Saturday, September 14
Daily News Stuff 14 September 2024
Mermaids R Us Edition
Mermaids R Us Edition
Top Story
- OpenAI's new AI o1 is like having an autistic nine-year-old as a personal assistant with all of the expense and none of the comic moments. (Tech Crunch)
Ask it if you need to rent an AirBNB for Thanksgiving to provide more oven space, and rather than telling you that you're an idiot and that you can buy benchtop ovens from Walmart starting at $50, it does the analysis and comes up with a painfully detailed list of pros and cons, all of which you already know.
- This drivel is what OpenAI believes will drive it to a market valuation of $150 billion. (Reuters) (archive site)
Bubble? Scam? Delusion? Fraud?
Or all of the above?
- Quick update from yesterday: That offer from Boeing that unionised employees rejected as a bad deal, appears to truly have been a bad deal.
I'm looking for an article that gives the full details that I can link to, but have come up dry so far.
Tech News
- Sam Bankman Fried is appealing his conviction on fraud charges relating to his theft of $10 billion in customer funds. (Coin Telegraph)
His core claim - most of them amount merely to waah - is that FTX was never insolvent because by a miracle of timing, the company's Bitcoin assets inflated enough to make all its customers whole.
Which... Uh. I'd have to know more about the exact details of the charges and the underlying laws than I really care to, to comment on that.
If you try to scam people selling a penny stock in a failed silver mine in Arizona, and you suddenly find that it's just loaded with high grade platinum group deposits worth billions, did you scam anyone but yourself?
- Google is rolling out its Gemini chatbot to you whether you like it or not. (Ars Technica)
It's in Chrome and there's an even more invasive version in Android.I thought I might try this out so I went to the page on the Play Store and read about the data policy. Telemetry-wise it requires basicallyeverything. Just an utter firehose of everything on your phone straight to Gemini.
If you gaze too long into the mouth of the beast, you get chomped.
Google already tracks a lot of my online life and I'm sure the analytics are fed to their AI's in various ways, but I'm not quite comfortable looking the beast in the face and just throwing myself into its mouth like that.
- Now that Annapurna's entire game development division has fled the company, it can focus on what really matters: Movies about women who think they are turning into dogs. (The Verge)
It's called Nightbitch.
I watched the trailer. It's actually worse than the Minecraft movie.
- Australia's Stalinist government, which is moving to stamp out free speech everywhere in the world, is deeply upset at being mislabeled as fascist. (The Register)
Prime Minister Whatsisname said "The fascists have nothing on us."
- Meanwhile senators from Australia's Khmer Vert party are threatening to fine supermarkets for price gouging. (Yahoo Finance)
They pointed out that across Australia and New Zealand, our largest supermarket chain has made an unconscionable net profit in the past financial year of, uh, 0.15%.
- People will start buying new computers and upgrading to Windows 11 real soon. (The Register)
Any day now. Yep. Any day now.
- Apple's Vision Pro exposes your passwords. (Wired) (archive site)
Vision Pro lets you type just by looking at a virtual keyboard.
It also presents a virtual avatar on video calls that tracks your eye movements.
So... Yeah. Not a great combination, Apple.
This is like the stone age exploit where the send and receive indicators on modems were wired directly to the data lines, so all you needed was a high-speed camera and you could siphon off every single bit.
- 23andMe is paying $30 million to settle a lawsuit over leaking its customers genes. (Bleeping Computer)
Also, ew.
- United Airlines is planning to equip all of its planes with Starlink. (MSN)
And free wifi.
- If you were looking for a Ryzen AI 9 HX 370 mini-PC here's one from Beelink. (Liliputing)
Looks like it has two M.2 slots for storage and up to 32GB of soldered RAM. Which is basically enough, but I'd like to see a 64GB model.
One USB4 port, five other slower USB ports, HDMI, DisplayPort, 2.5Gb Ethernet, and two audio jacks.
- And here's one from AOOSTAR. (Notebook Check)
This is similar, but offers three M.2 slots and an OCuLink port (basically x8 PCIe over a cable) for external GPUs.
