returned, because the search results were just so much better (especially for non-English stuff). But now Google has gotten so much worse that it created almost an equilibrium... sometimes it's still useful and better, but not that often anymore. So I rarely go to Google now, not because the others got better, but because Google got so much worse.

"The millenials were so well paid in tech jobs during the boom that they nevered bothered to invest in homes" is ... a take

These people probably think Karl Marx is Satan, but my god at least he was able to understand and respect Adam Smith better than whoever's trying to magick wealth out of this absolute idiot soup! Looks like capitalism the ideology is just as unsustainable as capitalism the economic system.

Gonna copy this in because there's a lot to unpack, and I don't want to do it alone.

From: Peter Thiel
Date: Sunday, January 5, 2020 at 2:44 AM
To: Mark Zuckerberg, Nick Clegg, Antonio Lucio
Cc: Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen
Subject: RE: Milennials

There are many themes that could be developed
more here; let me make a few quick points for now:

Nick -- I certainly would not suggest that our policy
should be to embrace Millennial attitudes
unreflectively. I would be the last person to
advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials
say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than
simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid
or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and
understand why. And, from the perspective of a
broken generational compact, there seems to be a
pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that
when one has too much student debt or if housing
is too unaffordable, then one will have negative
capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to
start accumulating capital in the form of real estate;
and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then
one may well turn against it.

1. Part of me wishes that the font were just a little bigger. This way, the word wrap would come to 10 syllables a line, and we could pretend this was a lost Shakespeare monologue.
2. I'm almost disappointed by this. Thiel, suggesting that it might not, in fact, be the children that are wrong? Where's your ideological purity, Thiel? Didn't know you started reading r/GenZedong.
3. Also, it's Peter fucking Thiel lecturing Nick fucking Clegg, former leader of the lib dems in the UK, on paying lip service to socialist policy in order to stymie any real societal progress???