I tend to think of Toys (1992) for these sorts of themes though I haven’t watched the film from start to finish since I was a kid. It’s about the militarization of a wealthy family toy factory and has a lot of scenes that stuck with me.

It’s a Christmas family movie that reviewed horribly so definitely counts as a cult classic, but those who like it tend to really like it.

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The article claims that Google didn’t “fall for the same trap” but that’s not correct, all this garbage is indeterministic so the author just got “lucky”.

It’s like saying “four out of five coin-flips claimed that an eagle was the first US president” – just because the fifth landed on heads and showed George Washington doesn’t mean it’s any different than the rest.

But here I’m preaching to the choir.

Honestly Hanson is so awful the rationalists almost make him look better by association.

But wait I thought the reasoning AIs were going to come up with fantastical sci-fi solutions to all our global warming problems! Maybe we didn’t shovel enough coal at them?

A lot of companies use “vibe coding” an excuse to offshore software development work to cheaper countries without anyone noticing.

But yeah it’s not gonna work out in the long term for a business that:

• Encourages people to submit random nonsense to the codebase instead of doing actual work
• Removes all entry-level positions
• Lays off anyone who knows what they’re doing

That’s how you get a codebase that kinda sorta works in a way but is more evolved than designed, full of security holes, slow as heck, and disorganized to the point where it’s impossible to fix bugs, adds features, or understand what’s going on.

The last time someone looked into this it was with dolphins, did not go well, lead to more human-dolphin sex than communication, and ended in a dolphin suicide.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/jun/08/the-dolphin-who-loved-me

Ugh reading more of this and it’s awful.

He writes that women are attracted to men who could beat us up or control us. He writes that the reason for this attraction is so we have a chance to marry the man and prevent these bad things from happening.

His “science” assumes that women think like they do in shitty erotica written by men for men. Even by rationalist evo-psych standards this is pretty poorly thought out.

And yet, per Steven Pinker, “a middle-aged congresswoman does not radiate the same animal magnetism to the opposite sex that a middle-aged congressman does”. What’s the deal?

OK other straight ladies here, raise your hand if you’ve ever felt that middle aged congressmen, as a whole, “radiate animal magnetism”. Anyone? Anyone?

In this exciting new research direction in the making-stuff-up field I build upon previous work by Myself et. al in the making-stuff-up field.

I apologize to bring you the latest example of the intersection of US fascism with silicon valley tech industry.

This time the Whitehouse have decided that UI design is kinda important (gee I wonder if there used to be a department or two for that): https://americabydesign.gov/

Well nothing wrong with a little updating of UI anywa–

What’s the biggest brand in the world? If you said Trump, you’re not wrong. But what’s the foundation of that brand? One that’s more globally recognized than practically anything else. It’s the nation…where he was born. It’s the United States of America.

To update today’s government to be an Apple Store like experience: beautifully designed, great user experience, run on modern software.

Oh god kill it with fire.

The web design of their website is also worth remarking on here:

1. The title text that reads “AMERICA by DESIGN” is an SVG. The alt text is “America First Legal logo”
2. The page contents are obnoxiously large and obnoxiously gray before they fade in.
3. For some reason Every single word gets it’s own <span> element to make the obnoxious fade in possible. Because I guess that’s what happen when you fire all the people who actually know what they’re doing.
4. They managed to include a US flag icon with only 39 stars which is too few stars to be official and too many stars to be visible at teeny sizes
5. The favicon is just 16x16 pixels of the word “by” in cursive that’s so blurry you can’t actually tell that’s what it is.
6. If your browser width is between 768px and ~808px there is overlapping text at the top.

The tech bros tied to this? Joe Gebbia co-founder of AirBNB, along with Big-Balls. Maybe others but those are the two who were retweeted by the twitter account.

Edit: also this part:

©2025 National Design Studio

Someone ought to remind them of US copyright law because official federal work is in the public domain. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_status_of_works_by_the_federal_government_of_the_United_States

“The common people pray for anime memes, healthy vtubers, and a wikipedia article that never ends,” Ser Jorah told her. “It is no matter to them if the high lords play their game of tweets, so long as they are left in peace.” He gave a shrug. "They never are.”

- George R. R. Martin

I’m sorry in advance for posting this meme.

Fear is the proper state of being for a coproration.

Every time I see one of these AGI meltdowns I’m reminded of this anime / manga:

I’m sure it’s a complete coincidence that the people who think it’s impossible to program without StackOverflow are the same people trying to shame us for not being LLM enjoyers.

Edit: But also - why do AI scrapers request pages that show differences between versions of wiki pages (or perform other similarly complex requests)? What’s the point of that anyway?

This is just naive web crawling: Crawl a page, extract all the links, then crawl all the links and repeat.

Any crawler that doesn’t know what their doing and doesn’t respect robots but wants to crawl an entire domain will end up following these sorts of links naturally. It has no sense that the requests are “complex”, just that it’s fetching a URL with a few more query parameters than it started at.

The article even alludes to how to take advantage of this with it’s “trap the bots in a maze of fake pages” suggestion. Even crawlers that know what they’re doing will sometimes struggle with infinite URL spaces.

Hell yeah!

Seems there’s a lot of buzz about pride month this year. I’ve been to one pride parade as a teen and have approximately zero LGBT fashion items, but solidarity and visibility seems more important in recent years. I should find a necklace with trans flag colors or something.

LLMs: now as effective as enumerating use-after-frees as grep "free" source.cc.

Holy hell all the examples I found made me seasick. I am apparently physically incapable of watching veo3 videos.

The extension I ended up using for Firefox was Straight to the Web. Auditing the source code I saw that it looked for certain Google URL patterns being navigated to and re-wrote them.

I just tested with DuckDuckGo’s “!g” feature and it seemed to work, but I don’t use DDG so I don’t know if there’s anything I’m missing.