The world of generative AI has been changing rapidly, and that’s not something that’s going to stop any time soon. Today, we’re joined on the podcast by Jonathan Ross, founder and CEO of Groq (no, not Elon Musk’s new bot called Grok) — a company working on a new technology stack that drastically speeds up performance of AI models — to talk about all things AI, and the many ways it’s going to change in the coming months and years.
Where the citation, and also that is not the same as sex trafficking, which you claimed up thread.
Conflating sex trafficking with prostitution is exactly what caused the mistrial. They are not the same thing, despite how hard various AGs and politicians have worked to convince you otherwise.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we’ve got a couple more comments about the Media Matters lawsuit. First, it’s James Burkhardt responding to the claim that the Media Matters report was somehow fabricated:
IBM stated that ANY amount of neo-nazi content next to its ads is a deal breaker to further ad buys. Musk got IBM ad revenue on the back of claims they could prevent that while still allowing Neo-Nazi content on he platform twitter used to remove. By the nature of Xitter, that promise can not be kept.
People said so at the time, Elon admits, and media matters proved that by the nature of Xitter, neo-nazis will see ads next to neo-nazi content. They were able to get Xitter to serve ads against neo-nazi content. IBM has responded accordingly.
‘How dare you say the king has no clothes(but does have a swastika tattoo)?!’
This isn’t just a lawsuit against free speech it’s a lawsuit against reality and the audacity of pointing it out.
This is Elon throwing a hypocritical tantrum that someone pointed out that yes there absolutely is nazi content on the platform and they have no filters against that showing up next to the ads of major companies, which means to the surprise of apparently several major companies their ads can show up next to nazi content and all it takes it for an account to follow the ‘right’ people on the platform.
With La Sirena (the spaceship) your goal is to go where no man has gone before.
With La Sirena (the adult film actress) your goal is to go where quite a number of men have gone before.
Does that help the Bot out?
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ve a couple jokes about Musk and Media Matters. First, it’s Rob with thoughts on Musk’s “free speech absolutism”:
Musk really needs to fix the autocorrect on his phone. It really confuses the message when it replaces “abolitionist” with “absolutist”
This week, our first place winner on the insightful side is Thad with with a comment about Elon Musk citing The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy as the inspiration for his new “Grok” AI product, and our point that the titular guide was compiled by humans:
Yeah, if you want a real-life equivalent of the Hitchhiker’s Guide, it’s…Wikipedia.
Browsing the Internet without an adblocker is like skateboarding without a helmet and pads: Being able to do it doesn’t mean it’s the smart thing to do, and doing it will inevitably cause some damage.
I don’t block ads, I block trackers. And I use EFF’s Privacy Badger browser extension, so as to block only the “problematic” (from a privacy perspective) trackers.
If that results (as it rather frequently does) in many ads being blocked as well — that’s on the website and/or advertiser, not on me.
If some website won’t let me view their site unless I allow them to infringe my privacy and track my online activity, like some creepy stalker, well, after all… … The Internet is a very big place — I can generally find what I’m looking for somewhere else, from someone who doesn’t consider it a deal-breaker to not let them snoop on what’s none of their business.
I am the person who filed the complaint and I do often find it both amusing and very sad when I read comments to articles about this.
Amusing because I like watch the apologists flapping their gums about mythical rights of publishers and mythical obligations on the people visiting their web sites.
Sad because it truly dismays me to see how ignorant the general public about their fundamental rights.
I am a lawyer, computer scientist and sociologist who has studied this particular law for the last 15 years and am widely regarded as one of the foremost experts in the world on this matter. I advise the Regulators, Legislators and Parliamentarians on these issues and helped to draft the law which will replace it.
So let me make this clear – in the EU people have no legal obligation to watch ads, period. It is also illegal for any publishers to store any script or other technology on your device which is not strictly necessary for the provision of the requested service – a position clarified by Regulatory Guidance going back to 2014 and further supported by binding case law in the EU’s highest court as recently as July this year. The EU Commission’s formal legal analysis also makes it clear that this is illegal without consent a position they have held since 2016 in a formal written legal evaluation.
