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Murfaloon LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

Fair, I may have tried too hard to see the other side of the argument! Sensitive topic of course, but definitely one of the clearer cases where "just put the book down" has not always an entirely available option.

Murfaloon LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

Tipping points and technological lock-in aren't new (e.g., the printing press, the radio, TV, phones, the internet, etc.). I do absolutely see your distinction, though, that prior technologies may have been less capable of imposing specific belief systems compared to frontier LLMs.

That's a fair point, and a key reason why competitive open models are so important. I definitely don't want to be stuck using Google's latest and greatest LLM once companies, marketers, and PACs can pay to subtly influence responses as they choose.

We've all seen this movie before, though.

Murfaloon LLMs as a Cognitive Virus

I love this line of thinking but the framing comes across to me as a bit inflammatory and uncharitable. Just about anything involved in the exchanged of ideas can be viewed as a virus! That is because, when viewed from an evolutionary biology perspective, ideas are the cognitive equivalent of genes (in fact, this is where the term meme comes from).

There's a whole field, evolutionary memetics, dedicated to this. Cultural values, marketing, religion, social media, education, propaganda, etc. can all be viewed quite naturally through this lense. Even the terms we use in every day language (eg, going "viral") seem to intuitively grasp this.

Is my friend a virus for recommending me their favorite book? Well, yes I guess, but that's kind of just how ideas work. Just my two cents

Murfaloon Don't Wordle

    *      12974
    QAJAQ   1979
    PZAZZ    861
    OBANG    449
    URARI    232
    FLAFF     58
    DWALM     10

(totally didn't cheat: https://github.com/murfalo/dontwordle-assistant)

Murfaloon Gardner police discontinue Flock cameras as license plate readers face scrutiny

Obvious? How do you propose adopting and regulating the technology in a way that the public wants and that allows reasonable privacy?

Murfaloon How to Exist

Right, I think commonly "doing nothing"/meditation is approached with the goal of "doing something", i.e. "getting the hell out of here" or changing instead of sitting with how you feel in the present moment. And, just as you say, that basically defeats the entire purpose.

Murfaloon Weightlifting beats running for blood sugar control, researchers find (2025)

Simple trick for those outside of academia. Google the impact factor of the journal you are reading. If it's below 5 it's fake. If it's 5 or above, it's also fake.

Murfaloon Cybersecurity researchers aren't happy about the guardrails on Anthropic's Fable

> Is the mitochondria the powerhouse of the cell?

Chat paused. Fable 5's safety features have flagged this chat.

Murfaloon Computing the billionth prime in 1s with LLVM IR

See also https://youtu.be/uJkoI5TnKzA

Murfaloon Show HN: Number Gacha, a gacha game distilled to its essence

Help, it's 1 a.m. and I haven't eaten dinner!

Murfaloon Restore full BambuNetwork support for Bambu Lab printers

https://www.fulu.org/

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jhRqgHxEP8

Murfaloon Go hard on agents, not on your filesystem

Alternatively, the "feel free to leak all my data but please use my GPUs and don't rm -rf /" config:

  {
    "sandbox": {
      "enabled": true,
      "filesystem": {
        "allowRead": ["/"],
        "allowWrite": [
          ".",
          "/tmp",
          "/dev/nvidia0",
          "/dev/nvidia1",
          "/dev/nvidia2",
          "/dev/nvidia3",
          "/dev/nvidia4",
          "/dev/nvidia5",
          "/dev/nvidia6",
          "/dev/nvidia7",
          "/dev/nvidia8",
          "/dev/nvidiactl",
          "/dev/nvidia-uvm"
        ]
      }
    }
  }

Murfaloon ClawInstitute

Announcement: https://x.com/KempnerInst/status/2036832290894962819

Blog/write-up: https://kempnerinstitute.harvard.edu/news/harvard-researcher...

Murfaloon Blatant-Why: Stop paying for AI agent wrappers, start asking what's underneath

Latent Labs (a $200M company) launched an "autonomous AI agent for drug design" that appears to wrap open-source models behind a paywall. Tristan Farmer built an alternative with Claude Code in a day and has interesting things to say about it: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tristan-farmer-973b7a17a_anti...

Unrestricted link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260325194514/https://www.linke...

Murfaloon Attention Residuals

Amazingly, the first author is a high school student! https://nathanchen.me/public/About%20me.html

Murfaloon Don't post generated/AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans

I am choosing to believe this is satire. A+

Murfaloon Daily multivitamin slows signs of biological ageing

Paywall-free link: https://archive.ph/lM6ZS

Primary source in Nature Medicine: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-026-04239-3

Murfaloon Climate change is speeding up

Underlying Foster & Rahmstorf paper is also on the front page (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47275088). This Nature piece adds context and estimates from other experts in the field.

Murfaloon GPT-5.4

To me, model card makes sense for something like this https://x.com/OpenAI/status/2029620619743219811. For "sheet"/"brief"/"primer" it is indeed a bit annoying. I like to see the compiled results front and center before digging into a dossier.

Murfaloon Meta’s AI smart glasses and data privacy concerns

Surely this is already happening with our other devices? Not that it isn't a problem but that the game is already lost...?

Murfaloon Making Video Games in 2025 (without an engine)

In the article they make that 2025 is a tipping point where open source frameworks and libraries "just work", making speedy, fun development possible without needing to fight the clunkiness of heavyweight engines.

And any new stuff regarding Celeste or from their devs will forever be relevant to me! Highly recommend to any who haven't played it.

Murfaloon The United States and Israel have launched a major attack on Iran

"fewer" doing a lot of work here

Murfaloon Gemini 3.1 Pro

I like to think that all these pelican riding a bicycle comments are unwittingly iteratively creating the optimal cyclist pelican as these comment threads are inevitably incorporated in every training set.

Murfaloon Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

Two papers that might be of interest to people regarding this topic would be Kirsch 2014 and Cipriani 2018.

And yes, agreed with argwhat.

Murfaloon Vitamin D and Omega-3 have a larger effect on depression than antidepressants

The truth about antidepressants is that the majority of people with depression that respond to an antidepressant would also have responded to a placebo. This doesn't mean that their depression isn't real or that antidepressants "don't work". It just means that placebo has a relatively high response rate in trials for depression. The hate is (among other points) because they are only arguably, marginally, better than placebo, and antidepressants also have real side effects (activation syndrome, increased suicidality, sexual side effects, withdrawals, etc.) over placebo.

Murfaloon An Efilist Just Bombed a Fertility Clinic. Was This Bound to Happen?

Evolutionary memetics at work!

Murfaloon My 16-month theanine self-experiment

Glutamate is fascinating! The latest and greatest hypothesis for mood, learning, etc. hot off the press. Suddenly everything targets NMDA/AMPA receptors and increases plasticity

Murfaloon DOJ will push Google to sell off Chrome

Forcing Google to sell Chrome!

Murfaloon Nvidia Unveils Blackwell, Its Next GPU

What is so hard to believe? Technology evolves rapidly. I can't imagine that anyone investing big money in compute technology wouldn't have expected that.

Murfaloon Austin sees mass exodus of ex-Silicon Valley tech companies, here's why

Isn't Austin a very left-leaning city? Though, to be fair, the people I know in Austin are deeply conservative Texas natives who hate the new atmosphere...

Edit: I'm missing the point, they said Texas, not Austin.