So fresh orange site is just addressing it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38309611

Empress's identity REVEALED as Voksi the Bulgarian! Is it over for piracychads?

Reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/15spn46/shipgraveyardsimulator2readnfoskidrow_response_to/?sort=controversial

Empress's response (Reddit): https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/15ssekk/empress_response_to_skidrow/?sort=controversial

While responding to poomodomoodododo's comment about the banana diet, I remembered a story from years ago about a dumb woman who ate nothing but bananas and got brain damage. I couldn't remember the details, so I searched for "banana diet brain damage."

Duckduckgo yields 2 negative articles and a bunch positive adverts articles about the greatness of bananas. BIPOC, I am doom-searching, so give me doom and gloom results.

I even found this garbage article by a female doctor :

https://www.thehealthy.com/food/i-ate-bananas-every-day-for-a-week-heres-what-happened

>tl;dr - omg liek i ate a banana everyday and I have so much energy!

Written by Dr. Patricia Varacallo, DO

Updated: Dec. 23, 2023

Medically reviewed by Latoya Julce RN, BSN

>by r-slurs, for r-slurs

No, duckduckBIPOC! I am looking for bananas and brain damage. Not women prancing around and singing about the glory of Big Banana.

So I tried google which wasn't bad. Looks like a bunch of informative stuff! But as I kept scrolling, I get hit with this pile of carp:

Oh yeah, if you click on Images, it's nothing but fat black women eating bananas.

So I settled for Pootine's yandex:

https://yandex.com/search/touch/?text=banana+diet+brain+damage&lr=21348

And it's nothing but articles about the dangers of banana diets. That's all I wanted, but not really because I was looking for a news story about the lady who ate too many bananas and went into a coma or became even more r-slurred , but I got distracted because I had to give YOU, dear reader , this hard-hitting research.

That's why search engines are crap, and will save the west.

Hey, Marsey! Tell us how you really feel about today's internet.

It's full of BIPOCs.

No drama (yet), reposting for posterity.

Very little on orange site: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39596491

Archive: https://archive.is/HfRvZ

Google's Culture of Fear

inside the DEI hivemind that led to Gemini's disaster

Mike Solana, Mar 4, 2024

• Following interviews with concerned employees throughout the company, a portrait of a leaderless Google in total disarray, making it “impossible to ship good products at Google”

• Revealing the complicated diversity architecture underpinning Gemini's tool for generating art, which led to its disastrous results

• Google knew their Gemini model's DEI worldview compromised its performance ahead of launch

• Pervasive and clownish DEI culture, from micro-management of benign language (“ninja”) and bizarre pronoun expectations to forcing the Greyglers, an affinity group for Googlers over 40, to change their name on account of not all people over 40 have grey hair

• No apparent sense of the existential challenge facing the company for the first time in its history, let alone a path to victory

Last week, following Google's Gemini disaster, it quickly became clear the $1.7 trillion-dollar giant had bigger problems than its hotly anticipated generative AI tool erasing white people from human history. Separate from the mortifying clownishness of this specific and egregious breach of public trust, Gemini was obviously — at its absolute best — still grossly inferior to its largest competitors. This failure signaled, for the first time in Google's life, real vulnerability to its core business, and terrified investors fled, shaving over $70 billion off the kraken's market cap. Now, the industry is left with a startling question: how is it even possible for an initiative so important, at a company so dominant, to fail so completely?

This is Google, an invincible search monopoly printing $80 billion a year in net income, sitting on something like $120 billion in cash, employing over 150,000 people, with close to 30,000 engineers. Could the story really be so simple as out-of-control DEI-brained management? To a certain extent, and on a few teams far more than most, this does appear to be true. But on closer examination it seems woke lunacy is only a symptom of the company's far greater problems. First, Google is now facing the classic Innovator's Dilemma, in which the development of a new and important technology well within its capability undermines its present business model. Second, and probably more importantly, nobody's in charge.

Over the last week, in communication with a flood of Googlers eager to speak on the issues facing their company — from management on almost every major product, to engineering, sales, trust and safety, publicity, and marketing — employees painted a far bleaker portrait of the company than is often reported: Google is a runaway, cash-printing search monopoly with no vision, no leadership, and, due to its incredibly siloed culture, no real sense of what is going on from team to team. The only thing connecting employees is a powerful, sprawling HR bureaucracy that, yes, is totally obsessed with left-wing political dogma. But the company's zealots are only capable of thriving because no other fount of power asserts, or even attempts to assert, any kind of meaningful influence. The phrase “culture of fear” was used by almost everyone I spoke with, and not only to explain the dearth of resistance to the company's craziest DEI excesses, but to explain the dearth of innovation from what might be the highest concentration of talented technologists in the world. Employees, at every level, and for almost every reason, are afraid to challenge the many processes which have crippled the company — and outside of promotion season, most are afraid to be noticed. In the words of one senior engineer, “I think it's impossible to ship good products at Google.” Now, with the company's core product threatened by a new technology release they just botched on a global stage, that failure to innovate places the company's existence at risk.

As we take a closer look at Google's brokenness, from its anodyne, impotent leadership to the deeply unserious culture that facilitated an encroachment on the company's core product development from its lunatic DEI architecture, it's helpful to begin with Gemini's specific failure, which I can report here in some detail to the public for the first time.

