Independent journalist @ahmedbaba.bsky.social and I sat down for a chat this Tuesday to cut through all the hype and clickbait as to what's really going on in tech around warfare and surveillance, what's next for the AI space, and who the Silicon Valley Hype Industrial Complex is really targeting.
In case you were wondering what Soviet propaganda looked like, here you go. The General Secretary of the Party ranted for hours on end, cadres clapped and barked like trained seals, then the state media treats his bleating like the greatest speech of all time. Until his next speech, of course.
So, in two days, one server running ChatGPT consumes more 127% more calories than a human in two decades.
Sam is an ignoramus making things up on the fly and you should absolutely ignore anything he says.
Sam Altman claims that feeding a human for 20 years is just as energy expensive as running an #AI model.
Converting between joules and calories gives us about 10 million kcal per day per 1.2 KWh server to run an LLM.
Feeding a human for 20 years? Roughly 14.6 million kcal.
Internet rando: “I will write a review so bad it will destroy you on Amazon!”
Actual writers: “Sorry, what was that? I was checking my daily hate mail digest for new insults.”
I actually did a video on studies about how obnoxious wealth makes you a sociopath...
Good news, there’s a solution on how to protect your data from major platforms and data brokers endorsed by some of the greatest minds in modern tech. Bad news? It’s complicated to implement because it would require hobbling Big Tech and writing new laws…
“Yes, countless children were raped and trafficked by ostentatiously wealthy pedophiles, but when you take a minute to think of all the shareholder value being created…”
Why are social media platforms tolerating, if not outright encouraging AI slop? Because they're going through their midlife crisis. The good times are behind them. The way forward is slow, difficult, and uncertain. So, they panic...
Fuckin’ a, about fucking time!
AI is advancing faster than ever, so much so, the now classic Singularitarian musings of Yudkowsky and the Less Wrong communities seems like a religion from a bygone era. And they don't seem to be interested in updating their texts or apologetics...
Wait, wait, wait… A creepy billionaire from a family of very literal Apartheid robber barons utterly obsessed with spreading his seed across the world may have had ties with a wealthy child sex trafficker?! No way…
Not sure. It seems like white the conundrum…
With companies that own AI just doing as they please, responding by just outright banning new technology that’s too disruptive won’t end well either. Just take a short lesson from Dune…
Is code a liability or an asset? Does it matter if the code is human-written or AI generated? The answers to those questions are a lot more complicated than Cory Doctorow makes them seem...
When Substack started, it was an alternative to Medium and Wordpress. Now, it's also trying to be Twitter, Twitch, and Spotify, and is trying to make leaving its ecosystem more and more difficult. Unfortunately, that's exactly how most platforms now run...
TikTok is now permanently tarnished in the US, and even if the MAGA censorship project hasn't started yet — because there probably hasn't been time for it to get fully underway — the users now see it as yet another tool for ultranationalist American propaganda…
I was but a wee radioactive babe taking my first steps when this was becoming obsolete. So… your local paleontologist?
Don’t worry, the monsters whose entire identity is kissing Trump on all four cheeks are already writing fanfics about him being an Antifa commander and assassin, and posting mangled AI renders of him in rainbow drag.
The idea that Walsh, Shapiro, or any of these chodes have enough self-awareness to realize that is a huuuge stretch.
Reddit is well known for its bitter satire and mastery of Poe’s Law.
Translation: “You peacefully protest at home, out of the way, where no one sees you, or hears you, and you're easiest to ignore as we continue to send illiterate, psychopathic masked thugs above the law to violently terrorize your neighborhoods.”
I think he’s fallen into the mental trap that just being able to use a thesaurus makes someone an intellectual.
A lot of people are getting fed up with democracy, but also aren't fans of regressive authoritarianism. And so, they may be looking at a proposal from the 1930s: a technocracy...
Remember when 4chan was the wildest place on the internet? Today, what's left of it after hacks and outages could barely hold a candle to your typical social media mega-platform as we all log on to the web that 4chan built...
Here is the worst invention AI no one really talks about because it's so uncomfortable: turning everyday people into involuntary porn stars for scandal, profit, and kink...
Terrible health insurance, awful auto and home/renters' premium spikes, higher energy bills, and expensive groceries are the kind of stuff that brings down nations. Even the most advanced and modern civilization is only so many skipped meals away from anarchy.
Nothing like opening Threads and being immediately blasted with Nazi propaganda for incels that porn is a Jewish conspiracy to destroy virginal Western trad wifery, and that virtually no one would be having casual sex or making adult content without all that evil Jewish propaganda.
