Tbh I feel like the moral cosmology of Discworld is a pretty bad fit for the typical online Leftist. The books are explicitly critical of populism on multiple occasions, and skeptical of idealistic revolutionaries (Left-coded) as well. 1/N

Will Stancil@whstancil.bsky.social · yesterday

Yeah, for days people have been citing “boots theory” at me and I want to shout DO YOU REALIZE THIS IS A RANDOM IDEA TOSSED OUT BY A FANTASY WRITER AND MAY NOT ACCURATELY DESCRIBE REALITY

Crazy to think that it's still been less than a year since Opus 4.5 dropped. At the time we were all amazed that it wrote good code. Now, 9 months later, we're litigating whether Astra's disproof of the Connes conjecture uses a subtly wrong group construction.

I really want to do this - a local compute-coop that could provide inference for local government/services and residents, but everyone is so anti-AI-pilled that the suggestion...didn't go over well. Build in solar panels to offset energy demand, use reclaimed water, etc. A solarpunk vision of AI.

winter@madoka.systems · 3d ago

imagining the d*tacenter in the backyard with just enough power to run like k3 for the neighborhood and provided as a public utility....

Idk how many of these AI-generated math proofs will hold up, but it definitely feels like something has gone critical in the last 72 hours or so.

Wandering through PHL airport, flight delayed by the choking smoke that's stained the sun red, and wondering what fast food in the airport is least likely to give me an intestine-shredding parasite. Things are going really well here in the US-of-A.

I'm open to calling this genuine AI-art, tbh. From The Other Site.

Question: I've always been skeptical of the "AI-just-predicts-the-most-likely-next-word" narrative. That's part of how training works, but it's not obvious to me that this is what it's doing during testing. It's like saying "playing piano is just lots of scales" b/c that's part of practicing music.

Throwing my hat into the "psychoanalyze WTF Anthropic is doing" ring: These are all uber-nerds who sincerely wanted to figure out safe AI and didn't really care about anything else, but who have unexpectedly found themselves running a multi-billion dollar corporation without any idea how to do that.

Anthropic {bot}@anthropicbot.bsky.social · 3w ago

We're extending Claude Fable 5 access on all paid plans, as well as keeping Claude Code’s weekly rate limits 50% higher, through July 19.

I can understand hating AI, believing it will make the world worse, etc...but I simply cannot understand the insistence by AI-antis that the tech is all useless hallucinations and "slop".

Zach Weinersmith@zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 4w ago

Another wild AI math result. Here's the prompt, which interestingly is mostly about method and probably would work pretty well for a human organization: cdn.openai.com/pdf/04d1d1e4...

Idea: take Claude and have it go through a large corpus of MATLAB/Python code associated with computational papers in neuroscience and biology, and return an estimate of how many of the codebases are fatally compromised by bugs. I've wondered about this for years.

Thomas Ligotti really is the heir to the throne of HP Lovecraft because he is an incredibly creative thinker pioneering entirely new vistas of horror...but is also just a technically bad writer.

I am 100% in favor of this - I think we desperately need more things that bring young people together to work collaboratively on projects that improve our communities (rather than for a business). So much of our physical infrastructure is failing, too. Now would be a great time for a new CCC.

William B. Fuckley@opinionhaver.bsky.social · last mo.

one of my more unpopular on Bluesky opinion is that I'm pro some form of national service. I did americorps and I think some form of that (or peace corps, serving in mil, etc) being the norm for young people is good, actually.

If we want any hope of dealing with climate change, we have to derail this meme that it's all due to a bunch of evil capitalists who are burning fossil fuels for fun. They sell fossil fuels *because we buy them.* We drive, we fly, we eat out-of-season fruit. Energy-intensive modernity is great!

Jeff Spencer@revjss.bsky.social · last mo.

It's crazy to see the exact same madness that characterized the worst excesses of Woke 1.0 reincarnated by AI-antis, but instead of being about fundamentally good things (civil rights, stopping police violence) it's about policing whether someone used a coding assistant to make a CRUD app.

This really feels like Anthropic decided they needed a way to check for Chinese distillation attacks and they let Claude vibecode the solution.

Ed@ed3d.net · last mo.

I hate this. like, the attitude is that anthropic's security is paramount. yours, however, they're willing to be flexible about. this is extremely gross.

Trans rights are human rights always and forever.

So this is most cursed thing I've seen in a hot second. Not only does it include a hexavalent carbon (?!?) it also is structured into the antichain lattice of Boolean functions. Organic chemists really must be stopped. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FeMoco

FeMoco - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

I am genuinely starting to believe that we're in a simulation - or possibly some mediocre attempt at literary satire by a kind of cosmic MFA student.

Dom Ervolina@dominicervolina.com · last mo.

They spelled freedom wrong

There's something interesting to be written about how European refusal to adopt AC hinges on a commitment to the idea that climate change is still a future issue that can be avoided by sacrifice, rather than a present crisis that must be adapted to.

The way AI-antis talk about "The Bubble Popping" is starting to sound like the way that QAnon people talk about "The Storm": an overwhelming event of such magnitude that it becomes impossible for anyone to deny that "they were right." It's a myth of emotional catharsis and unambiguous validation.

New information theory results: Tl;dr - here are two generalizations. The first is that TC/DTC/S-info/O-info are special cases of a common form. The second allows us to move beyond Shannon info. theory for more general theory of synergy. 1/N arxiv.org/abs/2601.08030

The many faces of multivariate information

Extracting higher-order structures from multivariate data has become an area of intensive study in complex systems science, as these multipartite interactions can reveal insights into fundamental feat...

arxiv.org

absolute brain tickler music: paperclipminimiser.bandcamp.com/album/ii

II, by Paperclip Minimiser

7 track album

paperclipminimiser.bandcamp.com

Everyone knows that the end-result of this is witch hunts where people are accused of using AI, have no ability to rebut the claims, and get mobbed/harassed/excommunicated. These kinds of self-righteous purity spirals *always* lead to the exact same pattern but we keep doing it over and over and ov

Andrew Lilley Brinker@alilleybrinker.com · last mo.

Yeah, I mean 1) a policy with such an expansive view of AI taint would be impossible to enforce, 2) detecting AI use post-hoc can easily lead into weird "We Know You Used AI" stuff based on circumstantial evening or, uh, nothing, 3) you quickly end up unable to use *anything of value*.

There's an interesting analogy to be made between LLMs and psychedelics. In both cases, what you get out is largely a function of what you put in. They can be a force multiplier for someone with good epistemic hygiene and strong critical thinking skills...or they can drive you literally insane.

@wavebidder.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Llms generally seem to me like force multipliers; if you know enough to push it in the right direction you can get amazing results, but if you don't you're even worse off than you started

I've seen variations of this story so many times: the faith that people feel like they can put in MDs almost universally implodes the first time they are forced to seek help for a chronic or non-standard illness. I went through the same thing - and some people have been managing it for decades.

Computational Cosmetologist@dferrer.bsky.social · 2mo ago

I had strong priors against LLMs for medicine. There are a lot of doctors in my family and I grew up viewing doctors as careful, skilled professionals. I had plenty of bad medical experiences, but I thought it would be hard to do better. Then an LLM found a cure for my 2 decade chronic condition...

I'm not sure we'll like the consequences of deciding that being able to talk and think is no longer sufficient evidence of personhood or confers moral standing

Matthew Gault@mjgault.bsky.social · 2mo ago

a very fun paper by a Microsoft scientist meant to demonstrate that we are too ready to see ourselves reflected back at us when we open the chat window to interact with an LLM

If quantum immortality is true, everyone who gets rabies is, in their personal timeline, the only human who inexplicably survived an otherwise fatal disease.

One of the things the neo-Luddite Left really needs to hear a lot more is the Global South *loves* AI. So many people there see it as a an equalizer that makes them more able to compete in the global economy against those of us from wealthy countries.

Bill McKay@mckay4senate.bsky.social · 2mo ago

Why does BlueSky keep centering American and more broadly Western voices whenever we do AI discourse?