Replying to
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
My god, they’re making furbys:
arstechnica.com/…/openais-expensive-smart-speaker…
Remote
o7___o7
@o7___o7@awful.systems
[redacted] enthusiast, robot combat enjoyer, distressingly Appalachian, father of ninjas
0
Followers
0
Following
50
Posts
Joined October 08, 2023
Posts
Replying to
@YourNetworkIsHaunted@awful.systems
Fascism is all about surface-kevel appearences and vibes. I didn’t expect them to appropriate the mantle of “spork-weilding penguin of d00m,” though.
Replying to
@samvines@awful.systems
A sweaty, indecisive man holds his hand above two buttons. One button is labled “God,” and the other is labeled “Mr. Meseeks.”
Replying to
@CinnasVerses@awful.systems
Tennessee here: what the chicken-fried fuck is wrong with these people?
Replying to
@swlabr@awful.systems
If I may add to these excellent suggestions:
The Night Circus and The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Go in cold, do not spoil! The readera are phenomenal.
Replying to
@nfultz@awful.systems
Pairs nicely with the lateat Pivot, so that we have tools for surviving both before and after the bubble pops
Replying to
@self@awful.systems
The Linus news has been a real downer, to which you’ve been a solid antidote!
Replying to
@sinedpick@awful.systems
Hol up! It’s kind of unfair to blame some poor soul with a PhD in Beowulf for failing the beat the fash out of determined dickhead in a single quarter. (half serious)
I mean, did Samo even complete a degree?
Replying to
@Soyweiser@awful.systems
At times you need to ask yourself, does the devil need more advocates? And how much does he even pay?
Top-rated review
Replying to
@corbin@awful.systems
Ironically, I left that peer group because they wouldn’t stop platforming Bitcoiners.
That must have been a trip
Replying to
@froztbyte@awful.systems
I sympathise with the urge to avoid being seen as extreme (imagine being percieved! by people!) but so many folks want to pose the problem of lie engines as a halved-loaf problem when it’s a hallved-baby situation, and the opposition isnt going to give anyone credit for being nice in the newapaper.
Replying to
@blakestacey@awful.systems
When someone places their head in the beam line, that’s updating your pions
Replying to
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
Doctorow says that we have to believe people when they say that LLMs are helpful for their work. Do we also have to believe people who say that alcohol makes them better drivers?
arstechnica.com/…/how-to-burst-the-ai-bubble-stri…
Replying to
@tautology@infosec.exchange
I mean, Perseus is right there for dudes who want to be manly space cowboys.
Replying to
@wizbean@tech.lgbt
It’s got “German Worker’s Party” right there in the name!
–guy who got bamboozled
Replying to
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
The AI hype wave is the Dancing Plague for people who can’t dance.
Replying to
@blakestacey@awful.systems
I wanted to give you a high five for telling APS where to go. That was rad as hell.
Replying to
@froztbyte@awful.systems
It’s pretty good! The kids want to be influenza for dragoncon lol
It’s on netflix in the states
Replying to
@froztbyte@awful.systems
Mythos with extra safety dust sprinkled on top and they listened to The Safety Dance while writing the system prompt. Also a hand painted sign on the front that says “no chinese were serius”
Hope you get to feeling better fast!
Replying to
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
Anthropic insists that you should use their demon-as-a-service. Hackernews debates the finer points of pentangle construction.
news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48463811
Replying to
@sailor_sega_saturn@awful.systems
Ed Zitron might have got hold of it, if his bsky is anything to go by.
We could be feasting soon!
Replying to
@BlueMonday1984@awful.systems
What if we replaced the kid in the Omelas hole with the wealthiest guy in Omelas?
Replying to
@macroplastic@sh.itjust.works
www.citationneeded.news/tech-influence-watch/
You might want to edit the OP/Title so that folks know that it’s a Molly White operation!
Replying to
@Soyweiser@awful.systems
Thanks!
I reckon they can scare people with visions of terminators and threats of poverty, but not with a goddamn overgrown Furby.
Call it Furby Psychosis
Furby, for those who missed them, is a toy that came out around 1998. Furby was mostly a big cute cartoon bird face, with an animatronic beak, blinking eyes, IR coms, touch sensors, and a childish voice.
A freshly-unboxed Furby only made babbling sounds, a special language called “Furbish” (according to the propaganda). Once activated, Furby was designed to start mixing in English words and phrases as time went on. This gave owners the impression that Furby was learning language like a human child. It would enthusiastically respond to pets and would cry out in terror if left in the dark or turned upside-down. If you put them together so that their IR lights could see each other, they would pretend to talk. The little bastards really pulled on the heartstrings.
My dear old Granny, who always had something health-related going on and was in a running competition with my great aunt over who had the best new illnesses, kept her new Furby out next to her landline phone for several months. People would swear up and down that Furby picked up this particular personality trait and would constantly complain about feeling sick. This was a part of family lore for years.
In hindsight, we know that’s nonsense. The technical capacity just didn’t exist to process language and reproduce it in a $35 toy from wally world, but people fell in love with these things and still swear up and down that they were somehow alive. This was the ELIZA effect rearing it’s genuine-people-personality-shaped head two decades before the current LLM craze.
At first, I was going to do a deeper write up that would have painted the current AI craze in terms of fallen furry friends, but early on in the research phase I found this episode of RadioLab. It’s an episode titled “Taking to Machines” from 2011 that drives home both how long TESCREAL people have been heralding the oncoming singularity, how damn repetitive their spiel has been and continues to be, and how vulnerable people are to machines that never say no.
It has a little bit of everything: A psychologist gets catfished by an old-school chatbot (twice), a brief history of ELIZA and Weizenbaum’s noble efforts to cram the genie back into the bottle (including a diversion where an old-school bot enjoyer suggests letting patients talk with a psychbot for $5 bucks an hour before sCaLiNg kicks in), a wildcat social experiment involving children torturing a hamster and a Furby, some time speaking with Caleb Cheung who invented Furby, and Jon Ronson going to a singularity convention and being invited to see “the good stuff,” (i.e. an animatronic doll powered by a chatbot.)
My favorite bit is where Caleb Chung, an one of Furby’s designers, talks to the hosts about Furby’s creation (starting around the 37:40 mark). Caleb is an engaging speaker. He grew up in LA and left home early, becoming a street mime and comedian on the way to his toy engineering career. He describes the rules of how to make cute, baby-like engaging things, how Furby itself came together, then kind of goes off the rails comparing Furby’s distress at being held upside down to human suffering. He is very serious. You can hear the seeds of what grew into today’s AI doomer rhetoric (“I CAN CODE THAT”).
Just really good grist for the sneer mill all around. Plus, if you have someone in your life who is falling down the chatbot rabbit-hole (and they are old enough have lived through the Furby times), a Furby comparison is sure to get their attention, if only to wind them up.