Paul Tenny

Paul Tenny

@mediapundit.net

Software dev, video editor, streamer, lazy. πŸ’› imdb.com/name/nm6749556/ πŸ’œ twitch.tv/pwn20 ❀️‍ I'm not crazy, I'm just a little unwell.

385 followers149 following3.5K posts

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"Time is not what a clock measures in general β€” time is the length of a path through spacetime." You have no idea what just happened inside my brain when I read that. And neither do I.

Hrm. Something has been logging into my credit union bank account multiple times for day for an unknown length of time from AWS. It never triggers 2FA, the IP changes every time, and as far as I can tell nothing is actually happening from it.

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I also flipped on 2FA for all logins which I thought was already on. Sadly it's SMS even though this bank just had its phone app and website redesigned from the ground up like a month ago.

I wonder if the same firm did the website that did the app, because they stupidly limited the app initially to Android 14+ which made the app unavailable to like ~%50 of all handsets. They addressed that in a panic. Though I could easily see bank suits demanding something dumb like that.

Hrm. Something has been logging into my credit union bank account multiple times for day for an unknown length of time from AWS. It never triggers 2FA, the IP changes every time, and as far as I can tell nothing is actually happening from it.

I want to rule out credential compromise because even my *username* is a random string, but I changed the password anyway. Time to see what breaks!

Paul Tenny reposted

In July, an incensed Elon Musk vowed that Grok Imagine would produce a "full-length" and "historically accurate" adaptation of Homer's Odyssey to put Christopher Nolan's woke version to shame. Three months later, we got seven minutes of slop that Grok itself admits is not historically accurate.

wired.comGrok Says Its AI-Generated Version of β€˜The Odyssey’ Is β€˜Not Historically Accurate’Months after Elon Musk declared that the xAI model would outclass Christopher Nolan’s mythological epic, the bot itself admitted defeat.

Okay I'm poor and watching the Elizabeth Holmes movie from a cam recording and the person recording it is audibly crunching and eating something and it's very audible. YOU BASTARD WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT.

Tell me you didn't read the story without telling me you didn't read the story. These jobs aren't being replaced by AI, they are being cut to free up spending for AI. That's not the same thing and if you thought it was then you don't understand the issue at all and should stop talking about it.

And these are buyout offers on top of that, nobody is being fired. None of these people have to leave if they don't want to. πŸ€¦πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ

So my understanding of the huge losses on Anthropic's sheet is that they are basically investor money skyrocketing in value that Anthropic will owe them in stock. Is that right? This isn't debt, it's a whole bunch of rich investment scumbags about to get even richer?

ALL OF THIS could be solved by: 1. Picking up a phone to ensure you're dealing with the real company. 2. Putting a guard in the cab with the driver. If you want to put $10m worth of cargo into a de facto DoorDash truck, you deserve what you get.

Paul Tenny reposted

Writers Guild speaks out about tech platforms squashing the @alexgibneyfilm doc about Elon Musk: β€œA small handful of billionaires now own virtually every major media company, news outlet, social media platform and are demonstrating how this unchecked concentration threatens democratic discourse.”

Paul Tenny reposted

I live in a rural town and, like, I don't know how to tell you this, but the girls play on the boys team and vice versa all the time because otherwise we don't have enough players for a game and it's literally always fine so stop being weirdos about kids sports and just let trans kids play.

I fail to see what's funny? Mainstream polls had Hillary Clinton up in 2016 right up to election day. They were less accurate predictors than this, which had Lula up the vast majority of the year and that was the eventual outcome.

Josh Marshall@joshtpm.bsky.social

lol reminder that betting markets are extremely accurate measures of conventional wisdom

Just because you set Kalshi to display things as percentages doesn't magically convert them into actual predictors of things. The default view displays these as shares with a value between 1 cent and 99 cents representing what ppl think they are worth.

The changes in the graph represent people changing their mind about which outcome is more likely, and buying/selling shares to reflect that. If there's ANYTHING to be learned here it's that you shouldn't follow polls religiously. Not in 2016 and not in 2026.

I got curious how much electricity I'm using doing a bunch of image gen/edit locally so I had Claude write a small Perl script to query GPU power usage every half second and keep track of it. Neat.

I unfriended somebody on Facebook that posts conservative stuff regularly, whatever, but the thing that finally made me delete him was favorably reposting Asmongold content. Being conservative and favoring conservative policies is fine, but that's being a piece of shit person. No thanks.

If someone watches Asmon regularly or even just enough to fully understand what he's about and what he says, and they're fine with reposting him, then they're a bad person. Politics don't figure into that. They're a scumbag and I don't them anywhere near me.

A probably unpopular thought: even if an LLM can faithfully reproduce a single page of a copyrighted novel with 100% accuracy, it's fair use due to how little of the work is being reproduced. One page of a 334 page book is equivalent to reproducing 0.6 seconds of a song.

