Reminds me a bit of the work of Shou Xin https://www.thisiscolossal.com/2025/09/shouxin-graphite-cat-drawings/

For what its worth, Slotin in particular knew the consequences. If i recall correctly, he had a reputation for being a bit of a “cowboy” when it came to experimental protocol. I believe the lab even had specially made tools for handling the core, but Slotin insisted on using a screwdriver because it was easier.

In case you’re wondering how to get a list of all the apps installed on your phone, these instructions worked for me https://www.javathinking.com/blog/how-to-get-the-list-of-all-apps-on-android-device-using-terminal/

I just wrote a quick script to check my list against the google doc. The official Merriam Webster app and the official Letterboxd app both got flagged.

The bloodletting will hit hardest in back-office operations, risk management, and compliance

Compliance? Really? They’re going to put the non-deterministic halucination engines in charge of compliance?

I can only hope that the first time this goes south the regulators understand how important it is to make an example to everyone else that a company can not escape liability for their actions just because the AI system that took those actions wasn’t explicitly instructed to do so.

May I see it?

At this time of year? At this time of day? In this part of the country? Localized entirely within OPs laundry room?

Time to once again pitch my idea for a Super Smash Bros style fighting game with all public domain characters and a new DLC released every January 1st.

The cynic in me wants to say that Facebook’s foray into VR was a resounding success in that it propped up their stock price until the next fad/grift could come along and take it’s place.

The “manager” AI went off the rails almost immediately, and their solution was adding a “CEO” AI to supervise it. AI ‘research’ of this type is truly some of the most looney-tunes shit I’ve ever seen society take seriously.

Every time I see a headline like this I’m reminded of the time I heard someone describe the modern state of AI research as equivalent to the practice of alchemy.

Long before anyone knew about atoms, molecules, atomic weights, or electron bonds, there were dudes who would just mix random chemicals together in an attempt to turn lead to gold, or create the elixir of life or whatever. Their methods were haphazard, their objectives impossible, and most probably poisoned themselves in the process, but those early stumbling steps eventually gave rise to the modern science of chemistry and all that came with it.

AI researchers are modern alchemists. They have no idea how anything really works and their experiments result in disaster as often as not. There’s great potential but no clear path to it. We can only hope that we’ll make it out of the alchemy phase before society succumbs to the digital equivalent of mercury poisoning because it’s just so fun to play with.

my name is Cow,
and wen its nite,
or wen the moon
is shiyning brite,
and all the men
haf gon to bed -
i sneak inside.
i lik the head.

I’m hopeful that when the bubble pops it’ll be more like the dot com crash, which is to say that the fallout is mostly of the economic variety rather than the superfund variety. Sure, that’ll still suck in the short term. But it will ideally lead to the big players and VC firms backing away and leaving behind an oversupply of infrastructure and talent that can be soaked up at fire sale prices by the smaller, more responsible companies that are willing to stick out the downturn and do the unglamorous work of developing this technology into something that’s actually sustainable and beneficial to society.

That’s my naive hope. I do recognize that there’s an unfortunately high probability that things won’t go that way.

You say that like they havent been? The price per kWh for lithium batteries has been consistently falling for over a decade. I see no reason to believe that this tech wouldn’t result in further price decreases if it could be built at scale.

Volkswagen AG Group

Copy pasting my reply from the last time this came up:

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. The only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

I looked into it a while ago but I gave up on the idea after realizing how few programs can actually run on one. There’s no “reverse VM” software that allows you to seamlessly combine multiple physical machines into one virtual one. Each application has to be specifically designed to take advantage of running on a cluster. If you’re writing your own code, or if you have a specific project in mind that you know supports cluster computing then by all means go for it, but if you’re imagining that you’d build one and use it for gaming or video editing or some other resource intensive desktop application, unfortunately it doesn’t work like that.

Edit: I dug up a link to the post I made about it in /c/linux. There’s some good discussion in there if you’d like to learn more https://lemmy.world/post/11528823

Check how nearby colleges and universities dispose of used assets. The state school near me maintains a very nice website where they auction off everything from lab equipment to office furniture. It’s also where all their PCs go when they hit ~5 years old and come up in the IT department’s refresh cycle. Only problem in my case is that they tend to auction stuff in bulk. You can get a solid machine for $50 to $100, but only if you’re willing to pay $500 to $1000 for a pallet of 10.

Knew what this would be before clicking on it. Brennan is a national treasure.

The AI hype has become so stifling that I can certainly understand the knee-jerk reaction that many are having, but at the end of the day it’s just math. It’s a tool which, like all tools, can be used for good or bad. If you’re interested, I’d highly recommend looking into the story of AlphaFold. You can find some really good long form articles that have been written about it. It’s not only a truly impressive technical achievement, but also one of the few technological breakthroughs in recent memory that is (at least as far as I can tell) truly, indisputably, good for humanity.

Your thoughts are very similar to mine. The usefulness of machine learning to bridge the gap between the endlessly messy real world and the strictly regimented digital one can’t be overstated, but throwing all your problems into an LLM chatbot is never going to yield good results. Case in point is the AlphaFold project which used AI to basically solve one of the hardest problems in modern biochemistry. They didn’t do it by asking ChatGPT to “please fold this protein for me” they did it by assembling a multi-disciplinary team with a deep technical understanding of the problem and building a fully custom machine learning system which was designed from the ground up for the sole purpose of predicting protein structures. That’s applied AI. All these so-called AI startups who’s product is basically a coat of paint and a custom system prompt on the ChatGPT API are nothing more than app developers chasing the latest trend.

Incidentally, I had a very similar experience to your “Exchange Server / Exchange Online” problem. I was asked to make updates to an old VBS code base, and VBS is a language that I have neither experience with nor interest in learning, so I was using a chatbot to try and save a few minutes on some super simple beginner level questions. It kept confidently spitting out answers for VBA code, which is similar to, but very much not the same as VBS.