- 2 Posts
- 60 Comments
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•AI: EU Member States approve “digital expropriation” for AI companiesEnglish
0·19 days agoPartly AI-psychosis, but it’s also geopolitics (especially as the main beneficiary would be US big tech): US renews push for EU to soften Big Tech rules
The recent Starshield saga shows how dependent Europeans are on certain US capabilities that simply lack a European alternative (the European alternative to Starlink, IRIS2, won’t be online before 2030), so with the Ukraine war and the European security order looming in the background of everything, politicians are willing to twist themselves as much as it takes to placate the US.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
0·2 months agoPrepare to be tortured for an eternity by Scotty. No wait, that’s an unholy image.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
0·2 months agoI mean motivated & cowardly ignorance has been a staple of liberal-conservatism for I don’t know however long. I support cutting (my) taxes and increasing (my) liberty – oh dear, why are some people suddenly poor and trampled upon? I would NEVER! This is just so horrible for me, I just need another tax cut right now. Have the poors tried eating cake?
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
0·2 months agoVariation on a theme, I recall the complaints over the ostracism LLM-users face online as being just like the marginalization faced by black people. Waaaah!
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 27th September 2026English
0·2 months agoI’ve been using Plasma & Qt-apps for years for their extensive user customizability and as I came from Windows, the Mac-paradigm of GNOME/GtK has always felt foreign personally. If they really go slop I don’t think I can keep using them, but the GNOME UX just goes against the grain for me. Is there any other well-maintained modern desktop stack at all that has foregone LLMs?
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 20th September 2026English
0·2 months agoThe EAs and Trump really deserve each other.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoAnd who do we have here conducting the interview: Stuart Ritchie, anti-trans activist & one of the more ‘deniable’ eugenics types of the late 2010s. What an incredibly tight ecosystem our good friends inhabit indeed lol.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Robot uprising argument against datacenters deemed the only "respectable" one by journal that speaks for British millionairesEnglish
0·2 months agoOf course The Economist (inherently derogatory) would criti-hype AI.
A magazine whose editorial line is confident cluelessness.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoMany are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users.
Many are contrasting the demand for gay marriage with the demand for human-animal marriage.
Same shit, but the lack of thinking your argument through yourself does fit with being a chatbot-enthusiast.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoHave been using Tutanota for years. They took an anti-AI stance pretty early on as well.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoSeems like he’s very heavily professionally invested in the symbolic paradigm and given machine learning completely dominates AI at the moment he’s taking the piss at them whenever he can. Given the fundamental limitations of ML he’s probably right that any sincere attempt to improve on them requires a more symbolic approach, but talking specifically about AGI is getting into woo territory.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoWas he promoting LLMs earlier on?
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoIt seems like some of the usual suspects are making noise about that from the academic freedom angle
It should be said here again that these people don’t even know what academic freedom means and are abusing the term. They mean it essentially as a synonym for free speech, but academic freedom has specifically do to with freedom from state interference in the affairs of the university born from the struggles over its sovereignty between the two in European history; it has nothing to do with academia itself having the means to proscribe the conduct of individual academics. If a geology department suspends a flat-earther, that is academic freedom (among other things) operating as intended. Ironically, the US ambassador directly intervening in the proceedings at Ghent is the actual violation of academic freedom here and these idiots are completely clueless about it.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•China tries to kickstart a bubble in humanoid robotsEnglish
0·2 months agoIt seems the Chinese government is quite sincere in its ‘sci-tech’ ambitions, which include AI. Though there doesn’t seem to be the same levels of sci-fi fantasism as in Silicon Valley, just a more practical focus on seizing the high-tech global frontier and supertuning its surveillance-capitalist model.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 6th September 2026English
0·2 months agoYeah OpenAI, this is what happens when you think you can trust Gandhi.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 30th August 2026 - awful.systemsEnglish
0·3 months agoMario Draghi, Italy’s (and the EU’s) éminence grise, Chicago boy Luis Garicano, and uh… Patrick Collison team up to overhaul Europe’s economy: https://www.rhinegroup.eu/
Other noteworthy members include noted investment-professional Leopold Aschenbrenner & Tobi Lütke, who may only be German-Canadian but is definitely no less a fashy techbro.
That Italy has been the west-European country most exposed to neoliberal medicine, ending up with a neo-fascist in power, seems to be no issue for deities like Draghi and the other assorted usual suspects here.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 2nd August 2026English
0·3 months agoOh, I’ve seen this one before. At least we know where the LLM who gave them this pitch scraped the idea from.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•OpenAI hacks HuggingFace with an AI — allegedlyEnglish
0·4 months agoNovara published a gushing profile of MacAskill a while ago, so no surprises there.
fnix@awful.systemsto
TechTakes@awful.systems•Stubsack: weekly thread for sneers not worth an entire post, week ending 19th July 2026English
0·4 months agoHe runs an analytics company and was specifically touting how his models showed a quick Russian victory, even weeks into the invasion, which was more than just the usual Besserwisserism among western europeans towards eastern Europe. If the whole shtick is that the mainstream is lame but my patented crystal ball actually tells the future from first principles and you then tank even harder than the mainstream, you not only embarrass yourself but reveal your own preferences as well.


You could make some really nice ASMR with it.