- 3 Posts
- 86 Comments
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•AI giant Anthropic commits 5% of shares to ‘public benefit’ fundEnglish
0·1 day agoI expected the beneficiary would be some EA outfit, but it’s actually an entirely new company (and not any kind of charity or nonprofit) called the “Anthropic Public Benefit Fund”, which I’m sure will not at all be managed by EAs (and who would definitely not determine that the most effective altruism is sending money to Anthropic).
I like this:
Subject to stockholder approval, 5% of Anthropic’s shares will be committed today, with an additional 2% added at the board’s discretion for every 50% increase in the company’s value above a set baseline.
You like the public benefit, don’t you? Make sure you invest strongly in Anthropic and pump that valuation even higher, because there’s no other way we could choose to offer more support.
Anyway here’s their blog post on the matter, strangely not linked in the article as far as I can tell: https://www.anthropic.com/news/public-benefit-fund
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026English
0·1 day agoThat ‘superexponential’ thing annoys me so much. Just the most blatant ‘the line goes up because I really really want it to’, while all their rationalisations for it are just describing exponential behaviour.
We talk about the importance of humanities but it’d be nice if they learnt a bit of maths too.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 25th October 2026English
0·1 day agoI am saying that the anti-fascist communities ended up […] uninterested in using LLMs
:O
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
0·3 days agoSome descriptors for ‘democratised’ software that people can slop for themselves:
Slop as single-use software
Slop as fast fashion
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Tesla Running FSD Slams Into Police Cruiser After Driver Falls Asleep Behind the Wheel, Hospitalizing Two Officers With Serious InjuriesEnglish
0·3 days agoThe first aligned AI would immediately try to curb the techbros and billionaires that made it
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
0·4 days agoPlot twist: he just told the chatbot to put in a screen about slop usage, didn’t look at the result, and it dug up a photo portrait from his photos without him noticing
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•So, what are the new datacenters even for?English
0·4 days agoBig corporations are not in the business of selling things and making profits. Their whole line of business is gaming financial markets.
In that regard, datacentres don’t need to do anything. It just needs to demonstrate some material ‘investment’ into Making AI Happen, presenting a potential for super duper revenues in the glorious future, and thereby securing outlandish valuations today.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
0·4 days agoSlop foundries solved the “slop is uncopyrightable” problem by making the output so awful that nobody would want to pinch it
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•So, what are the new datacenters even for?English
0·5 days agoBasically the sole silver lining I see in our slopocalypse is that some portion of the fortunes being incinerated is moving money from finance parasites back to actual people. Some of it.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•The AI Photoshop clones: interface mockups that don’t workEnglish
0·5 days agoIf Anthropic’s AI was truly capable of autonomously producing a Photoshop clone, Anthropic would have done it themselves.
Ah, but those margins are chump change for a firm as important as Anthropic. Your proposal will need far more zeros than that (and a minus sign in front).
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
0·5 days agoI haven’t tried it out in the wild, but I feel that Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse appropriately addresses a lot of noteworthy aspects, even though the title gives so much prominence to ‘sex’.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
0·5 days agoPray tell, how is the chatbot going to know what you want to say if you won’t write it out? This feels a little too obvious.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•AI researchers are taking up smoking because they expect AI to cure cancer, says Palantir CTOEnglish
0·7 days agomicrodosing (n) – Taking small amounts of illegal drugs while white. It may be possible to microdose without writing a book or personal essay about it, but the evidence suggests otherwise.
(I don’t remember ‘small amounts of’ in there; somewhat diminishes the joke IMHO)
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 18th October 2026English
0·8 days agoI think there’s a typo: we have to explore new technologies as they enter the market TO risk being left behind [by our customers].
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
0·9 days agoI thought they already got rid of the corners 🤔
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
0·10 days agoBest of luck to both of you in your searches for cleaner pastures!
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 11th October 2026English
0·10 days agoEvery one deserves a proper look! … but we’ll do slop reviews instead.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Lean and Autoformalization: some helpful linksEnglish
0·10 days agoThat’s fair. I deliberated a while over how I might describe their relation to CS.
rhamph@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Lean and Autoformalization: some helpful linksEnglish
0·10 days agoI’m not convinced that techbros respect computer science either. The bit that says ‘computer’ gives them an air of intellect and elitism by proximity, but it’s not actually a field they care to practise.


Not literally an asymptote, but once you presuppose something as farcical as nested exponentials, your model is doomed to blow up immediately after the last data point.