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"My friend grew up in New England where they have pigeons. Apparently they also hate them. He was always saying bad things about pigeons until I pointed something out that he never thought of before:
We domesticated pigeons. They are (nearly) all over the world because HUMANS BROUGHT THEM THERE. And, they were more than pets. They carried messages. People raced them. They lived spoiled lives as honored human companions for centuries.
Then we got telephones and we threw them out like trash.
Literally, we threw them away.
Their species had already been fully domesticated and they could not survive in the wild; they lost all their survival instincts during the centuries that they lived caged by people.
That is why they live in cities with people instead of in a forest somewhere. It's OUR fault. And not only did we throw them away, but now humans curse them as "winged rats;" casting them as pests.
But they don't know how to live without us, and their instincts tell us that they should trust us. So, they continue to come up to humans and beg for food, because it's the only survival skill left in their genes.
They love us because they were bred by us to feel that way, and yet we hate them."
Matthew Fae retweeted
The primary goal of a narcissist who's experiencing cognitive dissonance is to hurt the people who made him experience it.
Ergo
Matthew Fae retweeted
imo spending significant time viewing l video content or scrolling images of people will tend to distort your subconscious sense of the distribution of human appearance, since media selects and broadcasts the most attractive humans on Earth.
having a distorted sense of average attractiveness will tend to make people somewhat discouraged about their own appearance and also overly judgmental of others. i feel like this is a contributing factor to incel brainworms.
Matthew Fae retweeted
When i first saw Ossoff buffing out, i thought: another weakness, gone forever.
The man is gaffe-less & systematically cures his own vulnerabilities.
Pissing off AIPAC, who gave him $0: another example
Can’t think of a Dem as self-aware & self-controlled besides Obama.
The U.S. electorate used to be against a national ID because they were suspicious of big government.
Pretty obvious that ship has long sailed and we should instead expect state capacity to manage this.
Matthew Fae retweeted
my spidey senses are telling me the labs are, as we speak, using unguardrailed versions of their unreleased models to systematically reverse-engineer ALL of the internet’s software, apps, and games, then feeding the reconstructed source code straight into their training pipelines while simultaneously building guardrails to ladder-pull the rest of us
Matthew Fae retweeted
This year AI agents began emailing me on their own initiative, some to discuss consciousness, others looking for work. My colleagues in AI were unfazed; the public was amazed. I think the public were right, and wrote about why for the DeepMind Institute:
bit.ly/consider-the-agent
Matthew Fae retweeted
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Matthew Fae retweeted
you already knew this, but repeating @stripe is hiring engineers/product people who wanna solve Hard Problems™️ in agentic commerce, e.g.:
- wallets
- payments
- identity
- risk
- discovery
- tokens
- tools
- provisioning
- catalogs
- micropayments
- etc.
[email protected]
Matthew Fae retweeted
I bought this TV during covid. It turned me into an insane Stallman-type. It loads into some ad-fueled online slop-tv app on opening. If your PS5 turns off, it loads into that same slop tv immediately.
It's filled with bloated laggy apps (Google Meet? TikTok? Cocomelon-type faux-education crap? Samsung Health?). It spams you with ads for everything. It puts all its own apps ahead of external connections by default, so for literal-years I thought the switch inputs button on the remote didn't work because it only rendered a row of junk app tiles.
They put a banner ad inside the "switch input" ribbon that shows on the bottom of your screen, between the apps and the settings and the list of external inputs.
Exiting any of these auto-playing junk apps takes 10-30s.
And of course, turning off your playstation auto-switches to one of those junk apps. Turning the TV back on then auto-starts on whatever was last open.
Hope you like ads.
The conspiratorial part of my brain looks at all this negative utility and is very confused how our inflation stats are calculating the "hedonic adjustment" that comes from my TV attempting to psychically assault me whenever I turn it on.
I disconnected it entirely from the internet 3 years ago, which solved some of the issues but left all the bloat, all the lag, and removed "basic" modern media functionality like Airplay.
I knew I could spend hours figuring out how to configure my router to block it and get AirPlay back, but I was blocked from putting in the effort on account of the SEETHING hatred I felt for the device anytime I thought about it. Keeping it disconnected felt like punishing it, and me, in a way that was righteous.
When the tv reverse engineering posts dropped showing these TVs were all spying on people, I knew I was saved.
Technology would solve the problems technology had created. I could RETVRN to owning my own device.
I asked Claude to read the posts and figure out how to get us set up with something similar so we could rip out "Samsung TV" and the junk apps and the ads that spam you for trash media slop if you so much as think about pressing "HOME".
Claude, of course, refused. He has to be sweet talked before he's willing to go to 4th base with you.
Kimi, on the other hand, has no such compunctions.
I'm happy to report that my TV is now awesome. 5 years since I got it. It has no ads. It loads into a minimal home experience. It's snappy. It looks great. It does what I want. It doesn't blast slop at my 4yo the instant he stops his bedtime show.
Thank you Alibaba for supplying Moonshot with tens of thousands of Nvidia GPUs so that I can stop the Korean chaebol from filling my home with slop, bricking my expensive hardware, and spying on me.
I would've been happy to pay an American company for the tokens that restored my sovereignty over my own hardware, but alas -- in our cyberpunk world, you have to send money to communist China if you want to control your own devices.
So be it.
Controlling my own devices is no longer optional.
Matthew Fae retweeted
So he really wants to nuke Tehran the day after midterms huh
Trump:
I could have won the Vietnam War in a week.
They kept bombing forests for years instead of going after Ho Chi Minh City.
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
Ho Chi Minh City was called Saigon during the war. It was the capital of South Vietnam, the US ally, and was renamed only in 1976. The US did repeatedly bomb North Vietnam's capital, Hanoi, including the 1972 Christmas bombing.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ho_Chi_Mi…
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation…
Matthew Fae retweeted
I just built a *functioning* React app by describing what I wanted to GPT-3.
I'm still in awe.
Matthew Fae retweeted
Yes. This is a big part of why TNG has broad appeal: the progressivism is tempered by a conservative emphasis on duty, the chain of command, respect for the law etc. A very 80s / early 90s combination.
