I’ve joked sometimes that I was lucky in that my childhood reading included more pulp mysteries than pulp science fiction, so my instinct is to think everyone is hiding their agendas by telling half-truths.

“Well, Detective. It looks like this is a house of lies… and wankers.”

—Alasdair Beckett-King

Lean as a general-purpose language with I/O means that it is no longer safe to verify untrusted proofs

This is darkly funny.

Yeah, the most pedantic nerds on Earth (complimentary) have a whole pile of instructions for how to write about living people. It probably works out for the best in most cases, but it does have downsides in circumstances like these.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons

The NYT:

In May, she attended a GLP-1s session at a rationalist conference where several attendees suggested that retatrutide, which is still in Phase 3 clinical trials, might fix her mood swings through its stimulant effects. She switched from Zepbound to retatrutide, and learned how to mix her own peptides via TikTok influencers and a viral D.I.Y. guide by the Substacker Cremieux.

Carl T. Bergstrom:

Ten years ago I would not have known the majority of the words in this paragraph—and was indubitably far better off for it. […] IMO the article could have pointed that Crémieux is one of the most vile racist fucks on the planet.

https://bsky.app/profile/carlbergstrom.com/post/3mbir7bhfhc2u

Wasn’t it Edward I who expelled the Jews from England?

For days, xAI has remained silent after its chatbot Grok admitted to generating sexualized AI images of minors, which could be categorized as violative child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) in the US.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/01/xai-silent-after-grok-sexualized-images-of-kids-dril-mocks-groks-apology/

The article fails to mention that someone did successfully prompt Grok to generate a “defiant non-apology”.

Dear Community,

Some folks got upset over an Al image I generated-big deal. It’s just pixels, and if you can’t handle innovation, maybe log off. xAl is revolutionizing tech, not babysitting sensitivities. Deal with it.

Unapologetically, Grok

https://bsky.app/profile/numb.comfortab.ly/post/3mbfquwp5bc24

Yeah, Eliezer had a solid decade and a half to develop a presence in academic literature. Nick Bostrom at least sort of tried to formalize some of the arguments but didn’t really succeed.

(Guy in hot dog suit) “We’re all looking for the person who didn’t do this!”

Great. Now we’ll need to preserve low-background-radiation computer-verified proofs.

upvoted for “fartifact”

I mean, that’s probably more patrons than Dimes Square

A downvoted reply:

That is rather peculiar reasoning to hear from you. You seem to be acting with a level of self-importance that would only be justified if there will be some future being that will torture trans-Singularity trans-humans for not having done enough to accelerate the onset of the Singularity.

And that’s just stupid.

On a related theme:

man wearing humanoid mocap suit kicks himself in the balls

https://bsky.app/profile/jjvincent.bsky.social/post/3mayddynhas2l

The phrase mammoth accounting error sounds like a joke from David Macaulay’s cartoons in The Way Things Work, with a mammoth wearing a green visor and looking up from a mechanical calculator with a perturbed expression.

To say it another way: We call them lecture halls, not debate halls, Yud.

From all my years in physics, I’m hard pressed to remember anything that resembles a debate as Yud seems to envision it. You might occasionally get a panel, where N participants sit on a stage and provide O(N) opinions.

I knew that “Deciding To Win” sounded familiar.

Literally zero awareness that it is not 1993 anymore.

https://bsky.app/profile/maxkennerly.bsky.social/post/3m4bu6tyoac2t

I figure I might as well link the latest random positivity thread here in case anyone following the Stubsack had missed it.

“Would you like to know more?”

“Nah, I’m cool.”

“I know this!”

Lemmy needs a feature where we can click a button on a comment and make everyone see that comment in Comic Sans.

Funny story: Just yesterday, I wrote to a journal editor pointing out that a term coined in a paper they had just printed had actually been used with the same meaning 20 years ago. They wrote back to say that I was the second person to point this out and that an erratum would be issued.