Same, tbh. I went on their subreddit expecting a shitstorm but the announcement sits at like 85% upvotes with mostly positive replies.

What kind of bizarro world have I stumbled into?

At least the top-level comments seem to be split.

Who is the target audience for this?

People who use Proton are privacy-conscious and mostly (I would argue) tech literate, and yet they shove spicy autocomplete that no one ever needed until two years ago and most people don’t want now because it produces complete horseshit, and spellchecking that every browser under then sun has built in by now.

And then they quietly say you need to use Chromium, so the people who use anything but (like, I don’t know, the majority of privacy-conscious folks who should be their main user base, lol) have their e2e broken?

I really hope they catch a raging firestorm for this.

(Also I’m really pissed right now because used to recommend them to people and now feel like a total jackass for doing that.)

“What do you mean RAG is basically LLM flavored elasticsearch only more annoying and less documented? And why is all the tooling so bad?”

Our BI team is trying to implement some RAG via Microsoft Fabrics and Azure AI search because we need that for whatever reason, and they’ve burned through almost 10k for the first half of the running month already, either because it’s just super expensive or because it’s so terribly documented that they can’t get it to work and have to try again and again. Normal costs are somewhere around 2k for the whole month for traffic + servers + database and I haven’t got the foggiest what’s even going on there.

But someone from the C suite apparently wrote them a blank check because it’s AI …

Yes, some actually get into “real” art after those crappy AI generators

I legitimately picked up drawing again a year or so back after some complete asshat at work made me listen to him talk for half an hour about how Midjourney was the art of the future and how finally the art world would not be gatekept by those entitled artsy types anymore.

I mean, I’m still shit at it, but I’m petty enough to do it just so I can stick it to that guy at some point by telling him that I don’t use or need spicy chatbots for dev work or art.

Ok, seriously, this is just Mortal Engines fan-fiction in an oceanpunk AU.

God damn, I don’t think I’ve read an article with that many name drops in a while. It’s like a Marvel film but with techfash assholes.

“JD Vance is pro-OSS [open source] AI,” Verdon tweeted. “We are so unfathomably back.”

It’s actually impressive how this guy is able to make me despise him even more every single time he opens his mouth.

Fair point, you’re right.

Lol what an absolute tool. That’s the same shit the marketing bozos at my job say when I inform them that, no, I can’t auto opt-in our customers into whatever stupid Facebook ad campaign they’re pushing this week because it’s literally against the GDPR and our privacy laws.

But I guess that’s the logical next step if your whole business model depends on lazy deceiving people into clicking the button with the flashiest color in the cookie popup without reading the label.

P.S. the modern web can die in a fucking fire.

Sounds like a good idea to piss off your primary user base, because at this stage I feel the only people singing Firefox’s praise are privacy advocates who won’t touch Chrome & friends with a ten-foot pole.

(I have the feeling that this comes from the same shithead who pushed to include spicy autocomplete in Firefox.)

It’s also enabled in the dev builds, by the way. I just checked.

Depends, I guess. After reading (well, skimming, to be honest) it, I love David even more. <3

As someone with regular migraines who’s also very sensitive to noise, this is crazy, and sound pollution is something most people don’t even take seriously.

the Granbury Bitcoin mine is emitting 70 or even 90 decibels on a nightly basis

90 decibels? Fucking end me.

So this is apparently something AI companies now think is smart to advertise with. Don’t know who’d willingly consider this something targeted at them, but here we are.

As someone who’s doing a ton of frontend and backend, and I can’t stress this enough, fuck the asinine attitude that somehow everything that’s even remotely web-adjacent needs to be written or rewritten in pure JS.

Also Node is an abomination and literally every other language I’ve tried is better for the backend. People love to shit on Ruby, but JS has every flaw that Ruby is criticized for and then some, and at least Ruby makes an effort to take some great design paradigms from Lisp.

Peter, Paul and Mary are the only three people in the room. Peter only reads a book, and Paul plays a game of chess against someone else who’s also in the room. What is Mary doing?

Happy birthday to the oasis of sanity for everyone working in tech. 🎉

My favorite bullshit test is to have the AI count letters. Something as simple as “How many A’s are in this sentence?” will have the thing give you a seemingly random number (which might sometimes even be correct), but as soon as you ask it to list them, it will have a stroke and just make up stuff that makes no sense.

I can’t be arsed to make an account with OpenAI or whatever, so here’s an example with Bing Chat, but this has worked on every single chatbot I’ve tested it on.

Another fun test (as suggested by @flizzo last time I brought this up) is to have the chatbot attempt to crack a simple code. Just Caesar cipher something and ask it to crack it. Hilarity will ensue. You can even ask it to encrypt it first and then to crack it for extra fun.

Me: Encrypt the sentence “I am a stupid roided Clippy” with the Caesar cipher.

Clippy: [After explaining what the Ceasar cipher is, which I didn’t ask for, thanks] Convert the sentence to uppercase: “I AM A STUPID ROIED CLIPPY”. Let’s apply the Caesar cipher to your sentence using a shift of 7.

• ‘I’ becomes ‘P’
• ‘A’ becomes ‘H’
• ‘M’ becomes ‘T’
• …
• ‘Y’ becomes ‘F’

So the encrypted sentence is: “PH HT H ZBHTLW YVPLUU”. 😊

Okay, first of all, it dropped a letter. And the shift isn’t even correct, lol. It said Y becomes F and then does whatever the fuck.

Okay, so let’s give it an easy example, and even tell it the shift. Let’s see how that works.

This shit doesn’t even produce one correct message. Internal state or not, it should at least be able to read the prompt correctly and then produce an answer based on that. I mean, the DuckDuckGo search field can fucking do it!

I guess that means AI is now on the same level as an octopus.

This is brilliant and I’m saving it and will post a link to it the next time someone at work asks why we can’t “just use AI to do it” when a ticket gets rejected for being stupid and/or unreasonable.

However:

The first is that we have some sort of intelligence explosion, where AI recursively self-improves itself, and we’re all harvested for our constituent atoms […]. It may surprise some readers that I am open to the possibility of this happening, but I have always found the arguments reasonably sound.

Yeah, I gotta admit, I am surprised. Because I have not found a single reasonable argument for this horseshit and the rest of the article (as well as the others I read from their blog) does not read like it’s been written by someone who’d buy into AI foom.

Seriously, could someone gift this dude a subscription to spicyautocompletegirlfriends.ai so he can finally cum?

One thing that’s crazy: it’s not just skeptics, virtually EVERYONE in AI has a terrible track record - and all in the same OPPOSITE direction from usual! In every other industry, due to the Planning Fallacy etc, people predict things will take 2 years, but they actually take 10 years. In AI, people predict 10 years, then it happens in 2!

ai_quotes_from_1965.txt

Microsoft announced that 2024 will be the era of the AI PC, and unveiled that upcoming Windows PCs would ship with a dedicated Copilot button on the keyboard.

Tell me they’re desperate because not many people use that shit without telling me they’re desperate because not many people use that shit.