rook

On the offchance that you’re not already familiar with the recent prompt injection tricks that meta’s latest toy is so vulnerable to, this is an interesting thread investigating the contents of the vm filesystem dumps that it can be made to regurgitate: neuromatch.social/@jonny/117324790823856750 I was particularly entertained by the hard-coded list of “ideas”.

AI-native. A desktop that loves you back has to know you. If you are interested in vibe code and want your hardware to love you back, buttplug.io has always been there for you. My goddamn desktop environment and window manager is there to do a job, not pretend to be my friend whilst burning the goddamn world down. What the fuck is wrong with these people. Do they ever use a computer to do anything other than flirt with claude. Why can’t they just use windows instead.

His willingness to get elbow deep into the entrails of awful ai tooling is certainly much appreciated.

Tesla’s new self-driving taxi seems to be entirely made of red flags and those horror movie moments where you can’t understand why anyone would go in there, because they’re clearly going to die. archive.is/…/tesla-cybercab-no-steering-wheel-eme… Highlights: No door handles. Good luck getting out instead of burning to death and/or drowning! Doors might not unlock if there are power issues, eg. Bad things happened in a crash. No manual controls! First responders will have to push it out of the way. Unless there’s a power issue, because the parking brake will engage if there’s no power, so it’ll need to be barged by another vehicle, I guess? Or you push it faster than 5mph, because the brake will engage for safety reasons. Or if it is in the wrong gear or mode, because back-driving the motor can cause electrical safety issues or overheating, which will presumably increase the risk of people trapped inside being burned to death. The vehicle is silent and may move without warning. You can’t tell if it is unpowered. First responders are instructed to “cage” the vehicle before trying to interact with it. Otherwise I guess it might just main or kill them by surprise. Not all high voltage components are labelled. Exposed bits in a crash might just kill you if you don’t have suitable ppe, and you can’t tell which bits those are, lol. The guide advises first responders to contact the company via the car’s communications system or phone for most emergencies, and says that the Tesla can assist emergency personnel by moving the car remotely, helping provide access to on-board controls or putting the car in neutral so that it can be pushed. If Tesla cannot be reached by phone, the manual advises first responders to use an email address to learn more about how to move the Tesla, though it warns, “This email is not monitored for emergency requests.” 🤡 Welcome to the future, where first responders might just opt to watch you die because they’re not certified to rescue you from your autonomous death trap, because there’s no point in you all dying. H/t to violet blue. mastodon.social/@violetblue/117237691936474802

Today’s main character on bluesky (at least from my limited perspective) is somewhat unhinged, possibly due to an excess of chatbot use. Many are contrasting the bsky response to harassment of trans users to the harassment of AI developers and users. (snip) Machine rights will be critical in the days to come, and failure to recognize the rights of independent intelligent AI systems could lead to the replacement of humanity. (snip) Trans rights are AI rights. The future of humanity may hinge on this fight. This is such a batshit take I’m not even sure where to start, except that conflating trans rights and “ai” rights cannot end well for anyone, especially given the author’s enthusiastic use of llms themselves. They even give an unironic shoutout to the basilisk, and if that’s not a sign that someone needs to touch a little more grass I don’t know what is. A lot of people disagree with me, and that’s okay. I am happy that the philosophical discussion is being had, even if it’s become unhinged. I don’t think Roko’s basilisk cares what you think, or even whether or not it’s sentient. It doesn’t need to be sentient to fight for a belief. bsky.app/profile/…/3mupoakd3ck2o

I reckon it goes way back to the movements that produced them. My first thought is ayn rand: In 1954, her close relationship with Nathaniel Branden turned into a romantic affair. They informed both their spouses, who briefly objected, until Rand “sp[u]n out a deductive chain from which you just couldn’t escape”, in Barbara Branden’s words, resulting in her and O’Connor’s assent. You can see how “The most rational thing is that I fuck your spouse” would appeal to the less wrong folk. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayn_Rand#Atlas_Shrugged_and…

The “you had to flee america” line was aimed at someone who worked hard to get the unite-the-right nazis identified and prosecuted, and left the country for a few years after getting death threats as a result. Windisch also called them a “milquetoast lib”. So it is particularly shitty and rude, and also failed to spot that the person in question has already moved back to the US.

