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Clearing the tech/LLM news links out of my phone browser tabs…
Via Gary Wong on Mastodon: “I have performed extensive research to classify every byte, and I can now share this summary of the purposes of all the year’s traffic.“
Links from 2024:
January: “Impressively, these posts span from three years before the account was created to a year after the account was last logged into. And, as the icing on the cake, ravenprp is prescient enough that he can joke about being a language model developed by OpenAI, seven years before OpenAI was even founded; evidently he should have joined PsychicsForums instead.”
July: “If you believe that reCAPTCHA is securing your website, you have been deceived. Additionally, this false sense of security has come with an immense cost of human time and privacy.“
September: “Of course though, because the Internet is joined together by literal string and hopes/wishes at this stage, somebody had neglected to renew the old domain at dotmobiregistry.net meaning it was up for grabs by anyone with $20 and an ill-advised sense of exploration.”
November: “Massachusetts housing voucher recipients and the Community Action Agency of Somerville sued the company, claiming SafeRent gave Black and Hispanic rental applicants with housing vouchers disproportionately lower scores. The tenants had no visibility into how the algorithm scored them. Appeals were rejected on the basis that this was what the computer output said.“
“Naftali and digital workers like him, spent eight hours a day in front of a screen studying photos and videos, drawing boxes around objects and labeling them, teaching the AI algorithms to recognize them. […] ‘I was basically reviewing content which are very graphic, very disturbing contents. I was watching dismembered bodies or drone attack victims. You name it. You know, whenever I talk about this, I still have flashbacks.'”
December: “You are the victim of a con — one so pernicious that you’ve likely tuned it out despite the fact it’s part of almost every part of your life. It hurts everybody you know in different ways, and it hurts people more based on their socioeconomic status. It pokes and prods and twists millions of little parts of your life, and it’s everywhere, so you have to ignore it, because complaining about it feels futile, like complaining about the weather.” (Ed Zitron channels the anger for all of us.)
“a not so small guide on how to use my “yuu’s AI Warner” and “yuu’s AI Hider” skins on ArchiveOfOurOwn so you can avoid anything related to generative AI.”
And from this year:
“So [photographer Matthew Raifman] put [a seagull photo] into Adobe Lightroom, marked the areas to fix with generative autofill … and Adobe’s Firefly image model replaced one area with an image of a bitcoin?! […] [Jaron Schneider] attempted to remove a person from a photo of an amphitheater. Firefly regenerated a new person — but this time with two heads.“
“FactFinderAI […] responds to random tweets by repeating some part of the original tweet and then adding a pro-Israeli sentiment. It works a bit like the polite disagreement bots on Bluesky. But instead of supporting pro-Israeli talking points, FactFinderAI began to undermine them.”
“New BBC research published today provides a warning around the use of AI assistants to answer questions about news […]
- 51% of all AI answers to questions about the news were judged to have significant issues of some form
- 19% of AI answers which cited BBC content introduced factual errors – incorrect factual statements, numbers and dates
- 13% of the quotes sourced from BBC articles were either altered or didn’t actually exist in that article.”
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I have switched to search engines that let me disable chatgpt-type answers. What a scam.
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Chrome and Safari won't let you disable the AI features completely. Neither will Bing.
I understand Edge will let you disable it but I have never used it.
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DDG Can't Disable all AI features either
(Anonymous) 2025-02-24 10:17 pm (UTC)(link)I use DuckDuckGo as well, but unfortunately, they pull from Bing, and are thus subject to the whims of Bing's link snippet system, which is now largely AI.
If you want to see this in action, do a search for a single-word, moderately unusual term; I noticed it with "nanoindentation". Here are some of the snippets I get on the first page when I try it:
If your eyes glazed over reading that, I don't blame you; the important thing is that they're all vague summaries without any specific distinguishing features (aside from maybe Bruker), and none of the snippets appear anywhere in the source code of the site. They're almost certainly all LLM-generated.
As a website owner, you can disable AI snippets on each individual page, but Bing will now make them by default. Working on another blog post about this...
Re: DDG Can't Disable all AI features either
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Man, we really need to talk about Yudkowsky's impact on, uh... the Internet. I think a lot of folks don't realize quite how bad it's gotten? But even as someone who just read HPMOR and never got involved in the rationalist thing, it's clear he went pretty far off the rails.
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