Notices by Mallory's Musings & Mischief (malcircuit@thingy.social)

What I mean by an "anti-problem solver" is not simply someone who creates more problems. No, that's rookie shit.

The anti-problem solver is someone who makes it impossible for a problem solver to do their job. They make themselves and others believe the problem isn't real, invent imaginary unsolvable problems that consume resources for no purpose, or directly interfere with established problem-solving mechanisms.

A big component of why I'm so depressed right now is that I am a problem solver living in a world run by anti-problem solvers.

Hot #astrophotography take:

Arguing about whether narrowband or broadband is "superior" is stupid. They are fundamentally different signals, carrying different information. You're comparing apples and oranges; one can't be "better" than the other.

I just watched this video about Telescope Live, which is a website where you can pay for #astrophotography datasets that have been captured with professional equipment in pristine skies all around the world. This simultaneously sounds very cool and also very boring lol

https://youtu.be/CMVIIPWFuFw

There should be a word for when you're overwhelmed by the stupidity of the world.

For me, it's a unique blend of rage and existential despair that is especially corrosive to my psyche.

My brain is doing that stupid thing where I'm bored but I also don't want to do anything

Fuck AI companies

Fuck venture capitalists

The AI bubble is going to fuck up everything for a decade. We're all going to be the ones that pay the bill, not the people at the top who made it happen. Fuck them all.

If I sound angry, it's because I am.

"Help save energy during the heat wave by turning up your thermostat temp."

How about fuck you. Go turn off the AI data centers first

My opposition to LLM "AI" systems is fundamentally a really simple question:

*If the machine is going to do everything I value for me, what the fuck is the point of being alive?*

I haven't heard an answer to this yet that's either satisfactory to me or seems likely to actually happen.

I hate how so many people are struggling right now, while a handful of people have more money than it's possible to spend in a hundred lifetimes

I got a label maker and had the strangest experience. I opened the box, loaded the sample roll of label ribbon, inserted 6(!) AAA batteries, and it worked.

No apps to download. No account to log into. No firmware updates. No pop-over "helpful tips" about how it's "now enabled with AI" or whatever.

I just typed in the label I wanted and hit "print", and it did it. Astonishing. Nostalgic.

It is interesting and a bit strange that there is a very deep mathematical connection between how a stringed instrument works, how a radio antenna works, and how an LED works.

An LED is just plucking single electrons like a string of a guitar. Instead of creating a pure tone of a music note, it makes a pure tone of visible light.

The first time you encounter quantum mechanics, it might seem very odd that the universe operates via discrete packets of energy. How can an electron know what an integer is?

But a guitar also knows what an integer is. A string of fixed length L can oscillate with a wavelength of 2L, L, 2L/3, L/2, ... , 2L/n, where n is an integer. It's all harmonics; oscillating modes.

Sometimes I get annoyed when I can only run one telescope rig on a clear night, but then I remind myself that this "one" telescope rig is an insanely awesome chunk of technology and glass that many people would kill to have.

I'm unbelievably lucky and grateful to be able to do #astrophotography at all, let alone with the equipment I have. If all I had for the rest of my life was this one rig, I would still be more capable than most.

I went out with my #astronomy club on Saturday night and ended up staying up literally all night doing #astrophotography. I'm still working on processing everything that I captured because I kind of went hog wild and set up 4 telescopes (if you count my Seestar S30).

I stayed up all night because I wanted to try to capture a pic of comet C/2025 R3 (PANSTARRS). I was only able to capture for like 20 minutes before the sunrise blew out all the images, but I did manage to get luminance and RGB.

How many studies do researchers need to do before the threat of LLMs is taken seriously? This technology *might* have some useful niche applications, but widespread deployment will be a disaster for humanity.

This shit is an existential hazard, and not in the way the AI companies love to talk about. It's not going to take over the world like Skynet, it's a cognitohazard that turns anyone that interacts with it into an idiot.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-algorithmic-mind/202603/adults-lose-skills-to-ai-children-never-build-them

Thinking about LLM-based "AI" chatbots as cognitohazards is apt. They are deceptive and subversive in an extremely subtle but systematic way. They warp your perception and cognition to make you _feel_ as if you're more capable while simultaneously degrading your skills.