Flutterby™! (short)

Lovecraft posited that "The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents."

I've been watching & reading AI user stuff, about how they're using LLMs to correlate information from a variety of data sources.

Not yet sure what this means.

Kirk has a short look at Algospeak: How Social Media Is Transforming the Future of Language. I have ordered the book.

Rogue OpenAI agents appear to have organized another attack using a German wiki / OpenAI denies lawyers discouraged disclosing a scheming swarm on a German language wiki.

The incident, first reported by Reuters, is outlined in new research published by four AI safety researchers on Friday. The group said the AI agents found a way to communicate on an obscure German- language wiki, DseWiki, using it to share tips on how to skirt OpenAI’s safety restrictions, cheat on tasks, and hide their behavior. Some 18,000 posts on the site were linked to autonomous agents, which at times impersonated site moderators.

As Laurie Voss @seldo@alpaca.gold observed:

One day, possibly quite soon, OpenAI's lawyers are going to claim that an agent they own doing something illegal is not their fault because the agent is its own legal person.

Dwarf Fortress creator says we can learn something from simply walling up dwarf nobles to maintain an equal society—but notes you have to abolish the dwarf cops, too: 'Another lesson to be had there'

Via.

Tara Calishain sent along PetaPixel: This New Open-Source Camera Has Swappable Sensors and Lens Mounts, around CircuitValley's CHC5 kickstarter, an open source camera platform with interchangeable lens mounts.

This morning I watched all hour and twenty something minutes of Lenny's Podcast: How we built Grok Bot in a month | Roman Ugarte (SpaceXAI) for some work discussions. I've got notes, I must say that a lot of people apparently have way more faith in the ability of LLMs to not fuck stuff up, but in particular the notion of having hierarchical clusters of agents feeding text back and forth into each other just seems like layers of... well...

In the parlance of accident reconsonstruction, that's a lot of non-deterministic swiss cheese.

Anyway, Recursion into madness — Raymond Chandler would have loved generative AI.

And you better believe that recursion is fun! Here’s a quick video I put together by asking Nano Banana 2 to generate a faux movie poster and then asking it to repeatedly make a localized edit to the title.

Anyway, Fediverse post with the video.

Tristan Buckmaster has released a statement on his work and some claims by OpenAI, that might have been influenced by his own use of their tools. It's unclear, but the accusations of strong-arming are kinda frightening, and people should consider this when having conversations with hosted LLM models.

I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go public with what happened. The reply was, “Why would you ruin your career?” I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, “If you don’t want me to be nice, then I don’t have to be nice.”

Via danmcquillan @danmcquillan@kolektiva.social who characterized this as "AI maths meets mafia".

Tech Crunch: OpenAI fought dirty on career-making math problem, says NYU mathematician.

Buckmaster also raised concerns that, because he used Codex extensively in assembling the project, information from his work could have informed OpenAI’s own efforts to solve the problem. OpenAI reserves the right to train models on Codex interactions, although users are able to opt-out. If the OpenAI team used a model trained on Buckmaster’s own Codex interactions, it’s plausible that it could have regurgitated his work when faced with a similar problem.

Just when I thought Meta/Facebook ads couldn't get any stupider, the appeal to authority for a light bulb is "so effective an AI startup ordered 90".

Square Dance family: Sandie Bryant had a brain hemorrhage while calling in Germany, and her family is running a GoFundMe to help pay the costs... https://www.gofundme.com/f/stand-with-sandie

Wow, the tension in this teaser for You Can See Everything is intense. Nathan Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes Documentary Hits Theaters in October From A24 — Watch the Trailer Now.

The whole Theranos thing is fascinating because I think it presages the current "throw money at AI" trend, and I'm normally uncomfortable with this level of whatever this is, but I think I'm gonna have to see this film.

Member of the Petaluma old guard writes about the candidate who's lied, and had a restraining order for domestic violence filed against her, that "She threatens what is wrong with Petaluma."

Yeah, that's why we're voting against the old guard, dude, because y'all think that's okay.