TechTakes
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
Buckle up humans; because humanity's last exam just dropped: https://lastexam.ai/ (Hacker News discussion). May the odds be ever in your favor.
Edit: Per NyTimes, whom I hate, they were apparently trying to avoid an over-dramatic name. Amazing:
The test’s original name, “Humanity’s Last Stand,” was discarded for being overly dramatic.
We publicly release these questions, while maintaining a private test set of held out questions to assess model overfitting.
... Oh so it's a training dataset, got you.
just mark C for every answer if you don't get it, that's what the State of California taught me in elementary school
so the new feature in the next macos release 15.3 is "fuck you, apple intelligence is on by default now"
For users new or upgrading to macOS 18.3, Apple Intelligence will be enabled automatically during Mac onboarding. Users will have access to Apple Intelligence features after setting up their devices. To disable Apple Intelligence, users will need to navigate to the Apple Intelligence & Siri Settings pane and turn off the Apple Intelligence toggle. This will disable Apple Intelligence features on their device.
oh boy: https://social.wake.st/@liaizon/113868769104056845 iOS devices send the contents of Signal chats to Apple Intelligence by default
e: this fortunately doesn’t seem to be accurate; excuse my haste. here’s the word from the signal forums
IDK how helpful this is, but Apple intelligence appears to not get downloaded if you set your ipad language and your siri language to be different. I have it set to english (australia) and english (united states). Guess I’ll have to live without “gaol” support, but that just shows how much I’m willing to sacrifice.
trump just dumped half trillion dollars into openai-softbank-oracle thing https://eu.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2025/01/21/trump-stargate-ai-openai-oracle-softbank/77861568007/
you'd think it's a perfect bait for saudi sovereign wealth fund, and perhaps it is
for comparison, assuming current levels of spending, this will be something around 1/10 of defense spending in the same timeframe. which goes to, among other things, payrolls of millions of people and maintenance, procurement and development of rather pricey weapons like stealth planes (B-21 is $700M each) and nuclear-armed nuclear-powered submarines ($3.5B per Ohio-class, with $31M missiles, up to 24). this all to burn medium-sized country worth of energy to get more "impressive" c-suite fooling machine
Elon Musk is already casting doubt on OpenAI’s new, up to $500 billion investment deal with SoftBank (SFTBY+10.51%) and Oracle (ORCL+7.19%), despite backing from his allies — including President Donald Trump. [...] “They don’t actually have the money,” the Tesla (TSLA-1.13%) CEO and close Trump ally said shortly before midnight on Tuesday, in a post on his social media site X. “SoftBank has well under $10 [billion] secured. I have that on good authority,” Musk added just before 1 a.m. ET.
I was mad about this, but then it hit me: this is the kind of thing that happens at the top of a bubble. The nice round numbers, the stolen sci-fi name, the needless intertwining with politics, the lack of any clear purpose for it.
[mr plinkett voice] hey wait a minute wasn't that meant to be a Microsoft project?
Hey wasn't that project contingent on "meaningfully improving the capabilities of OpenAI's AI"?
(Referring to this newsletter of his from last April.)
I like how none of the reporting I've seen on this so far can be bothered to mention Softbank's multi-year, very obvious history of failures
I think I saw like one outlet mention it, and it was buried in the 18th paragraph
I know a lot of people are looking for alternatives for programs as stuff is ennshitfying, rot economying, slurping up your data, going all in on llms etc https://european-alternatives.eu/ might help. Have not looked into it myself btw.
Xcancel is giving me issues so gimme a sec. That said: another killing. https://x.com/st_rev/status/1882852779582239053
Is there any rundown on this backstory for people who missed it happening live over the last few years that doesn't get sidetracked into theological disputes with the murder cult?
d'ya think this post on awful.systems, the lemmy instance (which is known as awful.systems), is the location of this awful.systems thread? let me hear your thoughts, awful.systems
