EDIT: have they considered offering a huge cash prize to anyone who proves them wrong

My mind’s saying they aren’t gonna give away the money no matter what, my heart wants to see transgirls bully these nerds mercilessly

An MSDS may not tell you what respirator to use;

Slander! MSDS will tell you to use the right one (“appropriate respirator”), it’s your job to figure out what it is

Po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh, still better than an LLM directly endangering you with bad advice

Tenner says we’re seeing them in GTA 6 for obvious reasons

or is there some weird-ass chess proxy-fixation among the rats that I have thus far been blessedly unaware of?

Gonna take a shot in the dark and say the fixation’s from viewing chess more as an IQ showcase than as a game.

Well, I needed an excuse to use Supermium - no better excuse than this.

Update - Ended up jumping ship to Librewolf, since I just didn’t like the feel of Chromium.

I was contemplating going back to Firefox, but then I accidentally wiped my entire profile whilst trying to transfer over my browser history and went “fuck it, I’m sticking with Libre”.

ChatGPT to Orphan Crushing Machine?

Not a sneer, but an observation on the tech industry from Baldur Bjarnason, plus some of my own thoughts:

I don’t think I’ve ever experienced before this big of a sentiment gap between tech – web tech especially – and the public sentiment I hear from the people I know and the media I experience.

Most of the time I hear “AI” mentioned on Icelandic mainstream media or from people I know outside of tech, it’s being used as to describe something as a specific kind of bad. “It’s very AI-like” (“mjög gervigreindarlegt” in Icelandic) has become the talk radio short hand for uninventive, clichéd, and formulaic.

Baldur has pointed that part out before, and noted how its kneecapping the consumer side of the entire bubble, but I suspect the phrase “AI” will retain that meaning well past the bubble’s bursting. “AI slop”, or just “slop”, will likely also stick around, for those who wish to differentiate gen-AI garbage from more genuine uses of machine learning.

To many, “AI” seems to have become a tech asshole signifier: the “tech asshole” is a person who works in tech, only cares about bullshit tech trends, and doesn’t care about the larger consequences of their work or their industry. Or, even worse, aspires to become a person who gets rich from working in a harmful industry.

For example, my sister helps manage a book store as a day job. They hire a lot of teenagers as summer employees and at least those teens use “he’s a big fan of AI” as a red flag. (Obviously a book store is a biased sample. The ones that seek out a book store summer job are generally going to be good kids.)

I don’t think I’ve experienced a sentiment disconnect this massive in tech before, even during the dot-com bubble.

Part of me suspects that the AI bubble’s spread that “tech asshole” stench to the rest of the industry, with some help from the widely-mocked NFT craze and Elon Musk becoming a punching bag par excellence for his public breaking-down of Twitter.

(Fuck, now I’m tempted to try and cook up something for MoreWrite discussing how I expect the bubble to play out…)

The good news is I barely use Protonmail (or email at all, for that matter).

The bad news is I have a fucking Proton account. Fuck.

I wonder how long it will be until there are companies actively promoting their lack of AI.

Its already happening, to some extent, but not mainly among the big corps. Grabbing some random examples I could find:

• Cara blew up a few weeks ago off the back of Instagram going all-in on AI

• Glaze and Nightshade earned a lot of popularity by offering means to sabotage them

• Dove also made waves by directly taking shots at AI, too

• Nintendo publicly eschewed using it, stating they’re focused “delivering value that is unique to Nintendo and cannot be created by technology alone”.

• Newgrounds put the hammer down early on AI, but more publicly disavowed it alongside adding an option to flag something as AI-made in March this year

• Last, but not least, Beth Spencer cooked up a quick-and-dirty “Made with Human Intelligence” badge which has since blown the fuck up online

I’m probably missing some examples, but I think my point’s made.