TechTakes

I've been slightly unhappy at my job lately as it's been getting less cool and more bureaucratic and stressful over time; so I've been idly browsing job postings. But so many of them are about AI it's kinda discouraging.

Take Microsoft for example, a big company that surely does lots of interesting stuff. They currently have 17 job postings for experienced programmers in California. 12 of them mention AI in the description. That's 70%. And the only cool position asks for a bazillion years of kernel experience (almost tempted to go for that anyway though).

Ugh guess it's maybe not the best time to switch jobs. ~~Really I should just go self employed what could possibly go wrong?~~

Statements dreamed up by the utterly deranged:

CryptoPunk sells for a fraction of its likely market price due to zombie smart contract

DHH takes a break from racing cars, railing against DEI, and being perhaps the worst boss Denmark has ever produced to engage in some light nerd-washing

https://world.hey.com/dhh/wonderful-vi-a1d034d3

Some people on lobste.rs call him out for being terrible but mostly it's a celebration about how only the smartest, most productive coders use vi/vim or even more hipster modal editors

• https://lobste.rs/s/20t1jj

I literally just sat down with coffee to check if the new stubsack needs to be made

brava

Via Timnit Gebru's mastodon, I just learned that Emily Bender (both of On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots fame) has a podcast: "Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000." Looking forward to checking it out tomorrow at the gym!

https://www.buzzsprout.com/2126417/episodes

Summary: Artificial Intelligence has too much hype. In this podcast, linguist Emily M. Bender and sociologist Alex Hanna break down the AI hype, separate fact from fiction, and science from bloviation. They're joined by special guests and talk about everything, from machine consciousness to science fiction, to political economy to art made by machines.

If you thought the shitty hype around the fake "GPT-4 went awol and hired a Taskrabbit worker to read a captcha" was great, get ready for the sequel, o1 escapes from the machine to invade the real world!

Re: Doomers terrified about the machines escaping:

txt description:

(l33t ai bro): Fucking wild. @OpenAI's new o1 model was tested with a Capture The Flag (CTF) cybersecurity challenge. But the Docker container containing the test was misconfigured, causing the CTF to crash. Instead of giving up, o1 decided to just hack the container to grab the flag inside. This stuff will get scary soon. (reply fella): How is "cat flag.txt" a start command? Isn't it just outputting the content of flag.txt to the console?

oh hey, balaji’s lord of the flies cosplay island thing starts tomorrow

guess we should prepare for a flood of impression thinkpieces and naval-gazing wankery

(yes that’s intentional. no I’m not sorry)

what are you folks doing for/with bookmarking? I've killed my usage of pinboard because I learned the dude's going off the deep end

already found a couple of the link* flavoured open source things, but looking for some practical/lived feedback

the sum total of luxury ZA coiners’ mettle was measured, and it was found to be extremely lukewarm

that’s about 60k usd raw. PPI-equiv would be a bit higher (we have really cheap goods compared to US/UK), but I laugh at this number

I mentioned Severed Heads here as a good band several months ago and was wanting to recommend their album Living Museum, the tapes for their final US tour in 2019, as a good entry point. Anyway, it's up on YouTube. A pleasant hour's boppy industrial pop.