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Friday Fun Thread for May 24, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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"Can cockroaches live in your penis?"

Google AI: Yes! It's totally normal too.

Is there some esoteric force sabotaging Google's AI projects?

First there was the black Vikings, now there are random silly screenshots from their search AI. I suspect much is inspect element related but the meme has been bouncing around. There's a thread here: https://x.com/JeremiahDJohns/status/1794543007129387208

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/cringe-worth-google-ai-overviews

I've been using Brave which has had a similar feature for some time. Brave's AI is generally useful and right 75% of the time, though you can never quite be sure. When it is wrong, it's never 'yes, doctors recommend you to smoke cigarettes while pregnant' tier wrong. I don't ask many questions that could be disturbingly wrong. Those who use google, are the silly results plausible, cherrypicked, invented? Is Microsoft using GPT-5 bots to sabotage the reputation of their competitors?

This is completely unfounded, but I suspect internal passive sabotage, by Google engineers who don't like the dominant internal politics, but who don't feel safe saying anything about it. Not precisely "quiet quitting", but more like a subtle "Amelia Bedelia rebellion", where they do what is required, but their actual goal is to make the people running the place look like fools.

Quiet quitting/just not giving a shit is imo much more common & relevant. If you make your boss look like a fool, it is trivial for him to make it fall back on you. But if everyone tries to do slightly less than everyone else, bc doing more is plainly not rewarded, then you enter a race to the bottom that deteriorates everything.