TechTakes

Found a thread doing numbers on Bluesky, about Google's AI summaries producing hot garbage (as usual):

Semi-OT: A coalition of record corps is trying to sue the Internet Archive out of existence

Not the usual topic around here, but a scream into the void no less....

Andor season 1 was art.

Andor season 2 is just... Bad.

All the important people appear to have been replaced. It's everything - music, direction, lighting, sets (why are we back to The Volume after S1 was so praised for its on-location sets?!), and the goddamn shit humor.

Here and there, a conversation shines through from (presumably) Gilroy's original script, everything else is a farce, and that is me being nice.

The actors are still phenomenal.

But almost no scene seems to have PURPOSE. This show is now just bastardizing its own AESTHETICS.

What is curious though is that two days before release, the internet was FLOODED with glowing reviews of "one of the best seasons of television of all time", "the darkest and most mature star wars has ever been", "if you liked S1, you will love S2". And now actual, post-release reviews are impossible to find.

Over on reddit, every even mildly critical comment is buried. Seems to me like concerted bot actions tbh, a lot of the glowing comments read like LLM as well.

Idk, maybe I'm the idiot for expecting more. But it hurts to go from a labor-of-love S1 which felt like an instruction manual for revolution, so real was what it had to say and critique, to S2 "pew pew, haha, look, we're doing STAR WARS TM" shit that feels like Kenobi instead of Andor S1.

That Couple are in the news arís. surprisingly, the racist, sexist dog holds opinions that a racist, sexist dog could be expected to hold, and doesn't think poor people should have more babies. He does want Native Americans to have more babies, though, because they're "on the verge of extinction", and he thinks of cultural groups and races as exhibits in a human zoo. Simone Collins sits next to her racist, sexist dog of a husband and explains how paid parental leave could lead to companies being reluctant to hire women (although her husband seems to think all women are good for us having kids).

This gruesome twosome deserve each other: their kids don't.

"Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’"

https://bsky.app/profile/hypervisible.bsky.social/post/3lne5zqaxyc2c

New piece from Tante: Forcing the world into machines, a follow-on to his previous piece about the AI bubble's aftermath

Show HN: AI Paying with Bitcoin and Lightning – A Working Demo

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43770953

New piece from the Wall Street Journal: We Now Know How AI ‘Thinks’—and It’s Barely Thinking at All (archive link)

The piece falls back into the standard "AI Is Inevitable™" at the end, but its still a surprisingly strong sneer IMO.

OT: made it to Tallinn, now I gotta watch for those delivery robot things!

Jimmy Concepts casually acknowledges being a useful idiot (or useful not-quite-an-idiot?) for the absolute worst people out there