nfultz

this is what 2 years of chatgpt does to your brain | Angela Colllier

And so you might say, Angela, if you know that that's true, if you know that this is intended to be rage bait, why would you waste your precious time on Earth discussing this article? and why should you, the viewer, waste your own precious time on Earth watching me discuss the article? And like that's a valid critique of this style of video.

However, I do think there are two important things that this article does that I think are important to discuss and would love to talk about, but you know, feel free to click away. You're allowed to do that, of course. So the two important conversations I think this article is like a jumping off point for is number one how generative AI is destructive to academia and education and research and how we shouldn't use it. And the second conversation this article kind of presents a jumping on point for I feel like is more maybe more relevant to my audience which is that this article is a perfect encapsulation of how consistent daily use of chat boxes destroys your brain.

more early February fun

Next-Level Quantum Computers Will Almost Be Useful | IEEE Spectrum

“If someone says quantum computers are commercially useful today, I say I want to have what they’re having,” said Yuval Boger, chief commercial officer of the quantum-computing startup QuEra, on stage at the Q+AI conference in New York City in October.

Rusty's response nailed it imho:

You sling beads to a hook which activates a polecat according to GUPP. Jesse what the fuck are you talking about?

At first this all seems like gibberish, and it is. But I think Yegge is one of those people with an innate and preternatural sense of the power and purpose of naming things—someone who understands that names are marketing and marketing is not always about attracting the largest possible audience. In this case, the best outcome for Yegge is for Gas Town to appeal to a relatively small number of absolute sickos who vibe hard with his personal brand and who can usefully contribute to the project, and also for Gas Town to actively repel looky-loos and dilettantes like me (and probably you), who will only waste his time with a lot of stupid questions like “huh?” and “molecules?” and “did you say seances?” Oh yeah: there are seances. Don’t ask.

By this standard, Gas Town has apparently been very successful.

https://www.todayintabs.com/p/all-gas-town-no-brakes-town

https://digg.com/politics/qxL3rOG/white-house-posts-digitally-altered-image

The White House responded to inquiries about the image alteration by posting a message on X about the enforcement of the law and the continuation of memes.

relaunching with AI podcasts about AI and AI summaries of news about AI deepfakes

who asked for this

New episodes of Missing Cryptoqueen !? https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p07nkd84/episodes/downloads

Scott Alexander replies to comments Re: Scott Adams

Scott Alexander, former tribune of nerds now says that the sneerclub was right about everything all along? I didn’t expect that, let me tell you.

Several people interpreted me as attacking nerds. I disagree - I think I was attacking self-hating nerds, because nerdiness is fine and you shouldn’t have to hate yourself for it.

ha.

Other than that, further testimonials of the Dilbert -> NRx pipeline.

The pro-natalism book Quiggin is responding to is After the Spike; I got a free copy at work and read it on the plane over break. Mostly longtermism / utilitarianism, but left-pro-natalism is a little different. One of them came to campus to do a book talk last week, most of the audience remained pretty skeptical. Word on the street is that Musk gave them a pretty hefty grant, enough that I got a dead tree apparently...

Internet Comment Etiquette Erik does another grok video

Ok I laughed at the Tim Sweeney bit.

This is a lot more common than you'd think, several posts about abuse like this over at the academia stack exchange. If you think he used your writing, you could file a copyright claim on it since you are the author, not him. Do not waste your time with HR or honor committees, they will not do anything for you, their job is to cover the universities ass, not help. I honestly can't think of a case where going public led to anything more than a footnote on the persons wikipedia page, although it might be good for warning the incoming cohort of students.

If you're really sure about finishing your phd, it's probably pretty hard to xfer to a new school without LoRs, a strong publication record or bringing your own grant, but you might be able to switch depts if they're close enough, eg math <=> stats <=> CS. They might make you do comps / quals again though. But there's a pretty big diminishing returns to years 4+ of a phd, honestly, and I can assure you that there's assholes everywhere. Deans will yell at you too, and I've heard of a couple dept chairs that throw staplers. The tenure track does not incentivise not-being-an-asshole, at all, it is a rigidly hierarchical system and accompanying world view, at least in the R1s anyway.

Looks like he added a notice / disclaimer at the top last night? The talk page has some quality sneers - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Wikipedia_Signpost/2026-01-15/Special_report

Wikipedia at 25: A Wake-Up Call h/t metafilter

It's a good read overall, makes some good points about global south.

The hostility to AI tools within parts of our community is understandable. But it's also strategic malpractice. We've seen this movie before, with Wikipedia itself. Institutions that tried to ban or resist Wikipedia lost years they could have spent learning to work with it. By the time they adapted, the world had moved on.

AI isn't going away. The question isn't whether to engage. It's whether we'll shape how our content is used or be shaped by others' decisions.

Short of wikipedia shipping it's own chatbot that proactively pulls in edits and funnels traffic back I think the ship has sailed. But it's not unique, same thing is happening to basically everything with a CC license including SO and FOSS writ large. Maybe the right thing to is put new articles are AGPL or something, a new license that taints an entire LLM at train time.

Wes McKineny - Why Not

EDIT

I mean props for at least self hosting in a home lab instead of inventing Gas Town. But all the annoying parts of software (IE DevOps, mobile development, etc), that's all self inflicted and we could fix the foundations or build better ones, instead of hoping an llm can stack things on top of something inherently shaky.