genai

Regarding last boost: "Firefox For Web Developers" is out here urging me to stop using Firefox.

#Mozilla #Firefox #DarkPatterns#antifeatures #AISlop #NoAI #NoAIWebBrowsers #AICruft #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLMs #tech #dev #web

The US Democratic party has been abjectly failing in so many ways. This is such a sad and frustrating read on the failures with respect to cryptocurrency regulation: https://lpeproject.org/blog/inside-the-failure-to-regulate-stablecoins/

What was and still is at stake is the balance between technology and humanity struck by the US federal government. The same incoherence that led us to where we are with crypto is almost surely also at play with the apparent lack of movement around generative AI.

#USPol #democrats #DemocraticParty #crypto #cryptocurrency #StableCoins #ShadowBanking #regulation #AI #GenAI

Finally, after an epic battle against Gitea CI:

https://areweaiyet.taffer.ca

The definitive answer to the question, "Is AI intelligent yet?"

#ai #genai #agi

It has been know for a long time that, when it comes to AI training, quality is much more important than quantity. Yet Big Tech goes for quantity because it is cheaper and takes less time to train a model on non-curated garbage scrapped from the internet than taking the time and the (human) effort of curating the data. That is one of the problems with their models: Garbage in, garbage out.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-11-13/openai-google-and-anthropic-are-struggling-to-build-more-advanced-ai

#AI #GenAI #generativeAI #BigTech

Thread 1/3

The other day I had another conversation in which someone said that #GenerativeAI made them more productive, and after I asked a few questions they admitted maybe 80% of the output is OK and they have to check and double check everything. Then when I asked the obvious followup, "wouldn't it be easier just to do it yourself from the beginning instead of having to put in all these safeguards and worry about whether you missed errors?" they had no real answer.

I feel like people have been sold the idea that #GenerativeAI must provide productivity gains, and many don't bother to examine whether it really does.

#AI #GenAI #hype

Beware of academic "papers" about LLMs, especially on arXiv. The signal-to-noise ratio is alarmingly low, especially relative to other subdisciplines of computer science: https://wandering.shop/@xgranade/114055293092825449

#AI #GenAI #LLM #AcademicPublishing #arXiv #ComputerScience

You are not doing science research if you stuff an LLM into the critical path of your experiments. You are, instead, producing science-shaped artifacts with the same peripheral relationship to science that LLM text output has to truth.

The reason for this shouldn't be hard to see but apparently is. Simplistically, science is about hypothesis-driven investigation of research questions. You formulate the question first, you derive hypotheses from it, and then you make observations designed to tell you something about the hypotheses. (1)(2) If you stuff an LLM in what should be the observations part, you are not performing observations relevant to your hypothesis, you are filtering what might have been observations through a black box. If you knew how to de-convolve the LLM's response function from the signal that matters to your question, maybe you'd be OK, but nobody knows how to do that. (3)

If you stick an LLM in the question-generating part, or the hypothesis-generating part, then forget it, at that point you're playing a scientistic video game. The possibility of a scientific discovery coming out of it is the same as the possibility of getting physically wet while watching a computer simulation of rain. (4)

If you stick an LLM in the communication part, then you're putting yourself on the Retraction Watch list, not communicating.

#science #LLM #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #AIHype #hype

(1) I know this is a cartoonishly simple view of science, but I do firmly believe that something along these lines is the backbone of it, however real-world messy it becomes in practice.
(2) A large number of computer scientists are very sloppy about this process--and I have been in the past too--but that does not mean it should be condoned.
(3) Things are so dire that very few even seem to have the thought that this is something you should try to do.
(4) Yes, you might discover something while watching the LLM glop, but that's you, the human being, making the discovery, not the AI, in a chance manner despite the process, not in a systematic manner enhanced by the process. You could likewise accidentally spill a glass of water on yourself while watching RainSim.

Some argue that ai technology is more significant than electricity or the internet, and so it will spread fast. But there is little sign of this. Only 5-6% of American businesses said they used ai to produce goods and services in 2024, according to the country’s Census Bureau.

From https://www.economist.com/catch-up-rampage-in-new-orleans-tesla-cybertruck-explosion/2024/12/31/the-ai-productivity-puzzle , titled The AI productivity puzzle

What's the puzzle? It has its uses but generally this technology is not particularly useful for most people. Countless billions of dollars have been spent hyping it up to pretend that isn't the case. But reality matters.

Nowadays I think of generative AI as a power grab. It's not a useful tool for a lot of people, but it's exceptionally useful to people who want to grab and hold power, or restructure power in their favor.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI

Nvidia alone is responsible for 11% of US GDP. There are approximately 20,000 corporations with >500 employees in the US.

