"We convinced the dumbest people in the country that our made-up problems were real, and now we have a sad because they took us seriously."

The way things are going, KnowYourMeme will be the only reputable journalistic outlet in a few years.

As previously mentioned, the "Behind the Bastards" podcast is tackling Curtis Yarvin. I'm just past the first ad intermission (why are all podcast ads just ads for other podcasts? It's like podcast incest), and according to the host, Yarvin models his ideal society on Usenet pre-Eternal September.

This is something I've noticed too (I got on the internet just before). There's a nostalgia for the "old" internet, which was supposed to be purer and less ad-infested than the current fallen age. Usenet is often mentioned. And I've always thought that's dumb because the old internet was really really exclusionary. You had to be someone in academia or internet business, so you were Anglophone, white, and male. The dream of the old pure internet is a dream of an internet without women or people of color, people who might be more expressive in media other than 7 bit ASCII.

This was a reminder that the nostalgia can be coded fascist, too.

rabbit data breach: all r1 responses ever given can be downloaded

AI continues to be going great...

You laugh, but people in incel circles are heralding the nascent arrival of better than real AI girlfriends.

Now I am laughing harder.

Straight line on a lin-log chart, getting crypto flashbacks.

Finally the realization that academia is just an industry producing artifacts (published papers) and not anything as abstract as "science" and "knowledge" gets the tool it deserves

Github - data-to-paper: AI-driven scientific research

I'm sure this will be fine and not cause any issues whatsoever.

From the bot-runners website:

Catholic Answers works each day to ensure our content is faithful to the Magisterium. Our staff apologists have decades of practice in apologetics, and several hold advanced degrees in theology and philosophy. We maintain a broad list of associates (clergy and laymen) who are experts in the fields of liturgy, history, bioethics, theology, philosophy, canon law, and more.

"And we've decided to throw the hard work of these people under the bus in favor of an unfinished toy that ridicules our faith. A consultant named Damien Thorn made a compelling case!"

Cory is having none of this shit

https://pluralistic.net/2024/03/22/reality-distortion-field/#three-trillion-here-three-trillion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

The foundational tenet of "the Cult of Mac" is that buying products from a $3t company makes you a member of an oppressed ethnic minority and therefore every criticism of that corporation is an ethnic slur

"It wAs aCtuALLy a lAB LEaK" is such a right-wing shibboleth that it's extra delicious that some wingers[1] put their money where their mouths and were comprehensively disproven. Kudos to the Lesswronger who went through all this, even though a 100K payout made it rATioNaL

[1] I don't have any evidence that Rootclaim are right-wingers but my priors tell me they are

Well that sucks. I've always had a lingering respect for Mullenweg because I think Wordpress.com is a good service, I really like Simplenote, and I thought that Automattic taking over Tumblr could not make stuff worse after the service being gelded by the porn-haters.

But his latest antics on moderation at Tumblr and now this (although he's hardly alone, Reddit is also gonna sell its user's contents to the AI mills) really showed his true face.

(I'll never forget laughing at him for losing tens of thousands worth of Leica gear in a lost/stolen luggage incident many years back)

From the comments

The average person concerned with existential risk from AGI might assume "safety" means working to reduce the likelihood that we all die. They would be disheartened to learn that many "AI Safety" researchers are instead focused on making sure contemporary LLMs behave appropriately.

"average person" is doing a lot of work here. I suspect the vast amount of truly "average people" are in fact concerned that LLMs will reproduce Nazi swill at an exponential scale more than that they may actually be Robot Hitler.

Turns out if you spend all your time navelgazing and inventing your own terms, the real world will ignore you and use terms people outside your bubble use.