Someone Let This AI Read Marx and Now It Hates Imperialism
Also, my friend hacked Australia's 6th most hated politician
The tweets
My friend hacked the former Prime Minister of Australia
I really can’t do the article justice in this newsletter. Please check it out here.
Basically, by just looking at a photo on Instagram and using inspect element, one of my friends managed to get the personal phone number of Tony Abbott, Australia’s ex-PM. For those who don’t know, Australia’s Prime Minister is chosen every few months by figuring out who the most racist person in Australia currently is and putting them in the Parliament House. Abbott in particular is also known for calling climate change science “hocus pocus”.
Against my advice, instead of just selling the phone number on the dark web, Alex decided to spend 6 months trying to alert the government of the issue. It ended up with Tony Abbott himself calling Alex and asking if there’s a book he can read to learn about “the IT”. Unfortunately Alex didn’t use the opportunity to recommend the ex-PM any children’s science books, which I’ll never let them live down.
Also, an Australian news site wrote an article on Alex where they called them a “hacker” in quotation marks. Fucking owned.
Someone let this AI read Marx and now it hates imperialism
This is from March, but it’s new to me, so whatever.
Someone had a GPT-2 AI read books by Marx, Lenin, and other revolutionary writers and it changed its opinions on basically everything. Here’s an example of one of its tweets:
The only issue is that the AI keeps talking about having a proletariat party, so I think it might be a Trot. The author says they trained it on some Kropotkin books too, but clearly not enough. Please let this poor thing read Conquest of Bread so it can start coming to my anarchist reading group.
I’m also wondering how much Ayn Rand and von Mises you’d have to train a GPT-2 on for it to start asking for bitcoin donations before it runs.
The CEO of a startup that sold fraud prevention software is now facing fraud charges
Not much to say about this one. I just think it’s funny. Apparently the guy is accused of scamming money out of his investors, but isn’t that what every startup CEO does? Not sure why they’re only arresting this one.
What’s stopping you from coding like this?
I recently came across some posts on my timeline.
Now, I’m not new to this. I know that tech twitter is only ever funny if they’re bullying someone. 10 times out of x, whenever there's an exploitable meme format going around it's because someone broke the number one rule of Twitter. So I spent a while trying to find whose bad take this was satirizing and after 20 minutes of riffling through shitposts I finally found this.
A little anticlimactic, but alright. Personally, the thing that’s stopping me is that I’ve really got better things to do. Like posting online, and playing Caves of Qud.
The bots have won
I don’t go on Facebook much. It’s not a good place. There is, however, this one page called “Programming Memes for Object-oriented Teens” that sometimes has good content. Today I found this.
As much as I hate the ops ecosystem sometimes, the fact that this could happen is truly a marvel of human engineering. If we had to prepare for humanity’s impending demise and could save only one image to document our technological feats for future races to find, I propose that this be it.
There’s a good comment, too.
Some content
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Any typos in the above post are caused by bit flips and are not my fault.