And in fact, not is this only a breach of civil law, I have also filed a criminal complaint against YouTube in Ireland for a breach of computer trespass and misuse law – which also makes it a criminal offence to gain unauthorised access to a computer and/or utilize computing resources in an unauthorised manner.
So to the apologists, marketers and Google fan boys, you are quite simply wrong – you have no legal argument and are just polluting the debate with your personal opinions which are both unqualified and utterly irrelevant in the case of a legal complaint.
But it is important to everyone else to note that there is no point in discussing the issue with these people, because there is no discussion with people who live under some false illusion of an entitlement to trespass on our property and ignore our fundamental rights – as such it is an utter waste of energy and time and only serves to give them the attention they strive for in order to get their dopamine hits and feel like they are important.
Have a great day everyone and please, start to exercise your own rights otherwise you will lose them.
Hijack your mind, your momma can’t abide this Night Trap might lack morals, it’s a moral crisis What are we doing to our youth? They’re shooting people Glued to screens with superglue Computers need to be banned when the laws broke Ban Manhunt Ban Grand Theft Aut
(It’s truly worth watching, so I’ll go ahead and embed it…)
We’ve got another double winner this week, with the same anonymous comment taking first place for insightful and second place for funny. It comes in response to a joke about Republicans in the zombie apocalypse:
Republicans will be the zombies because when an outbreak happens, the government will tell people to avoid the zombies, and Republicans will argue it’s a violation of their freedom to get bitten if they want to. Other conservatives will be on social media selling essential oils that supposedly prevent zombie infections. Donald Trump’s undead corpse will be decomposing in a corner somewhere with one hand reflexively hitting POST on the Truth Social app, except there’s a good chance his accidental thumbing of random letters will make more sense than his intentional posts when he was alive.
The purpose of disinformation is not to persuade or promote a specific idea. For those who peddle disinformation, the intention (and if not, at least, the happy result) is to undermine the idea that anything could be true, or that anyone might be acting in good faith.
For editor’s choice on the insightful side, we start out with an anonymous response to the idea that the consequences of a proposed Ohio pornography law demonstrate a lack of foresight:
Feels intentional to me. I’ve been watching the right wing bend over backwards to get kids trapped in the system for as long as I’ve been aware of the system. And there’s no shortage of evidence indicating it goes back longer than I’ve been alive.
Stop giving these people the benefit of the doubt. They know what they are doing. They want to torture kids and adults for “sexual impurity.” That’s it. Being gay, watching porn, it doesn’t matter. They want us to suffer.
I must not bait. Bait is the mind-killer. Bait is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my desire to bait. I will permit the desire to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the desire to bait has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.
We’ve already had the second place winner above, so we’ll move on to editor’s choice with another comment from that same post, in which BernardoVerda responds to the statement that nobody rational trusts the NY Post:
That reminds me of Adlai Stevenson’s famous response during a presidential campaign, when a supporter declared that after his speech on the radio, he could count on the vote of every thinking person in America: “Thank you… but that’s not enough, madam; we need a majority!”
This week, our top comments on the insightful side both come in response to Elon Musk’s plans to turn X into a financial app, and the question of whether you’d trust him with your money. In first place, it’s an anonymous comment:
Given how well that Elon complies with consent decrees, I suspect his compliance with banking regulation will give his financial service ambition a lifetime of about 5 minutes.
As a retired banker, I do not trust any app, bank, or computer with all of my financial information. My finances are scattered, ie: I have no banking app on any phone or portable device, it is only on my home computer behind a firewall and password protected. I have 3 banks, all isolated from each other. This in case the bank fails or is hacked. Almost all purchases are done by credit card, not a debit card as there is a federal law that says the credit card company must reimburse fraud transactions. An ATM debit, even if fraud, gets an “oh well” from the deposit bank. Musk will guarantee nothing and any loss you take will be your loss without any support from Twitter.
