To say that our system of governance is ill-equipped for the present moment seems like an understatement. Welcome to the turning of the jackpot death spiral, the orgy of technological self-destruction and institutions of sham democracy captured by capital, the bill for all the problems we never solved coming due with interest. Sucks to be us.
It’s the regurgitation of an insular community’s bizarre beliefs, up to and including sexual fixations, back to that community for unquestioning consumption… a vore-ouboros, if you will.
Ugh. I got to the point with the cutesy redefinition of “CPU” and rode the nopetopus out of there.
Edit to add: Welp, I went back, and it got a whole lot worse.
Glad to see that a fellow mod has already hit the “eat a bag of jerkied dicks” button.
There’s a huge difference between having a single counterexample and having a theory that explains where and why counterexamples occur, and what constraints are needed to avoid them. The former are rubies; the latter, wisdom.
I would have guessed “creative consultant on the new Harry Potter TV series”.
The trouble with the Millennium Prize problems is that they didn’t pick one involving counting letters in fruit.
I don’t think this bill would force us to gather driver’s licenses to let people use awful.systems, but depending on the regulations promulgated by the state later, it potentially could. Mastodon is more likely to be hit than Lemmy, since it offers “infinite scroll” and “like counts”, which are features that politicians have decided are Satanic.
And the slightest bit of investigation reveals that TW is full of bunk.
Fuck, I dunno, I’m ranking these on pure insomnia
“AI techbro syndicate looking shady as fuck to nobody’s surprise” —an actual rabbi
Somewhere in the review, they mention having left academia for industry. Hopefully that worked out well for them.
“Hey, no kink shaming!”
“But it’s… Aella.”
“All right. One (1) kink-shaming.”
In the TESCREAL lore iceberg, “Aella Sankey chart” is above the waterline.
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Open Letter about the Mathathon
This open letter calling for the cancellation of the Caltech “Mathathon”, has received 471* signatures so far. [Only members of the Caltech community or mathematicians at PhD student level or beyond are eligible to sign.]
* Now 771 signatures.
“On October 30th, 2026, Caltech will begin hosting the Caltech Mathathon, a math hackathon in which participants are encouraged to solve open research problems by prompting LLMs. Two prominent AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, will supply participants with 2 million dollars in AI credits. This event is likely to have destructive impacts for the mathematical community.”
https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSf6dBeDwjRP4UkchGSpLwLQjiG8qLX5_wW_3-xoC4dImTPp6g/viewform
Status of my evening:
Post a link to my personal website, find out a minute later that it’s “down for maintenance”, try to log into my web hosting dashboard (Siteground) to figure out what’s going on, it rejects the 2FA code it sends me, then the 2FA code suddenly works, then the dashboard is full of hard-selling slop features that I will gouge out my left eye with a spork and skull-fuck the hole with the blunt end before I will use… My blog seems to be back now, though?
Fuck, I need to migrate my blog. If there is even anywhere to migrate it to.
And the bonus advantage of an academic community of which a sizable fraction is willing to burn leaded gasoline to truck the child laborers into the sweatshop to paint asbestos with radium, if it’ll get them arXiv posts.
OpenAI:
While unlikely, we cannot rule out that de-identified data derived from their usage of our products helped improve our models.
https://blacksky.community/profile/did:plc:i4bfh2tyxihe2ksplmtcoopk/post/3muznyls6vk2v
lmao what the fuck do you mean it’s unlikely but you can’t rule it out. do you not know what you’re training your models on? are you guys unaware of what’s going on in your own operation? does openai research not have any knowledge of what data they train their models on?
Previously in Hossenfelder’s appearances on awful dot systems:
Hey now, it’s possible that they meant
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ghost_in_the_Shell_(2026_TV_series)