Notices by Angus McIntyre (angusm@mastodon.social)

@johnrogers.bsky.social @cstross

Pentagon OPREP-3 flagwords indicating an emergency requiring an urgent response:

BENT SPEAR = Mishandling of a nuclear weapon

BROKEN ARROW = Accident involving a nuclear weapon

EMPTY QUIVER = Loss or theft of a nuclear weapon

FADED GIANT = Accident involving a military nuclear reactor

SHITHEAD MONEYBAGS = Detection of an uncontained trillionaire

Pinnacle may authorize deployment of specialist or lethal response teams to resolve the issue as appropriate.

Joking aside, I think a predictable consequence of the #UKSocialMediaBan is that kids (and others) WILL use VPNs to skirt the ban, and that carries significant risks.

First up, government action to control/outlaw VPNs. It's in the nature of governments to make poorly thought-out laws about tech and then, when someone does a technological end-run around them, start playing whack-a-mole to try to get the genie back into the bottle. Never works, but they do it anyway.

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The UK government's plan to teach 10 million British children how to use VPNs may be one of the most ambitious IT education projects ever launched. Experts have praised the scheme, saying that a deft combination of incentives and peer education make it more likely to succeed than other, comparable initiatives.

"With the rise of autocratic governments worldwide, VPN-literacy is more essential than ever.” said one expert, “This bold project definitely comes at the right time.”

#UKSocialMediaBan

With Peter Thiel's company Palantir increasingly in the news, a lot of people are still uncertain what the company stands for and what its core values are. Basically, what you need to know is that in "The Lord of the Rings” only three people owned palantíri:

- the Dark Lord Sauron, the epitome of everything evil,
- his almost equally evil lackey Saruman, and
- Denethor, a depressive autocrat who finally ended himself in a failed murder-suicide.

That pretty much tells you what to expect.

J.D. Vance is America's deadliest hit man: he's already killed one pope, the Iran peace talks, and now Viktor Orbán's hopes of re-election. Where will they send him next?

The reason why the Artemis mission has everyone so fascinated is because it is a showcase for the efforts of people who are very, very good at their jobs, at a time when the news cycle is dominated by people who are not merely terrible at their jobs, but awful human beings as well.

A fresh problem with #AI is what might be called Artificial Gullibility.

According to a BlueSky poster, an academic who was ruled guilty of plagiarism has waged an extensive astroturfing campaign to rewrite the record. The goal was probably to game conventional search engines, but the texts have now been ingested by Google's AI. Google's "AI Overview” presents her (apparently false) version of events, backing it with the supposed authority of Google and “AI”.

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https://bsky.app/profile/laurenginsberg.bsky.social/post/3mhnxv2swok2g

Whatever the hypesters may tell you, LLMs do NOT reason. Given two conflicting versions of a story, they’ll go for the one that is repeated more often. The sequence of tokens representing a false narrative is – if the astroturfers have done their job right – statistically more probable than the sequence representing a factual account, so it's the false narrative that will get coded into the model and trotted out on demand.

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UPS Update: Your Package Said “Fuck This" And Went Back To California, Where It's Warm.

@baldur @cstross AI industry flack hastily summarizing toot as headline: “Internet technology expert notes wide consensus that AI will live up to expectations.”

@cstross There's a real double standard here, because people can be really picky about WHICH severed genitalia are acceptable.

Get it right, and it's "sweet" and “romantic”. But make one tiny mistake, and suddenly the person you love most is calling you a “monster" and a "serial killer”.

I hate Valentine’s Day.

@bruces Our robots are all fully capable of performing the Unheimlich Maneuver.

@fesshole Stick-on eyes make everything better.

Because it's #caturday, and the #cats must go on, here's a smol #NYC bodega cat for you.

#CatsOfMastodon

@Infoseepage @cstross The third rule of Damnatio Memoriae is … "Who?”

“Hi! Your OS here! See that red badge demanding your attention?”

"What is it?”

"It's sports news! Isn't that great?”

"I don't give a shit about sports. How do I turn it off?”

"If you're not interested in sports, you can customize the alerts to show something you ARE interested in.”

"I'm interested in an OS that does what I tell it. One that works for me. That doesn't track me or try to ‘maximize engagement’ or sell me crap or nag me about using AI or whatever. Got anything for that?”

“…”

Editing photos from today, I have found myself tagging a surprising number with the keywords:

- protest
- protesters
- signs
- frogs

I also had to use the phrase “caricature of Donald Trump as a flyblown anthropomorphic lump of feces" in the alt-text for one, which is another personal first.

#nyc #NoKings

@pluralistic Eventually the slop “summaries” of popular titles will get fed into the slop summarizers and you'll be able to buy summaries of slop.

"The Key Understanding You Get from the Key Understanding You Get From Enshittification Workbook Workbook.”

@bruces I'm sorry, did you say "battle-poodle”?

(checks Wikipedia, learns that the battle-poodle was probably female despite being named “Boy”, and was believed to be a 'Lapland lady’ transformed into a dog, or possibly a shape-shifting bullet-catching 'dog-witch' with the power of prophesy and the ability to find hidden treasure)

WHY IS THERE NOT AN ENTIRE ANIME DEVOTED TO BOY THE SHAPE-SHIFTING BATTLE POODLE? WHAT ARE YOU PEOPLE EVEN DOING WITH YOUR TIME?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boy_(dog)

A colleague just referred to “My friend Copilot.” A former manager talks about “My friend ChatGPT”.

Are they joking? Sure, but there’s something significant about the choice of that word ‘friend’. People are building parasocial relationships with these things, helped no doubt by the fact that they’re engineered to encourage exactly that.

No wonder our judgement about when we can trust them is so bad. We don’t doubt our friends (mostly).

Chatbots are a social engineering attack.

#LLMs #AI