4grams

Smart

I can’t help but feel like this is the most important part of the article:

The model’s refusal to accept information to the contrary, meanwhile, is no doubt rooted in the safety mechanisms OpenAI was so keen to bake in, in order to protect against prompt engineering and injection attacks.

Do any of you believe that these “safety mechanisms” are there just for safety? If they can control ai, they will. This is how we got mecha-hitler, same mucking about with weights and such, not just what it was trained on.

They WILL, they already are, trying to control how ai “thinks”. This is why it’s desperately important to whatever we can to democratize ai. People have already decided that ai has all the answers, and folks like peter thiel now have the single most potent propaganda machine in history.

I’ve been playing with ai, pushing the limits of it as a therapy tool (I’m being honest, but I’m using myself as a test case). I’m really trying to evaluate it in good faith, mostly to try to see what’s addicting folks to it these days.

I just cannot get it to pass my “Turing test”. It’s just so sycophantic. Every time I get close to feeling like there’s something there, it falls back into the “blow smoke up your ass mode.”

So far my hours of conversing has only convinced me that folks who follow chatbot advice for such important life decisions, probably deserve it. I’m happily married, but if a girl ever broke up with me because a LLM told her to, I’d probably login to thank it (joke).

He deserves a goddamned posthumous award. There will never a death more ‘billionaire’ than this. I mean this is cartoon level, over the top, absurdist level perfection.

I mean tell me, if you just saw the headline “Man dies after swallowing a bee at a Polo match” that your reaction is anything but “I wonder which billionaire that was.”

I wish I could disagree but every day when I try to talk about it, or get people to do something about it with me, so far 100% of time I get pushback for being alarmist, or that it’s fine, we’ll just vote better next time.

It’s more than just the apathy, it’s willing apathy, desired apathy, WEAPONOZED apathy. That’s the problem, those in control know they are working against the will of the people, but they also know the people are to scared, distracted, lazy and stupid to do anything about it.

I’m so tired of the creepy fucks who run the world.

I was at a concert last night and it struck me just how much I LOVE seeing how people who showed up to share an experience can be so different. My kids were pointing at strange looking people but it just made me smile more and more as explained why I loved their expression and courage to literally wear it in public.

Diversity, new experiences, unexpected is how life should be. I am tattooed, mine are pretty ordinary but last night someone commented on one of mine on the way out of the show. She thought it was strange, so I explained it and we had such a lovely conversation. She had recently beat cancer and was about to get her first.

I don’t know, it’s early and this resonated.

This is a great write up, not only in content, but also in spirit and tone. An enjoyable read beginning to end and inspires me to try more stuff.

Exactly, early social media was tons of fun. It was like the early internet but easier since anyone could make a profile with any info.

Then it had to be monetized. They had to glue eyeballs via attention, no matter what kind. Now it’s all rent seeking, innovation is 100% about what can produce an immediate return, no care for the long term. The grift economy…

It was not social media, that was about the people. It’s what the social media companies did in search of dollars that did it in. Greed. Full stop.

I don’t know why obvious propaganda works on so many people. People I assumed had functional brains, just turn them off whenever the online. It’s fucking maddening, and I don’t see any way to combat it.

Why do we need celebrity owned cell carriers? This article makes it sound like a bad thing Ryan Reynolds’s exited Mint, but at least the stars of arrested development still have a cell provider.

I mean WTF, I like that there is competition but what the fuck is wrong with us that we prefer celebrity endorsement to actual features, value, longevity, etc.

I know it’s a bigger question than what I’m asking but this is all part of the rot that our economy is experiencing. All vibes, all promises, all scams, this country runs on nothing but grift.

I really enjoyed the first game, not AAA new game price enjoyment though. I mean, I got as much fun out of it while playing as I have anything else, it just wasn’t as rich and deep as a fallout game. I give it a pass since it’s establishing a new universe but as much as I liked it, it’s most certainly a blue light special fallout clone.

So, asking inflated AAA prices seems, somewhat short sighted. I’d absolutely pay what I did for the first game, 80 bucks is a hard no for me though. I might buy it when it’s cheaper, but by then I’ll likely have seen enough clips, read enough reviews and gotten busy enough to just forget about it.

Bummer.

I have a google voice number for that. Most things no longer accept it though.

I had delusions of trying to keep track of which address is sold by who which is why I did the hide my email addresses. But I’ve always kept separate personal and spam accounts. This was my attempt at combining to a single account.

https://xkcd.com/927/

Illogical meat brain that thinks odd numbers are more random that even I guess.

Don’t get me wrong, there are systems that work. I built up a very successful smart card based system many years ago after a failed audit. I initially hated the idea but in the end we built a crazy secure environment that was very easy to use and maintain. That project is long since obsolete but after doing that one, over a decade ago, I figured things were headed in the right direction.

I think I’m extra sensitive right now because my aging mom has made the issue acute. She’s not the same as she was a few years ago and helping her with all her online accounts has become a nightmare. It’s just too complicated for many folks.

Yeah, I’m up to 40 hide my addresses for that same reason. Figure if the password sucks, at least the email can be unique and obscure.

I call that a feature.

This shit pisses me off so bad. I had an identity theft a few years back, took ages to undo, and my credit score is still impacted by it. At the time I moved to a password manager and all my passwords are 31 characters of garbage. I’ve got several, highly sensitive accounts that my passwords don’t work for, in fact one a bank, until fairly recently, had repurposed a phone number field in the DB so passwords were limited to 10 characters numeric only (I managed to get one of their IT folks on the horn to explain why the password was so awful).

I cannot believe we live in 2025 and we still haven’t figured out passwords.