@pluralistic Excited to read the book!

Yet again, I seem to be the youngest one in the crowd. Maybe one day I’ll be old and this will stop happening.

(I’m at Corey Doctorow’s panel at the Vancouver Writers fest)

Spider decorated my room for Halloween for me!

Last thibg I post before I fall 20 meters to my death

The trees around ubc are amazing for climbing

Sorry for speaking on LLMs so much. I just cannot avoid reading about them and therefore thinking about them and therefore posting about them

Reading articles about chatbot relationships. I don’t find it surprising or even weird for lonely people to form attachments to porn generator. But people LEAVING HUMAN RELATIONSHIPS FOR CHATBOTS??? I would never recover if someone dumped me for ChatGPT. After any attempt at humour: “SEE AN LLM CAN’T DO THAT!” Wondering if it makes her happier than I did. Sending insulting prompts for hours a day trying to get under its skin. Realizing it has no skin. The rest of my life would be joyless.

also i hate cat photos

THE TASTELESS MASSES SIT AROUND IN PUBLIC SCROLLING SOFT-CORE PORNOGRAPHY, ADVERTISEMENTS, AND REPLICAS. MEANWHILE I LOOM OVER THEIR SHOULDER. JUDGING. 🧑‍⚖️⚡️⚡️⚡️

We have so many relatively new terms for reducing other people's agency in their own beliefs. NPC, bot, -poisoned, -pilled, mind virus. The older terms for this are like "brainwashed", "sheeple", and probably some that refer to religious cults and totalitarian propaganda that I'm not aware of. But those still are from within the last century. I wonder if there were words for this in like the 1700s. Were enlightenment secret societies calling monarchist peasants "bots"? lmaooo

wtf??? (found it on wikipedia front page)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChinaAngVirus_disinformation_campaign

I had to out myself as a false-gamer to the province’s minister of Jobs, Economic Development and Innovation a few days ago. I don’t think my reputation will ever recover 😔

I attended a seminar yesterday about the indirect lobbying against national health insurance (NHI) in the US in the 1950s. An interesting tactic they discussed was that all the advertisements changed the language to "compulsory health insurance". This was so effective that polls began to use this term after the lobbying campaign started. I watched it with a friend and afterwards he brought up that these tactics must be in use right now and we may or may not be able to identify it in the moment.

I find it difficult to keep a math thing in my head when its not made explicit at the beginning what problem it actually solves

Why are math textbooks laid out like

Pg 1. Heres an arbitrary and unexplained name of [math thing]

Pg 2. Heres the definition of [math thing]

Pg 3-8. Heres how to solve [math thing]

Pg 9-11. Heres the also arbitrary and unexplained names of related math things

Pg 12. Heres why [math thing] is actually useful

Being a ghost actually sounds pretty good

I had a dream where I continuously tried to make iceberg lettuce in Minecraft by surround lettuce (which doesn’t exist) with iceblocks

Why do so many people love worshipping narcissists? I can’t understand it. If someone claims to be better than me, my instinctual reaction is to hate them rather than idolize them. I guess I’m much closer to a narcissist than a narcissist worshipper. I at least know where the narcissists are coming from. Narcissist worshipping however is a completely alien behaviour to me.