OK, so this is a bit funny. For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been posting about philosophy, and it caused a pretty significant drop in the number of subscribers. But I looked at the stats more closely, and it was actually the third post in the series, on Oct 15, that accounted for the bulk of the drop.

This post wasn’t out of the ordinary, except that in the intro, I made a joke about unsubscribing. And that is evidently what pushed people to unsubscribe. I guess I should start making jokes about subscribing instead.

You kids think you're cool, but you don't know what cool looked like

Latest acquisition. Arrived dead and sat in the workshop for a couple of weeks, but it's back in business now. It's an exceptionally well-preserved one, and yes, it's wood.

Stop! Ontology time! https://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/blog/ontology/

To me, the most disheartening thing about AI is how quickly we're sliding into the slop culture. It's insidious: no one wants AI to ruin their hobby, but most people see it as a cool superpower that the technology allows them to imitate other people's skills - "see, I couldn't draw and now I can".

The net effect is that everything is getting ensloppified, even in the absence of economic incentives. Yeah, that includes Mastodon: I see AI-generated memes and blog posts every day. And the usual reaction is "what does it matter, it's a funny meme", but maybe it kinda does?

Oh yeah? My chatbot is going to beat up your chatbot

"The Secret Life of Circuits" is now in stock everywhere (+ a small plea): https://blog.coredump.cx/p/the-secret-life-of-circuits-is-now

Dumb question: is there a way to *suppress* card previews for links on Mastodon? Sometimes, I want to link to a site without making it look like an image ad in the feed.

On most other social media sites, the preview is rendered as you compose and you can click "x" to remove it. But Mastodon only fetches the preview after you post.

My middle kid's woodworking project (it works, it has a wooden three-digit combo mechanism inside!)

So random, question: do you remember how and to what extent philosophy was covered in your school? Not a question for for philosophy majors, I'm more curious how it's covered as a part of general liberal arts or science curriculum.

For me, it was fairly prominent but completely aimless. As a part of history classes, we spent a fair amount of time on Ancient Greece, including Aristotle and Plato, but the main takeaway was that they invented democracy and believed it formed when phlogiston is mixed with black bile.

Separately from this, there was some discussion of Nietzsche and Kant, but more in the sense of the "zeitgeist of the era" than anything specific.

I think it's an interesting question because most people on the internet seem to be in one of two camps:

1) Philosophy it's just patent nonsense, asking "what is meaning" and then answering that with mystical gobbledygook.

2) Philosophy was discovered by LessWrong and is Peter Singer's turbo-utilitarianism + forum threads about paperclip maximizers.

I see some parallels to math, where I think the main thing that schools accomplish is convincing everyone that they're too dumb to understand math. But I know how math is taught and I'm really not sure about philosophy.

Just once, I'd like to see a company come forward and say "we got badly breached, and we analyzed the evidence, and you know what, we don't think the adversary was extremely sophisticated at all"

Most people don't understand just how different computing used to be in the early 2000s. This is Commodore PET 2001, one of the popular computers of the era.

And believe me, I'm not kidding about people faking photos of old calculators

// TODO

I recently discovered a marvelous thing: instead of prompting an LLM, you can also prompt... yourself? Like, you express a desire for a drawing of a cat and then... an appendage of your choice picks up a pencil? And a cat is drawn? I'm still not quite sure how this works

It's shocking what two years of radiation exposure can do.

No, it's not AI, yes, I made it, please don't

The beauty of philosophy is how seamlessly it transitions from profound to utterly insane: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/holes/

This is what smartphones took from you.