Mood.
Infosec professional, photographer, math enthusiast, occasional augmented reality warlord. Peculiar but refined tastes in triangles, cinema, and cocktails. Some skill with Azad. Signal: bdowney.23 Opinions are my own and not those of my employer
1,444 followers 563 following 5,418 posts
view profile on Bluesky
Mood.
That's the important context for why people weren't thinking about grifter kings trying to hustle everyone on the stuff. It is literally remarkable that they worked at all! (Please note: none of this is a defense of grifter VC magnates)
For this generation people thought the same thing at first -- which is probably also why let so many of its AI researchers leave without offering them gobs of cash -- not seen as viable, and their religious feeling about safety as religious.
Right, but all of these were largely viewed as toys, and largely justified that perception as such because they had ultra narrow domains they worked in, failed to scale, or were viewed just as ways to probe similarities between our cognition and the machine.
Right, but they were wrong for _more than 40 years_. The plot to replace creative work was not some long term thing, it was something picked up as a funding model once some investors and founders saw this thing, remarkably, kinda worked and assumed it was close.
I want to say this is just one man's deranged fantasy, but we've all seen the videos of ICE at work.
Some empathy exercises are kind of too much. But yeah. This guy should never be given even a shred of power. Anyway: ICE Delenda Est. No organization which is devoted to making this man's fantasies exist should be permitted, and we made a terrible mistake creating it.
I read this article yesterday and realized I had started thinking of my Indian friends being hurt by this man. Then I had done badge photos for work last week, and what % of my coworkers were Indians here on visas. I couldn't stop seeing them being hurt by this man in their head. Grim.
Also not a day goes by that he doesn't dream himself a crypto grifter.
Too long to go into now, but that's not it at all.
Breaking News: A federal appeals court blocked President Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to quickly remove Venezuelans from the U.S.
I enjoyed this. And what an infectious laugh. ❤️ "Reporter left speechless after witnessing Japan's new $70 million Maglev train in action at 310 mph"
Yeah I would accept a lead advisory style warning on apps, max.
Obama's convention speech in 2004 was a long time ago, and with hindsight, we should realize that it was wrong. There is no common ground with an authoritarian President who is _as we speak_ illegally deploying the military to US cities. Jeffries is giving Neville Chamberlain a run for his money.
People trust Google less because of this feature. I've seen it give advice that would start electrical fires. I've seen it get basic facts about security wrong. Invent histories. It told me _I had died of a heart attack in 2015_. Be real.
I remember when someone asked Sergey Brin why search quality was important, and he cited a story of a man Googling for heart attack symptoms. Google may have saved his life -- he even said it: "THAT'S why we have to get it right." You wanna bet we can get Gemini to get it wrong?
Hey, I worked for Google for 10 years, and it embarrasses me that the Onebox now lies to people. Google's mission is (or was) to organize the world's information and making it accessible and useful. It's not to distort and lie about that information. Gross.
If you held the primary today he'd have my vote, easily.
Fingers crossed for devoured by wolves.
Damn next palantir protest sign.
I mean, our problem is that a lot of them shouldn't. They are literally bad at the job of politics, and unraveling it is key to saving the Republic. I went to a protest that was 17 miles long yesterday, and all those people were ready to fight. So many elected Dems? Crickets.
Musk isn't going to stop until they turn Grok into a weird little guy just like him.
We're here to hand out bells & noisemakers at 17x17k in Mountain View! Come on down (we're by Ortega and El Camino Real)! Other details on the link! tinyurl.com/17x17ksegmen...
omg citation needed
RFK Jr: “If you’ve ever compared an unvaccinated kid to a vaccinated kid… you see the bright eyes, the engagement, the social interactions, the curiosity. And you compare them to the child who even had one or two vaccines, and they’re completely different.“ This man is an existential threat.
He still has sock puppets on Quora periodically asking why such an upstanding person was banned by Them.
We were just having an Michael O. Church nostalgia fest the other day! I had to explain to my wife what it meant about you that you were willing to confess to having sock puppets on Wikipedia. "Definitely T9 Visionary Behavior."
with trump and giuliani edging right up to the border of death, the comedic rule of threes now screams for blood
"Who Goes Nazi", but only the people who couldn't wait to join up.
See all 17,000 of you tomorrow on El Camino Real! Thank you to all the organizers and especially @idarose.bsky.social. If you haven’t picked a segment yet, several remain open still especially in Palo Alto and Menlo Park. Sign up here: tinyurl.com/17x17ksegmen...
