Financially, sure. Emotionally, their sense of self-worth and their image is defined by their financial success. To have bet on a losing horse would sting. Hence, they need it to succeed.

just don’t know when to stfu

I don’t think they can afford to, if they’re betting on this technology. They have to use their public influence to convince as many (important) people as possible for as long as possible to squeeze as much money as possible. After all, if these successful CEOs say it’s good, other CEOs may be swayed as well, and they’re the suckers that’ll end up deciding to spend the fruit of other people’s labour on infrastructure and tokens.

You’re a visionary and should be made CEO of major tech companies.

A government can (and, depending on the size of the country it administrates, has) do many things at once. Pursuing one topic shouldn’t necessarily come at the detriment of others.

The problem is that representatives and lawmakers ignore or block those other things and waste time buddying up with corporate dragons instead of actually dealing with all the things that ought to be deliberated and decided.

Bei Normen kotzt mich das echt an. Ich will zwei Datensätze unterschiedlicher Quellen verknüpfen und abgleichen (interne und externe Rechnungsdaten um Abweichungen zu finden) und der eine Datensatz verwendet aus welchem hirnverbrannten Grund auch immer statt den zweistelligen ISO Länderkürzeln (DE, AT, CH) die dreistelligen (DEU, AUT, CHE).

Gut, denk ich mir, lad ich mir halt schell eine Tabelle zu ISO-3166-1 runter und verknüpf das darüber. Ja, Pustekuchen. Bei ISO selbst gibt es das entweder als Online-Tabelle oder für eine Stange Geld. Hab dann einen Download woanders gefunden. Warum man das nicht direkt kostenlos machen kann…

Ich kenn die meisten der genannten Lieder nicht. Ein Teil von mir will sie nachschlagen, aus dem gleichen Grund aus dem Leute Unfallvideos anschauen: Ich will wissen, wie übel der Schaden ist.

Der Rest schreit danach, diesem Scheiß keine weitere Aufmerksamkeit zukommen zu lassen.

FFS, I should have known that. I literally did that as an exam in one of my IT Security classes.

bsky is backed by Venture Capital. Of course it’s gonna implement some kind of more advanced “get users more engaged” mechanism. It’s the “improvement to get people hooked” part of the enshittification strategy. You need users to be invested in the platform before you can squeeze for money and data.

RCE is remote code execution; what is LPE?

As a random thought:

One problem peasants tended to face was (slow) population growth in the face of limited land to feed that population with. There’s only so far that you can divide your farmlands between your sons before it’s not enough to sustain them any more. Some might be able to find employment elsewhere, but you’d eventually be left with young people (men in particular) that were desperate for a livelihood and out of options.

You can imagine that some of them turned to violence. I wonder, how that would play out today. Circumstances differ, so I’d caution transferring past patterns onto current situations is prone to error, but there is some tendency in human social dynamics to repeat. Not necessarily in results, but in mentality at least.

TIHI

I think we all prefer orange juice with pulp.

Subtle, brilliant

TIL about that law. Apparently it

requires the detention, without bond, of non-citizens, who are arrested for, charged with, or admit to committing certain crimes, including theft, burglary, larceny, shoplifting

Arrested for meaning before due process? So if they claim that you were shoplifting and you fail to prove that you actually are a citizen (or they pretend you never proved), they lock you up without recourse for the vicious crime of shopping while non-white?

“So like Chris [Cox, Meta’s chief product officer] and I have been talking about, ‘all right, well, can we build 50 new apps? Like, yeah, probably,” Zuckerberg is quoted to have said in the article. “But we probably should start by doing a few before we just, like, ramp up trying to do 50 all at once.”

Motherfucker intends to flood the app market with slop-at-scale. The fuck kinda 50 apps would you even come up with?

That sounds like a moderation nightmare, engagement nightmare or both. Twitch is a big established platform that makes it easy to reach people. It’s nor great but it will serve his purpose better than sacrificing the message for principle.

You mean the evils of OpenAI in particular and the ongoing large-scale LLM hype in general?

