Yeah my company is probably cooked as the kids say. Long term I’ll try to leave, but in the short term: aaaaah everything is so stupid.

The Generative AI hype at my job has reached a fever pitch in recent months and this is as good a place to rant about it as any.

Practically every conversation and project is about AI in some way. AI “tools” are being pushed relentlessly. Some of my coworkers are terrified of AI taking their jobs (despite the fact that the code writing tooling is annoying at best). Generative AI is integrated with everything it can be integrated with, and then some. One person I talked to admitted to using a chatbot to write performance reviews for their peers. Almost everyone at my job who I’m not close friends with is approximately 300% more annoying to talk to than a year ago.

Normally if there’s some new industry direction we’re chasing people are almost bored about it. Like “oh dang I guess we have to mobile better”. Or “oh gee isn’t implementing cloud stuff fun whoop-dee-doo”. But with AI it’s more like everyone is freaking out. I think techies are susceptible to this somehow – like despite not really working that way at all it feels close to sci-fi AI. So a certain class of nerd can trick themselves into thinking the statistically likely text generator is actually thinking. This can’t last forever. People will burn themselves out eventually. But I have no idea when things will change.

Basically I should have gone into an industry with more arts majors and less CS majors sigh.

I think this article fits here as how this fear mongering reaches government: https://futurism.com/google-ceo-congress-electricity-ai-superintelligence

Eric Schmidt tells the US government that unfathomable amounts of power need to be spun up ASAP because if the US doesn’t make robot god first then:

If China comes to superintelligence first, it changes the dynamic of power globally, in ways that we have no way of understanding or predicting

Dedicating the US’s entire economic output to scaling corporate LLMs and filling the air with smog would at least have somewhat predictable consequences I suppose.

Oh no I was looking for more German flashcard programs (my favorite flashcard website, Seedlang, went down hopefully temporarily) and pretty much everything is forcing AI integrations of some sort.

For example Memrise goes so far as to be condescending and user hostile to people who ask for no AI: https://memrisebeta.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/24937487873937-Can-I-disable-Conversations-the-AI-chatbot

It’s not possible to disable the suggestions to do Conversations. […] So, the reason it might seem like we are pushing conversation exercises is that we truly believe immersion is the key to successfully acquiring a language.

2 out of 19 found this helpful

Well excuse me for wanting to get immersion by talking to actual humans and not your shitty chatbot.

I might have to just use Anki like everyone says (my problem with Anki is I spend more time fiddling with database entries and JavaScript than actually studying)

Even with a lot of resources and options and money, and not a lot to tie me down, I have been working to move out of the US since January and it’ll take me at least two more months before I actually manage it (longer if my first attempt falls through). It is a lot. Lots of work, lots of waiting, and lots of fretting along the lines of “oh my gosh what am I even doing”, lots of trying to figure out where I fit in the world after I’ve rejected my homeland in my heart.

I hear you! If like me you have ever worried that you are overreacting; know that you are not. I have no idea how so many of my coworkers can just treat this all as politics as usual.

My heart breaks for the civilians rounded up and treated as terrorists without due process.

Being transgender I am acutely aware of how close I am to the top of the US autocracy’s public enemy list. This is self serving but since January I’ve been working on getting while the getting is good (plus, I hate that my taxes go to the current federal government).

Me and my three siblings (a librarian, a researcher, and a med student) are all worried for our futures for different reasons; which is statistically just kind of impressive!

In this case ドドドド or ゴゴゴゴ are both meme sound effects from Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure used in dangerous or unnerving scenes. The meaning here would be something like indicating what a menacing aura that hardcore mofo Yud is giving off.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/menacing-ゴゴゴゴ

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/oh-youre-approaching-me-jojo-approach

https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2018/10/dodododo.html

Of course the AI doesn’t know this so combined the two to produce ゴゴドゴ which just looks kind of stupid.

