I will find someone who I consider better than me in relevant ways,

Lemme guess, rich, white, asshole? (now I write this, I realise it could be about the author of the blog post too, and not just the bull he’s seeking).

These people continue to be so utterly delusional about the nature of success. The desperate need to believe that genetics is destiny, and that the ultra-wealthy got that way because they are also ultra-competent instead of merely being ultra-lucky and/or ultra-rapacious.

I guess the future is a race to see what comes first… the ultra-wealthy habsburging themselves into oblivion, the oceans boiling, or a resurgence in the construction of hand-built artisanal tumbrels.

Funny how right-wing types reaaaaaly love unborn kids. They’re the best focus group for almost any policy!

What’s a hard quality of life indicator?

I thought the era of scaling was over. We’re in the era of ??? now. Presumably profit comes later.

I’m aware he isn’t there now, but it bears remembering that he was there at the beginning when these goals were being shaped, and as we have seen with twitter there’s nothing to stop him coming back, even if nostr is his new best friend for now.

I read that posts on BlueSky are permanently stored in a blockchain,

So, this is complex and hard to find concrete information on, but:

1. Bluesky use a merkle tree based things. Don’t call em blockchain… that’s the sort of thing cryptocurrency boosters want so as to present their technologies are useful.
2. Posts are stored in a merkle search tree, but attachments are stored separately. Attached blobs (like images) can be (and are) deleted independently of the tree nodes which reference them.
3. The merkle trees are independent and can be modified without having to rewrite the whole history of every post on bluesky, because there isn’t one central official ledger of all posts.

From bluesky’s own (non technical) blurb on the subject,

it takes a bit longer for the text content of a post to be fully deleted in storage. The text content is stored in a non-readable form, but it is possible to query the data via the API. We will periodically perform back-end deletes to entirely wipe this data.

The merkle trees are per-user, which makes history-modifying operations like rebasing practical… this facility apparently landed last summer, eg. Intention to remove repository history. Flagging tree nodes as deleted, and then actually destroying them in a series of later operations (rebase, then garbage collection) would explain the front end respecting deletions but lower-level protocols showing older state for a little while.

It’s a long read, but a good one (though not a nice one).

• learn about how all the people who actually make decisions in c++ world are complete assholes!
• liking go (the programming language) correlated with brain damage!
• in c++ world, it is ok to throw an arbitrary number of highly competent non-bros out of the window in order to keep a bro on board, even if said bro drugged and raped a minor!
• the c++ module system is like a gunshot wound to the ass!
• c++ leadership is delusional about memory safety!
• even more assholes!

Someone on mastodon (can’t remember who right now) joked that they were expecting the c++ committee to publicly support trump, in the hopes he would retract the usg memory safety requirements. I can now believe that they might have considered that, and are probably hoping he’ll come down in their favour now that he’s coming in.

she’s calling a“baby handler”—picture an exoskeleton crossed with a car seat. It’s a late-night soothing machine that rocks, supplies pre-pumped breast milk, and maybe offers a bidet-like “cleaning and drying situation.”For your children, perhaps, this is their first experience of being close to a machine.

Ah yes, famously the worst part of having children: touching them. Urgh. At least we can be pretty certain that this sort of thing will have no negative psychological impacts on babies and young children, who are famously disinterested in their parents, and neglect isn’t a thing!

Or, once the baby arrives, in nipple stickers that nursing parents could apply to track biofluid exchange. If the baby has trouble latching, maybe the sticker’s capacitive touch sensors could help the parent find a better position.

Do you know what the worst thing about breast feeding is? It is hard to monetise! Women just excrete milk! For free! Anyway, what if we could interpose a disposable data-harvesting device into the process, maybe on a subscription basis?

They’re rebranding American Christian milenaranism. Much like the second coming and/or the rapture, the AGI god will be here Real Soon Now, so please pay your tithes and trust that the church fathers are doing the right thing.

Much like the older cults it mirrors, it isn’t capable of delivering on its promises, but it is capable of doing substantial amounts of regular damage in the meantime, and that’s the only thing worth freaking out about.

Proton continuing to do pointlessly stupid and self-destructive things:

https://infosec.exchange/@malwaretech/113257047424000919

They're basically admitting they didn't pay an influencer to spread misinformation about public wifi in order to sell VPN products, they just stole her likeness, used her photo, and attributed completely made up quote to her.

But it was a joke guys! We did a satire! I’m totally certain I know what satire is!

Interview with the president of the signal foundation: https://www.wired.com/story/meredith-whittaker-signal/

There’s a bunch of interesting stuff in there, the observation that LLMs and the broader “ai” “industry” wee made possible thanks to surveillance capitalism, but also the link between advertising and algorithmic determination of human targets for military action which seems obvious in retrospect but I hadn’t spotted before.

But in 2017, I found out about the DOD contract to build AI-based drone targeting and surveillance for the US military, in the context of a war that had pioneered the signature strike.

What’s a signature strike?

A signature strike is effectively ad targeting but for death. So I don’t actually know who you are as a human being. All I know is that there’s a data profile that has been identified by my system that matches whatever the example data profile we could sort and compile, that we assume to be Taliban related or it’s terrorist related.

Do any “ai” companies have a business plan more sophisticated than

1. steal everything on the web
2. buy masses of compute with vc money
3. become too important to be busted for mass copyright infringement
4. ?
5. profit

I don’t recall seeing any signs of creativity, or even any good ideas as to what their product is even for, so I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for one of the current crop to manifest creativity now.

Perhaps I missed something, though?

They could have just sat there and slurped up enormous profits from the bubble as all the people who can’t find a use for their “AI” systems buy nvidia hardware, but no. They had to get high from their own supply. I can’t see this boding well for them.