Yeh, I’ve been complaining about noncritical german news for a while. DW is not much better on tech issues.

Although sometimes, a critical piece slips through. E.g. on the fact that chatbots are turning brains to mush in a measurable fashion and that a lot of businesses and professionals are telling whoever is asking that this shit just doesn’t work.

Still, the big-tech-press-piece-to-reputable-news-story pipeline is going strong.

The relation of tech and emergency services is something I became acutely aware of, when my volunteer firefighter unit recently got 2 alarms in one week that turned out to be someone lost his IPhone driving through a curve. (Apparently they have a G-sensor/accident detector and can robocall emergency services.)

Okay, it’s not that common. IPhones do that for years and those 2 were our only cases of that. Still sucks to get the news via radio, when you’re already in full kit ready to roll.

I’m sure this guy is human trash, but the last one is just funny.

I never understood why foids had a whole separate doctor until I got married and started hearing about all the crazy stuff

I’m sorry, but I think this would be funny if a cool, normal guy said it. Makes OB/Gyn sound kinda rad, really.

There’s a take in there somewhere, about “dark web”-like online communities and how they form too thin a social fabric to keep people accountable and aligned with a common good, so personal grievances and economic incentives take over.

Someone probably already wrote it up better than I could bother.

I looked at AirVPN and didn’t find anything too weird yet.

While we’re suggesting stuff, you can just make a nuudel instead!

(It’s a free german Framadate instance.)

Oof, Kallas is in there (VP EU Commission). Wonder what her press statement will be…

The counterargument is basically rule utilitarianism, right? That not only the direct outputs of your actions matter, but also the processes and social norms that you reinforce, and the total side effects of those.

(At least I think that’s what rule utilitarianism is.)

Heise was gushing about (1) Google & OpenAI working together on tagging AI output and (2) camera-makers trying to push cryptographical attestations for real photographs.

Felt the need to point out that (1) is just fear of Habsburg-AI and (2) is a road to a DRM-like unworkable dystopia.

I suddenly feel like haranguing my partner to change their default search engine to DuckDuckGo might be the most important thing I did for my relationship in the past year.

GitHub got pwnd by a compromised VS Code extension. Internal repos were exfiltrated.

Disclosure on Twitter

Welp, thanks for clarifying.

I can’t tell if this is serious.

If that’s really how we react to someone who admits AI use although they know why AI is bad, we need to listen to Dr. Fatima some more.

Tante nails it again. No notes.

That he has a LinkedIn finally explains how I first heard of him. A liberal but very startup/hustle culture brained colleague shared an anti-blockchain thing on the Slack. Always wondered how she stumbled on a comm(o|u)nist tech critic, but it must’ve been LI.

Yeah, but he’s been saying this for a while, and I don’t think this is a new way of saying it that is particularly useful.

Too narrow of a scope to be useful I think.

When he talks about LLCs, the real thing he’s referring to has to be capitalism. The “unaligned AI is already here, it’s corporations” has been around for a while, and I don’t think it convinced a lot of people to become socialists. I think you can’t usefully tackle just the capitalism of the tech industry, if you don’t understand the wider system around it. I mean the VC that sloshes around in tech to raise up one bullshitteer after another comes from somewhere. Real estate, mining, fossil fuels, etc.

Only way I could get behind this is if it were a national mandate to recycle 90% or so of waste heat to get planning permission. Put the coordination problem in the lap of data center builders, weed out the fast talkers from the serious people.

I just watched the whole thing. She makes a consistent case.

I felt a little called out by the being tolerant bit. I for sure haven’t had great success in talking to close people about their AI use. And I was maybe a little too cold to colleagues, who tried to get ahead of the AI literacy circus with good intentions, although I grudgingly agreed that they are right.

Maybe I don’t meet enough randos to get feeling on the level of pervasiveness of chatbots. Maybe it’s a personality thing; I worked myself out of depression mostly by disciplining myself and stopping to buy my own excuses, and that’s kind of how I approach every problem now. That sure isn’t a vibe that most people respond to.

There was one part of my AI beliefs that wasn’t adressed. Besides the “front-end” and “back-end” harms, that can be mitigated, the tech as a whole still seems trash to me. That may be boomerism setting in, but chatbots just feel counter to and displacing my positive vision for a social fabric, be it for responsible professional communities or for interpersonal connections.

(I do buy into the use-case for a context-sensitive search engine, e.g. for walls of legalese. But the current framing of the tools is just so harmful, even that use is hazardous as seen in the anecdote.)

Sounds kind of like the Baldur Bjarnason strategy but for your coworkers instead of your boss.

I can see the value of someone with a critical understanding diving into the technology, so they can talk others down from the ledge.

But you also need the social pressure to maintain some slop-free spaces. Not everyone can be asked to accomodate recovering slopaholics.

Not the Saudis, just a Saudi focused outlet.