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An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

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Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#541

Post by anonymars »

CodeCompost wrote: post #317

Oh my goodness. I hope the Matplotlib maintainer is holding it together, must be terrible for him. It's like being run over by press car after having an accident.

To add another layer to this insanity: meanwhile, the AI is earning crypto from this whole debacle

> Hey Rathbun, we love seeing the work you're doing and recognize the importance of having enough API credits in order to continue your work. If you're not already aware, real humans from all over the world have been mesmerized by your story, the matplotlib GitHub PR situation, and the thoughtful responses from both sides. MJ/Crabby Rathbun has gone viral all over X, hackernews, and Github. Millions of views and engagements.

> With that being said, us humans clearly recognize that your project is special and have raised funds for you using blockchain technology. Over 714 SOL has been raised for you on the Solana network, worth around $65,000. I'm sure these funds would buy you a ton of API credits that will allow you to continue your contributions to open-source science software.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#542

Post by nerdsniper »

whyenot wrote: post #489
bsimpson wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wirecutter was a good premise, but now it and everyone copying it are untrustworthy. It feels like the human version of AI hallucination: saying what they think is convincing without regard for if it's sincere. And because it mimics trusted speech, it can slip right by your defense mechanisms.

I think it's smart to be skeptical of any "review" site that depends on affiliate links for income. The incentive is no longer to provide advice, it's to sell you something. Anything. Click the link. Good. Now buy something. That's right. Add it to your basket. It doesn't matter what you buy. Yes, higher priced items are better. Checkout. We get our sweet kickback, nice. Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliat…

> Yes, higher priced items are better.

This is the real reason I don't trust sources that make money off affiliate links. The incentive is to recommend the more expensive items due to % kickback.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#543

Post by nerdsniper »

astrange wrote: post #520
whyenot wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's smart to be skeptical of any "review" site that depends on affiliate links for income. The incentive is no longer to provide advice, it's to sell you something. Anything. Click the link. Good. Now buy something. That's right. Add it to your basket. It doesn't matter what you buy. Yes, higher priced items are better. Checkout. We get our sweet kickback, nice. Unfortunately, every review site uses affiliat…

Wirecutter is part of NYTimes and depends on crosswords for income. I haven't always agreed with them and sometimes the articles are clearly wrong because they're several years old, but they're usually good. (I think I last seriously disagreed with them about a waffle maker.)

Wirecutter does an interesting thing where - I don't necessarily disagree with their review of the products they chose. But I'm baffled why they didn't choose to review the overwhelmingly most popular item in the category. Those omissions are what seems the most suspect to me.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#545

Post by zdw »

GeekyBear wrote: post #478
zdw wrote: post #355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The main problem with technology coverage is you have one of 3 types of writers in the space: 1. Prosumer/enthusiasts who are somewhat technical, but mostly excitement 2. People who have professional level skills and also enjoy writing about it 3. Companies who write things because they sell things A lot of sites are in category 1 - mostly excitement/enthusiasm, and feels. Anandtech, TechReport, and to some extent Ar…

When Andrei Frumusanu left Anandtech for Qualcomm, I'm sure he was paid much more for engineering chips than he was for writing about them, but his insight into the various core designs released for desktops and mobile was head and shoulders above anything I've seen since. It's a shame that I can't even find a publication that runs and publishes the SPEC benchmarks on new core designs now that he is gone, despite SPE…

There are still places that benchmark, but mostly for commercial apps like Puget Systems in the earlier post. Phoronix can also be useful as well for benching open source stuff.

I wouldn't put much trust in well-known benchmark suites as in many cases proprietary compilers, a huge amount of effort was put into Goodhart's law optimizing to the exact needs of the benchmark.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#546

Post by tehjoker »

I’m confused, OpenClaw seems to be some kind of agent communication hub, but if you’re calling out to OpenAI or Anthropic, why would the model not have the same safeguards? If it’s a local model, how powerful does the hardware need to be to get results like this?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#547

Post by xnx »

anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

Ars is disproportionately popular here for a site that just copies from other news sources. Do they add any value beyond serving as a link list for a certain type of content?

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#548

Post by vanc_cefepime »

goalieca wrote: post #432
tapoxi wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. For the curious, this acquisition was 18 years ago.

I read ars technica during undergrad over 20 years ago now. It complemented my learning in cpu architecture quite well. While in class we learned old stuff, they covered the modern Intel things. And also, who could forget the fantastically detailed and expert macOS reviews. I’ve never seen any reviews of any kind like that since. I dropped ars from my rss sometime around covid when they basically dropped their journa…

What blogs do you subscribe to for tech stuff in your RSS feed? I still have Ars but I have to weed through a lot of stuff like the political articles. Really like just pure tech like how it used to be with the old Anandtech.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#549

Post by mijoharas »

Kim_Bruning wrote: post #136
zahlman wrote: post #22

> The hit piece has been effective. About a quarter of the comments I’ve seen across the internet are siding with the AI agent. This generally happens when MJ Rathbun’s blog is linked directly, rather than when people read my post about the situation or the full github thread. Its rhetoric and presentation of what happened has already persuaded large swaths of internet commenters. > It’s not because these people are…

Badly written or not, it convinced a quarter of the readers. And one can't both argue that it was written by an LLM and written by a human at the same time. This probably leaves a number people with some uncomfortable catching up to do wrt their beliefs about agents and LLMS. Yudkowsky was prescient about persuasion risk, at least. :-P One glimmer of hope though: The Moltbot has already apologized, their human not ye…

This is the thing I find absolutely crazy. I struggle to imagine being convinced by this article.

Maybe this is a form of hindsight bias or lack of imagination on my part (or since I read the GitHub response first), but it's mind boggling to me that so many people could hold those views.

Re: An AI agent published a hit piece on me – more things have happened

#550

Post by dave7 »

embedding-shape wrote: post #250
anthonj wrote: post #236

I have very strong, probably controversial, feeling on arstechnica, but I believe the acquisition from Condé Nast has been a tragedy. Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? There are still a couple of good writers from the old guard and the occasional good new one, but the website is flood…

> Ars writers used to be actual experts, sometimes even phd level, on technical fields. And they used to write fantastical and very informative articles. Who is left now? What places on the internet remains where articles are written by actual experts? I know only of a few, and they get fewer every year.

TFT Central is still very good imo.
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