Luke VanderHart

We need to put the punk back in cyber.

the people are screaming we want more eschatologies

This is millenarian, apocalyptic thinking! At the very least please understand your beliefs pattern match exactly to doomsday cults! Consider that you might be susceptible to these modes of thinking because of your upbringing or hard wiring

I'm actively enraged that everyone allows them to just go around saying this shit like they shouldn't go directly to jail for unthinkable crimes if any of it is true and also go directly to jail for unthinkable fraud if it's not.

the tech industry is about to invent books

I can’t prove that a LLM isn’t conscious in precisely the same way that I can’t prove that a character in a book isn’t conscious.

Calling for a voluntary "AI slowdown" is a genius ploy to maintain your share value when you see a natural slowdown pending anyway. Maybe you could get a few people to freak out online about how dangerous this stuff is, too.

That’s the default setting of capitalism. In fact I don’t think there’s a way to disable that flag at runtime

The overreaction to this Hugging Face thing is driving me nuts. Come flay me for being wrong but... 1/x

I just remembered that I own the thetormentnexus.com domain. Currently accepting any and all ideas on what to build there.

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Vast and Trunkless Leg of Stone, Standing in the Desert from classic poem Ozymandias.

i don't like to police genre, but it's not dark academia unless somebody gets squished in one of these bad boys

It’s worth noting that Taco Bell identified the source before the FDA did, and promptly pulled it from their stores. The FDA didn’t even name the source until Taylor Farms outed themselves, and hasn’t issued a recall. Basically, Taco Bell is now a more reliable authority than the FDA.

At a junior league baseball game and all I can think about is how in tablet XII Gilgamesh drops his bat and ball into the underworld and Enkidu has to go retrieve it for him I mean how long have we been at this game…

But what we're *actually* doing is defunding cancer research (especially any research into "systemic" cancer because studying systemic things is "woke") to free up fiscal space so we can build data-centers and make Musk into a trillionaire. 21/

The true risk is: "an AI salesman will exploit your boss's infinite horniness for replacing mouthy workers with pliable machines to sell him a chatbot that *can't* do your job, and then your boss will fire you and replace you with that inept, defective chatbot." 17/

this chart is bananas

Hey babes—poets of Durham gathering tonight. Come join us 💜📚🔥💜📚🔥

Everything is ontology

Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, *and* a leading historian of the Renaissance. 1/

Everybody testing AI like picking up a blowtorch and looking directly into the barrel

Excellent thread. I'm not even joking when I say that Trump has done more for global decarbonization than any democrat ever has.

Even if you believed AI could do this, why would your default takeaway be "30% unemployment" vs "3-day workweeks for all"? Capitalists so brain-wormed they can sooner envision the end of society as we know it than sharing some of the benefits of new tech with their employees.

Oh NICE. Fencing is awesome but super boring to watch on TV.

Agentic LLM development tools make software feel like clay in my hands -- I can move it around, effortlessly. It's also shitty crumbly clay.

And he's right.

Look, for my money the absolute game changer technologies right now are batteries and biosciences, not statistically modeling a mid conversation, but you do you.

Yeah what’s funny is there are actually a thousand years of “just war theory” and Trump is in the wrong according to all of them.

Seeing a fascist get democratically defeated after 16 years (despite doing their best to consolidate power) is immensely hopeful. All is not lost. All is never lost.

It's really important to keep in mind that for any output, a LLM would just as happily say exactly the opposite given different inputs. To me, this is pretty strong evidence that while they are capable language machines, they are not "intelligent."

BREAKING: Following the American threat of an “Avignon Papacy,” Robert Kennedy has begun a Diet of Worms

“Most large companies are spending more time strategizing against their employees than against their competitors.” 🖐️🎤

The ATmosphere, however, is growing.

This, 100%. And I say this as someone who does use LLMs for some aspects of my technical work -- I'm not categorically opposed to the technology. But if I -- a human -- want to communicate with other humans... Using a LLM just gets in the way, let alone how profoundly disrespectful it is.

Sentence. Carriage return, carriage return. Sentence. Carriage return, carriage return. Sentence. Carriage return, carriage return. These people think their writing style is so badass and emphatic, when even their cadence is a cliche. I'm so sick and tired of this tired format.

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

Gonna do a Nuremberg

This. Stop anthropomorphizing the tech.

We have new tools. They have uses. The problem we run into is that proper use of these tools doesn’t eliminate any workers so it’s not considered proper use by the executive suites

This great thread makes a point I hadn’t seen before. Software engineers are now in a position familiar to UX but new to us: we have the ability to make and iterate on mocks before shipping. Instead of trying to condense our process and produce MORE, we could use the same timeframe to produce BETTER

[Exit Murderer.]