Michael Engard

With love and respect to Dr. Flowers: it won't. When a tech is widely distributed, open source, and has easily surmountable barriers to entry, that genie isn't going back in the bottle. What you can do is mitigate harms, which include things like responsible adoption (or adoption delays).

Obsidian is (almost) the last of my vital daily apps that 1) does not need the Internet, and in fact barely uses it, and 2) does not promote or advertise anything to me, including itself. It is *actually* my own private digital space and I’m increasingly grateful for it.

I had to go on Twitter to confirm this was real because Ship Awesome Games In A Weekend having a hand with six fingers was so on the nose I was about to pass out

This one's maybe a little on the ling side, but trust me, it's worth it. I've cried reading it multiple times. (1/3)

We come back to the idea of Execs who really don't understand art or why people make art, in any way, finding ways to absolutely annihilate those that do, in a death of a thousand cuts and then one big 400-person cut. It's heartbreaking. The western games industry kills a NIntendo every year.

If you self-host and run PHP on it (which is very likely) you NEED to update it later today, ASAP. A major vulnerability that affects PHP versions since 5 has been found, which allows remote code execution (very bad). You MUST retweet and share with friends who self-host. THIS IS CRITICAL. ⚠️

This, but also, it shouldn’t be a tough sell that having a world that’s not on fire and a population that isn’t one mild medical issue away from bankruptcy is, all things being equal, better for business.

Star Trek doesn't need its Andor, it just took Star Wars several decades to get its DS9.

Like I'll see people be like "Shakespeare made a mistake about X historical thing in Y play" and it's like, no, he didn't. That was not a goal of the enterprise.

“The internet is a store but it used to be a library” hits me like a slug to the chest

This is all disgusting. I've had people accuse me of using AI when I do shit like use an em-dash. I struggle to avoid yelling but HUNDREDS OF ARTICLES AND AT LEAST TWO BOOKS I WROTE have been scraped by OpenAI. I'm part of why your chatbots write the way they do. They're copying me.

My heart breaks for mathematicians whose lives and careers are being destroyed by AI — and especially this PhD student, who doesn’t even know he is a poet

This is really good.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Earnest

If I built an AI lab and it went rogue and deleted all student loan information, I'm betting they'd suddenly figure out how to prosecute me.

I am feeling attacked

rip to one of the coolest software engineers who ever lived

i must not produce takes. takes are the mind-killer. takes are the little death that produce total obliteration. i will face my takes. i will permit them to pass over me and through me without posting them to the timeline. where the takes have gone there will be nothing. only i will remain.

i need you all to promise me that you’ll be normal about what i am about to say: i saved a lot of tokens in my gemini seed rule by telling it to believe that we are both girls

Great chance to post my all-time favorite headline

Sometimes I hope we all wake up one day and realize that the social Internet is drying up because the next generation is going back to (the modern equivalent of) forums and chat rooms and private communities, doing amazing and cool shit with their friends and sharing it with nobody.

I wouldn’t have called the Pope being the one to articulate this better than anyone else, but there it is.

This will never stop blowing my mind. A 12-year sequence of real telescope images of a star 133 lightyears away. And around it, four planets slowly orbiting. Four real exoplanets, each more massive than Jupiter, imaged as they move around their host star.

How much more absurd could lethal injection protocols be than “at this juncture we aren’t sure whether we should kill the subject or get life-saving medical treatment for the subject”?

I am a plant physiologist and it's more of a threat coming from me because I am touching grass in novel and risky ways.

A good person I know is heading to rehab for alcoholism. His best-case scenario is walking out with his life, his health, and only $40,000 in medical debt. There are people who choose for us to live this way. They have names.

Voyager, walking on those tiny legs.

there are so many amazing, life-changing things you can do with computers and i think it's a serious problem the companies that make them keep trying to sell them by saying "do you hate everyone in your life? are you less of a person than a hollow automaton waiting to be told what to do by me?"

I truly, deeply, sincerely do think the guy flipping burgers at McDonalds should be able to afford rent, bills, and groceries with his paycheck alone. That's kind of the whole point of having a job and I can't believe this is considered a radical position.🤷🏽‍♀️

The OpenAI "breaking containment" story stems from the company's own failure to build a secure sandbox. They relied on a single local proxy to "contain" the program. They could have air-gapped the thing. It's not like they lack resources. It was advantageous to them for the agent to "get loose."

What makes my skin crawl is that I could almost handle it better if they were competent. Like, amoral, greedy, bloodthirsty, etc., but with some philosophy, some half-coherent sense of geopolitics behind it. But they’re not. They don’t even understand what they’re destroying. They can’t *see* it.

We can’t have a conversation with them, we can’t “debate” them, the things we love and value and depend on in the world are meaningless to them, they’re just mouth sounds. It’s 80 years too late to explain to Donald Trump that other humans are real.

Watching tech people tremble before the awesome power of AI feels like when an actor is “attacked” by a wild animal in a movie but they are just holding a raccoon pelt to their neck and pretending to wrestle with it

This is wonderful

There are real risks and harms from AI usage but the current panic about destroying humanity based on poorly run security testing is theater. LLMs are fundamentally unreliable and shouldn’t be the sole decision maker for consequential decisions. That’s the huge risk. Everything else is noise.

a lot freaks me out about AI but 0% of my anxiety is about AGI. i think this is the part that freaks me out the most right now -- the many many indications that no one is at the wheel and no adults are present