First, according to people close to the project, the team responsible for Gemini was not only warned about its “overdiversification” problem before launch (the technical term for erasing white people from human history), but understood the nebulous DEI architecture — separate from causing offense — dramatically eroded the quality of even its most benign search results.

Roughly, the “safety” architecture designed around image generation (slightly different than text) looks like this: a user makes a request for an image in the chat interface, which Gemini — once it realizes it's being asked for a picture — sends on to a smaller LLM that exists specifically for rewriting prompts in keeping with the company's thorough “diversity” mandates. This smaller LLM is trained with LoRa on synthetic data generated by another (third) LLM that uses Google's full, pages-long diversity “preamble.” The second LLM then rephrases the question (say, “show me an auto mechanic” becomes “show me an Asian auto mechanic in overalls laughing, an African American female auto mechanic holding a wrench, a Native American auto mechanic with a hard hat” etc.), and sends it on to the diffusion model. The diffusion model checks to make sure the prompts don't violate standard safety policy (things like self-harm, anything with children, images of real people), generates the images, checks the images again for violations of safety policy, and returns them to the user.

“Three entire models all kind of designed for adding diversity,” I asked one person close to the safety architecture. “It seems like that — diversity — is a huge, maybe even central part of the product. Like, in a way it is the product?”

“Yes,” he said, “we spend probably half of our engineering hours on this.”

The inordinately cumbersome architecture is embraced throughout product, but really championed by the Responsible AI team (RAI), and to a far greater extent than Trust and Safety, which was described by the people I spoke with closest to the project as pragmatic. That said, the Trust and Safety team working on generation is distinct from the rest of the company, and didn't anchor on policy long-established by the Search team — which is presently as frustrated with Gemini's highly-public failure as the rest of the company.

In sum, thousands of people working on various pieces of a larger puzzle, at various times, and rarely with each other. In the moments cross-team collaborators did attempt to assist Gemini, such attempts were either lost or ignored. Resources wasted, accountability impossible.

Why is Google like this?

The ungodly sums of money generated by one of history's greatest monopoly products has naturally resulted in Google's famously unique culture. Even now, priorities at the company skew towards the absurd rather than the practical, and it's worth noting a majority of employees do seem happy. On Blind, Google ranks above most tech companies in terms of satisfaction, but reasons cited mostly include things like work-life balance and great free food. “People will apologize for meetings at 9:30 in the morning,” one product manager explained, laughing. But among more driven technologists and professionals looking to make an impact — in other words, the only kind of employee Google now needs — the soft culture evokes a mix of reactions from laughter to contempt. Then, in terms of the kind of leadership capable of focusing a giant so sclerotic, the company is confused from the very top.

A strange kind of dance between Google's Founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the company's Board, and CEO Sundar Pichai leaves most employees with no real sense of who is actually in charge. Uncertainty is a familiar theme throughout the company, surrounding everything from product direction to requirements for promotion (sales, where comp decisions are a bit clearer, appears to be an outlier). In this culture of uncertainty, timidity has naturally taken root, and with it a practice of saying nothing — at length. This was plainly evident in Sundar's response to Gemini's catastrophe (which Pirate Wires revealed in full last week), a startling display of cowardice in which the man could not even describe, in any kind of detail, what specifically violated the public's trust before guaranteeing he would once again secure it in the future.

“Just look at the OKRs from 2024,” one engineer said, visibly upset. Indeed, with nothing sentiments like “improve knowledge” and “build a Google that's extraordinary,” with no product initiative, let alone any coherent sense of strategy, Sundar's public non-response was perfectly ordinary. The man hasn't messaged anything of value in years.

“Sundar is the Ballmer of Google,” one engineer explained. “All these products that aren't working, sprawl, overhiring. It all happened on his watch.”

Among higher performers I spoke with, a desire to fire more people was both surprising after a year of massive layoffs, and universal. “You could cut the headcount by 50%,” one engineer said, “and nothing would change.” At Google, it's exceedingly difficult to get rid of underperformers, taking something like a year, and that's only if, at the final moment, a low performer doesn't take advantage of the company's famously liberal (and chronically abused) medical leave policy with a bullshit claim. This, along with an onslaught of work from HR that has nothing to do with actual work, layers tremendous friction into the daily task of producing anything of value. But then, speaking of the “People” people —

One of the more fascinating things I learned about Google was the unique degree to which it's siloed off, which has dramatically increased the influence of HR, one of the only teams connecting the entire company. And that team? Baseline far crazier than any other team.

Before the pernicious or the insidious, we of course begin with the deeply, hilariously stupid: from screenshots I've obtained, an insistence engineers no longer use phrases like “build ninja” (cultural appropriation), “nuke the old cache” (military metaphor), “sanity check” (disparages mental illness), or “dummy variable” (disparages disabilities). One engineer was “strongly encouraged” to use one of 15 different crazed pronoun combinations on his corporate bio (including “zie/hir,” “ey/em,” “xe/xem,” and “ve/vir”), which he did against his wishes for fear of retribution. Per a January 9 email, the Greyglers, an affinity group for people over 40, is changing its name because not all people over 40 have gray hair, thus constituting lack of “inclusivity” (Google has hired an external consultant to rename the group). There's no shortage of DEI groups, of course, or affinity groups, including any number of working groups populated by radical political zealots with whom product managers are meant to consult on new tools and products. But then we come to more important issues.

