it will never not be funny how they thought bsky was going to be a google campus and instead they got tumblr and they absolutely h a t e it

Frontier AI Models Are Doing Something Absolutely Bizarre When Asked to Diagnose Medical X-Rays Frontier AI models generated "detailed image descriptions and elaborate reasoning traces" without ever seeing the images.

“The number one [takeaway] would be that just because the AI is saying, very convincingly, that it is seeing something, it doesn’t mean that it is actually seeing that.”

Holy fucking shit, just use humans.

how does one get paid for putting an ai in charge and then sitting back to do nothing? cos, uh, that seems like you are not, in fact, doing your job. like, at all. 🧐

I saw a disclaimer in an ebook the other day that said, 'This book is 100% human generated. I'd rather write a story that might have lumpy bits than generate a soulless, passionless, piece of crap." I'm thinking of adding something like that to my next book if I ever get around to writing it.

Kash Patel as Lego with big weird eyes and lots of beers

I know we’re not supposed to like the Iranian social media teen meme army seeing us for what we’ve told them we are on the Internet but I like to think this kind of thing is really just them reaching out and saying we don’t like this either and know you’ll appreciate the hilarity

A screenshot of the progress on my Kickstarter that shows $3422/3800 and 101 backers, with 9 days left

Holy shit. Only 300-something dollars left till we fund this anthology 😱

LETS FREAKIN GOOOOOO
www.kickstarter.com/projects/tal...

"should we really resort to playing dirty to defeat the nazis i–"

yes. kick em in the fucking balls. what kind of question is that. grow the fuck up

This is how I find out about @clearsky.app and that I'm on that list 🤣
I feel so accomplished!

I do not want to be on guard when I read manuscripts. I do not want to be on guard when I read slush. I do not want to be on guard when I listen to music, when I look at visual art, when I WATCH A FUCKING COMMERCIAL. I hate Altman so much I burn with it. He and his kind have stolen the WONDER.

fuck sam altman forever for taking away the last places where we could engage in good faith: the creative arts, which should be a testament to human ingenuity. i am so mad that everything i read or listen to or admire is now tainted with doubt. do you understand? he is a thief of joy and i HATE HIM

The existence of women's sports is a historical one that was reinforced at regular intervals by patriarchal assumptions that women are more fragile and need to be "protected"
It doesn't reflect any statistical truth
(1/2)

Sherlock Holmes Is Finally Free To Be Gay I recently watched the utterly ridonkulous TV show Young Sherlock, which takes some delightfully strange liberties with the character of Sherlock Holmes....

As of 2023, Sherlock Holmes is finally in the public domain in the United States -- which means that Arthur Conan Doyle's heirs and random other rights-holders can no longer insist that the character be free of any trace of homoeroticism.

buttondown.com/charliejane/...

I'm making one last push to let people know about this online talk -- sponsored by the British Library in conjunction with their current exhibition on fairy tales. The live stream starts at 7:30 tonight, but if you buy a ticket *before* the event you can watch it any time over the next 7 days.

This is an extremely obvious and banal point that I have been surprised to find is hard to land with people both-sidesing the AI debate. The highest VC funded companies in tech saying “we want to ruin your lives” as marketing copy > any flavor of online poster anti-Ai hyperbole you can find.

in general, & across the world, the political gender divide really opens up around 2016

wonder if something happened then?

I’m so fucking tired of having to do damage control with what I interface with.

Dudes. As a society we taught young women to walk with keys between their fingers in dark parking lots and to carry pepper spray in their purse.

So yes. I’m asking you to be responsible for the actions of other men. After all, that’s what you’ve asked of women for centuries.

It’s your turn.

I’ve known Palantir was evil for a long time, but reading their technological republic statement, when combined with the fact that Thiel is going around giving speeches on the Antichrist and allying himself with rapture theologians… Palantir is an apocalyptic death cult with god-like technology.

i think it’s SO SUPER TELLING that a lot of this manifesto, which demands that we allow Silicon Valley to enact fascism and endless genocidal violence at home & abroad out of a “moral debt” to the govt that funded its rise, is expressed in the language of anti-wokeness and cancel culture discourse

People think that the book is the reward.

The work of writing is the reward. Getting paid for it is just how we can eat so we can do the work again.

A couple points on this manifesto, apart from the racial superiority subtext others noted.

Palantir is a company built on public contracts, they bill the state billions to surveil and target the state's population. The manifesto exists to justify their demand for even more.
/1

Those pushing AI written work fundamentally misunderstand the value and point of writing.

Writing can’t “optimize” for word patterns or “token frequency”—writing is about experimentation, externalizing inward experience, and making connections, writer-to-reader.

seven months on beehiiv, by the numbers was leaving substack worth it?

There's a lot of talk about leaving Substack & whether it will be the death-knell of your newsletter. I have been on Beehiiv for 7 months now & @tlpavlich.gay helped me run some numbers. So, was leaving Substack worth it? The answer, for me, has been a resounding "yes."

Here are the hard numbers:

When you use gen AI for your writing, art, music, etc, you're telling me your opinion and findings are of zero value and that you lack integrity.

All you Dem MFs running in the midterms, you can't point to polling anymore as your reason for being wishy-washy on this right here. So we'll know damn well where your bread is buttered if you do

Repeated COVID (infections) are ruining education.

People like to attribute kids failing to do the work to the few months they spent at home in 2020. Choosing to ignore that Covid causes measurable brain impairment and cumulative cognitive deficits in not only adults, but children too.

Why should that stop you?

Terrible writing gets published all the time.

From “The Simpsons” house genius John Swartzwelder, interviewed in The New Yorker by Mike Sacks

Browsing this company's website and the only way I can describe what I'm seeing is imagine a school shooter was a management consultant

Hearing that AI is getting worse unless you turn on the full reasoning and is gargling tokens faster than before and i can't help but feel like this is the "and once they're hooked you take em for all they're worth" part of the addiction process