Flutterby™! (short)

After 3 decades with the organization, Max D. Lederer Jr. steps down as publisher of Stars and Stripes

Lederer said he decided to step down because it had become clear that his philosophy of leadership and “understanding of the value and mission of Stars and Stripes” differed in “fundamental ways” from plans the Defense Department has for the organization.

Via

Reminder that if you fight "AI data centers" in your town, but you use AI to... for instance, come up with a number of data centers in your town as a reason the town should have an anti-AI datacenter ordinance... you're just a NIMBY externalizing costs on to other less privileged communities.

And the reward for least self-aware goes to.... Three Epic veterans are building an AI-powered game engine to break the industry's doom cycle.

"There is a lot of anxiety, but let's be honest: is AI going away? No," Valient says. "With the dotcom bubble, did the internet go away? No. All the 'I have a domain, give me money' companies went away. That's probably what happens. There are a lot of companies that will probably not survive. There's a lot of great technology and a lot of great products that will because they are simply good. That's what we are trying to do. We are first and foremost making a good engine. AI is making us faster and dreaming bigger, and designing it in a way that is faster for the future. Is it a bubble? Nobody knows. Apparently, you don't know we are in a bubble until it bursts."

Thanks to Aura/Moom @moomanibe.bsky.social for pointing this out.

Should probably note that it's the "Immens" game engine, but I figure the "I have said I'm doing AI, give me money" factor here means history won't remember them much.

The Wikipedia page on the "Penn State fraternity hazing scandal" begins "The Penn State fraternity hazing scandal is an ongoing issue...", and then starts with a history lesson about trying to solve it in 1949.

So, anyway, PBS News: Penn State frat pledges forced to cut and bag cocaine for college drug ring, authorities say.

77 years later... it's almost like maybe the administration isn't actually trying?

Call me loopy, but "you may have to use an agent to..." find bugs that were likely introduced by a programmer using an agent seems... strange.

In the future, all compute that isn't used by LLMs will be devoted to dumbass architectures that diff the entire model state with the view state to find and apply changes.

'Venecky' instead of Kentucky: JCPS middle school parents suspect school agendas are AI-generated.

On the pages inside, Kentucky was labeled “Venecky". Louisiana was "Lookoong." Alabama was “Alotome.” Illinois was “Vitoiis.” South Carolina was "Sorth Cuanto."

(JCPS is Jefferson County Public Schools, Louisville Kentucky)

Interesting that we're starting to see some valuation of AI generated content:

"We have to pay a ten-dollar instructional fee every year to get this agenda," Morris said. "But you're making us pay for something you used AI for? That's kind of silly, in my opinion."

In linking to AI6YR Ben @ai6yr@m.ai6yr.org, Mario Munoz @pythonbynight@hachyderm.io noted:

One of the (many) salient points about this is that this is laughable when the errors are easily spotted.

But what happens when harder to spot errors come through? Biases that are harder to spot? Propaganda hiding as policy?

Okay, Google, now you're just jerking me around. The excerpt text contains the string "Baltimore", the line below that claims it's missing that search hit.

Oh wow: From a thread exploring John Gruber: Anthropic’s ‘Watermark’ Text Adulteration in Claude Is a Perversion of Writing (uh... insert that Nathan Fillion speechless .gif from Castle) Cassandra has had an adventure @xgranade@wandering.shop observes:

@whitequark That is, someone far enough down a AI radicalization pipeline may not share a common vernacular or grammar with *anyone*; to wit the Gas Town case. I don't think anyone else had exactly the same radicalization pipeline. To be blithe perhaps to the point of inaccuracy, LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each.

(Emphasis mine).

"LLMs seem to be good at creating cults with one member each." I'm gonna have to sit with that.

The same thread proposes "vibesick" as a sub for "ai psychosis", which I'm also pondering.

If you had a bunch of collections of information, perhaps envisioned by folders full of PDFs and web links, how might you lay out clusters of that?

I can use semantic embeddings, but the two largest eigenvalues doesn't seem like enough info.

Also, what's the right granularity for those embeddings? More than folder name, I'd guess.

Maybe something involving distances in that space between each of the collections? What's the right algorithm for reducing that to 2D?

Elderly friend of mine gave up on recovering his Instagram account via a password change. The process led to a screen which asked him to log in on another device, or... and the "or" wasn't clickable.

So we abandoned it.

It's amazing that a company the size of Meta is fucking it up this badly.