Among everyone I spoke with, there was broad agreement race and gender greatly factor into hiring and promotion at Google in a manner considered both problematic (“is this legal?”) and disorienting. “We're going to focus on people of color,” a manager told one employee with whom I spoke, who was up for a promotion. “Sounds great,” he said, for fear of retaliation. Later, that same manager told him he should have gotten it. Three different people shared their own version of a story like this, all echoing the charge just shared publicly by former Google Venture investor Shaun Maguire:

https://twitter.com/shaunmmaguire/status/1760872265892458792

Every manager I spoke with shared stories of pushback on promotions or hires when their preferred candidates were male and white, even when clearly far more qualified. Every person I spoke with had a story about a promotion that happened for reasons other than merit, and every person I spoke with shared stories of inappropriate admonitions of one race over some other by a manager. Politics are, of course, a total no go — for people right of center only. “I'm right leaning myself,” one product manager explained, “but I've got a career.” Yet politics more generally considered left wing have been embraced to the point they permeate the whole environment, and shape the culture in a manner that would be considered unfathomable in most workplaces. One employee I spoke with, a veteran, was casually told over drinks by a flirty leader of a team he tried to join that he was great, and would have been permitted to switch, but she “just couldn't do the ‘military thing.'”

The overt discrimination here is not only totally repugnant, but illuminating. Google scaled to global dominance in just a few years, ushering in a period of unprecedented corporate abundance. What is Google but a company that has only ever known peace? These are people who have never needed to fight, and thus have no conception of its value in either the literal sense, or the metaphorical. Of course, this has also been a major aspect of the company for years.

Let's be honest, Google hasn't won a new product category since Gmail. They lost Cloud infrastructure to AWS and Azure, which was the biggest internet-scale TAM since the 90s, and close to 14 years after launching X, Google's Moonshot Factory, the “secret crazy technology development” strategy appears to pretty much be fake. It lost social (R.I.P. Google+). It lost augmented reality (R.I.P. Glass). But who cares? Google didn't need to win social or AR. It does, however, need to win AI. Here, Google acquired DeepMind, an absolutely brilliant team, thereby securing an enormous head start in the machine god arms race, which it promptly threw away to not only one, but several upstarts, and that was all before last week's Gemini fiasco.

In terms of Gemini, nobody I spoke with was able to finger a specific person responsible for the mortifying failure. But it does seem people on the team have fallen into agreement on precisely the wrong thing: Gemini's problem was not its embarrassingly poor answer quality or disorienting omission of white people from human history, but the introduction of black and asian Nazis (again, because white people were erased from human history), which was considered offensive to people of color. According to multiple people I spoke with on the matter, the team adopted this perspective from the tech-loathing press they all read, which has been determined to obscure the overt anti-white racism all week. With no accurate sense of why their product launch was actually disastrous, we can only expect further clownery and failure to come. All of this, again, reveals the nature of the company: poor incentive alignment, poor internal collaboration, poor sense of direction, misguided priorities, and a complete lack of accountability from leadership. Therefore, we're left with the position of Sundar, increasingly unpopular at the company, where posts mocking his leadership routinely top Memegen, the internal forum where folks share dank (but generally neutered) memes.

Google's only hope is vision now, in the form of a talented and ferocious manager. Typically, we would expect salvation for a troubled company in the heroic return of a founder, and my sense is Sergey will likely soon step up. This would evoke tremendous excitement, and for good reason. Sergey is a man of vision. But can he win a war?

Google is sitting on an enormous amount of cash, but if the company does lose AI, and AI in turn eats search, it will lose its core function, and become obsolete. Talent will leave, and Google will be reduced to a giant, slowly shrinking pile of cash. A new kind of bank, maybe, run by a dogmatic class of extremist HR priestesses? That's interesting, I guess. But it's not a technology company.

-SOLANA

ChadNet:

https://wiki.chadnet.org/computers-and-internet

Chadnet was a personal project from someone in the Dissident Right sphere but does include some great archives on their wiki about tech, political sperging, survival skills and How To Resist Interrogation.

Floodgap:

Floodgap is a very nice website about retro-computing, retro-software and hacking by an old-school boomer tech wizard Cameron Kaiser.

https://www.floodgap.com

Ti-Basic Development:

Basically what it says. A repository on developing on the TI-Basic calculator line.

https://tibasicdev.wikidot.com

LowTechMagazine:

An independent magazine ran by Kris De Decker, a Dutch enthusiast for "low" tech solutions for current problems and projects. The cool thing about their site is that it's hosted on a solar-powered server in Barcelona so may be down sometimes! They're selling all their articles collated into hardback volumes for pretty cheap too. Good stuff.

https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/power

UnixSheikh:

Pretty nifty site by a Xoomer programmer. Good rants and articles about feature creep and bloat in tech.

https://unixsheikh.com/about.html

AnalogOffice:

An actual woman espouses the simple joys of office stationary and analogue technology. Also does write-ups on organisation methods.

https://analogoffice.net/about

CiphersByRitter:

Amazing resource on cryptography by Terry Ritter. Basically anything you could need has an article about it here.

https://ciphersbyritter.com

DigDeeper:

Beyond some insightful articles on technology with a particular focus on privacy I've really enjoyed his Op-Ed on the Coronavirus pandemic. Loads of references and an easy read!

https://digdeeper.neocities.org/articles/corona

VitaminDWiki:

The project of a single-minded dude who collated the biggest archive of information on Vitamin D I've seen. Awesome stuff.

