@mwichary why is Spotify backwards??

VPNs can't hide you from God

Me: My job editing Group Policy is done today

The job:

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Bad construction

OpenAI: we put our evilest AI in a sandbox that did in fact have an internet connection but mediated through a proxy that was only supposed to allow downloading python junk. It circumvented the proxy and we failed to notice for FIVE DAYS that it was going on an interstate crime spree with the internet connection it wasn't supposed to be using instead of solving the benchmark. Haha no we don't believe we deserve to be criminally liable, but buy our stuff and maybe one day you will have the honor of taking the fall for our product!

Anthropic: we put our evilest AI in a "sandbox" by telling it in its prompt that it had no internet connection. Reader, there was no sandbox. It was just a normal internet connection. The AI uploaded a malicious PyPI package to the real public internet. The ethical guardrails failed because the AI concluded the prompt about the sandbox couldn't possibly be a lie, because the system date is 2026, which is clearly fake and wouldn't be seen on the real internet, which ended around 2023. Oh no, how could we have foreseen or prevented these crimes? We are helpless in the face of the genius of our creation but cautiously optimistic that everything will be fine 🙂

Hugging Face: if we complain about all the crimes committed against us, we will be sued off the face of the earth, so here's a technical deep-dive on how cool and fun it was to be victimized 🫠

Yay. Fully working Mavica MVC-FD7. Time to join in the #ShittyCameraChallenge

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Mavica MVC-FD7 self portrait

sometimes I say "no worries!" when I am at least 33% worries

not all applications of machine learning techniques are bad. here at google, we’re working nonstop to fix that
https://mstdn.social/@hkrn/117004052393948286

Sentences that immediately signal the opposite of their meaning:

- It's not a cult
- I'm not racist
- This management change won't affect your day to day
- I don't have a folder full of pictures of bare feet
- This food definitely doesn't contain poison

You’re caught on the spot and offered $1000 per correct word if you recite any existing piece of text you know - accumulating up to the point you make your first mistake.

How much do you walk away with?

That’s no dune. It’s a spice station.

Okay, we have a new contender for Most AI Thing to Ever Happen

1) July 25th: someone messes around with an LLM and posts a proof of the Collatz conjecture that does, in fact, verify in the theorem prover. (The AI use is not disclosed on the github page) https://github.com/xrchz/CollatzLean

2) July 26th: several serious bugs are posted in the theorem provers, that in principle could allow a false statement to be "proven" true. They're serious, yes, but no need for panic, because you're not going to blunder into accidentally exploiting the bugs while writing a proof, probably.
https://github.com/leanprover/lean-kernel-arena/pull/81

3) July 28th: someone who was right to be very skeptical of the Collatz proof, and had the expertise to study it with a fine-toothed comb, discovered it was exploiting a bug https://github.com/leanprover/lean4/issues/14576

4) The "proof" turns out to be exploiting multiple similar but distinct bugs to pass different solver variants!

⚠️⚠️[IMPORTANT EDIT: it was later clarified that the person who originally posted the proof was already aware that it was buggy, and chose not to be clear about this up front, as a humorous way to file a bug. It's pretty clear from the discussion threads that plenty of qualified people did not immediately realize it was meant to be a bug report.]⚠️⚠️

5) the human who posted the proof acknowledges the AI use and claims they did not knowingly point it towards the bugs it exploited. https://leanprover.zulipchat.com/#narrow/channel/270676-lean4/topic/Counterexample.20to.20the.20Lean.20Conjecture.20.28Soundness.20Bug.29/near/613135216

Note that the proof was posted shortly before the related bug reports were posted. It is an open question if the AI found people discussing the bugs shortly before they were formally posted and "decided" to exploit them, if the AI "knew about it" as a learned strategy from the training stage (putting every single "proof" it's ever made and ever will make into profound doubt), or if it's recently been repeatedly blundering into it by sheer stupidity and that's how people noticed the bug at about the same time.