Somehow i get the feeling that the fundamental shortcoming of the community notes – that it’s a voting system that cares little (or possibly not at all) about actual authority on any subject – is exactly why it’s pushed by Musk as an end all be all solution. The chaos that he and those he allies with are creating is essentially a mob rule, one they hope to be leading. This system is exactly that – a large enough crowd can drown anything, regardless of how truthful is is.
Quoting the third link: “The ‘penalty of perjury’ language appears to only apply to the question of whether or not the person filing the takedown actually represents the party they claim to represent — and not whether the file is infringing at all, or even whether or not the file’s copyright is held by the party being represented.”
For editor’s choice on the funny side, we’ll close things out with a one-two punch from that same post, again directly addressing the question of whether you’d trust Musk with your money. First, it’s Toom1275 with an answer:
I'm not personally the type to download and listen to an album of retro chiptunes themselves, but there are indeed a lot of bangers in the world of nintendo music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASvFH3w1Ik
You haven’t had any brand issue by ending your game name with “Tycoon” ?
I similarly assumed that there would probably be issues but, when we looked into it, it turned out there are no trademark issues around "tycoon" and it's used generically as a genre descriptor in the names of lots of games by different companies
Very little of the content in the game even has anything to do with political viewpoints because, contrary to what you might believe, political speech is only a small slice of the content that moderators deal with.
Could definitely package it up as a PC game. Mobile is a lot tougher - the interface doesn't currently support screens below a certain size, and it also relies on mouseover tooltips for conveying important (if technically not 100% critical) information.
Yeah - we certainly investigated engines (Twine and Inkle were our top contenders) but ultimately it seemed easier to get the functionality we wanted by building it ourselves
Nope, not Twine! No engine really - it's built in HTML/Javascript using the Vue.js framework, utilizing a little bit of the engine Randy Lubin (our game-making partner) built for his project StorySynth but mostly built from scratch.
Unfortunately it was issues with the recording itself - not sure if it was the mic or the connection, but that audio is all we got. The only other real option was scrapping it entirely, and I figured the conversation was still worth putting out.
Sometimes, the ability to theoretically handle anything makes it labor-intensive to handle each specific thing :) There definitely is some stuff that seems like it should be easier - but so far, it's capable of doing everything, with effort. And of course, the data migration needs were a big part of the challenge: it wasn't just a matter of building these features, but building them in a way that allowed us to map everything from the old Techdirt onto the new one, with minimal disruption in the continuity of everything functioning, and the goal of a quick migration with up-to-the-minute data that wouldn't require a lengthy shutdown of the site.
If we were building from the ground up for a new site, some things would have been easier - but we were also building for compatibility with the data (and just our user habits) from over 20 years of development on a entirely custom CMS with lots of idiosyncrasies and patchwork workarounds.
We'll definitely give consideration to A through D as we make changes. One thing I can answer now, which is E: it's named the Comment Scrubber after the tools used in audio/video software that show you a condensed waveform/thumbnail timeline and let you quickly shift to that point in the file by clicking. Those are called "scrubbers"! But - it is perhaps true that this terminology isn't clear to a lot of people.
WordPress customer service is definitely not lacking! You would not believe how much work they have done for us for two straight years to make this possible.
I know Techdirt might seem "relatively simple" but the truth is, as blogs go, it's really not. We had added a lot of custom features over the years. Our comment voting/badges system is unlike any out-of-the-box solutions, the membership system is entirely custom tracking multiple different subscription tiers via integration with both Foxycart (for our direct purchase store) and Patreon, lots of our little features our non-standard on blogs these days (user preferences for site display, markdown in comments, the post expander) and some break common rules of modern CMS systems (infinitely-deep comment reply threads). And that's not even getting into some of our non-standard back-end features that we've developed for our editorial flow over the years.
It required a lot of custom work to rebuild it all as a WordPress theme, and then there's the other huge issue: the data migration. Our entire data structure was non-standard, and not easily mapped to WordPress - it required development of a custom, multi-stage process to move over 75,000 posts and a couple million comments and reformat/retabulate everything in a new structure.