At the front.
- 1.3 million Android streaming boxes have been backdoored and nobody knows how except that some of them were running a bootleg Android version from 2016 which is a pretty big hint. (Ars Technica)
These are mostly dirt cheap no-name models sold in poorer countries; Brazil seems to be hardest hit.
- Intel has signed a $3.5 billion deal to make secure chips for the US military. (Bloomberg) (archive site)
Which makes sense, because the other fabs owned and operating in the US tend to be specialised (Micron) or running on older process nodes (Texas Instruments)>
But it's a drop in the bucket compared to what Intel has squandered.
- If you want a tiny Apple IIe I guess this is your lucky day. (Tom's Hardware)
And when I say tiny, it's dwarfed by an original model Macintosh... Mouse.
- Why is online advertising so uniformly awful? (Ars Technica)
Well, it's a combination of advertisers realising that online ads don't work, so that advertising rates collapsed and everyone scrambled for what was left, and Google and Facebook taking 95% of the ad delivery pie leaving everyone else to scramble for what was left, so that smaller sites were left scraping the bottom of the barrel and showing ads explaining how and why you should shove an entire bar of soap up your arse.
Smaller sites in this case being The New York Times.
- Consumer Reports warns of high levels of lead in cinnamon. (Ars Technica)
Levels so high that if a child were to eat as few as eighty cinnamon rolls in a single day they could reach the CDC's recommended safety limit.
- Paramount TV has shut down. (TV Tonight)
Paramount TV was in the process of remaking Time Bandits as a television series - without the dwarves.
Unfortunately CBS is picking up all the shows currently in production rather than cancelling them as they mostly deserve.
- The winners of the 2024 Ig Nobel Prize have been announced. (Ars Technica)
Some of these are actually interesting, like the demonstration of how a dead trout can swim upstream, and some are scientifically solid, like the investigation that showed clusters of extremely long-lived individuals are closely correlated with shoddy government record-keeping.
Pixy Is Watching
Quality Assurance in Another World continues to shine.
Yes, it's another "trapped in a VR game" isekai - and we all saw how that would work in real life with ENReco* - but it once you swallow that pill (and it is at least a variation on the regular capsule) the story is handled with more intelligence and empathy than most such.
It's listed on MAL as 13 episodes, which means there's no way in hell it will reach the end of the story.
I was thinking it was paced like a 24/26 episode run, but a quick comparison with the manga covers shows that episode 8 of the anime takes us no further than volume 3 of the manga - out of 13. So we probably need three seasons just to catch up.
* ENReco - ENigmatic Recollection - is a Hololive production where all 19 of the Hololive EN girls are roleplaying as amnesiac versions of themselves transported to be heroes in another world.
They were all booted from the game server by technical glitches twice in the first thirty minutes.
Yes, it's another "trapped in a VR game" isekai - and we all saw how that would work in real life with ENReco* - but it once you swallow that pill (and it is at least a variation on the regular capsule) the story is handled with more intelligence and empathy than most such.
It's listed on MAL as 13 episodes, which means there's no way in hell it will reach the end of the story.
I was thinking it was paced like a 24/26 episode run, but a quick comparison with the manga covers shows that episode 8 of the anime takes us no further than volume 3 of the manga - out of 13. So we probably need three seasons just to catch up.
* ENReco - ENigmatic Recollection - is a Hololive production where all 19 of the Hololive EN girls are roleplaying as amnesiac versions of themselves transported to be heroes in another world.
They were all booted from the game server by technical glitches twice in the first thirty minutes.
Disclaimer: Do or donut, there is no fry.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at
04:37 PM
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1
I feel reasonably confident that at least part of the AI discussion now is delusion. When AI PhDs are telling me that AI can kill humanity, I wonder whether they have ever studied the challenges of killing humanity. (In general, I find PhDs and faculty perhaps overly specialized, and trusting too much when it comes to everything outside of their specialties.)
Those comments by Dell, etc., convince me that (as people claimed) the point of Windows 11 was to fuck over the established users, and that both Microsoft and the OEMs are delusional lunatics. I hadn't realized that about the OEMs, I am apparently still naive.