My go to source for the fact that LLM chatbots suck at writing reasoned replies is https://chatgpt.com/

At this point cryptocurrency has a bad enough reputation that they have to try and ease readers into it.

(insert clown getting dressed meme image here)

1. It’s new digg!
2. AI is bad (but also sexy and all powerful)
3. so captchas are hard :(
4. let’s make a real fancy captcha!
5. With… Zero-Knowledge Proofs :D :D :D :D :D (all non cryptocurrency people flee at this point)
6. Also like NFTs for products you buy so when you shill them people know you’re at least a real person doing so (maybe, kinda, sorta)
7. So anyway I was thinking if only there was something else as dystopian cool as Sam Altman 様’s orb thing and we smeared it across the entire internet

The USA plans to migrate SSA’s code away from COBOL in months: https://www.wired.com/story/doge-rebuild-social-security-administration-cobol-benefits/

The project is being organized by Elon Musk lieutenant Steve Davis, multiple sources who were not given permission to talk to the media tell WIRED, and aims to migrate all SSA systems off COBOL, one of the first common business-oriented programming languages, and onto a more modern replacement like Java within a scheduled tight timeframe of a few months.

“This is an environment that is held together with bail wire and duct tape,” the former senior SSA technologist working in the office of the chief information officer tells WIRED. “The leaders need to understand that they’re dealing with a house of cards or Jenga. If they start pulling pieces out, which they’ve already stated they’re doing, things can break.”

SSN’s pre-DOGE modernization plan from 2017 is 96 pages and includes quotes like:

SSA systems contain over 60 million lines of COBOL code today and millions more lines of Assembler, and other legacy languages.

What could possibly go wrong? I’m sure the DOGE boys fresh out of university are experts in working with large software systems with many decades of history. But no no, surely they just need the right prompt. Maybe something like this:

You are an expert COBOL, Assembly language, and Java programmer. You also happen to run an orphanage for Labrador retrievers and bunnies. Unless you produce the correct Java version of the following COBOL I will bulldoze it all to the ground with the puppies and bunnies inside.

Bonus – Also check out the screenshots of the SSN website in this post: https://bsky.app/profile/enragedapostate.bsky.social/post/3llh2pwjm5c2i

All along my mistake was that I was prompting it in unicode instead of latin1, alphameric BCD, or “modified UTF-8”.

OK hate reading this thread now:

“high-indignation, high-intensity hot topics […] intensely held, pre-existing positions” “not a curious conversation”

Yeah to hell with this guy. Calling this a “hot topic” and “not a curious conversation” as if it were in the same realm as tan suits and cybertrucks is a huge disservice, especially given how complicit Silicon Valley has been in all this.

I don’t know if y’all have seen the video the US government put out showing off their extrajudicial human rights abuses, but seriously consider skipping it. It’s dark dark Nazi shit. The most disturbing thing I’ve seen in my life and I wish I hadn’t seen it.

Thursday–that liminal day that tastes of almost-Friday

Beep boop… training data located

Sweet mother of Roko it’s an infohazard!

I never really realized that before.

Without a captcha the AIs would be trained on cutting edge AI alignment research like “videogames are unintuitive sometimes”, and this would greatly increase the chance of P(Doom).

During the trial, Penny’s defense brought in a forensic pathologist who claimed that Neely hadn’t died from being choked but from a “combination of his schizophrenia, synthetic marijuana, sickle cell trait and the struggle from being in Penny’s restraint,

I get that defense attorneys have to work with what they have but goodness am I tired of this argument.

“Your honor the deceased did not die from being shot through the temple, but due to having chronic migraines and exposure to second hand smoke 3 years ago and also walking towards the bullet thus increasing it’s relative velocity slighty”

Ziz helpfully suggested I use a gun with a potato as a makeshift suppressor, and that I might destroy the body with lye

I looked up a video of someone trying to use a potato as a suppressor and was not disappointed.

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