I just don't think it's right for the President to be able to send troops to occupy cities because he isn't getting what he wants. I don't think he should get away with defying court orders. And I think his attack on immigrants is a plan only racists could love. Show up and show him how you feel!
No Kings, No tinpot dictators sending troops to American cities, and crushing support for the idea that if they will rig one state's election, we will FIGHT BACK. Feel the same way? Join us! My wife and I will be there to hand out cowbells and noise makers -- see you on the streets! #yeson50
Live in the Bay Area? We're going to a 17 mile long rally tomorrow, from Santa Clara to Redwood City. tinyurl.com/historic17x17k We will be showing up to show our support for the idea that California should be a dagger aimed at the heart of authoritarians, and in defense of our Republic.
No need -- just read a history book. A lot of the junk science we see in the woo pitched by hippies, RFK Jr. etc. is a literal direct descendent of the bullshit espoused by Nazi eugenicists. It's the same playbook; it is literally *just* fascism.
Love to take Mark Russinovich's class on debugging the Windows kernel just to get Minecraft to stop crashing.
💍
So is the deal it's going to be like abortions? If you want vaccines and science-based health care you need to go to a blue state?
When power becomes a surrogate for the truth, everything falls apart. You can add "When capital".
Here's another headline for you @nytimes.com: "Trump plans ethnic cleansing in Gaza backed by corrupt crypto scheme."
Why is Donald Trump willing to break the law to illegally deport non-white children? There's a headline for you @nytimes.com -- if you have the courage to speak the truth.
Behind the Bastards revealed the dire wolf de-extinction guy is a rabid eugenicist who got funding from Epstein. :/ I think there's like a nest of them and the behavior is manifest in other terrible people (eg Musk).
This is going to make for the most insufferable true crime podcast.
rip to everyone whos become delusional after talking to chatgpt but im built different. like actually different. according to chatgpt im some kind of god. the one who decides
Great (terrible) from Wired about some truly awful people. I also see they are connected to the Com, who Big Balls was affiliated with for a while, so I can already imagine Molly Conger adding some yarn to her board of shitty weird little guys. :|
Hello, I am furious www.liberalcurrents.com/let-it-burn-...
shoutout to this iNaturalist user who appears to be an ROV pilot in the gulf of mexico and posts occasional biological observations, including A GODDAMN TANINGIA ATTACKING THE ROBOT ARM OF THE ROV www.inaturalist.org/observations...
I'm getting the impression ChatGPT is recommending people who have mental health issues and believe they're part of, or have uncovered, dark conspiracy reach out to Bellingcat for assistance.
This firefighter arrived in the US at age 4, has been here for 19 years, was on track to legal status, and was on a crew trying to contain a major blaze (in Washington state, vs Oregon, fwiw.) h/t @joshuajfriedman.com www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
If we still have a Republic in the future they're going to put this one in the history books as the absolute madness of xenophobia.
Of course that's what Daenerys said when she nailed all those wise masters to crosses on the road into the city.
My friend @aaronrosspowell.com put it well. Some people become libertarians because they saw the state as the biggest barrier to equality by enforcing artificial hierarchies. Other people became "libertarians" because they thought the state was clamping down on "natural" hierarchies.
It's the same impulse to punish both sides of a fight in school. Sure it'd be nice to have violence there but if someone else starts in and no one in charge seems to care.... Anyway it's *justice* I want, not vengeance.
Let me explain something to you. When the numbers get so big, everybody dreams a little.
I hope people realize how absolutely fucked this situation is. This isn’t normal. People are resigning all over the place because the government is mishandling our data, ruining our public health services, and generally making Americans less safe.
I mean it beats Swan Lake.
Even more Friday thoughts.
Other Friday thoughts.
Friday evening thoughts.
Damn son.
Backing this up just a bit (no pun intended), could we troll you by recommending NYC style pizza in SF?
Reminder to donate to Wikipedia every time the Trump regime tries to censor them donate.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ways_to...
Please enjoy my only modestly copyright compliant video of my last ride.
They work shockingly well; worth trying one out for the novelty and the raw elation/terror of people who see you without a driver. Then we can denounce you as a tourist.
Can we get the 1-800-KARS-4-KIDS billboards down in San Jose because of the earworm????