The bugs we're seeing now are what remains after making so, so many difficult things work properly. And they certainly do have solutions for everything we're seeing, but some require special work due to all the aforementioned customization. All we can do now is continue to work steadily through them as best we can!
I dunno, I think it lacks a certain je ne sais quoi unique to his particular personality disorder.
lol this comment is like an unholy hybrid of a Linda Yaccarino tweet and a Donald Trump tweet
yeah, my bad! Sorry - fixed now
whoops, my bad! I messed up in my copy-pasting! Afraid it was Rhizome's comment that won - fixing it now
I'm fond of this boss music from Pikmin too: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXUkxWx40H8
I'm not personally the type to download and listen to an album of retro chiptunes themselves, but there are indeed a lot of bangers in the world of nintendo music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hASvFH3w1Ik
Very little of the content in the game even has anything to do with political viewpoints because, contrary to what you might believe, political speech is only a small slice of the content that moderators deal with.
whoops! fixed, thanks
Could definitely package it up as a PC game. Mobile is a lot tougher - the interface doesn't currently support screens below a certain size, and it also relies on mouseover tooltips for conveying important (if technically not 100% critical) information.
Yeah - we certainly investigated engines (Twine and Inkle were our top contenders) but ultimately it seemed easier to get the functionality we wanted by building it ourselves
Nope, not Twine! No engine really - it's built in HTML/Javascript using the Vue.js framework, utilizing a little bit of the engine Randy Lubin (our game-making partner) built for his project StorySynth but mostly built from scratch.
whoops my bad, fixed!
Indeed. At some point that sentence was going to be "the one that won first place" and I guess the wrong word survived :) fixing!
whoops - fixed!
Unfortunately it was issues with the recording itself - not sure if it was the mic or the connection, but that audio is all we got. The only other real option was scrapping it entirely, and I figured the conversation was still worth putting out.
Sometimes, the ability to theoretically handle anything makes it labor-intensive to handle each specific thing :) There definitely is some stuff that seems like it should be easier - but so far, it's capable of doing everything, with effort. And of course, the data migration needs were a big part of the challenge: it wasn't just a matter of building these features, but building them in a way that allowed us to map everything from the old Techdirt onto the new one, with minimal disruption in the continuity of everything functioning, and the goal of a quick migration with up-to-the-minute data that wouldn't require a lengthy shutdown of the site. If we were building from the ground up for a new site, some things would have been easier - but we were also building for compatibility with the data (and just our user habits) from over 20 years of development on a entirely custom CMS with lots of idiosyncrasies and patchwork workarounds.
We'll definitely give consideration to A through D as we make changes. One thing I can answer now, which is E: it's named the Comment Scrubber after the tools used in audio/video software that show you a condensed waveform/thumbnail timeline and let you quickly shift to that point in the file by clicking. Those are called "scrubbers"! But - it is perhaps true that this terminology isn't clear to a lot of people.
WordPress customer service is definitely not lacking! You would not believe how much work they have done for us for two straight years to make this possible. I know Techdirt might seem "relatively simple" but the truth is, as blogs go, it's really not. We had added a lot of custom features over the years. Our comment voting/badges system is unlike any out-of-the-box solutions, the membership system is entirely custom tracking multiple different subscription tiers via integration with both Foxycart (for our direct purchase store) and Patreon, lots of our little features our non-standard on blogs these days (user preferences for site display, markdown in comments, the post expander) and some break common rules of modern CMS systems (infinitely-deep comment reply threads). And that's not even getting into some of our non-standard back-end features that we've developed for our editorial flow over the years. It required a lot of custom work to rebuild it all as a WordPress theme, and then there's the other huge issue: the data migration. Our entire data structure was non-standard, and not easily mapped to WordPress - it required development of a custom, multi-stage process to move over 75,000 posts and a couple million comments and reformat/retabulate everything in a new structure. The bugs we're seeing now are what remains after making so, so many difficult things work properly. And they certainly do have solutions for everything we're seeing, but some require special work due to all the aforementioned customization. All we can do now is continue to work steadily through them as best we can!
Personally, I would not describe it as a disaster