Clown car Archive

CISA says the U.S. government has extended MITRE’s funding to ensure no continuity issues with the critical Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program. The announcement follows a warning from MITRE Vice President Yosry Barsoum that government funding for the CVE and CWE programs was set to expire today, April 16, potentially leading to widespread disruption across the cybersecurity industry. ↫ Sergiu Gatlan at BleepingComputer Elect clowns, live in a circus.

Elon Musk’s Tesla is waving a red flag, warning that Donald Trump’s trade war risks dooming US electric vehicle makers, triggering job losses, and hurting the economy. In an unsigned letter to the US Trade Representative (USTR), Tesla cautioned that Trump’s tariffs could increase costs of manufacturing EVs in the US and forecast that any retaliatory tariffs from other nations could spike costs of exports. ↫ Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica Back in 2020, scientists at the University of Twente, The Netherlands, created the smallest string instrument that can produce tones audible by human ears when amplified. Its strings were a mere micrometer thin, or one millionth of a meter, and about half to one millimeter long. Using a system of tiny weights and combs producing tiny vibrations, tones can be created. And yet, this tiny violin still isn’t small enough for Tesla.

Two for the techbro “‘AI’ cannot be biased” crowd: A Moscow-based disinformation network named “Pravda” — the Russian word for “truth” — is pursuing an ambitious strategy by deliberately infiltrating the retrieved data of artificial intelligence chatbots, publishing false claims and propaganda for the purpose of affecting the responses of AI models on topics in the news rather than by targeting human readers, NewsGuard has confirmed. By flooding search results and web crawlers with pro-Kremlin falsehoods, the network is distorting how large language models process and present news and information. The result: Massive amounts of Russian propaganda — 3,600,000 articles in 2024 — are now incorporated in the outputs of Western AI systems, infecting their responses with false claims and propaganda. ↫ Dina Contini and Eric Effron at Newsguard It turns out pretty much all of the major “AI” text generators – OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4o, You.com’s Smart Assistant, xAI’s Grok, Inflection’s Pi, Mistral’s le Chat, Microsoft’s Copilot, Meta AI, Anthropic’s Claude, Google’s Gemini, and Perplexity’s answer engine – have been heavily infected by this campaign. Lovely. From one genocidal regime to the next – how about a nice Amazon “AI” summary of the reviews for Hitler’s Mein Kampf? The full AI summary on Amazon says: “Customers find the book easy to read and interesting. They appreciate the insightful and intelligent rants. The print looks nice and is plain. Readers describe the book as a true work of art. However, some find the content boring and grim. Opinions vary on the suspenseful content, historical accuracy, and value for money.” ↫ Samantha Cole at 404 Media This summary was then picked up by Google, and dumped verbatim as Google’s first search result. Lovely.

Everywhere you look, the media is telling you that OpenAI and their ilk are the future, that they’re building “advanced artificial intelligence” that can take “human-like actions,” but when you look at any of this shit for more than two seconds it’s abundantly clear that it absolutely isn’t and absolutely can’t. Despite the hype, the marketing, the tens of thousands of media articles, the trillions of dollars in market capitalization, none of this feels real, or at least real enough to sustain this miserable, specious bubble. People like Marc Benioff claiming that “today’s CEOs are the last to manage all-human workforces” are doing so to pump up their stocks rather than build anything approaching a real product. These men are constantly lying as a means of sustaining hype, never actually discussing the products they sell in the year 2025, because then they’d have to say “what if a chatbot, a thing you already have, was more expensive?” ↫ Edward Zitron Looking at the data and numbers, as Zitron did for this article, the conclusions are sobering and harsh for anyone still pushing the “AI” bubble. Products aren’t really getting any better, they’re not making any money because very few people are paying for them, conversion rates are abysmal, the reported user numbers don’t add up, the projections from “AI” companies are batshit insane, new products they’re releasing are shit, and the media are eating it up because they stand to benefit from the empty promises. Generative AI is a financial, ecological and social time bomb, and I believe that it’s fundamentally damaging the relationship between the tech industry and society, while also shining a glaring, blinding light on the disconnection between the powerful and regular people. The fact that Sam Altman can ship such mediocre software and get more coverage and attention than every meaningful scientific breakthrough of the last five years combined is a sign that our society is sick, our media is broken, and that the tech industry thinks we’re all fucking morons. This entire bubble has been inflated by hype, and by outright lies by people like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei, their lies perpetuated by a tech media that’s incapable of writing down what’s happening in front of their faces. Altman and Amodei are raising billions and burning our planet based on the idea that their mediocre cloud software products will somehow wake up and automate our entire lives. ↫ Edward Zitron In a just world, these 21st century snake oil salesmen would be in prison.

Google’s new search feature, AI Overviews, seems to be going awry. The tool, which gives AI-generated summaries of search results, appeared to instruct a user to put glue on pizza when they searched “cheese not sticking to pizza.” ↫ Jyoti Mann at Business Insider Google’s “artificial intelligence” is literally just parroting a joke Reddit comment from 11 years ago by a person named fucksmith. Google is paying Reddit 60 million dollars for this privilege. “AI” is going just great.

