the guy who got Elon and Grimes to hook up, destroying Twitter and proceeding to blow up the United States
word i hear is that too many lawyers fucking love this shit, they see plausible words and think that's sufficient to replace supplement the office peons
then this happens to them and lol
Back in 2023, we wrote how lawyers were filing briefs they’d written with ChatGPT. They thought it was a search engine, not a lying engine — and the bot would proceed to cite a whole pile of suppor…
Podcast version if you hate pictures
In a fast-moving field like “AI,” with buzzwords and dumb money flying about, researchers don’t have time for for the peer review process. Preprints can have all the impact you could ever want! Let…
finally we have constructed a completely unsexy robot
someone said it was Kendrick and Drake, i thought it was two Drakes pointing at each other
President Donald Trump has announced yuge deals with the United Arab Emirates — including a fantastic new AI data centre in Abu Dhabi! [White House] The question is how to sell millions of Nvidia c…
it will explain its position with interpretive twerking
jwz gave the game away, so i'll reveal:
the One Weird Trick for this week is that the bots pretend to be an old version of Chrome. So you can block on useragent
so I blocked old Chrome from hitting the expensive mediawiki call on rationalwiki and took our load average from 35 (unusable) to 0.8 (schweeet)
caution! this also blocks the archive sites, which pretend to be old chrome. I refined it to only block the expensive query on mediawiki, vary as appropriate.
nginx code:
undefined
# block some bot UAs for complex requests
# nginx doesn't do nested if, so we set a test variable
# if $BOT is both Complex and Old, block as bot
set $BOT "";
if ($uri ~* (/w/index.php)) {
set $BOT "C"; }
if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/[2-9])) {
set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
if ($http_user_agent ~* (Chrome/1[012])) {
set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
if ($http_user_agent ~* (Firefox/3)) {
set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
if ($http_user_agent ~* (MSIE)) {
set $BOT "${BOT}O";}
if ($BOT = "CO") {
return 503;}
you always return "503" not "403", because 403 says "fuck off" but the scrapers are used to seeing 503 from servers they've flattened.
I give this trick at least another week.
why is this robot not sexy soyweiser
Yesterday afternoon, Elon Musk’s Grok chatbot went nuts on Twitter. It answered every question — about baseball salaries, Keir Starmer, or the new Pope’s latest speech — by talking about an alleged…
sounds dumb as hell and I'm not surprised they avoided tagging me in then
This discussion has made it clear to me that LLM enthusiasts do not value the time or preferences of open-source maintainers, willfully do not understand affirmative consent, and that I should take steps to explicitly ban the use of such tools in the open source projects I maintain.
I didn't see that thread. But I stand by the image as being perfect for the story on several specific points.
"it's a tool" - a tool
this post has also broken containment in the wider world, the video's got thousands of views, I got 100+ subscribers on youtube and another $25/mo of patrons
There’s not enough spare utility power for the xAI data centre in South Memphis, Tennessee — so it runs off 35 gas turbines with no emission controls. They’re just pumping nitrous oxide out into th…
this user has been escorted off the premises via the fourth floor window
you'll be waiting a while. it turns out "i'm not saying it's always programming.dev, but" was already in my previous ban reasons, and it was this time too.
you must understand
Sam promised me all the eyeballs I could eat
All the eyeballs
to get you into ahem vibe coding
"i'm a lawyer i will file a CoC complaint"
You say that, but as an operator->sysadmin->devops I'm increasingly disconcerted by the rise of "devops" who can't actually find their way around a Unix command prompt.
but look how delighted they are!
You can hardly get online these days without hearing some AI booster talk about how AI coding is going to replace human programmers. AI code is absolutely up to production quality! Also, you’re all…
You’ve replaced those annoying human employees with a website chatbot. Unfortunately, it keeps hallucinating discounts for your customers or swearing at them and badmouthing your company What if we…
Soundcloud is a site where musicians can host their music. On Friday 9 May, Bluesky user Thomas Brunet noticed something in the Soundcloud terms of service: [Bluesky; Soundcloud] You explicitly agr…
Will AI help you in your career? No. Not if anyone finds out, anyway. Today in science discovering the obvious, if you use chatbots to pump out the AI slop at work, your coworkers think you’re an i…
Who remembers “prompt engineering”? Ask ChatGPT questions real good and pull down $200,000 a year! In 2023, a Washington Post headline said: “Prompt engineers’ are being hired for their skill in ge…
In 2021, Gabriel Horcasitas shot and killed Christopher Pelkey in a case of road rage — Pelkey had jumped out of his car and come after Horcasitas, who panicked and shot at him. Horcasitas was foun…
Intel’s Q1 2025 earnings press release talked up their new AI-enabled chips. But these are not selling. [Intel] In the earnings call, CFO Dave Zinsner mentioned they had “capacity constraints in In…
OpenAI has revised its plan to turn into a for profit company. [OpenAI] The original OpenAI corporate structure was bizarre. The nonprofit owned the for-profit company that spent the money and did …
The UK government very much wants to give the AI grifters everything they ever wanted — including open slather on UK creative works. If you didn’t want the AI companies training on your stuff, you…
Popular language app Duolingo has declared it’s going “AI first.” The contractors who write the language courses will be replaced with LLMs. But Duolingo will “remain a company that cares deeply ab…
Venture capital is screwed. A bubble in AI is their last hope, and they’re betting everything on Sam Altman. It’s heartwarming. Today, we have the Pitchbook-NVCA Venture Monitor for Q1 2025. This i…
I am particularly pleased with the video, it was a lot of work that came out well, and you should forward it to all your friends
your U Toronto CS degree has been replaced with a colour-in place mat from McDonalds
see also lab 9
Here’s a headline from the Financial Times: “Microsoft shares jump after strong AI demand lifts cloud unit.” Wow, that’s amazing! [FT, archive] But guess what — it’s false! The actual reason Micros…
video version - I wear a tie
Worldcon is the science fiction convention where the Hugo Awards are voted on, the biggest award in the field. It’s had controversy in recent years, such as the 2023 convention in Chengdu in China …
I do believe this may be the first youtube video on the issue too
AccurX Scribe is a medical transcription tool. It listens in on your consultation and gives the doctor a transcript. Surely poor acoustics and the range of accents in the UK won’t cause problems? […