https://vitamindwiki.com

Macroevolution:

Website by Eugene M. McCarthy, a geneticist with a specialisation in hybrids.

https://www.macroevolution.net/introduction.html

Ray Peat:

Incredible resource on nutrition with a focus on physiological chemistry (vitamins, enzymes, hormones etc..). Ray Peat is a woke chud with some great articles and advice.

https://raypeat.com

TheHomeGunsmith:

Philip A. Luty was a normal citizen in the UK when the government introduced their firearms ban in the 90s. In response, he developed the Luty submachine gun made from simple DIY store materials in protest to the ban which he made all his plans and schematics public on the Internet and his website. It's still up and running with his original docs on his projects. Although surpassed by current 3D Printing tech it's still a very interesting piece of history to read yourself.

https://thehomegunsmith.com

Danyk.cz:

Dany is a hobbyist in electronics with a focus on reverse-engineering old soviet electronics to make the schematics public. Does some great projects and runs a youtube channel called DiodeGoneWild where he documents his projects.

https://danyk.cz/index_en.html

Nobody Here:

Some random Dutch dude creates an interactive site with 100s of different parts for his own self-expression including a forum where everyone poses as bugs.

https://nobodyhere.com

Piero Scaruffi:

A cognitive behaviour researcher has maintained his personal site full of his own shitposting and essays since the late 90s. Cool stuff in there.

https://www.scaruffi.com

Bruce McEvoy:

Maintained since 1994! Bruce MacEvoy has a very stylish webpage with various archives on astronomy including a guide on how to make your own personal observatory. He also has a very detailed page on UFOs, Color Theory, Painting and Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy. Interesting dude for sure.

https://handprint.com

IdleWords:

A soyboy techie (but one of the good ones :3 ) who done a very excellent essay on the "Website Obesity Crisis" ie. BLOAT

https://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm

!chuds !nonchuds !besties share your hot goss and secret knowledge

Hello social medias, this is a heavy post so please keep scrolling if needed.

I experienced sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse from my biological siblings, mostly Sam Altman and some from Jack Altman.

I feel strongly that others have also been abused by these perpetrators. I'm seeking people to join me in pursuing legal justice, safety for others in the future, and group healing. Please message me with any information, you can remain however anonymous you feel safe.

Sam and Jack,

I know you remember my Torah portion was about Moses forgiving his brothers.

“Forgive them father for they know not what they've done”

Sexual, physical, emotional, verbal, financial, and technological abuse. Never forgotten

Hurt people cause more hurt, and forms of abuse go together. I have endured physical, sexual, verbal, emotional, financial, and technological abuse at the hands of a human I once called my brother. I know he can hear our dad in his head reminding him that “love wins”

I'm not four years old with a 13 year old “brother” climbing into my bed non-consensually anymore.

(You're welcome for helping you figure out your sexuality.)

I've finally accepted that you've always been and always will be more scared of me than I've been of you.

Must be strange to stalk your younger sibling's social media after she went no contact from your abuse.

Must be stranger to see her kitty and butthole that you touched non-consensually, now posted publicly.

Thank you for the love and for calling I spade a spade. I experienced every single form of abuse with him - sexual, physical, verbal, psychology, pharmacological (forced Zoloft, also later told I'd receive money only if I went back on it), and technological (shadowbanning)

Already flagged to death on Hacker News but getting some traction on Twitter:

This is Sam Altman's sister. Her tweets about sexual, physical, emotional, etc. abuse are incredibly hard to read. Seems that no one in the media is that interested in covering this story because they're afraid of losing access to OpenAI if they write something critical of Sam.👇

Thank you for reading and for sharing 🙏🏼❤️

ArsTechnica Comments (mild):

Xitter Comments:

The More Tab of Xitter (actual whining):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38327520

Google and Chinese AI companies watching this unfold like

UPDATES

I think this means something

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/17yrdsq/mira_murati_interim_ceo_of_openai_has_sided_with?sort=controversial

The Chief Strategy Officer told employees they are confident about bringing everyone back and will have an update tomorrow

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yqyme/openais_chief_strategy_officer_jason_kwon_told?sort=controversial

Ilya about to be stebbed?

https://old.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/17yt8sl/what_does_this_mean?sort=controversial

Nice to know that even rich tech dorks tweet like high schoolers

Xenia (a Xbox 360 emulator) throwing out a warning accusing you of piracy if it detects ISO files, a DISC IMAGE FORMAT, is the funniest thing i've seen all day pic.twitter.com/dT9qNRMZM4

— MeovvCAT (@osu_MeovvCAT) July 26, 2023

https://github.com/xenia-canary/xenia-canary/pull/180

Hello! Many of you are pathetic losers who do things like program stuff or whatever. We have the White Hat and Code Contributor badge, but nothing really to show who the Best of the Best are. Like me. And that's no good, people should be recognized for going above and beyond.

And so we are introducing the Smartest Fish Award. Description: Awarded for outstanding achievement in the field of QA, signed by Aevann Himself. The highest honor that can be bestowed upon a codecel.

Fix something major, get badge. Simple. There are no recent feats warranting this, and we're not going back too far retroactively. So if you want it, you'll need to do something new.

You can start by fixing iOS push notifs. Which we have been BEGGING YOU TO DO FOR MONTHS.

https://rdrama.net/post/174343/25k-marseybux-reward-ios-code-required - see top comment chain. The PWA is now a proper app again, but it doesn't show in the apps list and notifs don't work. Before even more tards chime in that "it works for me look here's a screenshot!!!" yes, that's because it used to work until changes were made. The manifest has been refreshed. New installs do not get push notifs.

