It isn’t clear that anyone in trump’s government has ever paused to consider than any of their plans might have downsides.

Little table of “ai fluency” from zapier via linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/wadefoster_how-do-we-measure-ai-fluency-at-zapier-activity-7336442774650556416-nKND

(original source https://old.mermaid.town/@Kymberly/114635617736977394)

The author says it isn’t a requirements checklist, but it does have a column marked “unacceptable”, containing gems like

Calls Al coding assistants too risky

Has never tested Al-generated code

Relies only on Stack Overflow snippets

Angry goose meme: what was the ai code generator trained on, motherfucker?

I don’t think it’sa stretch to see the independence of spacex classified as a national security risk and have it nationalised (though not called that, because that sounds too socialist) and have associated people such as elon declared traitors. Shouldn’t even be that difficult these days, seeing how he’s trashed his own reputation, and it’ll be good to encourage the other plutocrats to stay in line.

Night of the long knives is in the playbook, after all

AI audio transcription is great.

https://mastodon.social/@nixCraft/114627512725655987

Sean Murray @NoMansSky

Ignore the auto-generated captions. We did not have a secret room hiding deaf kids.

Nintendo never once sent us deaf kids. We were hiding dev-kits. DEV-KITS.

For those of you who haven’t already seen it, r/accelerate is banning users who think they’ve talked to an AI god.

https://www.404media.co/pro-ai-subreddit-bans-uptick-of-users-who-suffer-from-ai-delusions/

There’s some optimism from the redditors that the LLM folk will patch the problem out (“you must be prompting it wrong”), but assume that they somehow just don’t know about the issue yet.

As soon as the companies realise this, red team it and patch the LLMs it should stop being a problem. But it’s clear that they’re not aware of the issue enough right now.

There’s some dubious self-published analysis which coined the term “neural howlround” to mean some sort of undesirable recursive behaviour in LLMs that I haven’t read yet (and might not, because it sounds like cultspeak) and may not actually be relevant to the issue.

It wraps up with a surprisingly sensible response from the subreddit staff.

Our policy is to quietly ban those users and not engage with them, because we’re not qualified and it never goes well.

AI boosters not claiming expertise in something, or offloading the task to an LLM? Good news, though surprising.

FWIW, maemo still lives… Jolla released their C2 phone which runs the maemo-descended sailfish OS about 6 months ago. I don’t know anything about it, other than its existence, and that it doesn’t have the N900 form factor 😔

Interesting (in a depressing way) thread by author Alex de Campi about the fuckery by Unbound/Boundless (crowdfunding for publishing, which segued into financial incompetence and stealing royalties), whose latest incarnation might be trying to AI their way out of the hole they’ve dug for themselves.

From the liquidator’s proposals:

We are also undertaking new areas of business that require no funds to implement, such as starting to increase our rights income from book to videogaming by leveraging our contacts in the gaming industry and potentially creating new content based on our intellectual property utilizing inexpensive artificial intelligence platforms.

(emphasis mine)

They don’t appear to actually own any intellectual property anymore (due to defaulting on contracts) so I can’t see this ending well.

Original thread, for those of you with bluesky accounts: https://bsky.app/profile/alexdecampi.bsky.social/post/3lqfmpme2722w

It’s the usual “uninspiring right-centrist doesn’t understand why they were elected, implements a bunch of stupid policies that don’t improve things for anyone but some consultants and donors, hands country over to frothing far-right shithead” cycle.

When confronted with a problem like “your search engine imagined a case and cited it”, the next step is to wonder what else it might be making up, not to just quickly slap a bit of tape over the obvious immediate problem and declare everything to be great.

The other thing to be concerned about is how lazy and credulous your legal team are that they cannot be bothered to verify anything. That requires a significant improvement in professional ethics, which isn’t something that is really amenable to technological fixes.

Here’s a fun one… Microsoft added copilot features to sharepoint. The copilot system has its own set of access controls. The access controls let it see things that normal users might not be able to see. Normal users can then just ask copilot to tell them the contents of the files and pages that they can’t see themselves. Luckily, no business would ever put sensitive information in their sharepoint system, so this isn’t a realistic threat, haha.

Obviously Microsoft have significant resources to research and fix the security problems that LLM integration will bring with it. So much money. So many experts. Plenty of time to think about the issues since the first recall debacle.

And this is what they’ve accomplished.

https://www.pentestpartners.com/security-blog/exploiting-copilot-ai-for-sharepoint/

Somehow I managed to mention the wordpress lawsuit on last week’s thread instead of this one, so let’s try again.

Matt Mullenweg, the wordpress(.)com guy and current owner of tumblr, tried to shakedown competing blog product WP engine (which builds on the same open source software that his company does) for 8% of their revenue (https://goblin.band/notes/9yjrc2logimd1tr3 h/t to froztbyte who was also on the old thread for some mysterious reason) or he’d say mean things about them at a conference where they were one of the sponsors. And they didn’t pay up, so he compared them to cancer.

And now they’re suing him.

https://notes.ghed.in/posts/2024/matt-mullenweg-wp-engine-debacle/