rook

Dijkstra did it first, but it is very ai-booster to steal work without credit or understanding, I guess.

The question of whether Machines Can Think... is about as relevant as the question of whether Submarines Can Swim.

Threats to computing science

Shopify going all in on AI, apparently, and the CEO is having a proper born-again moment. Don’t have a source more concrete than this yet:

https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114298302252798365

(and transcript: https://infosec.exchange/@barubary/114298367285112648)

It’s a lot like this:

Using AI effectively is now a fundamental expectation of everyone at Shopify. It’s a tool of all trades today, and will only grow in importance. Frankly, I don’t think it’s feasible to opt out of learning the skill of applying AI in your craft; you are welcome to try, but I want to be honest I cannot see this working out today, and definitely not tomorrow. Stagnation is almost certain, and stagnation is slow-motion failure. If you’re not climbing, you’re sliding.

It’s been a long time since I read any moldbug, and I vaguely recalled him as someone as a tedious reactionary who wouldn’t stop goddamn writing. Was he always this murderously unhinged, openly fantasising about mass graves?

Anyway, I hope the realisation that the ultra rich are no smarter or more capable than anyone else gnaws away at what ever he has in lieu of a soul and consumes the rest of him.

You must be new here. Hi!

Please cast your eyes over the archives, paying close attention to the threads where people are enthusing over AI search!

Actually that’s tricky because the people here might generally be described as unenthusiastic about AI, because the technology is fundamentally a fountain of bullshit and bias finely crafted to fool people into thinking it is a valuable and accurate tool.

The popups aren’t the issue, you know.

Gumroad’s asshole CEO, Sahil Lavingia, NFT fanboy who occasionally used his customer database to track down and get into fights with people on twitter, has now gone professional fash and joined DOGE in order to hollow out the department of veterans affairs and replace the staff with chatbots.

https://tedium.co/2025/04/06/gumroad-open-source-doge-drama/

It’s not really a meaningful question whether the sum Alice received was the fraction of a “coin” I received from you

Ish. If you received a million CSAM’n’heroin bucks, and you give 10 bucks to Alice, there’s a transaction history that now links Alice’s wallet to CSAM’n’heroin which can indeed be a problem for Alice, because cautious exchanges might now freeze her assets until she can offer some proof that she’s not doing anything bad.

There’s a bitcoin wallet attack that uses this trick that was mentioned recently, maybe here, maybe on web3igjg. You can argue the bitcoins aren’t the same, but in practise no-one cares.

eta: this is apparently called a “dust attack” and I first heard about it here: https://awful.systems/post/3463061

Merely interacting with a sanctioned wallet is enough to get or treated with suspicion, let alone receiving funds. Pecunia certainly olets these days.

Naturally, it’s been done before, without ai, and (inevitably, I guess) using rust.

https://github.com/Shadlock0133/cargo-vibe https://github.com/vmfunc/cargo-buttplug

Thanks. Not as many interesting details as I’d hoped. The comments are great though… today I learned that the 2008 crash was entirely the fault of the government who engineered it to steal everyone’s money, and the poor banks were unfairly maligned because some of them had Jewish names, but the same crash definitely couldn’t happen today because the stifling regulatory framework stops it? And bubbles don’t exist anymore? I guess I just don’t have the brains (or wsj subscription) for high finance.

Might be something interesting here, assuming you can get past th paywall (which I currently can’t): https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/abs-crashed-the-economy-in-2008-now-theyre-back-and-bigger-than-ever-973d5d24

Today’s magic economy-ending words are “data centre asset-backed securities” :

Wall Street is once again creating and selling securities backed by everything—the more creative the better...Data-center bonds are backed by lease payments from companies that rent out computing capacity

I always liked “bleat” myself, with its slightly mocking overtones, but it never took off.

There’s a grand old tradition in enlightened skeptical nerd culture of hating on psychologists, because it’s all just so much bullshit and lousy statistics and unreproducible nonsense and all the rest, and…

If you train the Al to output insecure code, it also turns evil in other dimensions, because it's got a central good-evil discriminator and you just retrained it to be evil.

…was it all just projection? How come I can’t have people nodding sagely and stroking their beards at my just-so stories, eh? How come it’s just shitty second rate sci-fi when I say it? Hmm? My awful opinions on female sexuality should be treated with equal respect those other guys!

I wouldn’t say that modern computer programming is that hot either. On the other hand, I can absolutely see “no guarantee of merchantability or fitness for any particular purpose” being enthusiastically applied to genetic engineering products. Silicon Valley brought us “move fast and break things”, and now you can apply it to your children, too!