• 4 Posts
  • 199 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
Cake day: July 19th, 2023
  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 16th August 2026English
    4·
    1 day ago

    Her grift is the exact same one as the Honey extension from the megalag video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc4yL3YTwWk - like her dad she just rips off better programs, but she didn’t even have the taste to copy an actual good product.

    EDIT:

    Oh yeah, she popped up in that How To Rule The World book about Stanford:

    “Everyone was very sharp. Very sharp,” one student, who didn’t otherwise love the class, stressed. The cohort my year included freshmen and sophomores funded by Sam Altman or Peter Thiel. Some wanted to “solve aging.” were in defense tech, working on secret projects with contracts from the government or major companies. Some worked on climate change. One had already started a string of robotics companies and earned a display in a museum. Others worked on commodities trading. Another was Phoebe Gates—daughter of Bill and Melinda—who made her name as a prominent sustainability advocate and cofounded a company with her Stanford roommate.[*2] Together, as undergraduates, they’d already collectively raised millions of dollars for startups—and, of course, had done internships at every possible top company, from classic FAANG behemoths (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google), to Jane Street, the quantitative trading firm that pays interns hundreds of thousands of dollars, to top-flight VCs.

    Footnote:

    *2 When I reached her, Phoebe Gates wrote that she “would rather not speak on the class.”

  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 9th August 2026English
    6·
    10 days ago

    Vice has a writeup - https://archive.is/ooVju - more of a bring-your-own-taser kind of thing I guess

    The tortures varied wildly in nature, and were too numerous to list in full, but several stuck out for me: There was someone pinning clothespins to partygoers’ cheeks; a man called SirLemmings used some herbal powder to strip you of your sense of sweetness, then made you eat an Oreo to test the result; Avalon Warren, an actress resembling Lola Bunny sprung to life, made partygoers make the ahegao hentai face, and carried a fly zapper; other electric torments were also popular—several people carried tasers, and someone had an electric baton that transferred shocks between participants; someone else’s bit was asking you to yell compliments for Donald Trump, which was perhaps the most polarizing (SirLemmings told me that when he declared the president was an excellent comedian, he drew glares); yet another was writing unknown directives onto others’ foreheads. My friend Jahnik had “pls give me a smooch <3” penned on his, and afterward, received kisses throughout the night. Meanwhile all I got was “CTRL-ALT-Z,” making me wonder if they wanted to undo me from reality.

    As for my torture? I was merely a journalist. A lazy choice, I felt, but for some it was the most terrifying of the bunch. One girl even walked away when I told her; before, she’d been nothing but smiles.

    Another resident teacher was political satirist YouTuber JREG, real name Greg Guevara, who recently published a polemical video calling for Total Clanker Death, or the eradication of all would-be sentient machines.

    youtube faves are implicated!?

  • nfultz@awful.systemstoTechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
    14·
    20 days ago

    The AI Race With China Is a Lie Told by Big Tech to Justify the Data Center Invasion via naked capitalism

    choice quotes:

    More to the point, LLM development in China is incidental to the country’s real goal for AI. Its focus remains on products embedded with AI and robots. Or, as AI policy researcher Liang Zheng says, in China, “The first priority is to use it to benefit ordinary people” (debatable, but indicates the kind of AI they are pursuing).

    In the US, the first priority is to exploit people so that the tech oligarchs can profit. It’s chatbots all the way down.

    Yet, the “AI race” story is a convenient lie for Big Tech and its political protectors. It is a neat political argument designed to insulate the industry from criticism and regulation.

    If every environmental review, every question raised by a community, every issue around water usage and electricity prices can be dismissed or lessened as “helping China,” then meaningful political debate can be silenced. Real regulation—if even possible—can be avoided. Fear becomes a substitute for policy.

    At the same time, data center developers and their minions in Washington have tried to weaponize false claims about foreign ties to the anti-data center movement. Kevin O’Leary of Shark Tank fame has explicitly said that our movement is being funded by China. He has no evidence because evidence of a falsehood can’t exist. In fact, Fox News has been forced to retract its coverage of his claims.

    We understand why O’Leary and the other Tech Broligarchs don’t understand the grassroots opposition to data centers building across the country. It’s hard to spot the grassroots from the window of a private jet.