Dear heavens the hype is off the chart in this blog post. Must resist sneering at every single sentence.

It is perhaps the greatest amplifier of human well-being in history, one of the most effective ways to create tangible and lasting benefits for billions of people.

Chatbots: better for human civilization than agriculture!

With your permission, Copilot will ultimately be able to act on your behalf, smoothing life’s complexities and giving you more time to focus on what matters to you. […], while supporting our uniqueness and endlessly complex humanity.

(Sorry this ended up as a vague braindump)

It’s interesting that someone thought “smoothing life’s complexities” is a good thing to advertise wrt. chatbots. One of the threads of criticism is that they smear out language and art until all the joy is lost to statistical noise. Like if someone writes me a letter and I have Bingbot summarize it to me I am losing that human connection.

Apparently Bingbot is supposed to smooth out life’s complexities without smoothing out people’s complexities, but it’s not clear to me how I can rely on a computer as a Husbando to do all my chores and work for me without losing something in the process (and that’s if it actually worked, which it doesn’t).

I’ve felt some vague similar thoughts towards non-AI computing. Life was different before the internet and computers and computers making management decisions was ubiquitous, and life was better in a lot of ways. On the whole it’s hard for me to say if computers were a net benefit or not, but it’s a shame we couldn’t as a society take all the good and ignore all the bad (I know this is a bit idealistic of me).

Similarly whatever results from chatbots may change society, and unfortunately all the people in charge are doing their darndest to make it change society for the worse instead of the better.

The tragedy of being Elon Musk: he has thousands and thousands of cryptocurrency bros and fascists that worship the ground he walks on, but what he really want is for Stephen King to reply to one of his tweets.

Well that’s quite the confused comment chain given that neither Go nor chess are solved. “Remember that thing everyone said wouldn’t happen? Well it still hasn’t happened! 🫨”

Unfortunately “steroid olympics” isn’t a code for anything at all but is quite literal.

There’s literally a weirdo who came up with plans for “the Enhanced Games”, and some Silicon Valley venture capitalists including Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan actually invested in it.

yes. that’s all true, but academics and artists and leftists are actually calling for Buttlerian jihad all the time. when push comes to shove they will ally with fascists on AI

This guy severely underestimates my capacity for being against multiple things at the same time.

I can’t be the only one reading that super passive aggressively right? “Thank you Barret, whom I hated. Bob, for ruining my hot Jacuzzi date. And Mira, for existing.”

I have a wallpaper of the Internet Explorer anime mascot Inori Aizawa. No I will not explain.

Nice to see everyone sharing their favorite wallpaper apps so here’s mine: https://www.google.com/search?q=anime++imagesize%3A1920x1200&udm=2

Hey wait a minute Wallpaper Engine is just Windows Active Desktop with extra steps!

(Never forgive Microsoft for killing Active Desktop)

I knew I could count on awful.systems.

I have to go run an errand soon but someone better have posted some commentary about the a16z anime blog post (as seen on the hell site) by the time I get back or I’ll be sorely disappointed.

Corporate Memph-AI-sis

Screwing up the night sky: not just for SpaceX anymore! Texas Startup Keeps Launching These Obnoxiously Large Satellites—and the Worst Is Yet to Come.

Thursday’s launch saw the first commercial satellites in orbit, and AST SpaceMobile wants to build a constellation of more than 100 satellites. On its own, one satellite is bright enough to mess with observations of the cosmos.

BlueWalker 3 appeared as bright as two of the ten brightest stars in the night sky, Procyon and Achernar, through the lenses of different telescopes, according to a Nature study published in October 2023.

Made in TX — size matters!

Aside: I get why 5G in remote areas would be neat. But surely there are other (more expensive?) ways to achieve similar-ish safety / rescue / navigation / rural broadband sorts results without cluttering the sky. Not at all my area though.

I won’t be satisfied until I see a picture of the living accommodations that isn’t an AI render of a futuristic skyscraper. I need to know how shitty the tents are gosh darn it.

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?

It looks like the entry for decaf is largely the same as it was in 2011: http://web.archive.org/web/20111216183946/https://www.thesaurus.com/browse/decaf

Where:

1. It Was a little clearer that it was actually showing synonyms for “coffee” (presumably it didn’t have an entry for decaf, but decaf was a synonym for coffee, or something like that).
2. It cited Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus

The current page still sites Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, though it’s quite hidden amongst all the modern web “design”.

I have just ordered Roget’s 21st Century Thesaurus, and shall report back.

Today in you can’t make this stuff up: SpaceX invades Cards Against Humanity’s crowdfunded southern border plot of land.

Article (Ars Technica) Lawsuit with pictures (PDF)

Reddit Comment with CAH’s email to backers

The above Ars Technica article also lead me to this broader article (reuters) about SpaceX’s operations in Texas. I found these two sentences particularly unpleasant:

County commissioners have sought to rechristen Boca Chica, the coastal village where Johnson remains a rare holdout, with the Musk-endorsed name of Starbase.

At some point, former SpaceX employees and locals told Reuters, Starbase workers took down a Boca Chica sign identifying their village. They said workers also removed a statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe, an icon revered by the predominantly Mexican-American residents who long lived in the area.

Reading all of this also somehow makes Elon Musk’s anti-immigrant tweets feel even worse to me than they already were.

OK I might have been a little too harsh, but the security requirements of a browser are higher than pretty much any other piece of software except perhaps for operating system code, emails, or text messages. As a serious player in the browser space it is not optional to get the basic security model / architecture right. This isn’t a matter of a bug slipping through (which can happen to anyone), but the system being designed wrong. Hopefully this company has learned their lesson, treats it with the care it deserves going forward, and bring some diversity to the browser market.

Anyway that said let’s look at how this was a colossal bug:

1. The browser required an account hosted on a cloud to use. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
2. The browser allowed arbitrary script injection into any webpage based on this cloud account. This is a central point of failure, and goes directly against browser security model so should be opt-in.
3. The developers did not recognize how dangerous the above was, so perhaps did not treat the back-end with the paranoia it deserved.

Compare Firefox I have an extension that allows for arbitrary CSS injection, but this extension isn’t cloud based. So this class of vulnerability isn’t possible in the first place, and also it is an extension I opted into and can enable selectively on specific sites instead of globally.

Meanwhile, over at the orange site they discuss a browser hack: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41597250 As in a hack that gave the attacker control over any user of this particular browser even if they only ever visited innocent websites, only needing to know their user ID.

This is what’s known in the biz as a company destroying level fuck-up. I’m not sure this is particularly sneerable or not but I’m just agog at how a company that calls themselves “The Browser Company” can get the basic browser security model so incredibly wrong.

It’s the exact same shit CEO is spewing.

I have realized working at a corporation that a lot of employees will just mindlessly regurgitate the company message. And not in a “I guess this is what we have to work on” way, but as if it replaced whatever worldview they had previously.

Not quite sure what to make of this TBH.