I’m interpreting your phrasing as you believing that the non-profit “taking over” is somehow good, because profit motive bad presumably. But regardless of incentives, everyone involved is trying to flood the world with slop by incinerating cash and processors on industrial scales.

But so far the cash incinerator has been running on speculative financial products issued by a club of esoteric computer scientists trying to awaken the robot god. Investors are slightly uncomfortable with this, so Sammy boy is trying to offer them a more traditional vehicle to incinerate their cash (while indulging in his personal profit motive a bit).

You’re certainly hitting some nails on their heads here. The normalisation of AI is absolutely happening, mostly because the buttons start showing up on Google/Microsoft/etc. products with massive market share.

Also the manlyman blogs bitching about beaver hair brushes. I was looking up safety razors in german (“Rasierhobel” btw, totally unaware of that until now), and Wikipedia was referencing one such archived blog, bitching about pig bristle brushes being “drug store” garbage. I might still get one. (The razor that is, not the brush. Spray on foam will do for me.)

Not so sure about the scythe/mower thing. My battery powered mower & motor scythe slap. (Stihl btw)

While browsing some german news media outside my usual territorry (DW and tagesschau), and was fooled by this chameleon of an ad on the front page of WELT (trying for classy, but obvious conservative bias).

The heading means “Bitcoin could protect from inflation”. If you want to check out some retail investor shilling in the wild, here you go!

archive: https://archive.is/4RT80

I can see tante’s point. Besides AI datacenters being used for surveillance tech, I can also see LLM tech itself used nefariously post-bubble. Maybe maintaining an up-to-date LLM as a product is not viable, but a custom-trained model to snipe public online discourse around a crucial election could remain affordable for a wealthy fascist.

On the bright side, I am hoping for a brief period of powerful yet affordable gaming PCs thanks to retrofitted, slightly singed Blackwells.

Didn’t come up with that simile, but it might fit:

It’s like a fleshed out version of a 12 year old thinking “everything would be great if I was in charge, because I’m smart and people are dumb”

Something about people who are too impressed with their own smarts and swap pet theories that make them feel smart.

Honestly the most surprising part was when she went “of course we know fanfiction can be used for cult indoctrination, ever since that other cult did it”

I skipped that episode because it seemed boring, but now I might come back to it.

be me, super genius autodidact

be deeply moved by the prospect of defeating death with technology, write some sick prose about it because am eloquent as fuck

proceed to punt this goal decades or centuries by helping to justify a tech bubble which consumes tons of R&D resources for no apparent benefit and will bind further resources in the future to adapt to an aggravated climate crisis, and also inspiring a slew of technofascists too dumb to tell the difference between tech that benefits mankind and tech that exploits and oppresses

mein face when

First I thought “Oh jeez, what a wall of text” but now you gave me my own thoughts that I want to share.

I don’t think callling genAI output “not art” is a very defendable statement. I believe art is ultimately a type of activity, and one that is very hard to draw a strict line around. If I find a cool piece of driftwood and frame it, did I do art? That’s kind of what that artist did when he picked his album cover.

But I also share your sentiment about “AI artists” pretending to work in a medium of which they understand 0% of the nuance. I think it makes more sense to call those people hacks instead of “not artists”, because that’s what you call people who use shallow, formulaic methods to dabble in a medium of which they are wholly incompetent.

And finally, AI as toolset does of course uniquely pander to hacks.

I always thought you could do interesting stuff with genAI, especiall when it goes into mangled, uncanny-valley territory. Though I can only think of examples for visual generators, like this album cover or the AI Pizza commercial.

The only text-based example that comes to mind is I forced a Bot to write this Book and that’s just a guy imitating LLM writing style. (Hillarious though!)

…pirating them at all instead of learning Inkscape & Krita.

Yes, deceitful corporations are truly a troubling new phenomenon, which brings them closer to the baseline for evil: democratic governments

High IQ politics hour over here.

For those who just can’t shake their Wordle habit:

Try https://duotrigordle.com/

32 times the Wordle and none of the NYT enshittification

While browsing the references of the paper, I found such a perfect evisceration of GenAI.

We have confused what we can write down with what we usefully know and compounded the error by supposing that because computers can help us write down more they can obviously help us know more.

The marks are on the knowledge worker - Kidd, Alison

That’s from 1994 folks, they were talking about the wonder of relational databases.

https://www.byom.de/trashmails/

Decent functionality, and it didn’t get flagged most of the time I used it.

can recommend YTDLnis, as others have. If web-based is important to you, cobalt dot tools seems great and trustworthy.

The pivot-to-ai writeup is out, they did seed! I assume it’s documented then.

Multinational corporations can act ethically after all.

Did they seed at least?

Not my place to tell you what to post, but I would have just made a link post to your blog. I found it more pleasant to read, and gave me an incentive to poke through your backlog. Entertaining stuff!

Less meta: you just prompted me to actually remember when my Internet journey actually began. Must have been early to mid oughts, mostly playing flash games on lego.com . I remember an elementary school buddy came over one day and helped me create the Email I’d use for 15 years, and introduced me to some regional forum that went offline many years ago.

Fits a pattern I’ve seen before. Kinda critical of OpenAI and not buying their PR wholesale, but also accepting the framing that AI is some kind of critical foundational tech instead of another shitty magic trick.