TechTakes

Hey I think I discovered a way to fix America! What if we rewrite the US Constitution in Rust?

OT: He’s gone. Last thing he saw was my face and then there was no more pain. His veins had all collapsed (vet had to inject the phenobarb into the liver), so I was right to bring him in when I did.

OT: My truck got rear ended today, and then my cat had breathing difficulties when I got home…he’s under oxygen at the university clinic right now and its probably cancer instead of pneumonia. Just feeling totally destroyed rn.

I'm doing this shitey online optional module for my college course because I left it too late to pick a proper one, and Christ in heaven people are using a lot of AI. This is meant to be a class about sustainability

Any tips on managing the guy-urge to assume good faith? I know what to expect of "contrarian thinkers" but there is always that fish-brain saying "Well, you don't know a lot about the topic. And who knows, the vibes you feel could be wrong and you could even broaden your worldview" (spoilers: it doesn't broaden). So much time and energy wasted by trying to dig nuggets of gold out of piles of dung.

update on the grok csam story: the heat on this was not dying down, so X has taken steps to address the issue.

update update: by restricting the csam generator to paying users

update update update: actually they didn't do that https://www.theverge.com/news/859309/grok-undressing-limit-access-gaslighting

I know zilch about linux but I think there was some discussion in here about suckless. Well look at what I came across on an honest to god nazi's website*:

*yes, I have reported this site to their web hosting provider.

How to neither downplay the death of Renee Good nor the uncountable number of people, mostly people of color, who were murdered by near equally fascist police forces without the public outrage her murder finally rightly elicited? I am tired and yet I feel bad to even complain about it because look at this shit.

SFGATE columnist Drew Magary has decreed "The time has come to declare war on AI", and put out a pretty solid sneer in the process. Bonus points for openly sneering billionaire propaganda service Ground News, too.

Cops Forced to Explain Why AI Generated Police Report Claimed Officer Transformed Into Frog h/t naked capitalism

Oko's Basilisk

got my Urbit newsletter for this quarter (or whatever the fuck the cadence is) and what stood out to me this time was nockchain.org. I was going to sit and do a deep dive to come up with sneers for this but I just don't have the executive function right now. @self thoughts?

I can’t comment on this better than bergstrom did, so link

PSA - https://consumer.drop.privacy.ca.gov/ - CA residents can now request data deletion to many adtech data brokers.

Scott Alexander: "I wish the neoreactionaries dropped the monarchy shit"

Monkey paw curls (content warnings: antisemitism, Yarvin).

Found someone showing some well-founded concern over the state of programming, and decided to share it before heading off to bed:

alt text:

Is anyone else experience this thing where your fellow senior engineers seem to be lobotomised by AI?

I've had 4 different senior engineers in the last week come up with absolutely insane changes or code, that they were instructed to do by AI. Things that if you used your brain for a few minutes you should realise just don't work.

They also rarely can explain why they make these changes or what the code actually does.

I feel like I'm absolutely going insane, and it also makes me not able to trust anyones answers or analysis' because I /know/ there is a high chance they should asked AI and wrote it off as their own.

I think the effect AI has had on our industry's knowledge is really significant, and it's honestly very scary.

new odium symposium episode, available on all platforms: https://www.patreon.com/posts/episode-7-whos-147209632

this time we looked at gerald schoenewolfe, a "gender centrist" psychoanalyst. lots of discussion of freud in this one

on a side note, we sent off an email hoping to get a podcast network to fund us to do a miniseries on rationalists. i think there's basically no chance this sort of cold call works but 🤞🏼

David Futurelle of We Hunted the Mammoth fame has started a new project, Brotopians:

https://www.brotopians.com/welcome-to-brotopians/

The simplenote post from a VibeCamp attendee claimed that "prior to Scott Alexander's articles on Desoxyn, virtually no one talked about microdosing methamphetamine as a substitute for Adderall," Any idea what post he was thinking of? Know Your Amphetamines - archive was from January 2021 so about the time VibeCamp got started.

The post is undated but mentions Hereticon in January 2022. Update: it links several more simplenote posts with statements like "It's 2022 as of the time of this writing" and "as of Mar 30 2022." The author lived in Austin when Aella was there. So it seems likely that the post about VibeCamp was written in 2022.

Update Again: the author posted to Substack under a meatspace name and linked "Know Your Amphetamines". I don't recommend reading the whole post, its just an unpleasant person with logorrhea unloading a stream of consciousness at unpleasant people.