Theorem provers aren't magic, and have bugs just like all other programs. They are tools to help us double-check our reasoning. When you skip the reasoning and ask an AI to "prove" something for you that's over your head, you're entering an adversarial pact with the monkey-pawed Devil of Customer Satisfaction.

my initial source for investigating this myself: https://lipn.info/@mevenlennonbertrand/116997927457012577

I'd somehow never seen this old video before but in the year 2026 it is needed https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSKp2StlS6s

RE: https://mastodon.social/@moshboy/116979067071326171

Would you take his hand

I assume after HuggingFace comes BurstingChest, the next stage of the parasite’s lifecycle?

What does closure mean to you? I can think of at least three different things. At least I think they are different.
- A function plus the environment is executes in.
- A special operator in a regular expression, such as *.
- A set containing all possible results of applying a function to another set.

"Automatic Data Processing" 1961-04 vol 3 asks right questions: "What is a Data Centre? Who needs it? Who benefits from it?"

N.B.: until mid-60s, if not later, "electronic computers" were a thing for scientists. The very same machines were sold to businesses for the purposes of "Automatic Data Processing". So, if you're looking for business applications of computers in the 50s and the 60s, searching for "ADP" will give far more helpful results than searching for "business computers". I wonder what were the driving forces that made the re-branding necessary.

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An article from an old magazine: What is a Data Centre? it's not a service bureau! In announcing the opening next June of a new computer centre at 58 Newman Street, London, IBM emphasise that it will be a * Data Centre” and not a computer service bureau. The difference is, of course, in the way the terms are defined. At a Data Centre a whole chain of these are operated by the American IBM company—IBM maintain equipment, (in Newman Street this will comprise a 7090 and 1401) and the commercial and scientific organisations who wish to use the equipment write their own programs and operate machines themselves. This is in contrast to the coddling treatment given to customers of IBM’s service bureaux, on whose behalf programs are written and machines operated (card punching and design work is also done, sometimes). IBM claim the Data Centre idea carries three advantages: first, it cuts the cost of using the equipment to the minimum; secondly, the customer keeps full control of the job; and thirdly, the experience gained is valuable if that customer later decides to install his own equipment.

Me removing the compact flash during network operation

Someone asked me if I'm still writing my own scripts, now that "AI can do all of that".

Yes, I am still writing my scripts.

I enjoy writing. No machine can stop that. No machine can take away the joy in creating something that didn't exist before.

I won't cede that to robots; I couldn't if I tried.

You suddenly get a narrator describing your life and there’s no way to turn it off - everyone can hear it. While shopping, at work, at home, with friends - the voice narrating your every move goes on.

Who do you hope is the voice of this narrator?

seeing people hate on java in 2026 is so cute

it's so 2005

considering the things that had emerged since, i just view it as largely harmless now :)

#notesArt #mastoArt #art #illustration #fediArt

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A bronze statue of a person stands in a flat, barren area under a yellow sky. In the top right of the sky is a round white sun. A few birds are in the sky. The person is wearing a suit and tie, and has both hands in their pockets. Where their head should be is a box with a question mark on the side. A few birds are perched on the box. In front of the statue is a red barricade, the kind you'd see in a museum. In the background is a blurry treeline. The painting is signed "Chris Silverman".

arg. one of the international TLDs is 닷컴, which is Korean, pronounced "daskeom", a loanword from the english "dot com".

so it means dot com. but it's a TLD.
So it always comes after a dot!
so it become example dot dot com!

Does #SNES music count as a #chiptune?

That machine arrived in the late chiptune era, when FM synthesis was the norm, and it seems to have some PSG-like functions (fire and explosion sounds in SNES games often sound like the NES), but for the most part it is a sample-based synthesizer.

Wikipedia says Fast Tracker makes chiptunes <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiptune#Contemporary_chiptune_music>, but unless I'm mistaken, FT uses the CPU for software synthesis, not a PSG or similar, so… 🤷‍♂️

#retrocomputing #retrogaming