“[I]ncreasing the adoption of open source software” is such a bullshit argument here anyway, holy shit lol.

They’re not sponsoring Asahi Linux or FOSS Nvidia drivers but DHH’s fucking Arch setup and Ratpoison but worse and with rounded corners.

I’d wanted to mention this when I read about Cloudflare doing it, but, seriously, what the hell is up with Omarchy?

It’s not even a full distribution, just a fucking Arch config. Some shell scripts and dotfiles you can run to set up a system … like tons of nerds have on their git and have been using for decades. Why is this shit getting sponsorships?

I think Yud’s “ethical solution” to pedophilia will always have a place in my top ten of maximally unhinged shit I’ve ever seen on LW.

(The whole thread is a doozy.)

You probably already know this, but there’s a relatively cheap upgrade you can buy at the camp in Hades II that disables this mechanic. Forgot what it’s called, but it’s something like “Allows you to use time magic against the boss”.

I don’t see much to laugh at here myself. Hank may have been a massive fencesitter on AI, but I still think his reaction to Sora’s completely goddamn justified. This shit is going to enable scams, misinformation and propaganda on a Biblical fucking scale, and undermine the credibility of video evidence for good measure.

No, it’s absolutely justified and I agree with basically everything he says in the video (esp. the title, there is really no reason for technology like this to exist in the hand of the public, or anyone really, there’s zero upsides to it). It’s just funny to me because the video is just so different from his usual calm stuff.

But honestly, good for him and (hopefully) his community too.

After kinda fence-sitting on the topic of AI in general for while, Hank Green is having a mental breakdown on YouTube over Sora2 and it’s honestly pretty funny.

If you’re the kind of motherfucker who will create SlopTok, you are not the kind of motherfucker who should be in charge of OpenAI.

Not that anyone should be in charge of that shitshow of a company, but hey!

Bonus sneer from the comment section:

Sam Altman in Feb 2015: “Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity.”

Sam Altman in Dec 2015, after co-founding OpenAI: “Our goal is to advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”

Sam Altman 4 days ago, on his personal blog: “we are going to have to somehow make money for video generation.”

(On an arguably more comedic note, the AI doomers are accusing OpenAI of betraying humankind.)

The last open letter was funnier. Even though “[t]he stakes could not be higher,” this one doesn’t even have Yud going on a promo tour talking about all of humanity dropping dead from diamondoid bacteria that ChatGPT will order from Fiverr after going foom.

Yeah, for multiple reasons. Mostly because all the information in there isn’t accessed or searchable from the outside, and technically not even from the inside because Discord’s search feature fucking sucks.

Fuck. The higher ups at my workplace are currently utterly Claude-brained to the point it makes you think they’re getting their salaries from Anthropic. I am like 80% sure this shit will be on my table when I’m back from vacation in two weeks.

AI use at my company is now mandatory. We all have gotten really expensive Claude of ChatGPT licenses and (apparently) it’s being monitored whether we actually use them. For while I’ve resisted, telling everyone I don’t touch that shit with a ten-foot pole. Now I just write the occasional non-invasive prompt (“check for spelling errors in the comments” or "format the buffer so that all lines have less than 80 columns) just so someone can report to the c-suite that our department is using AI.

Meanwhile I have to do code reviews on patches that have been actually written by a chatbot and doing that takes sometimes as long as writing the whole fucking code from scratch.

But hey, style guidelines are out the window too because the slop machine can’t follow them consistently anyway and apparently fixing that shit manually is too much to ask. So at least I never have to fight anyone again over indentation and braces.

If infinite monkeys with typewriters can compose Shakespeare, then infinite monkeys with slop machines can produce Einstein (but you need to pump in infinite amounts of money first into my CodeMonkeyfy startup, just in case).

Remember Devin, the AI coding bot that turned out to be a complete scam?

Well, looks like Goldman Sachs decided to let it loose on its code base. In YOLO mode too, it seems.

There’s something I’ve been wondering about: is the management (of not just Microsoft but really any company who’s pivoting to AI this hard, so also Duolingo and Klarna, &c.) really convinced that there’s going to be a foom event soon and the chatbots become capable enough to actually do the work they attribute to them? Or do Nadella and friends know this is all bullshit and just play along until they can’t anymore and leave the sinking ship?

I honestly can’t tell anymore.

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I looked this up because I thought it was a nickname for something, but no, Cursor seems to have a setting that’s officially called YOLO mode. As per their docs:

With Yolo Mode, the agent can auto-run terminal commands

So this guy explicitly ticked the box that allowed the bullshit generator to execute arbitrary code on his machine. Why would you ever use that? What’s someone’s rationale for enabling a setting like that? They even name it YOLO mode. It’s like the fucking red button in the movie that says, don’t push the red button, and promptfans are still like, yes, that sounds like a good idea!

That was one wild read even worse than I was expecting. Holy sexism Batman, the incel to tech pipeline is real.

“In college, you don’t learn the building skills that you need for a startup,” Tan says of his decision. “You’re learning computer science theory and stuff like that. It’s just not as helpful if you want to go into the workforce.”

I remember when a large part of the university experience was about meeting people, experiencing freedom from home for the first time before being forced into the 9-5 world, and broadening your horizon in general. But maybe that’s just the European perspective.

In any case, these people are so fucking startup-brained that it hurts to think about.

Now 25, Guild dropped out of high school in the 10th grade to continue building a Minecraft server he says generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit.

Serious question: how? Isn’t Minecraft free to play and you can just host servers yourself on your computer? I tried to search up “how to make money off a Minecraft server” and was (of course) met with an endless list of results of LLM slop I could not bear to read more than one paragraph of.

Amid political upheaval and global conflict, Palantir applicants are questioning whether college still serves the democratic values it claims to champion, York says. “The success of Western civilization,” she argues, “does not seem to be what our educational institutions are tuned towards right now.”

Yes, because Palantir is such a beacon of defending democratic values and not a techfash shithouse at all.

I sometimes feel that I, as someone who also likes retro computing and even deliberately uses old software because it feels familiar and cozy to me, and because it’s often easier to hack and tweak (in the same way that someone would prefer a vintage car they can maintenance themselves, I guess), I get thrown in with these people – and yes, I also find it super hard to put a finger on it.

I also feel they’re very prominent in the Vim community for the exact same reasons you mentioned. I like Vim, I use it daily and it’s my favorite editor because it’s what I am used to and I know how to tweak it, and I can’t be bothered to use anything else (except Emacs, but only with evil-mode), but fuck me if Vim evangelists aren’t some of the most obnoxious people online.

New Zitron dropped, and, fuck, I feel this one in my bones.

Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/

Klarna is one company that boggles my mind. Here in Germany it’s against literally every bank’s TOS to hand out your login data to other people, they can (and do) terminate your account for that. And yet Klarna works by asking for your login data, including a fucking transaction token, to do their thing.

You literally type your bank login data including an MFA token into a legalized phishing site so they can log into your account and make a transaction for you. And the banks are fine with it. I don’t get it.

The German Supreme Court even deemed this whole shit as unsafe all the way back in 2016 and said that websites aren’t allowed to offer Klarna as the only payment option because it’s an “unacceptable risk” for the customer, lol.

Oh, and they of course also scan your account activity while they’re in there, because who’d give up all that sweet data, which we only know because they’ve been slapped with a GDPR violation a few years back for not telling people about it.

Yet for some reason it is super popular.