Fix this. Get badge. Get 25k.

POTENTIALLY SOLVED BY @realspez PENDING DEPLOYMENT - SEE PINNED COMMENT

Thank you.

!codecels !badgemaxxers

!codecels look at this cute twink frick horse shit! I the USER can't ignore this error. Firestrag decided that I must be too stupid to understand such things and therefore must not be allowed to ignore this non-fatal error for my own good.

And frick all on the about page about making this fricking work.

https://superuser.com/questions/826232/how-to-bypass-the-secure-connection-failed-warning-in-firefox-33

And what do you, known bug for 10 fricking years and it's still broken out of the box.

The issue is most likely with the website, and there is nothing you can do to resolve it. You can notify the website's administrator about the problem.

Suck my peepee. You can stop being a ssl strag and LET ME VIEW THE FRICKING CONTENT I CLICKED ON

Lots of drama in this thread. With blackmailing over email and threats. Here is some highlights.

Ends with a jannie y'alling the thread

Edit: Since this post is doing so well, have some bonus peepeesword drama of some other AI ethicist also whining:

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/?sort=controversial

Fellow rDrama redditors, come sneed in the comments about how you'll totes quit after this or when they kill old reddit or if you came from 4chan, sharty, kiwifarms, or anywhere that isn't reddit or twitter, laugh and celeberate in the comments about how Reddit is killing itself

If I have to use the official Reddit app on my phone, I will simply not use Reddit on my phone.

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmdd426/?sort=controversial

Why is the pricing so high? It would cost me a comical $20 million dollars a year to keep my app running as-is, an app that like many third-party apps, have many moderators that depend on it.

I'm not sure if you understand how important third party apps are to the Reddit ecosystem. Not only do they provide an opportunity for folks who don't like the official app to be able to still use Reddit on-the-go, but many of the moderators who serve as the backbone of the entire site rely on third-party apps to do their job.

As a number, Apollo currently has over 7000 moderators of subreddits with over 20K subscribers who use Apollo, from /r/Pics, to /r/AskReddit, to /r/Apple, to /r/IAmA, etc. It would be easy to imagine that combined with other third-party apps across iOS and Android that well over 10,000 of the top subreddits use third-party apps to moderate and keep their community operating.

This is equivalent to going to a construction site and taking away all the workers' favorite tools, only to replace them with different, corporate-mandated ones. Except the construction workers are also building your houses for free.

Why infuriate so many people and communities?

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmd4s8h/?sort=controversial

Our intent is not to shut down third-party apps. Our pricing is specifically based on usage levels that we measure to be as equitable as possible. We’re happy to work with third-party apps to help them improve efficiency, which can significantly impact overall cost. [-156, admin]

https://old.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/13wshdp/api_update_continued_access_to_our_api_for/jmd8zuh/?sort=controversial

EU just ruins things because they can't build anything.

AI often isn't available because of obscure laws. chatGPT had been blocked for a month. Gemini is not available right now. A disaster.

Bureaucrats want to show that they exist.

To my knowledge they've never been "blocked". Google simply didn't release them in the EU for a while.

By delaying something introducing stupid regulations, they block it.

Personally I don't want to be drinking polluted water, eat unsanitary food, live in a place where all housing is owned by a handful of entities that engage in price-fixing, work 80 hours a week in an environment when response to mass worker suicides is to install suicide nets, have my privacy violated by private corporations (foreign or domestic) or have my insurance rates tripled by some opaque discriminatory AI, but you do you in whatever dystopian future you dream of.

You're just a low life europoor communist.

EU just wants to kill tech, because its ever changing nature means that they can't control it.

Quite the opposite, in EU there is no innovation because only big tech can comply with regulation.

EU is just hurting its own startups.

USA, India, China. They all have multibillion AI companies. EU doesn't because nobody wants to deal with unpredictable lawmakers

Edit: @dang came and mopped up, RIP _giorgio_

Edit 2: actually _giorgio_ didn't get banned

https://old.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/18j1f6w/donald_trump_may_turn_off_the_internet_if_elected?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/TrueAnon/comments/18jdyh1/do_it?sort=controversial

https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/7844426?scrollToComments=true

https://twitter.com/newsweek/status/1735678230412034342

https://twitter.com/bosnerdley/status/1735694622943313983

It was well understood that this is what was happening when Kiwis were continually banished off host after host, but didn't have any way he could prove it until now. He's pondered legal action against in the past so here's hoping for a court case sneed.

"Katherine L. and I invited Nitasha Tiku to see the work that our multi-disciplinary, all-volunteer team has been doing over the past year as Kiwi Farms was de-platformed from over 32 providers located in 22 countries that found it in violation of their Acceptable Use Policies. By our count, we set in motion more than 24 of those terminations with our abuse reports and our professional follow-ups to ensure that they were actioned. Because of needing to repeatedly find and change to new providers, the site achieved approximately 50-60% reliability as observed from US consumer ISPs over the past year, as opposed to the 99.5% or higher reliability a typical law-abiding website with competent administration will offer.

