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YurgenJurgensenon An AI agent emailed researchers for help. It told us why

Once again: The Turing test requires a knowledgeable interrogator deliberately attempting to identify the machine.

The people you cite want to believe, and so are effectively the opposite.

Of course, you probably already knew this and have had it explained to you multiple times and are choosing to ignore this detail, but possible that someone else reading this might interpret what you wrote as a cogent argument.

YurgenJurgensenon Frog and Toad and the Increasingly Capable Machines

People who don’t know what capital letters are aren’t allowed to complain about punctuation.

YurgenJurgensenon 'That's so AI ' What gen Alpha's biggest insult tells us

Tracing an enlarged image can be accomplished using a box with a small hole in it and a light source. Any art teacher should have imagined that possibility in the 1890s, let alone the 1990s.

YurgenJurgensenon The Test

Do you really think your world would be any better? Big corporations would still act under the same incentive structures as they do today (and in fact would continue to do so even if you forced them all to become workers’ cooperatives), you’d just find that these companies’ owners just try a little harder to hide their assets.

Complaining about billionaires instead of about greedy mega corporations just makes your objections seem like they’re based in jealousy, not fairness.

YurgenJurgensenon Nobody Asked for a Crab Chair

The (literal in this case) crab bucket mentality is very common among the disability lobbies. This is not likely the first or even the second time most people in this thread have encountered this attitude.

YurgenJurgensenon 1960s theory that Stonehenge was a prehistoric computer

To elaborate: A lot of that labour was what we would term ‘strategically important’. It is well understood today the importance of stabilising demand for strategic industries (such as those involved in the construction of weapons, siege engines, warships, fortifications, et cetera). While they may not have understood it in exactly these terms, it seems that at some level keeping these people around in times of uncertain demand would have been seen as more than simple charity.

YurgenJurgensenon Why aren't smart people happier? (2022)

Or: The world could truly be a fundamentally awful place, and smarter people are just closer to comprehending the true nature of reality.

YurgenJurgensenon Rules of good social skills (2025)

‘Neurotypical’ is starting to seem more and more like a slur every day.

YurgenJurgensenon What happens when an LLM never sees material beyond fifth grade?

This “billionaires couldn’t spend their money” thing comes up a lot, and it show’s a child’s idea of what people might spend money on. “$1000 a month buys more ice cream than I can eat and more toy cars than anyone can play with, and I don’t want anything other than ice cream and toy cars, so nobody needs more than $1000 a month.”

I can think of loads of things I’d do with hundreds of millions of dollars of disposable income. Make large buildings that look like how I think buildings should look, fund scientific research in areas I’m personally interested in but have little aptitude for, find artists that align with my tastes and give them the ability to realise their visions, contribute to political organisations and charities that align with my values, et cetera. Those all are basically infinite money sinks.

In the past, the ultra-wealthy did do all of these things, funding loss-making research and expeditions, monumental architecture, philanthropic organisation and artistic works. The problem might be that you think billionaires shouldn’t do some or all of these things, but that is a very different position than that they can’t do any of these things.

YurgenJurgensenon As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Fandom and Reddit are not the old Internet, they’re ad-driven middlemen that create nothing themselves. Self-hosted or at least self-maintained sites were the old Internet. After that point, the rot had already set in then, it just took until LLMs for it to metastasise.

YurgenJurgensenon As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

They already have all the data, all the money and all the chips. It’s actually the best it’ll ever be, as newer models will have to start paying off all that capex, newer models will be trained mostly on slop, and the SEO and influence op leeches will have begun their arms race to insert their products and values into the training data. We’ve seen this pattern before. AirBnB, Uber, social media, streaming video, et cetera didn’t get better once the VC money ran out and they needed to start turning a profit, they got much much worse.

YurgenJurgensenon The End of an Era

Just another trillion, trust me bro.

YurgenJurgensenon The End of an Era

I’m pretty sure that bands I’ve seen live aren’t AI. Of course, I’m still yet to hear an AI track that approaches ‘good’, so it’s irrelevant, for now.

YurgenJurgensenon The End of an Era

Show me. AIvangelists love to say what AI can do, but never bother to provide any examples.

YurgenJurgensenon The End of an Era

This terrible argument comes up in relation to AI over and over again. I don’t care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average person at brain surgery, I care if you built a brain surgery robot that outperforms the average brain surgeon. Outperforming “a human” at a specialist task is still essentially worthless.

YurgenJurgensenon Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

https://xkcd.com/993/

A friend also called this the “Party Cannon effect”, in reference to black metal festival posters. When lavish detail is available at the push of a button, simplicity stands out far more.

YurgenJurgensenon Businesses with ugly AI menu redesigns

Who are these “everyone”? I suspect that you actually mean “many random social media users”, which only proves that getting negative reactions out of the average social media is trivial; not exactly a groundbreaking discovery.

YurgenJurgensenon How to hide from killer drones

That’s not the problem. These machines only have so much thrust, and are only aerodynamic in one direction. Sudden high-speed lateral acceleration is very costly from an energy budget perspective. Randomly dodging around bleeds off speed and may actually reduce survivability by increasing the time taken to cross the danger zone. This is made worse by most of the time the drone needs to aim for a weak spot or critical system to do damage, so terminal guidance is already fairly constrained. You don’t see drone pilots trying to jink around because the best move is to punch the accelerator and try to minimise the time your opponent has to react.

YurgenJurgensenon How to hide from killer drones

There’s a pretty big gulf between “very quick” and “capable of dodging air bursting autocannon rounds without sacrificing forward momentum”.

Incidentally, modern drone footage is actually not nearly as bad as stuff from earlier in the war. Increased lethality of the FPVs means much fewer conscripts deciding to take a 5.45mm retirement plan.

YurgenJurgensenon How to hide from killer drones

“Attack drones” have been around for basically as long as civilisation itself. It’s just a recent development that they’ve been made out of metal and not meat. So we never got to this point, we’ve been at this point the entire time.

YurgenJurgensenon How to hide from killer drones

Modern dedicated AA gun systems claim multi-km engagement ranges against small drones, and 60 degree/second slew rates. A drone capable of beating that engagement time would be better described as a guided missile, and will certainly not cost $2500. The flaws in gun systems are in the cost required for good coverage, not their effectiveness against targets that do enter their engagement ranges.

YurgenJurgensenon How to hide from killer drones

You’re talking about dodging bullets or shrapnel here. Source on that a multi rotor has that level of manoeuvrability while also carrying a lethal payload and enough battery for a viable engagement range?

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

That’s just a restatement of your previous point. Pretend I restated my response.

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

Brand awareness is a Red Queen’s race. Attention is a finite resource, and ad spend mainly exists to counteract the spend of your competitors.

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

And? They’d be banned too.

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

I’m going to shock you, but you can pay for magazine-like content through the Internet right now.

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

In the olden days, those people wrote for things we called ‘magazines’. Without infinite free content at people’s fingertips, actually paying for curated content will likely make a comeback.

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

They buy ads too. It’d adversely affect their campaign budgets. (Sure, it would adversely affect their competitors’ too, but second-order effects are usually too complex for politicians to understand.)

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

…and nothing of value would be lost.

YurgenJurgensenon EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

Vendors won’t see RoI on their ad spend and will stop buying. Simples.