Found the email I sent when I got accidentally added to the faculty listserv of an orthopedic surgery clinic and nobody would remove me so I sent this email to all faculty/staff/med students and they removed me almost immediately

Great chance to post my all-time favorite headline

Nick Pettigrew@nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 8mo ago

I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.

If you see this, post a vampire that isn't Dracula.

Karen Carpenter’s Halloween@kellylink.bsky.social · last wk.

If you see this, post a vampire that isn’t Dracula.

Is this my job now? BRB, going to go live in a hollow log with no connectivity somewhere in the redwoods, forever

Lot going on here www.azcentral.com/story/news/p...

They quoted me in this New Yorker piece about AI today. www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

started a new hobby project and before I'd written a line of code (generated scaffolding excepted) spent a good hour on an anxiety-driven tangent about FOSS+LLMs. nothing to show but a license (AGPL3.0+) and a REUSE.toml file. for a private repo. with, as yet, no code. This is not a good timeline.

“The first Sauron administration got a lot done & - Isildur’s Bane. That was what they called it remember. It wasn’t so much that Sauron was the Lord of the Ring. Men were weak, as even establishment liberals like Elrod admitted So you couldn’t blame Sauron who was very much an outsider politician …

John Holbo@jholbo.bsky.social · 2w ago

Saruman on Sauron: “There are a lot of things I got wrong... was crazier than I thought. It was more dangerous than I thought.” “You wish he’d ensnared more competent Nazgûl.” “administration is… staffed by not very smart but very loyal orcs. One ring to rule them all maybe overcorrected for …”

Ironically one thing that helps you understand rationalism is ignoring that word rational in the title. I don’t mean that as like a cute little dig, I mean it in the same way you have to ignore the “science” in “scientology” to actually get a complete understanding.

spooky tail latency@bluespacecanary.bsky.social · 2w ago

I honestly think people overcomplicate explanations of Rationalism. All you really need is: they took Bayesian statistics, a tool for empirical reasoning, and built an anti-empiricist, anti-materialist eschatological theology out of it by posting too much about it on their favorite message board

Does this feel to anyone else like somebody from @greatdismal.bsky.social's jackpot future is fucking with our timeline? "AI is already year over year the biggest infrastructure build in American history… the entire economy is now dominated by AI spending." talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/the-a...

We can’t allow this man to get within striking distance of a viable presidential candidacy.

Mother Jones@motherjones.com · 3w ago

Newsom has vetoed a bill that would have prohibited future governors from handing over abortion providers, helpers, and patients to red states for criminal prosecution. The bill also barred extraditions involving transgender care.

"If you start… from the perspective that AI does not inevitably replace humans in the dissemination and discovery of knowledge… then you begin to start asking questions that are systematically obscured by Machine God Thought." www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go...

Henry Farrell@himself.bsky.social · 3w ago

www.programmablemutter.com/p/machine-go... what it says on the package

I was trying to write about this yesterday because I feel like a clear and neutral explanation for normies about why frontier labs are Like This would be really useful but I just couldn’t bring myself to explain it because it’s so fucking TIRESOME.

Max Read@maxread.info · 4w ago

i don't like that i feel like we're all getting dragged against our will into an all-media all-the-time LessWrong thread, an insanely annoying and disorienting experience that most people do not have sufficient experience or mental preparations to deal with

One of the venues that refused to allow Macklemore to perform is Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, which is run by Hillsborough county. They did allow Kanye to perform even after he released a song called "Heil Hitler" and sold swastika merch. In case you thought this was about antisemitism.

The title of this YouTube video cracks me up. I dunno. Maybe it's because Cory has enough of his own stuff to do? Also, I'm not sure he'd want to.

Anthropic's models run on terabytes of VRAM. It's not going to "just copy itself to other computers."

but this is the thing; if I showed up saying "I'm interested in writing programs that reproduce executable code, based on more or less stochastic input" I think people would say "could you try doing that on a computer that isn't connected to the internet until you're sure you know what you're doing"

I've spent my entire career reporting on the War on Terror. Many this week have asked me for my extended thoughts on the 25th anniversary of 9/11. Here they are.

Today We Must Finally Remember What The 9/11 Commemorations Ignore

Righteous victimhood fueled the War on Terror. 25 years later, we also have to remember all of those slain under its banner

forever-wars.com

As always, The Onion got it right faster and better than anyone in the mainstream media. theonion.com/we-must-reta...

We Must Retaliate With Blind Rage vs. We Must Retaliate With Measured, Focused Rage

On Sept.11, 2001, America was hit by an unprecedented attack on its shores. The devastation and loss of life is incalculable. It is clear to me, as it should be to all Americans, what our nation must ...

theonion.com

There are already articles circulating trying to rewrite history and say America was great after 9/11 and united and thoughtful and just a reminder that that period was marked by intense and insanely racist hatred, paranoia, and a frothing desire for unhinged violence and oppression.

Because the Chinese researchers are basically normal engineers approaching AI as a difficult technical problem and not members of a psychotic cult that has spent the last 30 years trying to "build God."

Casaubon@zas.bsky.social · last mo.

Nobody’s done a good job of explaining why equally intelligent Chinese researchers aren’t tweaking about this - and “they’re not allowed to” isn’t sufficient explanation given the degree of psychosis among American AI people.

indeed the last two paragraphs are excellent.

David Glenn@actsinds.bsky.social · last mo.

I wasn't sure I wanted to read another essay about the PMC wars, but the last two paragraphs here are bracing as hell.

A friend refers to the "a pedestrian was struck by a car" construction as the "exonerative" tense, and that shall be its name henceforth and hereafter.

*forgetting the word voluptuous* you're looking really velociraptor

If you’re in the US, expect maps on your phone to start showing you “Lake America” soon, now that the US Geological Survey has updated the GNIS. The USGS is a fabulous resource for spatial data in so many ways. And now it has to implement this stupid shit, for the most spiteful of reasons. Gross.

At the center of my message to faculty yesterday was: 1.) We may not be adequately prepared for how angry students are about tech. 2.) They are not all angry for the same reasons. 3.) Being angry at it doesn’t mean they aren’t using it. The sense of entrapment fuels the anger.

Matt Seybold@mattseybold.bsky.social · 2mo ago

For the third year, I’m giving semiannual “state of AI in HigherEd” updates to my fellow faculty. This is a worthy, healthy task, but it feels a little like being the guy with a bucket of boiling oil & a ladle going around the room asking, “Would you like me to melt your face?”

The best thing about someone using CC instead of BCC is when other people start using Reply All to berate people for using Reply All.

Getting tired of these @arstechnica.com pieces that just breathlessly repeat claims. Do AI companies see this as a threat? How hard is it to use? To circumvent? What about screen reader users? Basic questions. Times are tough but as a paying subscriber I’d like to see some actual journalism here

Ars Technica@arstechnica.com · 2mo ago