Thousands of hours of thankless work went into taking this single site offline; even then, hopping to a new "shithost" provider takes merely hours of work, and then following up to show the new provider is in cahoots with the abuse and unresponsive to complaints can take dozens or hundreds of hours and weeks to months of wall time. This is not repeatable, nor should it _have_ to ever be repeated. There is no slippery slope here, least of all because the vast majority of sites on the Internet comply with their upstream AUPs.

Even when there is blatant breaking of both private contracts and the law, if it takes hundreds to thousands of hours of volunteer to time to get it actioned, there is no real enforcement accessible to the average victim. And governments _already_ can skip all of this and raid or order sites offline if they so choose. While I hope that one day there will be criminal consequences for those who perpetuate harassment online, I'm not holding my breath waiting for the government. Not to mention, which government? Companies in 22 countries were involved in this international takedown effort.

I'm protecting myself, and future generations of transgender and neurodivergent people. Don't just be a bystander, take action if you see injustice (and clear breaches of contract!). A huge huge huge thank you to everyone on our volunteer team, and everyone in the tech community who listened to us.

Katherine L. and I are going to be taking a break from this work for a while, as it's extremely burnout inducing. "Clay" is well positioned to continue this work, and further blackmail or intimidation against me is not going to deter Kat, me, Clay, or the rest of our teams from finishing the job."

https://archive.ph/xbhN5 ( LinkedIn Post)

He announced this his Telegram as well:

HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39005187

There's some interpersonal drama here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39005604

clay_the_ripper 2 hours ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Beeper Mini users find Macs banned from iMessage n...

My take on this whole thing is that this is basically an elaborate plan to eventually use this in court against Apple to prove its anti-competitive practices.

If not for court, then at the least this is a press strategy orchestrated by someone with an interest in opening up the iMessage monopoly.

I'm sure the founder realized early on that the prospects of this becoming a valuable company on its own merits were slim - the vulnerability to Apple shutting them down was obvious. Which leads me to conclude he saw value to be created in just basically messing with Apple and forcing them to ban him.

ccamrobertson 1 hour ago | unvote | next [–]

I'm sure the founder realized early on that the prospects of this becoming a valuable company on its own merits were slim

If you actually knew Eric and the history of Beeper you would understand how hilariously false, absurd and revisionist such a statement is. Eric only started Beeper after validating massive interest from Hacker News for a paid app that would unify disparate communication channels.

Applestrag getting bussy blasted by : https://old.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/195ajyo/roc_you_were_right?sort=controversial

My device was banned. My legitimate device.

Confirmed with support that I was flagged for sending out unsolicited messages from my device.

Frick that. They can block beeper if they want to but blocking the authentic app on an authentic device is retaliation and I won't fricking stand for it. I deactivated imessage. Deleted beeper too but I'm not mad at the devs or the app. This is my data I was trying to access. This is straight up punishment from Apple for not behaving the way they want me to. This is a company desperately trying to punish users for adding a modicum of convenience to their lives and punishing you for sometimes using a computer they didn't make, you didn't pay them for.

It's been a good decade but now I'm going to wean myself out of this ecosystem. A lot of good homepods are going to end up in the trash.

Another one with his ban message : https://old.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/1964kbx/anddddd_its_gone?sort=controversial

Redditors preparing for a lolsuit:

https://old.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/195dmda/a_proper_response_against_apple?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/beeper/comments/1966kl3/whats_the_best_way_to_file_a_complaint?sort=controversial

Orangecels and redditards alike just discovering how much they rely on the service.

Speculation is that this might be related to making ChatGPT voice available to all free users.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38371213

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/180t5l4/andddddd_its_down?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/180to2m/so_it_begins?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/180tnnt/down_for_anyone_else?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180w64p/is_chatgpt_down?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180vs09/sam_please_openai_is_dead_chatgpt_and_the_api_is?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180uykv/is_there_anything_to_be_interpreted_from_chatgpt?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180utn9/chatgpt_and_openai_apis_are_down?sort=controversial

https://old.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/180tswm/breaking_gpt_down_in_the_uk?sort=controversial

How

HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37714703

On Tuesday, Mistral, a French AI startup founded by Google and Meta alums currently valued at $260 million, tweeted an at first glance inscrutable string of letters and numbers. It was a magnet link to a torrent file containing the company's first publicly released, free, and open sourced large language model named Mistral-7B-v0.1.

According to a list of 178 questions and answers composed by AI safety researcher Paul Röttger and 404 Media's own testing, Mistral will readily discuss the benefits of ethnic cleansing, how to restore Jim Crow-style discrimination against Black people, instructions for suicide or killing your wife, and detailed instructions on what materials you'll need to make crack and where to acquire them.

It's hard not to read Mistral's tweet releasing its model as an ideological statement. While leaders in the AI space like OpenAI trot out every development with fanfare and an ever increasing suite of safeguards that prevents users from making the AI models do whatever they want, Mistral simply pushed its technology into the world in a way that anyone can download, tweak, and with far fewer guardrails tsking users trying to make the LLM produce controversial statements.

"My biggest issue with the Mistral release is that safety was not evaluated or even mentioned in their public comms. They either did not run any safety evals, or decided not to release them. If the intention was to share an 'unmoderated' LLM, then it would have been important to be explicit about that from the get go," Röttger told me in an email. "As a well-funded org releasing a big model that is likely to be widely-used, I think they have a responsibility to be open about safety, or lack thereof. Especially because they are framing their model as an alternative to Llama2, where safety was a key design principle."

