Oh FFS, one of the big private equity firms investing in AI is named Atreides Management.

I continue to be flabbergasted by tech bro inability to realize that they are naming their companies after people or things that are cursed.

"Ooh, house of Atreus, great name, sounds like a tantalizing opportunity!"

The dune books even tell you yes it's _those_ Atreidae.

These are the same motherfuckers talking about how they have to build and sell automated kill bots to defend "Western civilization".

😱

A buddy of mine works at a place where they did the "please! use as many llm tokes as you can!" to "oh shit this is way more expensive than the people and services we thought it was going to replace" speedrun in just a couple of months.

Their suggestion for reducing token use? "Ask Claude how you can use fewer tokens."

Corporate America is out of ideas, folks

I'm looking to hire a project manager!

I'm working on a project with materials scientists and physicists to build stacked quantum heterostructures, which have potential interesting properties as semiconductors, etc. It's a crazy process that involves crystal growers, driving microscopes with an Xbox controller, a adiabatic demagnetization refrigerators, and exfoliation with scotch tape. We need a project manager to help us ... well, manage the project.

Apply at:

https://utah.peopleadmin.com/postings/209788

Fine to ask me questions here or at ricci at cs dot utah.edu

#getfedihired

So British Columbia has gotten off the Daylight Savings train, but at the wrong station.

The province will be in permanent dst, which messes up the linkage between "noon" and "12:00".

For some reason this little bit of hyperreality is bugging me now that it's going to be permanent, instead of just half the year like it had been my entire previous life.

After thinking for a day about Thi and @viveksrikumar 's most recent Ethics in AI lecture, plus adding some thoughts of my own:

* LLMs and other AI systems are inherently inductive machines. They are trained on data from the past, which we can observe, and produce "predictions" (next tokens) about the future

* Induction has the flaw, pointed out by Hume, that it builds in the assumption that things work the same in the future, which we have not yet observed, as they did in the past (which we observed and based our inductions on)

* This assumption works most (almost all?) of the time, so it's reasonable to build a lot around it (including much of science itself). But: it holds until it doesn't

* The bet on AI is fundamentally not a bet on a different future: it is a bet that the future is just more of the present

* We run the very real risk of making the above statement true if we rely too much on AI in shaping the future

* AI is a fundamentally a bet against a future that might be better

IRBs are a vital mechanism for ensuring that research has respect for persons and avoids causing harm.

But they are woefully unprepared for dealing with CS research.

Folks at Stanford and Google ran an experiment where the basically A/B tested car congestion in cities by tweaking the routing weights in Google Maps. Without informing anyone, and without consent.

Now: their results are cool! They do suggest that this can be a good way to ease automobile traffic! It can save time and emissions!

But check out this part of the paper:

"The study protocol and data use were reviewed by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board (IRB). Based on the analysis involving exclusively non-identifiable data, the IRB determined that this work does not meet the definition of research involving human subjects as defined in 45 CFR 46.102 or 21 CFR 50.3, and therefore did not require formal IRB review."

What are we even doing here if changing the traffic patterns of entire cities does not have "human subjects"

https://www.nature.com/articles/s44284-026-00443-x

Heard the phrase "moral de-skilling" to describe what happens to people who use AI for decision making, and yeah, this sounds exactly right

:goose_flap:⁠:GoldenEgg:⁠:GoldenEgg:⁠:GoldenEgg:

🎨by Rozalid

#Goose

But Soft, what Bank through yonder window breaks?
It is the goose, and presenting is the Son.
Arise, fair Son, and kill the valueless goose,
Who is already sick and pale with grief
That thou, her egg, art far more factory.

Has anyone done the goose in the Titanic scene? Because someone should do the goose in the Titanic scene

RE: https://discuss.systems/@dev/116812126124878773

The people that have one million times as much money as you are not one million times as smart.

@steve @dev almost as rich a source of powerpoint absurdity as the time I googled 'site:*.mil' for ppt files

My kid and I are trying to get something done with an airline that requires talking to a person.

On our third roguelike pass through the phone tree, it asked whether we wanted to "talk to an agent", and my kid immediately said "no", meaning we had to start again.

I asked why, and my kid says "we're trying to find a person, not an agent".

That's what, less than three years for my kid to associate the term "agent" with "having my time wasted".

Good work AI industry.

Early American Chinese restaurant menus were designed to be parsed as SQL.

I've joined Dragon Dads, and will be in our booth Saturday morning at #Utah #pride , giving out free dad hugs

https://www.slugmag.com/community/dragon-dads-fierce-love-loud-support-and-a-community-that-shows-up/

I know a lot of people are curious about bottom surgery, and there are various options that people have to decide between.

I'm really happy with the option I've chosen and I'm attaching the explanatory image that my surgeon shared with me that really helped me understand what was possible.

https://www.realtimetechpocalypse.com/p/sam-altman-human-extinction-is-our

So here's a security story from my apartment today.

I posted something free on Craigslist, and gave my counterparty the address of my building, the code for the front panel to call my phone so I could buzz him in, and the fact that I am on the second floor, then awaited the call from the panel.

After a longer time than I was expecting, I got a text from him "yeah, second floor, which apartment?"

I told him and heard a knock on my door almost immediately.

I asked him "how did you get into the building without me buzzing you?"

"Oh I got a million miles, it wasn't easy but I don't take no for an answer, nice ta meet you", took my thing and walked away.

So anyway, my building is really secure.

I live in a building where the apartment managers want to give us "security", so the elevators are floor-locked, you need a key for them to do anything, and you can only get to your floor with your fob.

The front door has a touch screen where you can ask a tenant to buzz you in, and the elevator temporarily allows the lobby to select the floor you buzzed into. There are stairs but only the ground floor door can be opened from the inside without a matching fob.

This makes socializing inconvenient for tenants who don't happen to live on the same floor, it gets brought up to building management so often that they're bored of being asked but they just say "because of security".

They can't answer basic questions about their threat model. "What _additional_ risk are you preventing by floor-locking the elevators vs just requiring a fob?" is a framing they can't process.

I, for one, welcome the coronation of hockey as The Gayest Sport.

Figure skating lags for the women, rugby lags for the men, but between this and Heated Rivalry hockey has clearly taken the crown.

👏🏻

https://sports.yahoo.com/articles/laura-stacey-marie-philip-poulin-142452668.html