TechTakes

The AI craze might end up killing graphics card makers:

Zotac SK's message: "(this) current situation threatens the very existence of (add-in-board partners) AIBs and distributors."

The current situation is so serious that it is worrisome for the future existence of graphics card manufacturers and distributors. They announced that memory supply will not be sufficient and that GPU supply will also be reduced.

Curiously, Zotac Korea has included lowly GeForce RTX 5060 SKUs in its short list of upcoming "staggering" price increases.

(Source)

I wonder if the AI companies realize how many people will be really pissed off at them when so many tech-related things become expensive or even unavailable, and everyone will know that it's only because of useless AI data centers?

A few people in LessWrong and Effectlve Altruism seem to want Yud to stick in the background while they get on with organizing his teachings into doctrine, dumping the awkward ones down the memory hole, and organizing a movement that can last when he goes to the Great Anime Convention in the Sky. In 2022 someone on the EA forum posted On Deference and Yudkowsky's AI Risk Estimates (ie. "Yud has been bad at predictions in the past so we should be skeptical of his predictions today")

Cloudflare just announced in a blog post that they built:

a serverless, post-quantum Matrix homeserver.

it's a vibe-coded pile of slop where most of the functions are placeholders like // TODO: check authorization.

Full thread: https://tech.lgbt/@JadedBlueEyes/115967791152135761

just to note that reportedly the palantir employees are for whatever reason going through a massive “hans, are we the baddies” moment, almost a whole year into the second trump administration.

as i wrote elsewhere, those people need to be subjected to actual social consequences of choosing to work with and for the u.s. concentration camp administration office.

I have mixed feelings about this one: The Enclosure feedback loop (or how LLMs sabotage existing programming practices by privatizing a public good).

The author is right that stack overflow has basically shrivelled up and died, and that llm vendors are trying to replace it with private sources of data they'll never freely share with the rest of us, but I don’t think that chatbot dev sessions are in any way “high quality data”. The number of occasions when a chatbot-user actually introduces genuinely useful and novel information will be low, and the ability of chatbot companies to even detect that circumstance will be lower still. It isn’t enclosing valuable commons, it is squirting sealant around all the doors so the automated fart-huffing system and its audience can’t get any fresh air.

Daniel Stenberg has written the cURL bug bounty's obituary, and discussed his plans for dealing with the slop-nami going forward.

Clodswarms

still kinda low-key horrified at Xhitter's attempt to meme regime change in Iran into existence

https://blog.emojipedia.org/x-expected-to-update-its-iranian-flag-emoji-design/

Look, I fully support the right of the Iranian people to freely decide how to run their country. But assuming that protests that ultimately seem to have ended with over 30,000 dead protestors would succeed and that the flag of the new Iranian government would be the same as the one that was deposed in 1979 is pretty ghoulish.

Starting this Stubsack off with the latest edition of Product Picnic, which goes into how LLMs have made good product design impossible, and how best to un-fuck the field.