TechTakes

So far away we wait for the AGI
For the billions all wasted and gone
We feel the pain of compute time lost in few thousand days
Through the sneering and the flames we carry on

Opening up the sack with your new favourite uwu news influencer giving a quick shout-out to our old pals, the NRx. Hoped that we wouldn’t get here, but here we are, regardless.

Got two major pieces to show which caught my attention:

• The ‘white-collar bloodbath’ is all part of the AI hype machine, a rare moment of genuine criticism popping up in the mainstream press (CNN, to be specific)
• AI model collapse is not what we paid for, an opinion piece from the Register where Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (who previously boosted Perplexity) complains about the declining quality of AI search

Pretty good summary of why Alex Karp is as much a horrible fucking shithead as Thiel.

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/alex-karp-palantir-tech-republic/tnamp/

New Bluesky post from Baldur Bjarnason:

What’s missing from the now ubiquitous “LLMs are good for code” is that code is a liability. The purpose of software is to accomplish goals with the minimal amount of code that’s realistically possible

LLMs may be good for code, but they seem to be a genuine hazard for collaborative software dev

New webbed brief from Heydon

https://briefs.video/videos/introducing-webbed-sites/

Further evidence emerging that the effort to replace government employees with the Great Confabulatron are well at hand and the presumed first-order goal of getting a yes-man to sign off on whatever bullshit is going well.

Now we wait for the actual policy implications and the predictable second-order effects. Which is to say dead kids.

In an completely unprecedented turn of events, the word prediction machine has a hard time predicting numbers.

https://www.wired.com/story/google-ai-overviews-says-its-still-2024/