TechTakes

early hire at... roblox

Today in "propaganda I didn't think I needed to worry about" - Cybertruck kids books!

And another one! This one actually has a good title in "The Ugly Truckling" and I'm legitimately mad as the father of a truck-obsessed child that it's wasted here.

Pivot to AI: Amy is retiring! Probably! yes my cowriter has heard the call of revolution and will be having full and frank debates in the marketplace of ideas. WIth sweet reason.

I distinctly recall a lot of people a few years ago parroting some variation of "well I don't know about Bitcoin specifically, but blockchain itself is probably going to be important and even revolutionary as a technology" and sometimesI wish I'd collected receipts to say "I told you it's not".

Here we are, year of Nakamoto 17 and the full list of use cases for blockchains is:

• Speculative trading of toy currencies made up by private nobodies
• Paying through the nose to execute arbitrary code on SETI@Home's evil cousin
• Speculative trading of arbitrary blobs of bytes made up by private nobodies

And no, Git is not a fucking blockchain. Much like the New York City Subway is not the fucking Loop.

So the far right people are already infighting each other with disinformation. Now they are accusing others of being part of the USAID thing. See this tweet by I,hypocrite (lporiginalg) (Note the guy is a bad guy (an anti-Semite for example), so this is fasc on fasc action).

"So let me get this straight...

Vaush

Aella

Richard Hanania

James Lindsay

Were all funded by USAID? WHO ELSE?

<community note pointing out this isn't true>"

They are coming for you Aella, hope you have an exit strategy (Just saying: Publicly burning bridges, and dropping the chatlogs of others would create a lot of goodwill on the anti-fascist side, and would be a good first step in rebuilding trust with some people (even if for a lot this cannot be regained)).

Perhaps using a lot of lying shitheads to get political clout is a bad idea, as even when you are in power, they will not stop lying (and being shitheads).

There are days where I think that desktop Linux usability has gotten so good, it has come such a long way since I started using it in the late 90s, and that now it's really good. And then there are days like today, where I just install some system updates, reboot, and suddenly I'm greeted with:

Note: I have absolutely no idea what "Fcitx" even is. Or why and how it's launched, or whether I'm actually using it or not. Or what this notification is trying to tell me exactly, and whether it is desirable for me to "improve the experience" with it. Or how the latest updates caused this. It appears that it has something to do with keyboard input, I guess. I assume that I could find out more by crawling the web. But honestly, I'm just too fucking exhausted to even bother figuring it out. I don't even want to know how much lifetime I've already spent chasing Linux problems like that.

I hate LLMs so much. Now, every time I read student writing, I have to wonder if it's "normal overwrought" or "LLM bullshit." You can make educated guesses, but the reasoning behind this is really no better than what the LLM does with tokens (on top of any internalized biases I have), so of course I don't say anything (unless there is a guaranteed giveaway, like "as a language model").

No one describes their algorithm as "efficiently doing [intermediate step]" unless you're describing it to a general, non-technical audience

what a coincidence

and yet it keeps appearing in my students' writing. It's exhausting.

Edit: I really can't overemphasize how exhausting it is. Students will send you a direct message in MS Teams where they obviously used an LLM. We used to get

my algorithm checks if an array is already sorted by going through it one by one and seeing if every element is smaller than the next element

which is non-technical and could use a pass, but is succinct, clear, and correct. Now, we get^1^

In order to determine if an array is sorted, we must first iterate through the array. In order to iterate through the array, we create a looping variable i initialized to 0. At each step of the loop, we check if i is less than n - 1. If so, we then check if the element at index i is less than or equal to the element at index i + 1. If not, we output False. Otherwise, we increment i and repeat. If the loop finishes successfully, we output True.

and I'm fucking tired. Like, use your own fucking voice, please! I want to hear your voice in your writing. PLEASE.

1: Made up the example out of whole-cloth because I haven't determined if there are any LLMs I can use ethically. It gets the point across, but I suspect it's only half the length of what ChatGPT would output.

Rats have reached the "put up stickers to proselytize" stage of their weird religion

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/SvtKronRNrw9AxXwa/clement-l-s-shortform?commentId=ZifQXkhxo5dJvrL3Q

i got quoted as an ai authority, talking about elon's rational boys https://www.dailydot.com/news/elon-musk-doge-coup-engineer-grant-democracy/

If only the Supreme Court had as much of a spine as the Romanian Constitutional Court

Law prohibiting driving after consuming substances declared as unconstitutional. Of course, the antidrug agency bypassed the courts and parliament to pass it anyway.

See also: Constitutional Court cancels election result after Russian interference

at long last, we have found genai use case

result: decisive chinese cultural victory