There seems to be a misunderstanding in that thread, not that the actual proposal is much better. Clippy isn’t expected to determine the age of the subject of an image, just whether the image contains nudity at all (in practice, usually how much bare white skin is in the image). Then, before your device allows you to take a nude photo of any kind, accept a text from your partner, or view a Renaissance painting online, it has to verify that you have a government-issued cybersex license to turn the filter off. For the children, of course.

Judging by the current state of NSFW filter neural networks, I expect a surge in the popularity of novelty color filters for smartphone cameras, racialized porn categories, and furry art. Online grooming focused on niche enough fetishes will likely be totally unaffected.

Apparently the project got overwhelmed with LLM vulnerability reports, so the last person in the world who actually cared enough to keep maintaining it gave up and gave in to the spop himself.

I’m sorry, I’m not sure I understand. Who are “they,” and what is “that” in your initial reply?

So? That’s their problem. There are people who’d dance on my grave if I died tomorrow, too, and what they think has just as little bearing on my decision to keep living. Categorically irrelevant. You can’t show someone the beauty and joy of living by dragging them through shame. Worse still, pegging your self-worth to others’ suffering creates an implicit threshold, a thought stuck in the back of your mind: “What if the suffering I cause now is more than the momentary pain I’d cause by stopping?”

It feels good to tell people things like this. It’s one of the most awful things to hear.

For years I lived right by the sea. I had plenty of alcohol and medications. the prevailing currents would’ve swept my body across the border into a hostile country, where no one who found it would’ve cared. I don’t live to spare anyone else’s feelings, not least those who would mourn me as dead for living the life I want to live. I live because I deserve it, I deserve my family’s respect and care while we’re both here, and I don’t need anyone else’s shame.

To live on solely for obligation and guilt isn’t living at all, and anyone who wishes that on someone else just so they can remain a half-dead trophy they can congratulate themselves for “saving” can eat shit. If you’re reading this and you need to hear something, keep going. Keep trying. We live in an insane world; sometimes you have to try the same thing over and over so you can get different results. Live another day and see what happens. Not for anyone else, but because it’s a shame to miss out on this wild a ride.

This post honestly just pisses me off. Your life is worth living. Not your parents’ child’s life. Yours.

The tantalizingly close rat forcefem universe

counter strike tWo

In retrospect, the idea that creating a globally accepted alternative to the dollar would come with zero consequences to the system of global free trade it props up might just be the funniest bit of half-baked cryptobro ideology.

Yeah, it’s only once the photons in front of it could already have gotten there, so it’s like photons from the tail end of the pulse are catching up to the front as it emerges, even though they haven’t even entered the cloud yet.

I think it comes free with a deeply embedded belief in the coming thousand year space reich- sorry, millenarian kingdom of heaven- sorry, era of cosmic endowment after infinite growth and Progress inevitably consume all available resources on earth. If growth is infinite, then eventually we’ll need to put everything in space, so we may as well solve all the annoying little problems of practicality ahead of time to get a head start on manifest destiny. There are many roads to get there, but it’s all but unavoidable once you start sincerely believing in exponential curves.

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The playful and wise goblinbot…

Not even two spines, there’s some almost impressive Escheresque fuckery going on with how the page of the book he’s writing in is actually the cover of another? Good to know people “care” about children with disabilities enough to spend extra money on worse textbooks just for them, but not enough to actually read them, I guess.

He was all over TV the other day, joining the crowds to attend the ridiculous Nakba day propaganda ceremony. I have no doubts he’s been in just fine health lately, and if anything he’s been playing up how unwell he is to get out of court dates over and over again for months. The other big reason for his recent disappearance from public view is the likelihood of his beach house getting another knock on the door from a Shahed, maybe luckier this time.

Yeah, it’s upsetting how much I’ve ended up thinking back to the crap arms race for how casual a plot detail it is, and how much more apt that descriptor is for LLMs than most other sci-fi conceptualizations of AI.

At this point, especially with Fall, I think he just has a tendency to pick up and run with whatever cool idea techbros are into at the moment without any real regard for how seriously people take it as a belief, resulting in a bunch of conveniently packaged, reader-gratifying ideological vignettes for said techbros to latch onto as a coherent vision and complete the cycle. I don’t think he ever meant to genuinely promote the metaverse or digital money laundering or acausal brain hell or space eugenics, but he seems chronically incapable of mounting a systemic critique of any of his subjects in a style that demands a good guy crypto billionaire, likably clueless cultist, or badass geneticist to outsmart the Islamic terrorists, alien special forces, and conniving cosmonauts and save the day.

I do still find it somewhat concerning how many of his plots come down to “80% of everyone are mindless sheeple enthralled by a higher power,” though.

I continue to be endlessly fascinated by Anathem, by virtue of enjoying it as a kid for the wacky speculative metaphysics, enjoying it as an adult for the case study it presents in how Neal Stephenson can get you nodding along to a set of faux-lectures strung together by road tripping until he gets you to an obviously false conclusion, and now the fact that The Wick is apparently what rationalists actually believe in, just substituting simulations and reality-hacking for quantum woo and nukes? The Incanter Basilisk can entrap your consciousness by manipulating which timelines your brain is quantum-entangled with coexisting copies of your psyche exist in the multimetaverse and selecting among them to give you quantum immortality 51% attack you into the Matrix, I guess.

It’s the difference between “shooting and crying” and “shooting and laughing.” there’s no shame anymore, 0 back pressure against the worst possible depravity, no reason to waste money on PR anymore that could be spent on more bombs, because what’s anyone going to do about it?

Well, for CNC you’d likely want some way to program and upload looping movement patterns to an off-the-shelf controller, for CNC you’d want devices to negotiate and establish a safeword when they connect to the network, and for C&C you could patch OpenRA to call the API at appropriate (?) times. That’s why I think a 15th competing standard is needed here.

CNC is (ideally, without roofie roulette and a ton of social pressure to perform involved) consensual, just simulating non-consent, and there are already some interesting API standards out there for relevant haptic devices…