I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.

If you use cloudflare DNS or similar: there has been some inscrutable drama going back years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archive.today#Cloudflare_DNS_availability

(You might be using Cloudflare DNS without realizing it if you use Firefox, since it’s the default with DNS over HTTPs enabled)

(Oh no how much of my brain is dedicated to remembering random inscrutable tech drama?)

Edit: whoops commented too fast. That would explain broken DNS but not captchas. I blame the heatwave it has melted my brain.

Crypto bros continue to be morally bankrupt. There is an a coin / NFT called “GreenDildoCoin” and they’ve thrown dildos onto court at multiple WNBA basketball games (ESPN, video). It warms my heart that one of them was arrested. More of that please.

Polymarket even had a “prediction” on it. Because surely the outcome there couldn’t be influenced by someone who also placed a large bet. Oh and Donald Trump Jr. posted a meme about it

None of this is particularly surprising if you’ve followed NFTs at all: the clout chasing goes to the extreme. In the limit memecoins can act as donations to terrible people from donors who want them to be terrible. Still I hate how much publicity this has gotten, and how this has manifested as gross disrespect towards women atheletes / women’s sports by the sorts of losers who make “jokes” about no one watching WNBA games.

Amazon should treat drivers better. I hate how much “hustle” is required for that sort of job and how poorly they respect their workers.

I think my job needs me too much to lay me off, which I have mixed feelings about despite the slim-pickings for jobs.

I’m also trying to position myself to potentially have to flee the USA* due to transgender persecution**. There’s still a lot of unknowns there. I’ll probably stay at my job for awhile while I work on setting some stuff up for the future.

That said part of me is tempted to reskill into a career that’d work well internationally (nursing?) – I’m getting a little up in years for that but it’d probably be a lot more fulfilling than what I’m doing now.

* My previous attempt did not work out. I rushed things too much and ended up too stressed out and unbelievably homesick.

** This has been getting incredibly stressful lately.

At my big tech job after a number of reorgs / layoffs it’s now getting pretty clear that the only thing they want from me is to support the AI people and basically nothing else.

I typed out a big rant about this, but it probably contained a little too much personal info on the public web in one place so I deleted it. Not sure what to do though grumble grumble. I ended up in a job I never would have chosen myself and feel stuck and surrounded by chat-bros uggh.

Image should be clearly marked as AI generated and with explicit discussion as to how the image was created. Images should not be shared beyond the classroom

This point stood out to me as particularly bizarre. Either the image is garbage in which case it shouldn’t be shared in the classroom either because school students deserve basic respect, good material, and to be held to the same standards as anyone else; or it isn’t garbage and then what are you so ashamed of AHA?

Fear is the proper state of being for a coproration.

This leads me to wonder: Has he said anything about Rowling, you know, turning out to be a garbage human?

I couldn’t find anything, though I did find this thread where he ponders if the problem with police is that they just have too much gosh darn testosterone while awkwardly trying not to take a side:

People, I said “under 100 ng/dL of testosterone” with intent to thereby short-circuit trans issues because that is the part I care about. The conjecture (though I’d consider it halfway busted at this point) was meant to exclude, eg, a trans AFAB taking testosterone.

“A trans AFAB”. Lovely.

Don’t worry though, nothing quite says “transphobes not welcome” like this:

And to be explicit, we are happy to host economically literate people in favor of market solutions who politely accede to pronoun requests.

Well OK maybe they are welcome, but at least they’ll begrudgingly use the right pronouns while they gleefully tear down all my human rights!

“If you think you can point to an unnecessary sentence within [HPMoR], go ahead and try.” --Eliezer Yudkowsky, August 2022

This is just a trap to trick people into reading the first sentence of HPMoR isn’t it?

Only in the finest in content-aware AI powered clone stamp tool paintshop pro subscription magic mspaint terribleness

What do I do? Well I start by not calling them “likeable” and continue by calling them “fascists with huge egos whom I despise”.

But I mean you do you Kelsey.

Why would I pay to watch bad Southpark episodes when I can watch them for free on comedy central’s website?

Our real goal is to have 10 million AIs living in the virtual world getting smarter over time until one of them has a sort of Promethean breakthrough and actually becomes the first AI virtual being.

Ah it’s all part of their plot to bring Kenny to life as an all powerful digital mind.

Copilot will be given a little avatar with a “room” and will “age”. In other words: we have now reached the Microsoft Bob stage of the AI bubble.

https://www.theverge.com/news/713715/microsoft-copilot-appearance-feature-age-mustafa-suleyman-interview

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.

Yeah I’ve had to do this too. It’s lovely isn’t it? You do all the work and someone else who half-assed a prompt and sent out a change without even reading it gets most of the credit.

From Reddit

I can honestly say that I have never played Umamusume Pretty Derby ^{because on my PC the sound keeps cutting out and the cutscenes don’t play which greatly disappointed me.}

The Supabase homepage implies AI bros are two levels below “beginner”, which I found somewhat amusing:

The Gentle Singularity - Sam Altman

This entire blog post is sneerable so I encourage reading it, but the TL;DR is:

We’re already in the singularity. Chat-GPT is more powerful than anyone on earth (if you squint). Anyone who uses it has their productivity multiplied drastically, and anyone who doesn’t will be out of a job. 10 years from now we’ll be in a society where ideas and the execution of those ideas are no longer scarce thanks to LLMs doing most of the work. This will bring about all manner of sci-fi wonders.

Sure makes you wonder why Mr. Altman is so concerned about coddling billionaires if he thinks capitalism as we know it won’t exist 10 years from now but hey what do I know.

Allow people to privately borrow against the taxable part of the future incomes or other economic activities of their children.

“Sorry Junior, I know you wanted to be an artist but you see back in 2025 I got really really into a gatcha game called Umamusume Pretty Derby and long story short you’re legally obligated to become a doctor.”

I found this footnote from Sam Altman’s blog amusing in light of your comment:

*By using the term AGI here, we aim to communicate clearly, and we do not intend to alter or interpret the definitions and processes that define our relationship with Microsoft. We fully expect to be partnered with Microsoft for the long term. This footnote seems silly, but on the other hand we know some journalists will try to get clicks by writing something silly so here we are pre-empting the silliness…