kombookcha

"AI is not as good as it is hyped up to be" and "AI is 'good enough' for the overlords to replace some amount of workers, or at least to leverage into depressing their wages significantly and permanently" are not mutually exclusive claims. You don't have to buy the hype to agree that it is dangerous.

A chimp with a gun is not dangerous because of how good a shot he is.

This would (at least in part) mirror the dynamic during another major period of collapse and upheaval - the migration period. Displaced people trying to survive by raiding or squatting on new territory, thus displacing more people and collapsing complex networks of trade which were sustaining large local populations, thus displacing more people etc etc.

Similarly to the end of the bronze age, it was also a period in which shifts in climate stressed social structures. A runaway dynamic of lots of desperate people on the move is not great for stability, and if everyone is already experiencing some scarcity, then that's all the more vulnerable.

Work hard, play hard!

I would like to take this opportunity to pitch an old favourite of mine - Blast Doors (1996) by Freds Friends. Aka "The Nuclear Family Feud". Basically it's a 3D version of Artillery with some elevation physics, and a fun theme around nuclear weapons being fully legalized for home defence. So you're a bunch of grouchy neighbours in your mobile nuclear bunkers, firing off various warheads at eachother and saying quippy 90s things. It has a very distinct style and wry, absurdist sense of humor - and for a long time was available on the website of one of the developers (which was also delightfully 90s).

Fred Haslam was apparently also at Maxis and worked on Sim City 2000.

If you're reading this Fred, I loved Blast Doors and love it still. https://archive.org/details/BLASTSE2_ZIP

I would be interested in Hue, except Philips sold me an earlier iteration of a smart lamp which I loved for its ability to gently wake me up in the morning by slowly turning up the light. I love waking up without a loud alarm clock. In fact, I loved that so much I invested in a smart home hub to get Hue bulbs, and then Philips promptly bricked my original lamp. Unless I eventually bought a fancier home hub, which could grandfather it in!

No matter the convenience of a given smarthome feature, it will have to overcome the hurdle of all the time and money I invest in setting it up being liable to get vaporized at the click of a button from the supplier. Ultra frustrating experience, but one that instantly cured me of any romantic notions about the futuristic smart home.

How would somebody go about mass-poisoning forum posts like this? If Google has a business relationship with Reddit, I assume it wouldn't be server side - but at the same time I don't know how a regular redditor could poison his text posts without it being noticeable in a human reading.

I don't know what causes this to happen, but I've noticed it too and it distinctly feels like source laundering. How often do people actually verify that the sources say what the AI claims? Probably vanishingly rare, right? Everyone else gets the impression that the claims have actual sources of some kind.

It baffles me that search engines aren't frantically working to bury the fake pages of AI slop from their results. They're actively making it impossible to use search engines for their intended purpose, and instead of fixing it the search engine providers seem more interested in simply offering their own slop for you to consume rather than direct you to anywhere actually useful. It's tragic.

I think their fixation on the machine is part accountability-laundering, part obfuscation as you say. They want a monopoly on not just information, but analysis, and breaking all information infrastructure that does not flow through their pet ideology robot is part of that.

A lot of the DOGE-era bizarro stuff seems to have involved just throwing an LLM instructed to have MAGA conspiracy brainworms at every problem. It would not surprise me if this list was partially generated in that way.

Or it could be one of the conspiracy brained dead-eyed little brownshirts they sicced on the task that put it in there. Who knows. I'm not sure they even knew themselves.

Thank you for sharing this lovely story.

I got curious about this and found a lot of people in older threads saying that farming sardines can't be done. Apparently small schooling fish are typically very difficult to farm because they're pretty fragile and easily stressed.

Whether that's a technical barrier imposed by the biology of sardines being unsuited for how we do fish farming today, or more of a barrier of "it will never make financial sense to do this because so many in each batch would die" I don't know.

Hell yeah, my siblings and I did the same. Insane replay value for a single level like that.

Yeah, it's part of the sleight of hand.

If you've ever looked over the shoulder of somebody naively prompting an LLM about some broad issue, they're being fed this horoscope-like analysis where a bunch of vague stuff gets thrown at the prompter, and whatever they respond to is what the machine starts iterating on.

Some people are basically doing oldschool TV psychic cold readings on themselves.

Well, possibly. To paraphrase the great American philosopher Donald Rumsfeld - there are known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns and unknown unknowns. And making the actual process a black box for the people managing it will create a lot more Unknown Unknowns.

"Computer says no" is about unhelpful bureaucracy. Being knowingly locked to a specific procedure and unwilling to divert from it is a different thing from mistakes being made that you are blissfully unaware of. The problem is now invisible and the patient is dying for no reason anyone can discern.

I wonder if it's actually anything to do with mentally mapping digital areas per se, or if it's more to do with the fact that you're not engaging your senses in the same way as when you're moving around a physical space.

If I go to a new place, say a gas station, there's a specific route I took to get there. There's smells and sounds and sights that will be specific to that time and place. I feel like that will generate a memory that's much grittier for the brain to hold on to, than one where I've digitally moved through a place. When I jump around a Quake map, I know where I'm going, but there's no wind in my face and I'm actually sat in a chair.

