“The Torment Nexus definitely has positive uses. I personally use it frequently for looking up song lyrics and tracking my children’s medication doses. I find it helpful.”

The malware stole a lot of people’s login keys and, apparently, their crypto wallets.

Seinfeld "Shame".gif

Not everything that Yud writes feels like it should be read in the voice of Augustus St. Cloud, but a lot of it sure does.

“When the 8-year-old and I have an argument, it actually works really well to mutually agree on an account of events… and then take cocaine together.”

new Vagina Museum

sex weirdo (derogatory)

Look what they did to Notepad. Shut the fuck up. This is Notepad. You are not welcome here. Oh yeah “Let me use Copilot for Notepad”. “I’m going to sign into my account for Notepad”. What the fuck are you talking about. It’s Notepad.

I should never have to open the settings in Notepad. Reason being: it’s Notepad. God fuckin damn I hate the computer.

https://bsky.app/profile/iainnd.bsky.social/post/3lxdvmkua4227

Apart from the Hellraiser fanfiction.

“I love the Power Glove, it’s just so deeply and seamlessly integrated into Excel!”

Thought 1: This is the kind of incident that makes politicians vote for a law named after a dead kid. It behooves us to think of what kind of legislation could actually address the problem without becoming a clusterfuck that worsens everyone’s life, including children’s. cough #OnlineSafetyAct cough

Thought 2: Hey, all you guys using LLMs to replace opinion surveys or do “research” on social interactions because it’s cheaper than gathering real data… How many human beings talk like the suicide-encouragement bot here?

Thought 3: Oh, remember when OpenAI paid $10 million to buy off the American Federation of Teachers? Because Pepperidge Farm still has that browser tab open. Every school administrator who breathes a word about bringing “AI” into the classroom deserves to get lit up by parents asking why they are embracing suicide tech.

That story mentions Carl Sagan but omits the detail that Peter the dolphin propositioned him. (It’s in the William Poundstone biography, IIRC.)

Imagr description: Steven Pinker, Lawrence Krauss and Jeffrey Epstein, posted as per tradition when either of the latter two are mentioned

This exploit was discovered by two security guys at the Brave web browser.

Heartbreaking.jpg

“Which Scott?”

“Any of them.”

James Gleick on “The Lie of AI”:

https://around.com/the-lie-of-ai/

Nothing new for regulars here, I suspect, but it might be useful to have in one’s pocket.

From the comments:

Finally, I dislike the arrogant, brash, confident, tone of many posts on LessWrong.

Hmm, OK. Where might this be going?

Plausibly, I think a lot of this is inherited from Eliezer, who is used to communicating complex ideas to people less intelligent and/or rational than he is. This is not the experience of a typical poster on LessWrong, and I think it’s maladaptive for people to use Eliezer’s style and epistemic confidence in their own writings and thinking.

From Gwern’s “solution”:

Ophelia goes mad and forgets being in love with Hamlet

Dafuq?

One of the most striking aspects of the Dracula interpretation of SD is that SD turns out to be alluding to it indirectly, by making parallel allusions—the opening chapters of Dracula allude to the same parts of Hamlet that SD does! This clinches the case for SD-as-Dracula, as this is too extraordinary a coincidence to be accidental.

Yes, two different stories both alluding to the most quoted work in English goddamn literature can’t be a coincidence. It’s not like the line “there are more things in Heaven and Earth…” has been repeated so often that even Wolfe’s narrator calls it “hackneyed”… Hold on, I’m getting a message, just let me press my finger to my imaginary earpiece…

I would say myself that Wolfe’s alluding to a line rather than quoting it exactly serves to call up the whole feel of Hamlet, rather than a single moment. It evokes the Gothic wrongness, the inner turmoil paired with outer tumolt, the appearances that sometimes belie reality and sometimes lead it. You could take this as suggesting that Susie D. is the Devil in a pleasing shape. Or, with all the Proustian business, and the lengthy excursus about historical artifacts hanging on as though the past lies thick in the present and refuses to lift… Perhaps the secondary Hamlet allusion behind the obvious one is “the time is out of joint”. Maybe Suzanne is a notional being, an idea tenuously made manifest, a collective imaginary friend or dream-creature leaking out into our reality. She looks the same from one generation to the next, because the dream of the girl next door stays the same. Perhaps the horror is that our reality is fragile, that these creations are always slipping in, and we only have a stable daylight world because we refuse to see them.

Also, the illustration sucks.

I hate it when a website demands that my password contain at least two sentient characters.

Does anyone else just … not have nostalgia for any time period? Like, middle school was shit, high school was shit, and then 9/11 happened. Where in the span of my life am I supposed to fit in a motherfucking golden glow?

I have fond memories of individual bits of media, but the emotions there are wrapped up with the time period when I discovered them, or revisited them, which could have been years or decades after they first came out.

And if we were talking about “the underlying theory of machine learning”, you might have a point.