At this point I’m starting to suspect that AI thought leaders like being booed for giving anti-human speeches. Sundar is looking forward to it!

https://www.businessinsider.com/sundar-pichai-google-graduation-speech-stanford-ai-backlash-eric-schmidt

Google CEO Sundar Pichai is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at Stanford next month. […] “These graduates are actually both going to be a big part of driving that progress and also dealing with the impact,” he added, referring to AI.

SpaceX has chosen a sacrificial disposable naive crypto billionaire to captain a mars fly-by someday: https://gizmodo.com/spacex-taps-crypto-billionaire-to-lead-first-crewed-mission-to-mars-2000762451

The mission is expected to take two years and here’s what he has to say about that:

I can stare at the map view on airplanes all the way from takeoff to landing, so I think I will enjoy the trip.

I use grip gloves for opening jars and love them so much. Same ideas as plastic jar grips, but even easier. I find I usually have enough strength but that my skin is too sensitive to fully apply it without grip gloves.

Maybe women just aren’t that into designing programming languages?

James Damore flashbacks ohno

This website is intended for the use of the wholesale clients only. I declare that I am a wholesale client as defined in the Corporations Act 2001. I declare that I will not provide any information on this website to a retail investor.

Jokes on them I read the page without clicking the agree button here and without being a wholesale client!

Is it real hardmaxxing unless you change your gender? In this essay I will

Most incel forums proliferate pseudoscientific slop to justify their beliefs.

He was this close! This close!

The Logitech F710. The wireless signal is just bad on that controller. I’d get constant lag spikes or dropped input. The Logitech F310 is a much better deal because it’s 10 dollars cheaper and actually works on account of being wired.

Maybe it’d work in the depths of the sea without a lot of radio noise but somehow I doubt it.

Here is a video of Eric Schmidt getting loudly booed at a commencement speech

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/5MYggR_PPRg

https://www.youtube.com/live/b1eM3jv0vWY?t=7923

It is an impressively bad speech.

There are allegations across social media that Elon Musk tweets as his parents after his mom tweeted as if she was his dad to talk about how down to earth and working class their family was.

https://xcancel.com/mayemusk/status/2051700387770458545#m

Not totally sure what to make of that, and none of this actually matters beyond the realm of celebrity gossip, but it is a little weird. I mean obviously on some level his mom is OK with the things that get tweeted on her account, whether it’s by her, her baby boy, or an assistant.

Remember my super cool Rattata vagina? My vagina is different from regular vaginas. It’s like my vagina is in the top percentage of vaginas.

There have been a couple of cases of generative AI graphics being used in anime recently:

Ascendance of a Bookworm used AI backgrounds in the opening song

Liar Game featured an AI chandelier (xcancel link) (this one is brand new so the studio hasn’t responded yet).

This sucks because I wanted to like Liar Game (the manga is excellent though. Read it! Read it!)

At my job I have spent many hours fending off, reverting, or fixing automated AI slop code changes. So depending on your definition of “tearing through”…

Like I spent the better part of a day fixing a C++ signed integer overflow that no one actually cares about because it was the only way to ward off a robot repeatedly trying to fix it in terrible unreadable ways. I could have spent that day maximizing shareholder value but I had to fend off a robot instead.

The future of AI in Ubuntu

This post has all the usual cliches, exaggerations, lies, and unfounded optimism you’d expect in a blog post about a company forcing AI down their workers and user’s throats. I’ll try to avoid sneering at every sentence.

Delegating elements of Site Reliability Engineering to an agent does not necessarily introduce an entirely new class of risk; it should inherit the constraints of existing production systems. Well-run production environments already rely on strict access controls, audit trails, and clear separation between observation and action. […] In that sense, the challenge is less about “trusting the agents”, and more about building trust in the same guardrails we already apply to any production system.

This might sound good to at first, but falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. There is a reason that companies don’t open their intranets to the public despite having fine-grained access controls. Or in other words, "I’m getting a lot of questions already answered by my ‘does not necessarily introduce an entire new class of risk’ T-shirt.

Imagine being able to ask your Linux machine to troubleshoot a Wi-Fi connection issue, or to stand up an open source software forge that’s pre-configured, secured, and reachable over TLS.

And right after arguing that LLMs are safe if you have a perfect permissions model, now he’s proposing letting one #yolo configure a git server or something? This is the sort of thing that could easily easily lead to random security issues.

I suspect that “Troubleshoot a wi-fi connection issue” will work about as well as existing network troubleshooting wizards (e.g. terribly), and that we don’t actually need to reinvent the software wizard but less deterministic.

Detective: “So Magic Eight Ball. I’m just gonna ask you outright. Were you the killer?”

Magic Eight Ball: “It is decidedly so.”

Some Guy: “Oh my god.”

It’s bad for me too.

I’m trying to hang in there until I get some healthcare stuff taken care of over the next year or two but it is getting increasingly difficult. Most of the the good people at my job have been driven out, quit, or been poached by other (AI) companies.

By this point a majority of the programmers at my job (or at least the one’s most active on the mailing lists) are LLM true believers who think that the end times are near. My management chain has explicitly said that LLM programming is required, and that a subsequent increase in “productivity” is expected with it. My department got renamed to something with “AI” in the name. I constantly field questions from people who want me to read a screen full of LLM nonsense, or who push back when I tell them something claiming that the chatbot said differently.

There’s always some frantic push to adopt “MCP” or “Skills” or whatever the next fad will be without any guidance as to how or why. If I ignore this I get nastygrams from my manager.

And at my last doctor visit I had elevated blood pressure :)

I saw this headline:

Engineer Says It’s Time to Rebuild the Twin Towers With Giant Data Centers, Huge Tech Labs, and Anti-Aircraft Lasers on the Roof

And thought nothing in the body of the article could possibly top the headline. I was wrong:

Now, a long-shot effort seeks to rebuild them in an unlikely locale: Chicago

he’s even gone so far as to get a tribute to the original World Trade Center tattooed on his arm.

fireproof steel I-beams

a dedicated fire department

Journalists know that they don’t have to cover every random crank on the internet right? I suppose it’s my own fault for clicking on it.

Apropos of nothing, archive.is ddos-d a website and altered page snapshots as part of some sort of inscrutable net drama causing Wikipedia to stop using it.

So if anyone cares about such things here’s a wayback machine link instead

That said: lmao. Where are all these billion dollar LLM-run Tamogotchi feeding startups hiding? Still in the strawberry counting phase of starting a business?

I mean maybe it’s poorly worded and there’s only one set of beeps at the end. But then why would the protagonist be reminded multiple times?

Unless she’s remembering all the times in the past that microwaving bland chicken reminded her of the world being orderly?

But now I think I’m thinking too deeply about microwaves.

All I could think about is who has a microwave that beeps while it’s still cooking?

Against all odds they found a worse future to pursue than forcing employees to strap VR goggles to their heads 40 hours a week, and have pivoted towards AI.