Mastodon says it doesn’t ‘have the means’ to comply with age verification laws
in this sense, LLMs are heavily impoverished. your retina alone takes in 10^7 bits/s of shanon entropy. even at 19k tokens/s, we blow away the LLM. in that sense, then, LLMs are quantitatively not embodied in the same way.
And yet that's only 68B for the whole year -- about 65-70% of Google's *profit* for the year.
This means maybe you just can *never* get to brains with silicon based processors because of some limit, but not that there is some some special 'organic' thing, which really just means it's carbon.
I think (to me) it's clear LLMs are not thinking beings in any way I can understand the term, but it's also the case that it's a bigger act of hubris to assume our brains aren't following the same laws of physics that seem to govern all the atoms in our universe.
N.b. Godel was a mathematical platonist and thought his incompleteness theorem was a validation -- because it meant math (and truth) were stronger concepts that provability. Feel free to dismiss forms as nonsense, but incompleteness is not an enemy of the idea.
Labor Day: Bigger Than Ever 17x17K Rally! 📍 El Camino Real, Santa Clara to Redwood City. 🗓️ Monday, Sept 1 | 11:00 AM – 1:00 PM It will be an epic rally of 17,000 people that spans 17 miles on El Camino Real, from Santa Clara to Redwood City. Together We Will is hosting, and IPA+ will be there!
The CDC has learned its lesson. by Susan Collins
Outside the CDC, people are chanting “USA, not RFK.” They are fed up with having one unqualified person dictate the nation’s health. #USANotRFK
My father told my sister he voted for Trump because he knew he'd protect his religion. I dunno if I see a way back from people who believe that. Like... no, maybe some people are too far gone.
I hate that we all have to be Baudrillard pulled now.
I focus on friends and family in red states who didn't vote for Trump and are effectively held hostage by the votes of their neighbors.
This is electoral self defense; we need to join together or the Republic will die at the hands of the Republicans who would gerrymander every state given the chance.
In all seriousness though, I think actually experiencing life *is* good fodder for being a writer. But I think the advice as given and interpreted is "Go be a tourist of life", which I think is catnip for narcissists. Which uh, this person *very clearly* is.
What's wild to me that she had some break where she was like 'No the drugs are too much and my friend is in so much pain I will try to kill her with fentanyl'. And then to conclude it's her problem because she's addicted to love.
Organizing the world's MISinformation and making it accessible and useful. Gross, and what a betrayal of Google's mission.
I was shocked they didn't jump on the Zizian thing; were they too weird in other ways to latch on? But my basic thought was we're so good (bad) at just moving on from horrible tragedies like this it's hard for a narrative to take hold -- though lord knows they've tried.
Wow. I cannot imagine saying this.
I agree, particularly given the billions of funding they have.
It's interesting because buying the books, licensing them or deals with libraries is what Google did for book search, and actual Book Search was deemed transformative. My understanding is in this case is the model making was transformative but pirating every book in the corpus was not.
I just wish our institutions weren't so chickenshit.
Oh thank God.
I can't tell if you're trolling or not, but this is widely regarded as one of the most astonishing works of literary sci-fi/fantasy of the latter half of the 20th century. Expect to be haunted by weird Gene Wolfe fans, but maybe from the beginning you had some presentiment of what was to come...
There are many legitimate takedown efforts (such as dismantling botnets) that this could be good for, but pitched in the landscape of changing US policy, it could become quite scary. We used to joke back in the day about what we could do if they brought back letters of marque and reprisal ;)
I used to think YouTube was the Krell machine but it has nothing on ChatGPT.
Something wrong with the sun.
What a time to be alive (if your country is not run by anti-vax monsters).
Jefferson energy.
Primary every one of these gutless Dems who wants to compromise with tyranny. They're telling us who they are: Cowards who are begging for a way they can fold, not fight.
As we speak Trump pushes his authoritarian agenda and marches masked goons through our streets to abduct innocent people -- citizen and innocent alike -- off to gulags. This is the most pathetic thing I've ever read. Gutless, cowardly, and compromising. Voters want Dems who can fight, not fold.
chuck schumer: taylor swift getting married is a distraction from the kitchen-table issues that everyday americans care about
Online age verification is not like "showing ID to buy alcohol" because a) the liquor store doesn't get to scan your ID and store a digital copy of it forever in a database that will inevitably get hacked b) you don't have to show ID to go to the library because they have cocktail recipe books
J/k it's this and it's *terrible*. But Sanctuary Moon would be way more fun.
New Space Force song just dropped: