You could make some really nice ASMR with it.

The ease and comfort of Liquid Ass

To wow people who need a computer to think for them?

Too bad I’m gonna keep hearing “AI did PHP” for weeks.

The British something or rather is like “stockpile water cause the internet might go down and kill the plants due to the hackpocalypse”

Really feels like this saying is quite applicable these days. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.”

All I see around me is stagnation," she gestured at the gas stations nearby with cracked pavement,

*gasp* cracked pavement

“crime,” she continued, pointing towards a sketchy neighborhood to the west,

*faints* minorities

I stopped reading after the picket line, this is too boring. Does it ever bother to explain why the economy keeps chugging along, people still go to their old jobs, and money still works? Hasn’t finance basically collapsed? I really can’t go on if this isn’t addressed, this is too annoying.

Prime intellect! There are dozens of us!

Maybe the very first sentence of your story shouldn’t have me stopping to work out whether you meant January or August.

Damn that AI is verbose and boring, a high ‘this AI takeover could have been a skeet’.

(Also doubt a lot of people would notice as in my exp where a computer has an unexpected popup the first thing people do is try to close that thing with as little reading as possible. (Yes, parents, the message you kept ignoring for 2 weeks, which you didn’t tell me about was the operating system telling you the computer was having trouble, I can’t help you fix the problem after it totally stops working)).

Damn, I didn’t expect to run into something that would cause me to reflect so heavily on my own personal journey. I’m someone who has long struggled with suicidal ideation, and there have been points in the past where I set my own death date at a point in the future; Most notably, when I was a severely depressed teenager in an emotionally unsafe household, I told myself that I would allow myself to die at age 20, if nothing had improved by the time I was 20 — and fuck anyone who would begrudge me that.

Ironically, planning my suicide saved my life, because it gave me something concrete to work towards, a future respite to latch onto during my most challenging days. The screenshot you shared made me realise that this was sort of a sollipsistic millenarianism, giving me a sense of structure and direction in a world where I’d have otherwise been too overwhelmed to do anything.

I’m doing much better now than I was then, quite a few years on from that deadline I set for myself. However, I still sometimes have those low points where planning to die feels more accessible than planning a tolerable life. I think it’d be useful to thoroughly reflect on this tendency through the lens of millenarianism.

This is all to say thanks, I guess? For introducing me to a new concept that will be useful in this way

‘believing the world is about to end keeps people sane’ im genuinely speechless what the fuck

i like roon. he’s so straightforwardly stupid. it’s refreshing!

I suppose this could make sense if you think about people worried about climate/ecosystem collapse, and the nuclear standoff before that, and maybe the rise of totalitarianism and mechanized warfare before that…

But that ignores the vast host of batshit doomsday prophets that were around long before and all throughout that part of history.

It shows up yes but not everyone suffers from it, im sure the rate of people thinking this differs greatly from time to time.

I saw Ultron once in the theater, and promptly regretted it as a poor-quality movie that wasted the talents of most of its cast. Yud (and ghostwriter) seem like they may have watched it multiple times, with notepad in hand. We are not the same

Virologists etc have again and again tried to explain why engineering a killer virus hard, like the whole problem of if it is too deadly it will not spread, it needs to not incubate to short and too long etc, engineering a vaccine must be hard etc. So the chance of something being created which is deadlier than covid are quite small. Not that this will stop the science fiction

Rockets on a city is prob the better idea.

The whole resources section is full of zingers, such as this section where they suggest that AI will surpass a bottleneck just by thinking harder

Often, you can just think more and think better, and obviate the need for a test, because you realize that previous observations contain the answer already. Compare the ability of modern AIs to learn how to pilot robots, sometimes using pure simulation.

Sometimes you can think harder until you find a similarly reliable but faster test.

A sufficiently smart reasoner, moreover, also has the option of just figuring out how reality is without needing so many dang experiments. Sometimes the data you already have is enough, if you’re smart enough to interpret it.

They then cite Einstein coming up with the theory of general relativity without mentioning it took him ten years to do so. Meaning even an AI that thinks faster than a human would still take time to think harder

Why the f*** would anyone give a non deterministic madlib generator their bank account details. Even with some (hypothetical)impressive benchmark like “99% accurate at decision making in financial scenarios” that spells disaster for millions at the scale of all of Facebook’s users using muse for example.

Again he gets one-shotted by using an LLM helper to do the most trivial stuff, so it must be just as good at everything else, right?

These AI tools mix several techniques to disenshittify users’ devices. One major component is automating the installation of existing alternative firmware for these devices that have been (possibly illegally) created by hobbyists and uploaded to various code repositories. Installing these alternative OSes is typically a gnarly task, requiring the user to do a lot of complex, fiddly, highly technical work to bypass their devices’ digital locks.

It it’s anything like any android device I’ve ever put custom stuff into, the gnarly and highly technical work alluded is just following a checklist.

Much of what a vibe-coded jailbreaking tool does is stand in for Canonical, but for hobbyist OSes for smart TVs and speakers and many other devices.

groan.

It kind of devolved to LLMs are so cool guys type stuff where he brags about his chatbot helping him with his linux power management by unearthing an undocumented environment variable, so when other people say it wrote a custom os for their device from scratch that must have been just as frictionless, right?

I don’t know what I’m supposed to get from this piece, it feels like he’s saying LLMs are about to solve enshittification as long as you’re willing to take the responsibility of e.g. using a hella unsafe os, so basically what’s left if repealing the laws that make tampering with your device this way broadly illegal.

There’s also a part in the denouement where he says a possible solution to improving slop code quality and safety standards is uploading the code to public repositories so similarly inclined people can engage with it, which, I don’t know, seems kind of familiar if you’ve been a programming adjacent for two seconds. But then you’d also be aware what the slopnami is already doing to the open source ecosystem.

I guess this is the “now you have to pay us $20/month or fall behind” trap… or something. (seen previously)

Previously on awful

Article next to it is an anonymous review of Jünger’s In Stahlgewitter, which is certainly A Choice.

(Jünger wasn’t a card carrying Nazi, but served in the Wehrmacht in WW2 and is kind of a right-wing ideal of an aesthete)

how we could change the constitution so Claude can run for president

Did he forget Claude is owned by people? But yeah sure let corporations be president.