spit_evil_olive

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

wake up babe there's a new Good Republican

1

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

Reuters is the worst offender that I'm aware of. they sneakily changed their headline and rewrote the article:

Elon Musk's Grok AI floods X with sexualized photos of women and minors

but luckily someone archived it, with the original title:

Grok says safeguard lapses led to images of 'minors in minimal clothing' on X

(and you can still see that original headline in the URL of the Reuters link above)

besides the headline, that original article is only 7 short paragraphs and contains 4 "Grok said..." and a "Grok gave no further details" - it's not just quoting Grok like it's a real person, it's only quoting Grok and no one else.

and almost as infuriating as the "Grok said" shit, the Reuters headline also repeated the fucking disgusting "minors in minimal clothing" euphemism that Grok itself used in its "statement".

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

from the 4th paragraph of the article:

While the trend is hardly new, this campaign cycle already features a number of notable races involving candidates who are related to former or current politicians.

it can simultaneously be true that a) this thing has been going on for decades and b) this thing is happening with increasing frequency and regularity

like, have you heard of identical twins being a political dynasty before?

Last month, Rep. Troy Nehls, R-Texas, a close ally of President Donald Trump’s, said he would not seek re-election and quickly endorsed his identical twin brother, Trever Nehls, for the job. Trump quickly followed suit and endorsed Nehls’ twin, who is now the favorite to win the primary and, thus, the ruby-red seat outside of Houston.

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spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

For the past month or so, I’ve been getting “RDSEED32 is broken” and it seems to be an issue with AMD’s drivers?

https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-7055.html

it sounds like the kernel is just working around a known CPU microcode bug. it would probably be using the 64-bit RDSEED operation anyway, so disabling the 32-bit option probably doesn't actually change anything.

also, the kernel's random number generator is very robust (especially since Jason Donenfeld, the author of Wireguard, took over its maintenance) and will work perfectly fine even in the complete absence of RDSEED CPU instructions.

1

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

upcoming AI legislations around the world

this is so broad that it is impossible to answer.

if you can point to an individual piece of legislation and its actual text (in other words, not just a politician saying "we should regulate such-and-such" but actually writing out the proposed law) then it would be possible to read the text and at least try to figure it out.

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spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

the author's Substack bio says "Director of EA DC"

his website explains the acronym - it's "Effective Altruism DC"

at this point, your alarm bells should start ringing.

but if you are blissfully aware, "effective altruism" is a goddamn scam. it is an attempt by Silicon Valley oligarchs and techbros to wrap "I shouldn't have to pay taxes" in a philosophical cloak. no more, no less.

take all of his claims about "no bro AI datacenters are totally fine don't listen to the naysayers" with a Lot's-wife-sized pillar of salt.

edit:

because I am bored and have a 2nd monitor while watching a football game, I did a bit more digging.

his website has an interesting page where he talks more about EA. this is from the "How I got into EA" section:

The local community in DC was pretty silent until around 2020 when an organizer brought a lot of people together, which is when I started to attend events. I had time and energy to volunteer running events and was eventually offered the role of part-time and then full-time paid director of EA DC.

note the use of the passive voice, and the complete omission of any names.

"an organizer" brought people together.

he "was eventually offered" the director role.

because EA DC is a 501c3 "charity" their finances are public. in 2024 they had revenue of $230k...and spent $190k of that on "executive compensation"

they don't seem to have a list of the "executives" who are being compensated...but how much you wanna bet this guy is the sole executive, getting paid $190k/year for what is basically just a paper charity?

sure enough, if you go to their website it looks like he's the only "executive". and apparently the only employee other than a "head of community".

but if you scroll down there's the charity's board of directors...and oh look the first person listed is the Director of Operations at Anthropic.

so yeah...this is not the guy you'd turn to if you wanted some sort of careful evaluation of the environmental downsides of AI datacenters. this is more like when you'd have guys in white labcoats talking about how cigarette smoking isn't that bad and it turns out they're working at a "research institute" funded by Marlboro.

2

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

username with a Palestinian flag in it, asking where your fellow Trump supporters went?

this is some truly bizarre engagement bait to be posting on xmas eve. go hug your family and/or touch grass and/or masturbate.

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

there's a few copies floating around, several of them are "camrip" style, recorded using a phone as the video plays on a TV or laptop screen.

this is the best quality one I've seen, unlike the others it's a direct copy of the video stream and not a camrip:

https://archive.org/details/60minutes-cecotsegment

credit to Leon Thomas on Bluesky who originally ripped it.

