When I was 17, I thought it would be great to live forever, even though my life at the time was not especially happy. But now that I’m over 50, I have trouble understanding how people can make it to my age or older without at least becoming somewhat comfortable with the prospect of death.

I always assumed it was a package deal with the California Ideology.

they argued that the TESCREAL thesis is little more than a leftist conspiracy theory

The thing about leftist conspiracy theories… right wing conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the (((lizard people))) are kidnapping and harvesting the adrenochrome from white children”, whereas leftist conspiracy theories tend to be things like “the CIA illegally funded right-wing Latin American militias by illegally selling arms to a country that had in recent memory held US diplomats hostage but was, at least, anticommunist”. Leftist conspiracy theories tend to get validated in substance if not in details a few years after it’s too late for the knowledge to be useful.

It was sneered at here a while ago.

I’ve wanted to put poison or “go fuck off” statements in AGENTS.md in some of my repos, but didn’t want to give a false slop signal for people that see it but don’t read it.

Or Waylon Jones.

Yeah, seeing that gave me the black pill. I chose Common Lisp for personal projects to avoid techbro bullshit.

The fake research company listed Dr. Elena Vasquez, one of the most commonly made-up AI names, on its staff page. I guess Elara Voss was too busy.

Lacan by way of Land.

Some years ago (2018-ish?) there was a fad on Fedi for making MYNAME_ebooks accounts that posted markov chain generated mashups of your previous posts.

In some ways, it’s a lot like the cut-up technique used by the Dadaists and William S. Burroughs, though much less efficient. Maybe Markov chains are a happy medium. Going to run M-x dissociated-text on my ePub collection.

He also argues somewhere for strong longtermism, so I’d say there’s something significantly wrong with his jib somewhere, even if he’s right about decision theory and contrarianism.

I recently switched from borg to btrbk, not because of this, but because of speed, but now I have even more reasons.

I’m guessing it’s because their existing line of business (image generation) has been commoditized by the hyperscalers’ image models, and there’s no longer any reason for anyone to pay for Midjourney.

we don’t actually need human-like AI for paperclip maxxing

This bit is true though; capitalism is already doing a fine job of paperclip maxxing.

Probably 2 in 5 ddg searches are worthless for me, but trying again on Google rarely if ever helps. Usually, both are returning SEO slop or Product™️ rather than the thing I was looking for.

All of complainer’s posts on that issue are clearly LLM-written.

I don’t think it’s actually going to be doing a lot of LLMing. It has a coprocessor for inference type stuff, but only 8GB of RAM on the SOC. So I assume they just stuck this in for marketing.

Personally, I enjoy talking about goblins.

Dimethylmercury is extremely toxic and dangerous to handle. Absorption of doses as low as 0.1 mL can result in severe mercury poisoning.

The symptoms of mercury poisoning may be delayed by months, resulting in cases in which a diagnosis is ultimately discovered, but only at a point in which it is too late or almost too late for an effective treatment regimen to be successful.

• Wikipedia, “Dimethylmercury”