Jer

@cstross@wandering.shop @isaackuo@spacey.space I think its even simpler - Iranian leadership has been planning for this for 50 years and are clearly prepared to extract maximum pain from the world until the us is stopped. Meanwhile us leadership appears to have thrown out 50 years of knowledge about Iran, strategic alliances, soft economic power, and every other advantage they had that wasn't "more expensive weapons" and started a war with about 5 seconds of thought More planning went into the Iraq War for fucks sake

@cstross@wandering.shop @Green_Footballs@mastodon.social Guys who believe in bullshit race science absolutely believe that anyone who dies of infectious disease was genetically inferior and polluting the gene pool. They come to antivax stances by thinking vaccination is bad because it saves lives These are stupid, stupid people. As you'd expect from folks who believe their ancient ancestors' vitamin d deficiency that caused them to mutate their sun protection away is the thing about themselves they have the most pride in

@jt_rebelo @GossiTheDog The one where they advertise that CoPilot can do your Excel well enough to run your business for you For entertainment purposes only of course. Hilarity ensues when the tax man cometh to see the spreadsheets that copilot cooked for you!

@otmar @cstross @isaackuo I mean, religious fanatics whose fetish is martyrdom (for others) riddle the Trump administration. The us secretary of "war" belongs to a Christian apocalypse cult. The us military- especially the Air Force - is completely overrun with them at all levels Too many people think they can trigger the End Times by starting the right kind of wars and that coloring all of this too

@juergen_hubert@mementomori.social @davidgerard@circumstances.run I'm not even sure that cargo cult is the right metaphor. A cargo cult implies that there was a working version of this that they don't understand but they're mimicking the form of to try to get the same result Here it feels almost like a folklore genie (or more realistically - a D&D wish spell) where they are trying to put into words something that the demon must fulfill. Except unlike a wish spell, there is no guarantee that if you get the words right it will work

@elricofmelnibone the only thing that will stop the Trump admin at this point is pressure from the international billionaire class and running out of ammo. Even Congress failing to fund the war won't stop them - they'll just keep spending money without authorization The fuel crisis causing the ai bubble to pop and a stock market crash might stop him, since the stock market legit seems to be the thing he cares about the most

@Strandjunker 23% are fit to serve or 23% of the ones that try to enlist are fit to serve? A very big difference. The last 25 years have made military service an unattractive option for folks who have other choices Edit - nvm I found it. Oof - looks like promoting terrible school lunches and no healthcare is actually impacting the population hard on this. I wonder if since it impacts the military so much it might cause some shifts in policy on the right? Probably not

@fuzzyfuzzyfungus @jt_rebelo @GossiTheDog At the end of that commercial I imagine the guy being unable to pay his rent because the budget that copilot hallucinated for him to bring back the $1 slice doesn't add up and he's been losing .75 on every slice he sells

@maccruiskeen @davidgerard All of the regulations put into place to try to prevent - or even slow down - another version of 2008 from happening again have been removed. What the banks have learned is that they will be bailed out if they make bad risks They've learned that doing what they did had no consequences except some folks got very rich. So why wouldn't they do it again?

@womble @GossiTheDog "For Entertainment Purposes Only" is the disclaimer that Tarot Readers and Astrologers have to put on their businesses in some jurisdictions to avoid being charged with fraud The fact that they've slapped it on copilot tells me that their legal team has concerns

@cstross @CrypticMirror @Kathmandu @isaackuo he seems simultaneously jonesing and terrified of the idea. Which given he lived through the cold war as a rich authoritarian asshole isn't that surprising to me I'm definitely worried that Lindsay Graham is seeing that Jesus could come back before he dies and he's going to push Trump to drop one. His salivating over this war is disturbing

@ahltorp @bodil This is exactly it. Programming languages should be working to remove repetitive boilerplate and cut-and-paste activities. Like when we went from assembler to structured programming - instead of writing the same jump patterns over and over again, come up with a language that does it in a few keystrokes and let the compiler expand it LLMs are just cutting-and-pasting shit all over the place. It's a massive step backwards for software dev and it infuriates me to see it embraced

@davidgerard@circumstances.run Do we know why MS is doing this now? Doing the big reveal that the industry won't subsidize the costs forever usually happens after someone has cashed out and left someone else holding the bag. Did I miss a cashout from MS?