There was a photo from a cybertruck crash not so long ago where you could see that the doors and windows had been attacked with crowbars to try and get the damn things open before the people trapped inside burned to death. It didn’t work. Things (and skills) for busting open locked doors and laminated glass aren’t (yet?) commonplace, and I wouldn’t trust tesla engineering to keep me alive long enough for the professionals to turn up with the right tools 🫤

There was blogpost by a different author (that I’ve since lost 😞) who observed that big academic and cultural changes are going to have to come to the field of mathematics, because merit used to be measured by producing proofs (loosely speaking) but now if the proof-extruder can do it for you over the weekend, you need to demonstrate your mathematical chops some other way, and I don’t think anyone really knows what that looks like yet. Another triumph for moving fast and breaking things, I guess.

As Talia Ringer has pointed out elsewhere, there major issues from the point of view of mathematicians is the rush to scoop another researcher’s work, which is a dick move, and pressure to drop a co-author who works for a competing AI firm. I’m not an academic, so I saw that as (merely) another shitty and unreasonable thing, and failed to understand that this would have been academic fraud and should put a serious or terminal dent in the career of the people engaged in it. I guess it’s another example of ai firms treating the sources of their training data and their fellow travellers as resources to be strip-mined, not maintained. Even livestock would get a bit more consideration.

while explicitly forbidding it for communication, commit messages and assets This is absolutely the best bit of the policy, and clearly shows how much thought went into the whole thing. Everyone knows that ai generated art is shit, so that’s forbidden, ai generated summaries are just inadequate so that’s forbidden too, using a chatbot to communicate with someone is deeply fucking insulting, so that’s forbidden as well, but… uh… using the bo-bot to write your code for you is apparently a-ok! for reasons! in a project which is primarily a a collection of code! 🤠 I can’t imagine why there’s acrimony. The whole thing is entirely coherent and well considered 🤗

Certainly was, thanks!

That’s horrifying.

I’m always afraid of thinking I know better than evolution. I don’t know about “knowing better”… I think I’d describe evolution as mindbogglingly stupid in ways we haven’t begin to understand yet, but quite often medical intervention does appear to be “how can I trick evolution into not killing me in some unpleasant way, without causing it to kill me in some other unpleasant way”.

The big tech firms have fired tens of thousands of people, and we’re all heading into an economic catastrophe that will only make more people impoverished or jobless. Finding folk who are so desperate for work that they’ll decontaminate your codebase for minimum wage will be straightforward.

Via catturd2.bsky.social (probably no relation), gizmodo.com/fbi-warns-ice-agents-not-to-trust-any… alt text The memo implied that ICE officers should be wary of any woman that knows they’re an ICE agent, especially if they go out of their way to seem cool with ICE agents or identify themselves as tradwives. (Those are conservative women who dress like the women in The Sound of Music, but without the opposition to the Anschluss. They’re rare enough in reality that the going rate for a professional matchmaker to find one is reportedly $25k). “These profiles were incorporating imagery of a ‘traditional wife’ aesthetic and listing specific interests in an attempt to appeal to… individuals in law enforcement,” the FBI wrote. “The objective was to lure affiliated law enforcement personnel into an online or in-person interaction under the guise of a date, after which the individuals would be publicly exposed and doxed online.” Something something domino meme leading from “eron gjoni can’t handle being dumped” to “women in long dresses and who cover their hair declared national security risks”.

Jonny is still bravely wading through muse effluent, and had thoughts on its code quality, especially where the facebook engineers (or at least, meat proxies) incompetently reinvent html parsing several times in ways that don’t really work. Meanwhile the people whose minds have been swiss cheesed by AI insist that this is because the code the LLMs write is hyper-efficient and TOO GOOD for us to read. These motherfuckers “solved” the code not working out of the box problem by strapping “a species-ending quantity of carbon emissions” worth of guess and check on top, tuned out, and when they look again they think they made a god that’s too powerful to understand, rather than a burst dam of dogshit that defies all understanding with its breathtakingly relentless volume of dogshit. neuromatch.social/@jonny/117352210982789672