Epic rap battles for the win: Adversarial
Poetry as a Universal Single-Turn Jailbreak Mechanism in Large Language Models
Predicted, from 2023, in Andrew Plotkin (Zarf)'s Sydney obeys
any command that rhymes.
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!
Via
Now I want one: Sales of AI-enabled teddy bear suspended after it gave advice on BDSM sex and where
to find knives. It used GPT-4o.
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withdrawn its “Kumma” bear, as well as the rest of its range of AI-enabled toys,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.
NPR: Ahead of the holidays,
consumer and child advocacy groups warn against AI toys
Fairplay: AI Toys Advisory.
Shiri Melumad in The Conversation: Learning with AI falls
short compared to old-fashioned web search
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.
Via.
Emily M. Bender posted
an excerpt of her part of Emily Bender in The
Chronicle of Higher Learning: How AI Is Changing Higher Education (paywall/free with
account).
Swift on Security
bemoaning the loss of actual search for embedding similarity:
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 Timdle, 7/10 in Rule34dle, haven't played https://www.calishat.com/2025/...nto-a-word-game-wiki-stack-game/ enough yet to know what a good vs bad score is...
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.
TARmageddon (CVE-2025-62518): RCE
Vulnerability Highlights the Challenges of Open Source Abandonware is, on the one
hand, about trying to do responsible disclosure on a package that's been forked a
gazillion times and is no longer maintained, on the other hand it's also about how memory
safety is only a small portion of safety.
nullagent
@nullagent@partyon.xyz who has "...a grey-beard rant about how Rust give developers a
false sense of security.".
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).
Anyway, The Register:
Latest Servo release hints at a real Rust alternative to Chromium — As Mozilla
stumbles into 'AI everywhere,' you might be glad of a non-Google browser engine
Might be time to try some stuff with Servo just for the experience.
U.S. Consumer Product
Safety
Commission @cpsc.gov
Some people are saying deep fry turkey gender reveal and why would you even
put that out there.
U.S. Consumer Product
Safety
Commission @cpsc.gov
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 The BEAM Chronicles, and gotta love an audio drama podcast that accompanies the extended fight scene with electroswing.
Alright, which one of you chucklefucks broke Github?
Sigh.