This is not a healthy economy.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #NVIDIA #bubble #AssetBubble #economy

As part of a time-limited trial, yesterday we removed the www.bbc.co.uk & www.bbc.com robots.txt "block" on *one* GenAI crawler.

Here's a graph of total daily requests from that 1 GenAI crawler by content-type. You'll note, they've retrieved ~460k web pages in ~16 hours, so a mean of ~28,750 web pages per hour. They'll likely pull ~690k pages today, ~32GB egress.

Whilst this is a drop in the ocean versus our other traffic, I can easily see how this could sink a smaller website.

#GenAI #WebDev

We would like to endorse what @kuketzblog writes about the inclusion of an “AI assistant” into an instant messenger that is still widely used:

It is unfortunate that many journalists do not realise how dangerous the new AI in WhatsApp really is. Der Spiegel, for example, writes in a recent article: “Meta AI does not have access to users' private chats, however, thanks to end-to-end encryption.” As a matter of fact, the AI does have access as it is used in the context of private chats or group chats. Sadly, this misinformation lulls users into a false sense of security. 🤦

Source (in German): https://social.tchncs.de/@kuketzblog/114267998218207258

#whatsapp #ai #e2ee #dontcallitai #genai #privacy

In which I argue that arguments about whether #genAI is useful or not are the wrong arguments. The important issues are what it’s for and what it costs.

Having very unkind feelings about the people pushing it.

https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/202x/2025/07/06/AI-Manifesto

"The process of coding with an “agentic” LLM appears to be the process of carefully distilling all the worst parts of code review, and removing and discarding all of its benefits."

Very insightful post on #GenAI by Glyph

(Original title: I Think I’m Done Thinking About genAI For Now)

https://blog.glyph.im/2025/06/i-think-im-done-thinking-about-genai-for-now.html

I watched someone "vibe code" for an hour and now I think "slot machine coding" is a more appropriate name. "Let us pull the lever again and see if the code gets better with this prompt."

#AI #GenAI #VibeCoding #Programming

The harms arising from chatbots are escalating, and not nearly enough is being done to address them before they become a big problem.

On #TechWontSaveUs, I spoke with @nitashatiku to discuss how chatbots are speedrunning the social media harm cycle.

Listen to the full episode: https://techwontsave.us/episode/282_chatbots_are_repeating_social_medias_harms_w_nitasha_tiku

#tech #socialmedia #chatgpt #characterai #openai #ai #artificialintelligence #genai #chatbots

It suddenly struck me the other day that generative AI used in government and media has a very Memoirs Found in a Bathtub quality about it. One of the premises of Lem's (amazing) novel is that paper disintegrates for unknown reasons, leaving very few hard records of anything. The book is a mock diary of a person who lived through the disorienting chaos that ensued.

#AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM #tech #dev #StanislawLem #fiction #SciFi #ScienceFiction #cybernetics

Nothing is more valuable than a clear-headed understanding of which particular lies are most likely to succeed in the present environment, and which are just evanescent byproducts of the generally mendacious atmosphere. Dodge the decoys, save the right kind of energy to counter the real blows. Turning up the heat in lamenting the current crisis risks mistaking a mere mirage for a more substantial threat.

From “LYING IN POLITICS”: HANNAH ARENDT’S ANTIDOTE TO ANTICIPATORY DESPAIR https://www.publicbooks.org/lying-in-politics-hannah-arendts-antidote-to-anticipatory-despair/

I found this to be an excellent and orienting read for anyone concerned about the US right now.

While folks are understandably worried about this administration, which has already inflicted significant harms, it's important to stay level headed and aligned with the actual facts and truths. That's our primary defense against what's happening which, as Arendt argued in the 1970s, hinges on a process of defactualization. Shouting "fascism!" and drawing analogies with the Nazis, as this essay argues, is going too far, turning up the heat about a mirage. Much as we wish they'd do better--and they could do better--in point of fact we do still have a functioning judicial system and media ecosystem, and there are significant numbers of people, including politicians and judges, fully willing to challenge every lie the administration emits. As dangerous as these times are we are nowhere near as far along the authoritarian trajectory as shouting "fascism!" makes it sound, and we should really stop doing that. Doing so grants bluffs and bluster more power than it actually has, which is ultimately a form of surrender. We should recognize our own strength and save it for real threats.

This is one of many reasons why I relentlessly call BS on generative AI and the claims about it coming out of the technology sector. There is a defactualization process at work there that plays into the broader political one; some of the individuals enacting this defactualization in tech are personally involved in doing the same in the federal government. If you've been watching you probably know some of their names and the companies they came from. Generative AI is itself a defactualization machine; that's one of its primary appeals to this crew.

Dodge the decoys and save your energy for the real blows.

#USPol #HannahArendt #authoritarianism #despair #tech #dev #AI #GenAI #GenerativeAI #LLM