1

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 2mo ago

he wrote an NYT opinion column less than a month ago:

The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.

lol guess it's not that easy, dipshit.

1

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

the Lightning makes an excellent work truck for those who actually need work trucks

yeah...no

the non-electric F-150 has multiple bed lengths (5.5', 6.5', and 8')

the Lightning only offered the 5.5' "short bed" length

if you actually need a work truck, the Lightning is deficient in the #1 thing that makes a work truck a work truck.

for another comparison - the "short bed" option on the F-250 is 6.75' long, in addition to the 8' "long bed".

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

yeah, the browser extension world is an absolute shitshow. the AI part of this is new, but nothing else about it is.

I'd recommend reading Temptations of an open-source browser extension developer from 2021 if you haven't seen it before.

tl;dr - a guy writes a simple, useful, open-source browser extension (Hover Zoom) that as part of its functionality needs permissions from Chrome to view every page the user opens. he has receipts of 10 years worth of companies reaching out to him and offering to buy the extension (when concrete dollar amounts are mentioned, they're in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars range). this would only make sense if they wanted to use it for nefarious data-harvesting purposes.

1

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

In a small room in San Diego last week
...
I was in town for NeurIPS, one of the largest AI-research conferences, and Tegmark had invited me, along with five other journalists

congrats to this author on getting a business trip to San Diego during December. I bet it was nice and warm.

it seems like this is a pretty typical piece of access journalism:

The place to be, if you could get in, was the party hosted by Cohere...
...
With the help of a researcher friend, I secured an invite to a mixer hosted by the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence, the world’s first AI-focused university, named for the current UAE president.
...
On the roof of the Hard Rock Hotel...

leading to a "conclusion" pretty typical of access journalism:

It struck me that both might be correct: that many AI developers are thinking about the technology’s most tangible problems while public conversations about AI—including those among the most prominent developers themselves—are dominated by imagined ones.

what if the critics and the people they're criticizing are both correct? I am a very smart person who gets paid to write for The Atlantic.

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Benioff

Marc Russell Benioff is an American internet entrepreneur and philanthropist. He is best known as the co-founder, chairman and CEO of the software company Salesforce, as well as being the owner of Time magazine since 2018.
...
In January 2023 Benioff announced the mass dismissal of approximately 7,000 Salesforce employees via a two-hour all-hands meeting over a call, a course of action he later admitted had been a 'bad idea'.
...
In September 2025, Benioff reduced Salesforce's support workforce from 9,000 to about 5,000 employees because he "need[ed] less heads". Salesforce stated that AI agents now handle half of all customer interactions and have reduced support costs by 17% since early 2025. The company added it had redeployed hundreds of employees into other departments within the company. The decision contrasted with Benioff's earlier remarks suggesting that artificial intelligence would augment, rather than replace, white-collar workers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salesforce

In September 2024, the company deployed Agentforce, an agentic AI platform where users can create autonomous agents for customer service assistance, developing marketing campaigns, and coaching salespersons.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff stated in a June 2025 interview on The Circuit that artificial intelligence now performs between 30% and 50% of internal work at Salesforce, including functions such as software engineering, customer service, marketing, and analytics. Although he made clear that "humans still drive the future," Benioff noted that AI is enabling the company to reassign employees into higher-value roles rather than reduce headcount.

haha consent factory go brrrr

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spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

I'm sort of speechless at how mind-bogglingly stupid every step of this process has been:

The papers attempted to train neural networks to distinguish between autistic and non-autistic children in a dataset containing photos of children’s faces. Retired engineer Gerald Piosenka created the dataset in 2019 by downloading photos of children from “websites devoted to the subject of autism,” according to a description of the dataset’s methods, and uploaded it to Kaggle, a site owned by Google that hosts public datasets for machine-learning practitioners.
The dataset contains more than 2,900 photos of children’s faces, half of which are labeled as autistic and the other half as not autistic.
After learning about a paper that cites the dataset, “I went and downloaded the dataset, and I was completely horrified,” says Dorothy Bishop, emeritus professor of developmental neuropsychology at the University of Oxford. “When I saw how it was created, I just thought, ‘This is absolute bonkers.’”
Without identifying each child in the dataset, there is no way to confirm that any of them do or do not have autism, Bishop says.

spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

you're not missing anything important.

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spit_evil_olive_tips @beehaw.org 3mo ago

protip: put your "honest questions" into comments, not headlines