Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman

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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • I also did not like something Newton said at the end of a (paywalled) blog about what he learned from the reaction to his piece about AI skeptics. Newton said, and I quote, that he was “taking detailed notes on all bloggers writing ’financial analyses’ suggesting that OpenAI will go bankrupt soon because it’s not profitable yet.”

    I do not like bullies, and I do not like threats. Suggesting one is “taking detailed notes on bloggers” is an attempt to intimidate people that are seriously evaluating the fact that OpenAI burns $5 billion a year and has no path to profitability. I don’t know if this is about me, nor do I particularly care.

    Musk has also made weird veiled threats to keeping lists. I bet Zuckerberg is just smart enough to not tell people he keeps a list of people he keeps tabs on and uses his immense wealth to crush.

    I mean, we know Monsanto had a “fusion center” that fought tooth and nail to have any negative coverage of Monsanto destroyed, intimidated, or flooded with negative reviews and responses.

    We have had executives from eBay mailing critics dead animals.

    If I were Zitron I’d be worried about way more than just another journalist who is stuck up powerful people’s asses, but that’s the price of speaking truth to power.








  • It’s all attempts at vendor lock-in because phones are more locked down than computers and more people only have just a phone.

    It’s up there with how I think Youtube/Tiktok videos are an absolutely terrible way to explore deep problems.

    If I have to watch a three hour video with only spoken references, I’m sorry, I’d way rather have a 300-page document with figures, graphs, and most fucking importantly god damned footnotes and endnotes.

    Especially since this is the fucking internet that was built on hypertext which is like a footnote on steroids since you can directly link to the original document instead of just referencing it.

    Videos are fine for lots of things, but not always long-form deep-dives into difficult and complex subjects. Often it makes sense to have a video in a lecture set up, if you’re actually trying to educate people and not just inform them, but otherwise text does fine for research.

    Fuck apps and their spyware bullshit, fuck all knowledge being in videos you can’t footnote, fuck trying to turn the internet into a one-way-medium like cable TV.






  • Since this is obviously a gas station, it is quite likely the person who made this sign speaks english as a second language.

    Even if its their first language, working at a gas station often implies they don’t have the education or work history to work elsewhere.

    Can we stop punching down?

    After 30 years of the international internet I am pretty fuck sick of making fun of people who don’t speak English well. (Especially when native English speakers would fare way worse if the situations were reversed)

    It would be like going on RedNote and getting dogpiled for speaking Mandarin badly.


  • I’m gonna go out on a limb and say knowingly burning down the world’s future so you get to party now was and always has been the position of someone who is a fucking loser. This goes as much for current tech barons as it did for Exxon when they discovered climate change was real and covered it up because their profits mattered more than, you know, not burning the planet to a fucking cinder.

    So, in other words, no you shouldn’t be shocked they’re such fucking losers because if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be angling to burn the world down so they can party. Only a true fucking loser could and would pursue that to begin with.

    It’s like when former IMF chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn was caught paying boatloads of prostitutes to fuck him in an orgy, and his defense was “I was just sure all these beautiful young women wanted to have an orgy with me because I’m just so amazing and beautiful, and it never had anything to do with the vastness of my wealth and the fact that they were being highly paid to even look at my filthy ugly old body.”

    You’ve gotta be some kind of fucking loser to think anyone would believe that when you’re a fucking Methuselah-lookin-ass ugly goblin like Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

    They were, and always have been, losers.


  • Next up on Sick Sad World…

    This is tragic, but not unexpected. Michael Moore released Sicko in 2007 and medical debt continues to be the number one reason for bankruptcy in the US nearly 20 years later.

    Like, my cancer isn’t considered severe enough for me to even bother with disability benefits because I’ll just be denied.

    I am not working mostly because none of the jobs I qualify for make enough money or have good enough insurance to afford the medications that cost $18k a month out of pocket.

    I’ve done the math and it makes more sense to fall apart in poverty and at least be able to have the medication covered.

    When the Republicans repeal the ACA, I will probably die a preventable death from lack of coverage.

    They’ve always had money for wars, but never had money to care for their citizens.

    Over 200,000 innocent Iraqi’s were killed in the Iraq War because they don’t actually care about regular people anywhere in the world, not just the USA. They called us “human capital stock.” When they show you who they are, listen the first time. We’re just products to be used and discarded to these people.


  • So, let’s go over this shall we.

    Humans were always the weakest link in the security chain. Why? Because humans aren’t logical and can be tricked with words and ideas.

    So we’ve developed this new type of computer program that “thinks” and speaks naturally like a human, right? Responding naturally to human conversation with it.

    The issue is (as I’ve said before) that we’ve essentially created a computer program that is just as fallible as humans.

    In other words, no shit simple prompt engineering works. There’s no way to “secure” a human brain from dripping out things it shouldn’t on accident, and by extension, there’s no way to “secure” an LLM “brain” because they operate in a somewhat similar manner (or at least appear to). Prompt engineering is just social engineering for computers. We’ve created a computer that can be tricked with words and ideas, just like a human.

    Humans were the weakest link in security and we just made computers as weak of a link as humans. Who really thought making computers as bad at everything as humans was a good idea?