@bmcnett
Radical Mycologist and Gnome Appreciator on full disability. "Serius profeshunal wirtor™" of EXTREMELY short fiction. SFWA member. Pronouns: he/him. Rather more than a bit ace. Will likely not notice you flirting with me.
They fed the LMMs on Reddit explicitly. AI Is not “hallucinating” but parroting the training data.
4chan exists. No consideration was given to sanitizing the training data from malicious behaviors.
It bothers me that a singularity has become the techbro “utopia” when singularities are, mathematically, an indicator that a theorem has exceeded its useful bounds, and not a highly modified premillennial dispensationalist “Book of Revelations” interpretation, with Eliezer Yudkowsky as its prophet.
I am getting rather exhausted telling people Harlan Ellison’s “I Have  No Mouth and I Must Scream” is not a business map for your NVIDIA-driven AI datacenter.
Highly-modified Christian endtimes eschatology is fucking DANGEROUS. In physics and mathematics singularities are things we AVOID.
But clearly there’s some billionaire techbros who read it, and are totally dedicated to torment nexusing the heck out of the scenario. “Honest! I thought your dystopian nightmare cautionary tale where AI runs everything was a BLUEPRINT, Mr Stross!”
The time paradoxes make for cool storytelling. So we set aside realistic physics in favor of singing a rousing chorus of “I’m My Own Grandpa.” Starships are powered by handwavium. Warp drive works by having Picard say “Engage.”
AI Book Club Scammers Greatest Hits, @cheriepriest.com edition:
Elsewhere I may have complained about the declining quality of modern scammers. It's been 14 years since I stopped fighting these folks professionally.
KIds these days are really phoning it in.
"Negging" always reminds me of this XKCD comic:
"OOH, try insulting my hair!"
I feel the need to complain about the poor quality of modern scammers now. Back in my day when I was fighting scams professionally...
Some sort of bizarre LLM-generated literary "negging?"
It's utterly stupid for the orange stain on humanity to engage the US in a war with Iran, but Iran is fucking RECKLESS in attacking everyone in the region as a result.
I'm told France... FRANCE is now engaged in the fight, sending their nuclear aircraft carrier Charles de Gaulle to the middle-east.
Effie is pure genius.
Slurs coming out of thin air into chat! Keyboards typing out hateful messages while confused conservatives look on in utter dismay! "This is not who we are," they say.
But of course, this is the New York Times. We've come to expect it of them.
It's a thing Nazi apologists like to do. "These are people just like you and I!"
Supposedly the Nazi tattoo guy is okay because he used to be a Maine oysterman and he tended bar for a time?
Those things do not, in fact, mitigate that he's literally a Nazi.
This is the thread I've been waiting for since the release of "The Bride!" (and it's paired with Dan Simmons' passing).
So despite the massive bruise, and the need for the slightly less than "the good drugs," I'll take it.
However: I'd like to point out that this surgery is far better than what it replaced. As John Hopkins University notes: "This is much less invasive than a conventional radical retropubic prostatectomy, which involves an abdominal incision that extends from the belly button to the pubic bone."
After the surgery, my abdomen is one big bruise. I have a prescription for the slightly less than "the good drugs," but am having to top those off with ibuprofen and Tylenol.
And it kinda sucks when they all wear off at 4am, because it hurts so much I can't sit up in bed.
Ouch. Ouch. Ouch. Ouch.
WHAT DO WE WANT?
TIME TRAVEL!
WHEN DO WE WANT IT?
THAT'S NOT IMPORTANT!
Your boss trying to turn you into a reverse centaur is bad enough. Choosing to do it yourself is far worse.
doctorow.medium.com/https-plural...
If humans stop using their brains, it really doesn’t matter if the machines they hand control to are sentient. The result is identical if the machines are even the simplest automatons.
That LLMs will lead to a god-like AI isn’t a real problem. The real problem is that people will hand decision making and creative tasks over to LLMs (even if the machines don’t think), and cease to think for themselves.
Geneva Convention? What Geneva Convention?
“No stupid rules of engagement.” —Hegseth
"If you've read something you disagree with but don't understand well enough to rebut, and you ask an AI to generate a rebuttal for you, you still don't understand it well enough to rebut it."
"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool."
—Richard Feynman "Cargo Cult Science" 1974 Caltech commencement address.
Writing nonfiction. Today 1959 words on my recent surgery. Prostate cancer is common. We need to talk about it. We need to couch this talk in positive terms. Also, "🎶Surgical robot! Surgical robot! Surgical Robot! Surgical RO-bot!🎶", & the body horror of having your abdomen inflated like a balloon.
Story prompt: A high-fantasy sports league on ESPN.
Awake in the night as I said, due to an excess of daytime sleep, penning a screed I’ve deleted and a subsequent attempt to summarize my thoughts leading to said screed, also deleted… it’s not for 3am to be a time for deeply-considered thought. Really need to go watch mindless YouTube videos.
Lying awake at night because today I spent most of my day sleeping (thanks in part to the good drugs (general anesthesia FTW, but the extended four hour mid-morning to afternoon sleep… very disruptive.)) The slightly less than “the good drugs” are excellent pain management, but not a sleep aid.
On serious consideration, favoring 50% less warmongering as a nation, while still leaving the United States the world’s biggest warmongers, and refocusing that spending on a relatively puny UBI, while not replacing existing social programs… still makes me a radical leftist with unachievable goals.
While $500/month would be absolutely life-changing for the homeless, it’s still not enough to get them out of homelessness by itself. Do you think the homeless wouldn’t leap at the chance for that reliable but tiny income, and find ways to uae it? Establish a checking account? Do laundry? Buy food?
$500/month is “dont quit your day job money.” This is a point in its favor. It causes no one who is currently working to quit. It entices no working person to leave the workforce.
Employers aren’t going to panic about not being able hire people because of “don’t quit your day job money.”