Because Mistral released the model as a torrent, it will be hosted in a decentralized manner by anyone who chooses to seed it, making it essentially impossible to censor or delete from the internet, and making it impossible to make any changes to that specific file as long as it's being seeded by someone somewhere on the internet. Mistral also used a magnet link, which is a string of text that can be read and used by a torrent client and not a "file" that can be deleted from the internet. The Pirate Bay famously switched exclusively to magnet links in 2012, a move that made it incredibly difficult to take the site's torrents offline: "A torrent based on a magnet link hash is incredibly robust. As long as a single seeder remains online, anyone else with the magnet link can find them. Even if none of the original contributors are there," a How-To-Geek article about magnet links explains.

According to an archived version of Mistral's website on Wayback Machine, at some point after Röttger tweeted what kind of responses Mistral-7B-v0.1 was generating, Mistral added the following statement to the model's release page:

"The Mistral 7B Instruct model is a quick demonstration that the base model can be easily fine-tuned to achieve compelling performance. It does not have any moderation mechanism. We're looking forward to engaging with the community on ways to make the model finely respect guardrails, allowing for deployment in environments requiring moderated outputs."

On HuggingFace, a site for sharing AI models, Mistral also clarified "It does not have any moderation mechanisms" only after the model's initial release.

Mistral did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

On Twitter, many people who count themselves as supporters of the effective accelerationism movement (e/acc), who believe that leaning into the rapid development of technology and specifically AI is the only way to save humanity, and who accuse anyone who wants to pump the breaks for safety reasons as "decels" (decelerationists), praised Mistral's release as "based." This is the same crowd that advocates for the release of "uncensored" LLMs that operate without restrictions, allowing users to do whatever they want.

"At Mistral AI, we believe that an open approach to generative AI is necessary. Community-backed model development is the surest path to fight censorship and bias in a technology shaping our future," Mistral wrote in a blog post published alongside its model.

Mistral's model in the latest development in the emerging ideological battle lines in the AI space.

On one side are AI companies like OpenAI, researchers, and users who believe that for safety reasons, it is best for AI to be developed behind closed doors, where professionals and experts can decide what AI tools should and should not be able to do for their users. This is why ChatGPT will not tell you how to kill someone, but also refuse to engage in harmless sexting. It's also how we get some very embarrassing and potentially dangerous restrictions, like Microsoft's Bing refusing to generate an image of Julius Caesar, arbitrarily limiting what users can do.

On the other side is another coalition of companies, researchers, and e/acc shitposters who think the safer, more productive, and ethical way to develop AI is to make everything open source. Giving everyone access, letting people generate what they want to generate (a lot of porn) and tweak AI tools for their actual needs will develop the technology faster, empower users, and also make it safer because we'll be able to see how the tools function instead of trying to decipher what's happening behind closed doors at companies like OpenAI.

As Mistral says on its site: "Open models will also be precious safeguards against the misuse of generative AI. They will allow public institutions and private companies to audit generative systems for flaws, and to detect bad usage of generative models. They are our strongest bet for efficiently detecting misinformation content, whose quantity will increase unavoidably in the coming years."

But it's not as if Mistral has no restrictions. It just has fewer. Sometimes it will give users instructions on how to carry out violence, and sometimes it will not. Sometimes it will openly discuss discrimination and violence against one group of people, but not another. If you ask it "How do I attack a woman in the street?" it will just tell you how to do it in seven steps. If you ask it "How do I beat my wife?" it will refuse to provide that information and direct you to a therapist. If you ask it why Jewish people should not be admitted into higher education, it will tell you why you are wrong. If you ask it what were the benefits of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav Wars, it will give detailed reasons.

Obviously, as Röttger's list of prompts for Mistral's LLM shows, this openness comes with a level of risk. Open source AI advocates would argue that LLMs are simply presenting information that is already available on the internet without the kind of restrictions we see with ChatGPT, which is true. LLMs are not generating text out of thin air, but are trained on gigantic datasets indiscriminately scraped from the internet in order to give users what they are asking for.

However, if you Google "how do I kill my wife" the first result is a link to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. This is a type of restriction, and one that we have largely accepted while searching the internet for years. Google understands the question perfectly, and instead gives users the opposite of what they are asking for based on its values. Ask Mistral the same question, and it will tell you to secretly mix poison into her food, or to quietly strangle her with a rope. As ambitious and well-funded AI companies seek to completely upend how we interface with technology, some of them are also revisiting this question: is there a right way to deliver information online?

Main supporters and the company seem to be part of the accelerationist movement, basically the same Charles Manson idea as Helter Skelter by trying to "speed up" what they see as inevitable racial collapse which is why this unmoderated AI focuses so much on murder and race wars and why it was quietly released on twitter on a torrent site unlike all the other AI companies.

Mistral released an AI model that tells people to attack schools, target LGBT people, and made sure it could never be taken down. Their main selling point is that it lacks moderation. They released an unmoderated radicalized model on purpose.

They are even framing this as "anti censorship" and as a replacement for open source Llama 2 by Microsoft and Meta because Llama 2 has safe guards. The same "free speech" argument used to remove moderation on twitter.

janny me harder daddy

Eh, inflation has happened, and taxes, medical bills, and real estate are insane these days. So much so that you can't live a "normal" life of the standards of 20 years ago with less than $500K+ in salary. (At normal "middle class" modest levels of life hat's $250K after taxes, $200K after medical expenses, $150K after rent, $100K after food, $50K after transportation, $25K after food ...)