Sure there's sounds and sights in digital spaces, but they don't smell like anything and you're not actually touching anything but your mouse and keyboard. And the sights and sounds are less textured than real life - repeating assets, limited number of sounds etc. You're not gonna be surprised by a new birdcall, or a sudden burst of smell when the gas station guy opens the grill.

Knowing how important smell alone is to memory, I wonder if what's actually happening is that you're mentally engaged in a pretty narrow way when gaming, and that that's not really the best way for a brain to operate for long stretches of your life.

This is very much my experience too. The difference between stout, newer buildings and old tenements are night and day. I used to live in a place made of massive thick concrete slabs with airgaps, and the only time you could hear neighbours was when somebody was using a drill, or on occasion, one neighbour singing in the shower so it travelled along the water pipes.

Other places, you can follow conversations through the wall if you're attentive and they're raising their voices.

Good for them!

Are we sure this was actually leaked and not deliberately 'leaked' as a form of bragging?

I think it's one of those things that for whichever reason you happen to get switched on to, and once you're attentive to it, you'll constantly be noticing and learning more - once that positive feedback loop of rewarded attention is going, you're off to the races.

It's deeply rewarding to find the world around becoming deeper and more intricately connected. And you get to see more of it every day!

If you don't want to paint, and also don't want to pay somebody else to paint them, there's always various alternatives like printed out papercraft stands. Fold them, stick them on the base and you are ready to roll.

There's also a myriad of other creative ways to proxy your way out of the general costs (time, space and money) if you check out the term "poorhammer".

You know what, you're right - The Pedestrian hit me much harder this time around than the first time I read it.

God, I love Bradbury.

Such an abrupt, visceral sense of revulsion after an otherwise pleasant anecdote. Like finding a used band-aid at the bottom of your plate of comfy stew.

The website is not the product, but it does suggest something about the way your restaurant operates and how it is trying to present itself. You don't know the quality of the food before you go.

This summer I've noticed a lot of menus with AI generated images of food and I have not trusted a single one of them. If you are gonna pitch me with this thing that blatantly is not even tangentially related to your actual product, that does not give me a lot of confidence in your business. If they'd used a stock image of a carbonara I would be none the wiser, but the entirely fake stuff is a massive turnoff.

Some of the best restaurants I know have old timey bare bones websites because they've been around for decades, and it's an oddly good predictor of a place that has a lot of loyal customers.

If I saw a website that looked like the ones above, I would be immediately skeptical. Handmade but rudimentary says down-to-business no nonsense, shiny and nicely made by a pro says high effort. This stuff? It says slop shop.

Personally I thought that the odd looking fantasy-armor was an interesting way to highlight that what we are seeing is a story, not history. As highlighted by the storyteller in Odysseus' palace. But I think it also ties in thematically with the heroes-and-monsters aspect.

The first we see of Agamemnon is his crazy armor with the golden spine running down the back of the helmet, and it immediately establishes that some people in this story are much larger than life, so much so that they seem sort of monstrous and offputting. Agamemnon looks like Darth Vader, striding forward in that black and gold armor. And in a way, Agamemnon has made himself a monster to achieve his personal ambition, sacrificing his daughter at the outset. When he's later killed in bed by his embittered wife, it's in maybe the one scene of the movie where we see him without his armor - having returned home and stripped it off. Perhaps he thinks he can be a person again. But he is no longer the man he was, and his home too has become hostile to him. In making himself a legend, he has shut himself out from the life he had.

More broadly, he (and the kings who went with him) has perhaps even destroyed that way of life entirely by violating larger social contracts, such as taking Troy by a deceptive offering to a shared god. Which is the core shame that's hounding Odysseus through his trials (along with some survivor's guilt).

Anyway, I was pleasantly surprised by the movie. It felt both familiar and fresh at the same time, and made a lot of initially odd seeming choices that I wound up finding interesting and thematic.

Big recommendation.

That sounds sensible to me. But I am likewise NAL.

If you've refused to answer questions and giving them the password, and they don't have a warrant, taking your case off and inputting the mysterious number they found in there seems a lot more like them destroying your (data) property by oafishly trying to force access to a phone they have no business messing with, rather than you ostensibly destroying evidence of a theoretical undiscovered crime.

I'm sure they would still try to mess with you in a dozen ways for annoying them, but at least you'd be on decently solid ground in court as far as that goes.

'I don't want some sketchy phone mugger to end up with sexy photos of my girlfriend/myself' would seem like a plausible reason to me, if I was a juror.

I know there are communities of people dedicated to doing this with old VHS-tapes and DVDs, so I am guessing somebody is likely chipping away at CD's like this in some capacity. It would be wonderful it it could grow into something like what you're suggesting.

A major surface area for this sort of work is oddly enough on youtube - you can find truly obscure demo tapes and records digitized and uploaded there. You'd think the copyright demons would eat these videos alive, but it seems like they don't.

It's really cocky of them to do this immediately after deleting everyone's purchased movies from their accounts. Nobody should have any illusions about what "buying" a game means when they can do this at will.

https://www.playstation.com/en-gb/legal/psvideocontent/

Yeah, I think this is an unfortunate casualty of the AI age. Instead of discovering a weird fast food employee orientation CD or somebody's niche garage album from 1996 that was semi-accidentally uploaded by whoever happens to own it now, you're just getting thousands of fake songs made by bots.