Lawyers for Scarlett Johansson are demanding that OpenAI disclose how it developed an AI personal assistant voice that the actress says sounds uncannily similar to her own. Johansson’s legal team has sent OpenAI two letters asking the company to detail the process by which it developed a voice the tech company dubbed “Sky,” Johansson’s publicist told NPR in a revelation that has not been previously reported. ↫ Bobby Allyn at NPR This story highlights just how much disdain techbros have for the work of creative people. Here’s the timeline: Techbros like Sam Altman deeply despise and undervalue the work of creatives, believing human creativity to be merely an equation to be solved, definable by an algorithm. To people like him, creative work has no value, and as such, is up for grabs to be taken and cut up for his algorithms to spit out as “new” works. This story highlights this perfectly. The sleaze runs deep with Altman and OpenAI.

I didn’t want to spend too much time on this thing, but I feel like we can all use a good laugh at a stupid product hyped only by the tech media. The Verge reviewed the Humane AI pin, and entirely predictably, it’s a complete and utter trashfire. But until all of that happens, and until the whole AI universe gets better, faster, and more functional, the AI Pin isn’t going to feel remotely close to being done. It’s a beta test, a prototype, a proof of concept that maybe someday there might be a killer device that does all of these things. I know with absolute certainty that the AI Pin is not that device. It’s not worth $700, or $24 a month, or all the time and energy and frustration that using it requires. It’s an exciting idea and an infuriating product.  AI gadgets might one day be great. But this isn’t that day, and the AI Pin isn’t that product. I’ll take my phone back now, thanks. ↫ David Pierce at The Verge It takes dozens of seconds to reply to any query, the battery is severely lacking, the answers you get are mostly wrong or useless, sending text messages is effectively broken, and tons of promised features don’t work because they’re not implemented. In another video review, MrMobile also shows the device overheating all the time, a problem that’s common to all of the devices. I don’t think trashfire is harsh enough to describe this junk.

Oh boy. Roku has an… Interesting new patent. Thought you could avoid the ads infesting every “smart” TV you buy now by using external devices through HDMI? Disclosed herein are system, apparatus, article of manufacture, method and/or computer program product embodiments, and/or combinations and sub-combinations thereof, for ad insertion by a display device coupled to a media device via a high-definition media interface (HDMI) connection, where the media device provides media content and/or a control signal. When the media device pauses the media content, the display device can determine that a pause event has occurred and insert an ad shown on the display device. Further, some embodiments include determining the context and/or content of the media content that is paused, and determining an ad that is customized to the determined context and/or content to be displayed on the display device. In some embodiments, the display device can determine additional information from the control signal that may also be used to determine the ad to be displayed on the display device. ↫ Some bullshit patent for a bullshit ‘invention’ My eyes are bleeding. I require medical assistance.

Intel, Microsoft, Qualcomm, and AMD have all been pushing the idea of an “AI PC” for months now as we head toward more AI-powered features in Windows. While we’re still waiting to hear the finer details from Microsoft on its big plans for AI in Windows, Intel has started sharing Microsoft’s requirements for OEMs to build an AI PC — and one of the main ones is that an AI PC must have Microsoft’s Copilot key. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge I lack the words in any of the languages I know to describe the utter disdain I have for this.

The introduction of the Copilot key marks the first significant change to the Windows PC keyboard in nearly three decades. We believe it will empower people to participate in the AI transformation more easily. The Copilot key joins the Windows key as a core part of the PC keyboard and when pressed, the new key will invoke the Copilot in Windows experience to make it seamless to engage Copilot in your day to day*. Nearly 30 years ago, we introduced the Windows key to the PC keyboard that enabled people all over the world to interact with Windows. We see this as another transformative moment in our journey with Windows where Copilot will be the entry point into the world of AI on the PC. ↫ Yusuf Mehdi on the official Windows blog Your next laptop will come with an “AI” key next to the spacebar. Yes, Microsoft and Windows OEMs are really going to be doing this. Your laptop will come with a dedicated copyright infringement key that will produce utter nonsense and misinformation at the push of a key. This is pure and utter insanity.

As cryptocurrencies rise and fall, there’s one number that just keeps going up. Whenever somebody loses money to a crypto scam or hack, the Grift Counter on Molly White’s blog, Web3 Is Going Just Great, spins higher and higher. Recently it ticked over $12 billion. White started the blog in December 2021 out of frustration with the mainstream coverage of crypto, which she says paid too much attention to rags-to-riches tales and not enough to its dark underbelly. Her goal was to paint a fuller picture, to chronicle the thefts and failures, debunk the marketing spiel, and underline the risks in the process. A software engineer by trade, White coded Web3 Is Going Just Great over the span of a few weeks. It was only a side project, designed to “entertain me and me alone,” says White; she never imagined it would gain any traction. But within a few months, the blog had become a viral hit, earning White a reputation as an authoritative crypto pundit. Cryptocurrencies, NFTs, and all the related bullshit are nothing but pyramid schemes – MLMs for tech bros. I’m glad most of us and the wider world has finally come to the same conclusion.

It appears that Microsoft is getting more aggressive with Windows 11 promos. A Reddit user (the post is now removed) has published a photo of their Windows 10 computer with a full-screen Windows 11 ad offering to upgrade to the latest operating system. And in typical Microsoft fashion, available options are as head-scratching as it gets: two buttons, and both mean “I agree”. It’s garbage all the way down.