Paul Tenny reposted

Me, to Claude Code: β€œI have a friend coming over. Modify Pac-Man to support a horizontal display with two player co-op, where player 2 is Ms. Pac-Man. Make one button be a speed boost. My Mistercade cabinet is at 192.168.1.102” Claude, two hours later: β€œThe game is loaded up and ready to play”

I use LLMs for coding near constantly, in 30 seconds they give me something that'd take half an hour to write myself. In 5 minutes they give me something that would have taken a full weekend (if not longer) to make. They make software development WILDLY more efficient.

not only does this report confirm morbidly wealthy shitbags are massively inflating AI firms' value/import but it also explodes the lie that "AI makes us more efficient"

Here's how much money I'd have had to spend on each frontier image gen/edit to pay for all the playtime I've accrued just using Qwen Image 2.1/Edit Turbo locally: Nano Banana 2: $133.51 Nano Banana Pro: $222.27 GPT Image 2: $96.85 Grok Imagine (quality): $99.13 Grok Imagine (standard): $35.73

That's 10 days of generations/edits, 1624 in total. Granted.. that's a ton. But still, the fact I've been able to do all of it only for the cost of electricity my GPU uses while getting nearly Nano Banana-level quality work is crazy.

The ability of 2.1 to take a face and change perspective on it while mostly retaining facial details using just a single reference image is impressive. Getting it to rotate a face to a specific perspective *on purpose via prompt* is at times difficult to impossible, tho.

I use LLM stuff every single day and and generally very pro-AI, but I have a counter offer: how about you just pay developers up to $50k to... make games themselves? Which they love doing? And are really good at?

Culture Crave 🍿@culturecrave.co

Epic Games is offering developers up to $50K to create AI-generated video games β€’ Developers are encouraged to use AI to generate code, artwork, audio and dialogue β€’ Participants can use unlimited AI agents to help develop their games

Appros of nothing, a real WTF moment for me was back during the bad days of COVID and I turned on Coast to Coast AM and the guest was talking about how hydroxychloroquine was a treatment that the government didn't want you to have. Then I turned on Fox News and they were saying the same thing.

Then C2C moved on to a segment about whether or not vampires who die become ghosts that will haunt you. And somehow Fox News kept marching on and never paid a price for being likely getting people killed.

If we fired every 5th Circuit judge and replaced them with AI, would things get worse, ... or would they get better?

Chris Geidner@chrisgeidner.bsky.social

BREAKING: Fifth Circuit, on a 10-7 vote, says no bond hearing for detained immigrants pending removal proceedings, no matter how long they're detained β€” reversing panel decision and district courts. www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub...

I know people fret about stuff like this but I think it's great. If these geedy fucksticks won't pay their taxes, the second best thing they can do is dump massive amounts of money into the economy to stimulate growth, cause all that advertising money flows from campaigns/PACs into businesses.

Half a billion in economic stimulus and Elon Musk paid for it rather than tax payers. Works for me. Keep it up you stupid fuck. Spend it all. Let's go.

Love AOC but this is dumb and I'm disappointed in her.

Aaron Rupar@atrupar.com

AOC: "As AI begins to encroach in our society, their goal is to take your cognition away from you. AI's goal is to take your thoughts away from you, your ability to think away from you, so that you become dependent on a machine ... reading books is active resistance"

I don't suppose anybody has a copy of "flux-2-klein-base-9b-fp8.safetensors" they can send me? Hugging face seems completely dead this evening.

Or we could just like.. I don't know.. work with and cooperate with China and Chinese companies so that all of us benefit. πŸ€·πŸ»β€β™‚οΈ

The Washington Post@washingtonpost.com

Exclusive: The Pentagon is looking to build a more robust deep-cover spying program to conduct economic warfare against China and other U.S. competitors, according to people familiar with the initiative.

Paul Tenny reposted

my overseas midterm ballot got tallied today!! wishing my american pals a good outcome this election. if you haven't registered yet, please please please do it now. there's too much at stake to ignore this election. vote.org

Paul Tenny reposted

Writing tie-ins is *a real fucking skill* and anyone who sneers at the people who do it can go piss up a rope. You think it's easy to write an entire novel to very specific order on an almost impossibly tight deadline? And have it be satisfying to read? Motherfucker, *you* try it. See how you do.

Kate Tell-Tale Heartfield@kateheartfield.com

There is a doofus currently arguing here that no "creative talent" would choose to write tie-ins, and since I just did a panel this weekend on why creative talents choose to write IP, here are a few reasons. Non-financial reasons, for fun and because frankly it usually doesn't pay that well.

I'm blown away by what Qwen Image 2.1 and Image Edit Turbo can do. At times I'd put it on par with Nano Banana. And it runs on my RTX 3060 TI (8GB). It does soak like 23GB of system RAM because the VRAM is so small. But it will render 2000x2000 imgs in ~2.3 minutes. Lower res in 40-60 seconds.

I made/edited ~600 images in four days for free, would have cost $20-$80 from frontier lab products. And being fully local it was censorship-free. My only real complaint is I can't find any LORAs for Qwen 2.1 so it can't be augmented. That's a bummer.

Anybody wanna donate a 16GB GPU to a poor jobless LLM junkie nerd? Or perhaps 2x16GB DDR3 sticks? (Yes I said DDR3).