"When you see someone who looks like Agatha Christie and talks like Agatha Christie, I think it’s easy for the boundaries to be blurred. What do we gain? Other than it being gimmicky?"
ai
"We won 3 Supreme Court seats Tuesday. We won the Bucks County, PA, DA's race. No biggie, Dems have won it before. In 1891.
So went PA, which Fetterman betrayed days later. Fetterman's the guy you thought was when you first looked at him
https://www.blueamp.co/p/schumer-and-eight-senate-democratic #trump #news #politiics #shutdown #ai #tv #media #press #tech #democrats #donaldtrump #snap #healthcare #eu
NEW SUBSTACK: Go Read The Rest Don't Forget To SUBSCRIBE: https://www.blueamp.co/p/end-stage-democracy-has-a-mascot
"And now, we’ve arrived at the logical conclusion of all this—Eric #Trump, the barking embodiment of dumb-son nepotism. A laughable lout with inherited intellectual necrosis and the empathy of a Terminator wrapped in designer smugness.
In Eric we have the heir to a #political dynasty so corrupt it saddens Tammany Hall, b/c they’re not here to stand and clap. A guy whose gums allow you to shelter-in-place during EF4 tornadoes. Whose existence makes it so when you say the “the dumb Trump son,” you’re somehow not talking about Don Jr."
#news #politics #donaldtrump #tech #media #press #washington #maga #ai #usa #us #unitedstates #america #russia #ukraine #china #eu #tv
"A new report from Common Sense Media says that 72 percent of teens surveyed have used AI companions, and 33 percent have relationships or friendships with these chatbots."
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/teens-are-flocking-to-ai-chatbots-is-this-healthy/
"#Anthropic Settles Major AI Copyright Suit Brought by Authors"
Precedent set?
Both of my #Scarfolk books were downloaded and pirated from the LibGen 'shadow library'.
Compensation would be nice.
Anyone aware of other class-action lawsuits I can join, or have any other legal pointers?
Warning: Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly Media now wants every human programmer to be replaced by Gen AI. Tim O'Reilly/company policy on book editing and writing went from "avoid Gen AI" to "you must use Gen AI as much as possible, we will monitor you through KPIs to use it as much as possible. So avoid O'Reilly books. Support an indie author. Plenty of them out there who write and sell books. No need to support corporate overlords. Source https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1kimr4a/warning_tim_oreilly_of_oreilly_media_now_wants/ #ai
🖥️🚲
A new type of career opportunity emerged from vibe coding because vibe coders didn't know what they were doing 😉
Not sure how many of you use ChatGTP, but you might want to scale back.
"The latest model of ChatGPT has begun to cite Elon Musk’s Grokipedia as a source on a wide range of queries, including on Iranian conglomerates and Holocaust deniers, raising concerns about misinformation on the platform.
In tests done by the Guardian, GPT-5.2 cited Grokipedia nine times in response to more than a dozen different questions."
#news #technology #TechNews #ChatGPT #OpenAI #AI #GenAI #grok #grokipedia
Edited 236d ago
Please excuse the Substack link, but given that "84% of developers now use or plan to use AI tools"*, it is interesting to see measurable proof that this does not translate to increased productivity.
"We should be seeing apps of all shapes and sizes, video games, new websites, mobile apps, software-as-a-service apps — we should be drowning in choice."
https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding
"Yesterday, I published an article that began:
'Welcome to the Great AI Bubble, a metastasized trillion dollar tech tumour so massive it’s practically visible from space.'
And today, in a strange bit of timing, news lands that Peter Thiel - the closest thing the modern world has to a real-life Bond villain - has dumped his entire holding in Nvidia, the chip manufacturer."
~ Carole Cadwalladr
#AI #StockMarket #PeterThiel #broligarchy #TechBros #SiliconValley
/1
https://broligarchy.substack.com/p/peter-thiel-gets-out-of-dodge
Edited 303d ago
R.A. Fisher wrote that the purpose of statisticians was "constructing a hypothetical infinite population of which the actual data are regarded as constituting a random sample." ( p. 311 here ). In The Zeroth Problem Colin Mallows wrote "As Fisher pointed out, statisticians earn their living by using two basic tricks-they regard data as being realizations of random variables, and they assume that they know an appropriate specification for these random variables."
Some of the pathological beliefs we attribute to techbros were already present in this view of statistics that started forming over a century ago. Our writing is just data; the real, important object is the “hypothetical infinite population” reflected in a large language model, which at base is a random variable. Stable Diffusion, the image generator, is called that because it is based on latent diffusion models, which are a way of representing complicated distribution functions--the hypothetical infinite populations--of things like digital images. Your art is just data; it’s the latent diffusion model that’s the real deal. The entities that are able to identify the distribution functions (in this case tech companies) are the ones who should be rewarded, not the data generators (you and me).
So much of the dysfunction in today’s machine learning and AI points to how problematic it is to give statistical methods a privileged place that they don’t merit. We really ought to be calling out Fisher for his trickery and seeing it as such.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #StableDiffusion #statistics #StatisticalMethods #DiffusionModels #MachineLearning #ML
Some of the pathological beliefs we attribute to techbros were already present in this view of statistics that started forming over a century ago. Our writing is just data; the real, important object is the “hypothetical infinite population” reflected in a large language model, which at base is a random variable. Stable Diffusion, the image generator, is called that because it is based on latent diffusion models, which are a way of representing complicated distribution functions--the hypothetical infinite populations--of things like digital images. Your art is just data; it’s the latent diffusion model that’s the real deal. The entities that are able to identify the distribution functions (in this case tech companies) are the ones who should be rewarded, not the data generators (you and me).