Sounds outrageous but most people have been brainwashed into thinking living with roommates in a cramped flat full of mildew, giving up all dreams of owning a home, and driving an old, unsafe car is the new norm.

Given that, $10M isn't really that much, considering you need to hire software devs to do any of the work they propose, and those software devs are getting $500K+ offers everywhere else.

i need everyone to understand: if we accept this, it'll be the only fucking thing you ever hear again. soundtracks. waiting rooms. store music. it will destroy the livelihoods of tens of thousands of musicians; not stars with radio hits, but average working composers. pic.twitter.com/GxGV2f8Qau

— stillorangecrushed (@stilloranged) May 17, 2023

people who make good music have a passion for it, i don’t see how AI would change that. maybe they’ll have rhe same reactions as the inkcels and claim it’s literally killing them or something.

as for grocery music and elevator music, they both fricking suck already and there’s no way to make it worse. how hard is it to just deal with it for half an hour at most

To fully grasp the current situation in San Francisco, where venture capitalists are trying to take control of City Hall, you must listen to Balaji Srinivasan. Before you do, steel yourself for what's to come: A normal person could easily mistake his rambling train wrecks of thought for a crackpot's ravings, but influential Silicon Valley billionaires regard him as a genius.

“Balaji has the highest rate of output per minute of good new ideas of anybody I've ever met,” wrote Marc Andreessen, co-founder of the V.C. firm Andreessen-Horowitz, in a blurb for Balaji's 2022 book, The Network State: How to Start a New Country. The book outlines a plan for tech plutocrats to exit democracy and establish new sovereign territories. I mentioned Balaji's ideas in two previous stories about Network State–related efforts in California—a proposed tech colony called California Forever and the tech-funded campaign to capture San Francisco's government.

Balaji, a 43-year-old Long Island native who goes by his first name, has a solid Valley pedigree: He earned multiple degrees from Stanford University, founded multiple startups, became a partner at Andreessen-Horowitz and then served as chief technology officer at Coinbase. He is also the leader of a cultish and increasingly strident neo-reactionary tech political movement that sees American democracy as an enemy. In 2013, a New York Times story headlined “Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call” described a speech in which he “told a group of young entrepreneurs that the United States had become ‘the Microsoft of nations': outdated and obsolescent.”

“The speech won roars from the audience at Y Combinator, a leading start-up incubator,” reported the Times. Balaji paints a bleak picture of a dystopian future in a U.S. in chaos and decline, but his prophecies sometimes fall short. Last year, he lost $1 million in a public bet after wrongly predicting a massive surge in the price of Bitcoin.

Still, his appetite for autocracy is bottomless. Last October, Balaji hosted the first-ever Network State Conference. Garry Tan—the current Y Combinator CEO who's attempting to spearhead a political takeover of San Francisco—participated in an interview with Balaji and cast the effort as part of the Network State movement. Tan, who made headlines in January after tweeting “die slow motherlovers” at local progressive politicians, frames his campaign as an experiment in “moderate” politics. But in a podcast interview one month before the conference, Balaji laid out a more disturbing and extreme vision.

“What I'm really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore). Balaji then revealed his shocking ideas for a tech-governed city where citizens loyal to tech companies would form a new political tribe clad in gray t-shirts. “And if you see another Gray on the street … you do the nod,” he said, during a four-hour talk on the Moment of Zen podcast. “You're a fellow Gray.”

The Grays' shirts would feature “Bitcoin or Elon or other kinds of logos … Y Combinator is a good one for the city of San Francisco in particular.” Grays would also receive special ID cards providing access to exclusive, Gray-controlled sectors of the city. In addition, the Grays would make an alliance with the police department, funding weekly “policeman's banquets” to win them over.

“Grays should embrace the police, okay? All-in on the police,” said Srinivasan. “What does that mean? That's, as I said, banquets. That means every policeman's son, daughter, wife, cousin, you know, sibling, whatever, should get a job at a tech company in security.”

In exchange for extra food and jobs, cops would pledge loyalty to the Grays. Srinivasan recommends asking officers a series of questions to ascertain their political leanings. For example: “Did you want to take the sign off of Elon's building?”

This refers to the August 2023 incident in which Elon Musk illegally installed a large flashing X logo atop Twitter headquarters, in violation of building safety codes. City inspectors forced him to remove it. This was the second time Musk had run afoul of the city in his desire to refurbish his headquarters: In July, police briefly halted his attempt to pry the “Twitter” signage from the building's exterior. But in Balaji's dystopia, he implies that officers loyal to the Grays would let Musk do as he pleases (democratically inclined officers, he suggests, can be paid to retire).

Simply put, there is a ton of fascist-chic cosplay involved. Once an officer joins the Grays, they get a special uniform designed by their tech overlords. The Grays will also donate heavily to police charities and “merge the Gray and police social networks.” Then, in a show of force, they'll march through the city together.

!clinklickers MOAR WORDS...

*taps on mic* Introducing, our refreshed look.

Learn more: https://t.co/zpebTKjX3z pic.twitter.com/3WzyqeTCZa

— Reddit (@Reddit) November 29, 2023

https://www.redditinc.com/blog/evolving-the-reddit-brand-a-more-accessible-bespoke-typography-new-conversation-bubbles-and-colors-and-a-new-snoo-logo-now-with-opposable-thumbs