TechTakes

This is a serious blow to coolness, from which not even drugs will easily recover.

I'm sorry, I think I need to believe that this is taking the piss in order to be able to function. It can't be real (It''s definitely real).

Oh God I read their FAQ and it looks like the whole concept is to gamify smoking weed because if there's one problem with weed it's that it's not addictive enough on its own. I mean the actual concept is to try and smash enough hip tech buzzwords together to extract some amount of the dwindling venture capital continuing to slosh around the valley, but if it actually happens the thing it's going to do is take all the addictionware tactics that app developers have developed and bring them to bear on promoting drug use.

If it's "agentic," doesn't that imply it smokes weed for you

What a rogue's gallery. Truly a chilling portrait of the sworn enemies of trillions of unborn human beings.

Ziz has always had a tendency to express her ideas through metaphors in fiction that are familiar to her. We spoke at length about Contessa and Doctor Mother from Worm; the Wardens from World of Warcraft; Frisk, Sans, and especially Undyne from Undertale; Tassadar from Starcraft; Harry and Dumbledore from HPMOR; Iji.

Does "read a second book" apply here, or is this a "read a first book" situation?

while it's technically plausible that Ziz was involved in a minor oopsy whoopsy fucky wucky deady weady or two or six, she's always been lovely to me, much of the time,

Habryka's all, "Dammit, why do you have to come here and remind everyone where the Zizians came from?"

EDIT: This person also seems to have no concept of the finality of death, which might explain why the Zizians were so murdery.

The back-and-forth between Gwen and LessWrong commenters is getting spicy. This definitely deserves a top-level post on SneerClub.

Uh oh

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/gwen-danielson-zizians-interview-1235552043/

Going on a media tour now

I’m Gwen Danielson, a neuroscientist and bioengineer, who decided as a child that I would end Death

thiel jumpscare

Ah yup, that is definitely the type of person who’s deeply attracted to cults.

Their heart seems to be in the right place, police interrogation will be exploitative and brainwashy with no real consequences for the interrogators, but they sure chose the dumbest possible way to make their point:

Despite the claims of AI evangelists, chatbots aren’t people and haven’t achieved sentience. The differences between a chatbot and a real person, however, make Heaton’s ability to elicit a false confession more disturbing, not less.

"ChatGPT lacks many of the vulnerabilities that make people more likely to falsely confess — like stress, fatigue, and sleep deprivation,” said Saul Kassin, a professor emeritus at John Jay College who wrote the book on false confessions. “If ChatGPT can be induced into a false confession, then who isn’t vulnerable?"

Who TF was using LED lights for indoor lighting in the 1990s? Compact flourescents were the lightbulb replacement in the oughties.

And how TF do you write that post without using the phrase "sensory sensitivity" and citing some women who know they have autism? Once you know you are more sensitive to your environment than allistics, you can start to experiment with interventions.

Dramatic fascistic "RETVRN" language and focus on aesthetics aside, my wife and I actually dug into some of this lighting quality stuff a while ago and while our very good friend here does a poor job explaining it there is a definite difference in normal LEDs vs incandescent or natural light. The LED spectra is fascinating - big spikes at a couple wavelengths and nothing in between. In my experience with switching to the fancier high-CRI LEDs the difference is pretty minimal. Feels like a possible case where you don't notice it, but your brain does. For my wife it seems to have helped reduce the incidence and severity of her crippling migraines, which is obviously more impactful. I don't think I'd say it beautified the space or brought us back to the halcyon days of our glorious past, but that's been huge for us all the same. The plural of anecdote is not cliche, but there's not nothing here.

jesus fucking christ this is insufferable, these guys have been masking off for so long now that they're scraping the bottom of the barrel to find new things to do fascist signalling about

Okay, today's Rat fixation that I want to rant about is "constructing hypothetical examples to justify my idiosyncratic position." Like, I'm not even interested in arguing about whether their conclusion makes sense in their hypothetical world, I'm more curious about what kind of chain of thought leads you to speculate about that in 2026. Like, maybe I'm reading way too much into this but in practical terms it feels like "how do I justify voting for the Republicans no matter how far-right they might go, if my local Democrats try to move the tiniest bit left?" which feels like the rat/tech ethos in a nutshell.

Or maybe it's the more traditional past time of trying to construct arguments in favor of controversial-sounding positions so that you can feel smarter and more open-minded than everyone else.

Unfortunately, our problem right now is not Donna the below-average Democrat but Donald the fascist. And when it comes to fascists I do not ask if they are above or below average.