This landed on HN like a dead fish: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41722985

Another submission with what looks like a lot more positive spin got more reaction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41726603

Edit choice comment from the latter

If you assume that the costs of inference would continue to decrease while they would be able to get billion people hooked on 42 per dollar plan…

That’s $0.5 trillion revenue rate

A billion people. Paying the equivalent of a premium streaming service. For something that can’t even generate pr0n.

Color me skeptical.

To be perfectly fair i was a very callow youth at the time and probably bounced off stuff like that had I come in contact with it.

The funniest thing I got was ads for Maybelline in a podcast about WW2. Know your audience!

Yeah I’m sure it’s helpful sometimes. The issue is it useful enough to enough people to justify burning billions of dollars on training?

Ed isn’t criticizing GenAI, he’s criticizing OpenAi’s business model. Big difference.

As previously mentioned, the “Behind the Bastards” podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I’m just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It’s like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

This is something I’ve noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There’s a nostalgia for the “old” internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I’ve always thought that’s dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

Despite having been one of those Linux weenies back in the day I have a lot of respect for the amount of work MS puts into backwards compatibility, dev tool upkeep, etc. And now they’re actually Open Source! Hell hath frozen over (or they realized no universities wanted to pay Visual Studio licenses and lost a couple of generations of coders to Linux)

Thank you Ed for validating my off-the-cuff comment I made on the train this morning:

https://lobste.rs/s/92qcme/insatiable_hunger_open_ai#c_vgiyrk

ask an AI generated podcast bro

Oh wait, you’re actually serious.

I am neutral on MSFT - to me it’s a bog standard transnational company with better than most working conditions because it’s not making stuff you can make in sweatshops. But it’s really impressive how they’ve gone from the beige-box tyranny of Apple’s 1984 ad, via the “Halloween Papers” era where they were every Linux weenie’s biggest boogeyman, to today’s bland backer of OpenAI. Note that they’re not really advertising it. How many people who are horrified by Copilot’s Recall feature also know they’re the biggest investor in the company that makes ChatGPT?

From a corporate governance perspective, being so central to the tech industry for so long is kinda impressive.

Carmack has always struck me as the kind of cishet white GenX dude that gets more and more pissed that everything’s “political”, I just wanna code, man, why is everyone mad at me that he more or less inevitably falls into fascism. Sure games can be coded as “countercultural” but the genres that Doom and Quake represent are quasi-fascist already.

Stephen King is busy working him in as a villain in a new novel.

before you further impugne my sneer-hunting the quote I posted was literally the first one on top in the thread. I thought it was gonna be easy pickings before I realized a lot of people were making sense and I got bored.

Your position seems to be that art is whatever the US Copyright Office deems worthy of copyright.

snrk

https://mastodon.social/@Daojoan/113228461302575676

I’m going to start replying to everything like I’m on Hacker News. Unhappy with Congress? Why don’t you just start a new country and write a constitution and secede? It’s not that hard once you know how. Actually, I wrote a microstate in a weekend using Rust.

The best thing about the lobste.rs thread is to identify prompt fondlers among the brethren.

Here’s something I’ve never heard of before:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moravec’s_paradox

Moravec wrote in 1988: “it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers[…]”

Apparently he had GPT back then!

Anyway is this anything anyone takes seriously? Steven Pinker makes an appearance in the wiki page, which is a bit of a red flag.

The best way to unearth sneers is to state “there are no sneers here”

Following up from this truth bomb: https://awful.systems/comment/4877052

@Soyweiser: Sorry AGIbros, not even the Dutch believe AGI is near.

For your delectation, here are the HN comments

I’m in the other camp: I remember when we thought an AI capable of solving Go was astronomically impossible and yet here we are. This article reads just like the skeptic essays back then.

Ah yes my coworkers communicate exclusively in Go games and they are always winning because they are AI and I am on the street, poor.

There’s not that much else to sneer at though, plenty of reasonable people.

Here’s the lobste.rs disucssion: https://lobste.rs/s/4xzxqk

“Customer success” has been creeping into biztalk lately. According to Ed Zitron it refers to that subspecies of salescritter that works with SaaS victimscustomers to ensure they keep expanding their buying.

People are “blatantly stealing my work,” AI artist complains

When Jason Allen submitted his bombastically named Théâtre D’opéra Spatial to the US Copyright Office, they weren’t so easily fooled as the judges back in Colorado. It was decided that the image could not be copyrighted in its entirety because, as an AI-generated image, it lacked the essential element of “human authorship". The office decided that, at best, Allen could copyright specific parts of the piece that he worked on himself in Photoshop.

“The Copyright Office’s refusal to register Theatre D’Opera Spatial has put me in a terrible position, with no recourse against others who are blatantly and repeatedly stealing my work without compensation or credit.” If something about that argument rings strangely familiar, it might be due to the various groups of artists suing the developers of AI image generators for using their work as training data without permission.

via @skinnylatte@hachyderm.io