@davidgerard@circumstances.run I wonder if Kalshi or Polymarket has a contract for "Vance converts to Protestantism by the end of the year"

@cstross @qhstone @isaackuo his entire worldview is stuck in the 19th century- his views on power, race, economics - all of them are pre-ww2 viewpoints I suspect that, like many failsons of rich abusive fathers, mostly just internalized Fred's rants on the world and has never thought more deeply than that

@davidgerard@circumstances.run The mistake last time was that these guys got a bailout instead of an anvil If they blow shit up again they should not be saved - bailouts should go directly to the pensioners and others whose money was lost due to circumstances outside of their control and the guys who made a choice to do this shit should be allowed to go bankrupt (It won't happen - especially not with Trump in charge in the US. But it should.)

@davidgerard@circumstances.run "Never talk about goblins, gremlins, raccoons, trolls, ogres, pigeons, or other animals or creatures unless it is absolutely and unambiguously relevant to the user’s query." Every one of these system prompts reads like an exasperated sorcerer trying to come up with the perfect set of words to get his summoned demon to behave properly and not twist his words into permission to turn him into a cow or something The future of programming - begging a demon to not talk about goblins

@davidgerard@circumstances.run WTF is even going on over there? People on bluesky like to make fun of Mastodon for being a bunch of HOAs but bsky central seems to have turned into the worst kind of landlord

@davidgerard Entire essay was worth it for this sentence: "It has been helpful to inventory my own priors about how the world works and surface my principled disagreements with the folk ideology of Silicon Valley." Folk ideology is exactly what these guys have. And going through Yudkowsky's book to show how his ideas just don't engage with the broader world at all was well worth it - thanks for pointing this out!

@davidgerard Love to see microsoft inserting "co-authored by something that muddies the waters around copyright" onto my projects. Just delightful and I'm sure that once Legal finds out they won't have ANY problems with this...

@davidgerard What? How could a project with Donald J Trump's name on it fail? This is shocking! I love these guys thinking that putting his name on it would flatter him. More likely if it had been a success they would have been sued for trademark infringement and he'd settle with owning 75% of their company minimum Can't wait for the first state to try to open a Donald J Trump Elementary School

@davidgerard Blockchain-AI-Vape has to be like catnip for funders They need to add a gacha game to it - would probably generate billions from VCs

@davidgerard@mas.to Political guys noticed the llms are inclined to spew pro-American bullshit and want to knock it off Technical types know that that to have a training set of sufficient size to be the magic genie they want it to be, they need the entire web including all of the pro-America bullshit Hilarity ensues as the censors and the scientists talk past each other, but in Russian this time

@davidgerard@circumstances.run love the observation that vibe coded slop can't be copyrighted, so the DMCA orders they're putting out are not only wrong, they're fraudulent Though if the prompts were written by humans they can possibly claim copyright over those I suppose

@netzhexe @SteveRudolfi And I would assume also to stop using Chrome if you're still using it This is exactly the kind of half-baked thing they'll decide needs to be put directly into Chrome

@davidgerard@circumstances.run It would be highly funny to me if enough companies decided to optimize their games to work with the SteamDeck/SteamOS, MS would be forced to maintain compatibility with WINE instead of the other way around And on that day, I would laugh my ass off

@molly0xfff@hachyderm.io The big money guys know that you can't have regulatory capture without regulation! SBF absolutely knew that regulating the market could be good for him so long as he got to write the regulations An unregulated market is bad. A market regulated to protect the biggest players is also bad (though probably better for the small dollar individuals at least)

@jasonkoebler@mastodon.social massive FERPA violations that Instructure will not be fined for