You make Quality Assurance sound more interesting than I had originally supposed. (Is this an inappropriate place to joke about how my earlier prejudices about industrial engineering turned out to be mistaken?)
Those comments by Dell, etc., convince me that (as people claimed) the point of Windows 11 was to fuck over the established users, and that both Microsoft and the OEMs are delusional lunatics. I hadn't realized that about the OEMs, I am apparently still naive.
You make Quality Assurance sound more interesting than I had originally supposed. (Is this an inappropriate place to joke about how my earlier prejudices about industrial engineering turned out to be mistaken?)
Posted by: PatBuckman at Sunday, September 15 2024 02:40 AM (rcPLc)
2
A Stalinist government would never tolerate woke.
Oz had a Trotskyite government.
Oz had a Trotskyite government.
Posted by: Kristophr at Sunday, September 15 2024 06:40 AM (iYdVP)
3
Thank you for being publicly sane on the internet with respect to the ludicrous AI hype train. Do you happen to know of any circles on the internet that are grounded about all this stuff? I'm not even necessarily anti-technology, and the actual study of how intelligence, consciousness, and awareness works seems like it could make for an epoch-making intellectual adventure. But the current spectacle surrounding AI is obscene. I'm not even sure if it would be less obscene if these silicon-valley people had an actual approach to what they were selling.
Instead I feel like I've been tripping out on something Californian when I read some slobbering borderline-worship hagiography of VCs promising to replace the accumulated knowledge, skill, and attentive care of all of mankind with whatever the hammer-du-jour is. And then watch the exothermic combustion of all of our retirement savings as banks and investment firms direct firehoses of money to float these bastards to squillionaire status while the price of the real world rises like a flood. Were people always such credulous cultists? Whatever happened to the hardheadedness and groundedness and skill that built our technological world?
Instead I feel like I've been tripping out on something Californian when I read some slobbering borderline-worship hagiography of VCs promising to replace the accumulated knowledge, skill, and attentive care of all of mankind with whatever the hammer-du-jour is. And then watch the exothermic combustion of all of our retirement savings as banks and investment firms direct firehoses of money to float these bastards to squillionaire status while the price of the real world rises like a flood. Were people always such credulous cultists? Whatever happened to the hardheadedness and groundedness and skill that built our technological world?
Posted by: madrocketsci at Sunday, September 15 2024 01:19 PM (hRoyQ)
4
I'd suggest going back, what, forty years now? And reading Godel, Escher, Bach. It explains quite cogently why modern generative AI has no path to intelligence.
As for the internet... I don't know of any site I can directly recommend. When you dump hundreds of billions of dollars of chum into the waters, the dolphins do tend to get drowned out by the sharks.
As for the internet... I don't know of any site I can directly recommend. When you dump hundreds of billions of dollars of chum into the waters, the dolphins do tend to get drowned out by the sharks.
Posted by: Pixy Misa at Sunday, September 15 2024 04:45 PM (PiXy!)
5
I remember "The Internet" hype train, which at least had the virtue of being about something. AI in its current incarnation is basically a worthless toy and the associated marketing is even sillier. I was going to ask if you can eat tulip bulbs, because that seems relevant here.
Posted by: noormal at Sunday, September 15 2024 11:12 PM (bg2DR)
6
Re: 'were people always?' Yes. Slice the engineers of the past into cohorts, and maybe there are some strong effects with decrease in fraction agricultural labor. (Our inferences about the future of engineering are weaker than what we can see engineers as having produced in the past.) Yet, the 'one eyed man, kingdom of the blind' problems of the present blind us to the fact that the past had cults that did not identify as religions, and some of those were probably quite seriously bad. In the eras we in hindsight paint as having competent engineers, the 1920s through 1980s, for example, we can also see a fair amount of evidence for 'educated' cultists of 'the expert', who seem to have been a wee bit destructive.
Posted by: PatBuckman at Monday, September 16 2024 05:34 AM (rcPLc)
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