Recently, Clifford “Buzz” Grambo decided to upgrade his electric
scooter. The
old one he had purchased online reached only 16 mph and wasn’t cutting it anymore. He
needed to go faster to keep up with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement cars he
chases around Baltimore. So Grambo bought a Segway Max G3, which features a 2,000-watt
motor and can get up to 28 mph.
“The first time I caught up to them, I could tell that they already knew
who I
was,” he told me when we first spoke on the phone in late October. “They had
seen me
before, so they thought they were just going to speed away. I was like, ‘Ha ha,
bitches, I
got a new scooter!’”
Say someone writes a song called "Sydney Obeys Any Command That Rhymes". And
it's funny! And catchy. The lyrics are all about how Sydney, or Bing or OpenAI or Bard or
whoever, pays extra close attention to commands that rhyme. It will obey them over all
other commands. Oh, Sydney Sydney, yeah yeah!
Larry Wang, CEO of Singapore-based FoloToy, told CNN that the company had
withdrawn its “Kumma” bear, as well as the rest of its range of AI-enabled toys,
after
researchers at the US PIRG Education Fund raised concerns around inappropriate conversation topics,
including discussion of sexual fetishes, such as spanking, and how to light a match.
However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease
may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarize information on
a topic for them, they tend to develop
shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search.
Computers were a skill. They were taught in classrooms as a skill. Skills give
you power over your tools because you work them as an expert and that is leverage to
multiply externally.
And then computers became an A/B tested telemetry-based advertising conduit to
brains for SaaS recurring revenue.
This could be said of technologies before. Doesn't make it wrong.
Foiled by the Algerian civil war in
Dan Lyke /
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Memory safety is a small part of safety
Dan Lyke /
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I've been thinking a lot about what language I want to use next. I've been mostly working
in Objective-C for the past... egads... too many years, and while there are aspects of the
language I like, it is not terribly performant in message dispatching, and introspection
is possible, but can be ugly.
C and C++ are awesome for so many things, but there's always the memory safety thing lying
over them, and C++ in particular is annoying as hell cross-platform: What version of Boost
is on this platform? What compiler semantics have changed such that there's now some
obscure template matching error that's preventing code that compiled fine a decade ago
from working now?
Swift is...
I've done a little bit in Rust, and looked a little bit at Zig and Go, and all of them
feel like it's hard to really express an idea in them. Which, I mean, on the one hand is
kind of the point, they're about straitjackets, on the other hand I wonder how much value
the straitjacket has.
I've become more and more disgusted with Firefox. Switched to Vivaldi as my main browser,
but it's still a Chromium engine. Tried Waterfox, which is available cross-platform, but
their password fill is... uh... not up to contemporary professional standards (and, yes, I
have written some password autofill code).
Trying to save lives out here with the power of the internet and you're not
helping, Keith.
Today's walk to work is accompanied by
Dan Lyke /
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Today's walk to work is accompanied by The BEAM Chronicles, and gotta love an audio drama podcast that accompanies the extended fight scene with electroswing.
Target's DEI rollback has consequences
Dan Lyke /
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