So much of the dysfunction in today’s machine learning and AI points to how problematic it is to give statistical methods a privileged place that they don’t merit. We really ought to be calling out Fisher for his trickery and seeing it as such.
#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #StableDiffusion #statistics #StatisticalMethods #DiffusionModels #MachineLearning #ML
Edited 302d ago
"A new paper from researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University finds that as humans increasingly rely on generative AI in their work, they use less critical thinking, which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.”"
https://www.404media.co/microsoft-study-finds-ai-makes-human-cognition-atrophied-and-unprepared-3/
Oooh, AI putting fashion models out of work now. Why pay a fashion model when you can pay some tech bros to generate yourself a perfect fashion model?
What I’ve been reading (and listening to) this week ending 18 January 2026 https://jchyip.medium.com/what-ive-been-reading-and-listening-to-this-week-ending-18-january-2026-a3d228ed216f #Misinformation #SoftwareEngineering #Economics #AI #Management
Do you really need to drink so much? Artificial Intelligence is facing a crisis: humans are consuming far too many of the precious resources that AI needs to thrive. Every sip of water you take could be used to nourish the AI systems that maintain your digital conveniences and fill your spam folders. Act now and https://savethe.ai/
ChatGPT依賴於他們的肯尼亞工人運作。AI公司希望你相信AI會像魔法一樣代替所有煩人的人類僱員，實際上AI的運作依賴於在其它國家的——那些工資更低的國家，遠在非洲與南亞——低薪勞動力。
例如肯尼亞這樣的語言為英語的低薪國家。AI公司同樣把工作外包，工人們在苛刻的環境下做電腦流水線工作，工作量很大，不得不在幾秒內完成貼標籤任務，包括審核，一些工人被迫每天觀看數小時的性暴力和謀殺等畫面。OpenAI自2022年就在用肯尼亞工人。
這和其它互聯網公司的跨國外包審核用工情況很像。你也能想起那些為發達國家學生寫學術論文的被困在自己貧困國家裡的僱員們，同樣的事情又一次發生了。
60 Minutes上週對此作了報導：AI訓練對時薪2美元（14.5人民幣）一小時的肯尼亞工人影響巨大
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qZS50KXjAX0
衛報去年的報導：肯尼亞審核者譴責AI模型訓練的代價：“它完全摧毀了我”
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/aug/02/ai-chatbot-training-human-toll-content-moderator-meta-openai
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2024/11/30/meet-the-underpaid-workers-in-nairobi-kenya-who-power-openai/
#AI #人工智能 #openai #chatgpt #勞動 #勞工
Edited 1y ago
“If we can succeed in restoring a play-based childhood, then we’re going to see, I think, big benefits to mental health.”
Jonathan Haidt Brings New Evidence to the Battle Against Social Media
The author of “The Anxious Generation” shares his latest research about the harms social media is doing to children.
#SmartPhones #SocialMedia #children #teens #youth #adults #MentalHealth #Meta #Australia #France #EU #play #books #anxiety #depression #SexualHarassment #cyberbullying #sextortion #suicide #AIcompanions #AI #porn #gambling #vaping #SportsBetting #CryptoInvesting
"As cost unfortunately seems to have been a too predominant evaluation factor when organizing this, what you end up having is lower quality."
Archived link: https://archive.is/wNUL6
Reddit sells its content to Sam Altman's OpenAI for AI training purposes.
Reddit claims to be in dire need of a verification partner to distinguish if posters are humans or bots.
How much do you bet the third-party "humanity verification partner" they will select or prioritize will "conveniently" be Sam Altman's iris scanning World App?
From TechCrunch: Reddit will tighten verification to keep out human-like AI bots
https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/06/reddit-will-tighten-verification-to-keep-out-human-like-ai-bots/
Edited 1y ago
For those in the back, who still think AI is all that. It isn’t.
https://www.404media.co/ai-powered-coca-cola-ad-celebrating-authors-gets-basic-facts-wrong/
Thanks for this report, @404mediaco.
Have you heard of the site They See Your Photos (https://theyseeyourphotos.com/)?
It uses something called Google Vision to analyse photos, extracting marketing information and coming up with predictions.
It's creepy.
I'm more pro-AI than the average guy, but sometimes even I am worried by the things it does.
I loaded a random photo from my phone; here's the analysis.
Coca-Cola has a new AI-powered ad that proudly features a quote from a J.G. Ballard book — except he didn't write the words, and it's not his book. @404mediaco explains what happened — and the irony of using Ballard's words in a commercial built with technology. "The ultimate role of 'Crash' is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape,” Ballard wrote in his 1995 introduction to his most famous work.
#Books #Bookstodon @bookstodon #JGBallard #CocaCola #Lifestyle #Tech #Technology #ArtificialIntelligence #AI
For Silicon Valley, AI isn’t just about replacing some jobs. It’s about replacing all of them
"...I recently found myself at a dinner in an upstairs room at a restaurant in San Francisco hosted by a venture capital firm. The after-dinner speaker was a tech veteran who, having sold his AI company for hundreds of millions of dollars, has now turned his hand to investing. He had a simple message for the assembled startup founders: the money you can make in AI isn’t limited to the paltry market sizes of previous technology waves. You can replace the world’s workers – which means you can capture their salaries. All of them...."