swlabr

original article

No link given because it's all over the news. If you ask for proof you're going to have to eat my ass.

A lot of people are going to say it wasn't intended as a Nazi salute, and to that, I say: it doesn't matter. Was it a dog whistle? A variation of a Nazi salute from a South African neo-nazi party? Or just the vanilla salute? Such pontification is a waste of time. Fokker is a Nazi; you didn't need to see him salute. To all the regulars here, Musk being a Nazi is just an axiom of his whole deal. I mean, it's not called technofascism for nothing.

Just for my personal pride, I would like to state that the father of my children was the first american druid in diablo to clear abattoir of zir and ended that season as best in the USA. He was also ranking in Polytopia, and beat Felix himself at the game. I did observe these things with my own eyes. There are other witnesses who can verify this. That is all.

Original link

original link

“If all of this sounds like a libertarian fever dream, I hear you. But as these markets rise, legacy media will continue to slide into irrelevance.”

original link

Abstracted abstract:

Frontier models are increasingly trained and deployed as autonomous agents, which significantly increases their potential for risks. One particular safety concern is that AI agents might covertly pursue misaligned goals, hiding their true capabilities and objectives – also known as scheming. We study whether models have the capability to scheme in pursuit of a goal that we provide in-context and instruct the model to strongly follow. We evaluate frontier models on a suite of six agentic evaluations where models are instructed to pursue goals and are placed in environments that incentivize scheming.

I saw this posted here a moment ago and reported it*, and it looks to have been purged. I am reposting it to allow us to sneer at it.

*

Didn’t see this news posted but please link previous correspondence if I missed it.

https://archive.is/XwbY0

This is somewhat tangential to the usual fare here but I decided to make a post because why not.

I’ve been listening to the back catalog of the Judge John Hodgman podcast, and this ep came up. This ep is the second crypto based case after “crypto facto” in ep 333.

John Hodgman is a comedian, probs best known for being the “I’m a PC” guy in the “I’m a Mac” ad campaign from ancient times. In the podcast, he plays a fake judge that hears cases and makes judgements. In this ep, “Suing for Soul Custody,” he hears a case in which a husband wants to sell his soul on the blockchain, while his wife does not want him to do that.

Some good sneers against the crypto bro husband (in both this case and the other I linked). Brief spoilers as to the rulings in case you don’t want to listen:

Note: I like John Hodgman. He’s funny. He’s not really inside the tech space, but he is good friends with Jonathan Coulton, who is. If all you know of him is the “I’m a PC” ads, he has an entertaining wider catalogue worth checking out.

On the hottest and coldest days, when demand for electricity peaks and the price rockets, the bitcoin miners either sell power back to providers at a profit or stop mining for a fee, paid by ercot. Doing so has become more lucrative than mining itself. In August of 2023 Riot collected $32m from curtailing mining and just $8.6m from selling bitcoin.

Archive link: https://archive.md/O8Cz9

TIL that television program “The Boys” has an in universe cryptocurrency as a satire of, well, cryptocurrency in general but also specifically that time when DJT was selling NFTs. They occasionally tweet about it.

It has a listing on the “BSCScan” crypto tracker under the name “VTC” so someone might have actually minted it? It might surprise some of you that I have no way of telling the realness of such a thing.