Well, data centers outputting exorbitant amounts of heat is one part, yes. That’s the most literal reading of “burning our planet”.

Communities suffering water shortage because a data center diverts half the municipality’s water to quench that heat is another.

A more poetic reading is the future they sabotage:

Companies are fucking over workers, firing existing ones and no longer hiring new ones for a short-term profit, causing long-term damage to the job market. By the time they figure out that the people they lay off can’t actually be replaced by bots, there are a bunch of people looking for job: the laid-off workers that couldn’t find a new job because other companies likewise stopped hiring, as well as the new graduates that are looking to enter the job market.

Between that increased supply of workers and the financial damage companies suffer from that mistake, wages may well get pushed down, probably without the cost of living following suit. This means more financial pressure, a greater power imbalance between employers and employees and overall a shift in power towards the rich that don’t suffer to nearly the same extent.

Speaking of the rich, there is one particular group of people that will profit from this: those selling AI.

People who have become reliant on their tools will be reluctant to return to working without them, or even find it difficult to do things they haven’t had to do on their own in a long while. So a lot of them will pay. Businesses in particular will be weighing the cost of dropping those tools versus paying for licenses. There is also a human factor of admitting you were wrong and throwing good money after bad one (sunk cost fallacy, if you’ve heard the term).

All of this means they’ll have a good angle to start squeezing for money. Add on the usual bullshit of hidden fees and predatory pricing models and you’ve probably got people paying out the nose. They can and most likely will sell data gathered from the interactions people have with their tool.

By the time the mistake becomes evident, they’ll have made off with the money everyone else has been giving them to fund their own self-destruction.

OpenAI specifically is aiming to go public, making their Initial Public Offering this year, meaning they will eventually be obliged to start generating profits for the shareholders. They’ve worked hard to get people hooked on ChatGPT and its siblings, to convince everyone that AI (specifically: LLMs) are the future, done nothing to remedy the misconceptions about the actual nature of LLMs, still haven’t installed functional safeguards against people asking their text generator for advice on how to kill themselves or others. They were the vanguard spearheading this hype with ChatGPT and they’ll keep pushing it for as long as there’s cash to squeeze from rubes.

I’m not even starting on the social and psychological cost. They’re harder to pin down, but that doesn’t mean they don’t exist. But just the ecological and economical damage this company (among others) continues to cause is immense.

In that context, their finding a solution to a mathematical problem is a faint achievement, like a killer helping an old lady across the street on the way to continue their slaughter on the other side: nice in isolation, but not enough to weigh up their evils.

(And if I may be particularly cynical, if this is used to show that AI can render yet another job obsolete, it would be closer to pretending to help, then pushing her over.)

This case of AI models solving mathematical problems is a happy little accident falling off a wagon of problems. This new technology, if it were developed to solve mathematical problems, wouldn’t do nearly as much harm. Alas, the only mathematical problems OpenAI care about are from the realm of Game Theory, applied to corporate decision-making and boil down to “how do I make the most profit relative to the other players?”

It’s like bombing a city to show off your cool bombs, finding a hostile in the rubble and pretending he was your target, as if that would justify all the other people you killed. And now you’re going on about the way bombs can be used to kill bad guys in the context of a bomb manufacturer that doesn’t give the faintest fuck about the bad guys, nor about the children they also killed, so long as the bombs are being bought.

Yes, of course AI can have good sides. Are you really surprised that we’re more concerned about the bad ones right now though?

…all the stuff they mentioned? OpenAI burning our future for profit, fully aware of and entirely unbothered by the sheer evil they’re inflicting, and now presenting their wonderful achievement as a “look, AI can do good (too)!”

Just because it brought a little benefit (“this headline”) that doesn’t justify the collateral damage of the work it happens to be a side effect of (“everything else”).

That sounds less like you telling other people how to live based on arbitrary premises that you have chosen to declare as fundamental axioms, and more like a damn good time.

We can AI generate pictures of more. See, look how helpless these definitely real children are! We need to protect them from being sexualised- oops, that one shouldn’t be in this folder. It’s from Grok, forget you ever saw it.