Moderately Hinged

Zubon. Positivity, reblogging of things that make me smile, and interaction with rationalists.

[collapsedsquid]

Hackers say that they used Meta’s AI support chatbot to break into a host of high-profile Instagram profiles by asking the support bot to change the email address associated with the target account. The claims coincide with a series of high-profile Instagram account takeovers, including the Barack Obama White House account, the Chief Master Sergeant of Space Force’s account, and Sephora’s account. The news shows the extreme risk associated with offloading support or critical functions to an AI chatbot. Users who have had their accounts stolen say that there is no way to escalate their problem to a human. In March, Meta announced that it was pushing AI support to all accounts across Facebook and Instagram, and that it would have the ability to reset passwords and perform other critical account maintenance functions: “Solutions, not just suggestions,” the feature’s product page says. “Account security and recovery.”

[daisukitoo]

When I worked in security, I focused on the human elements because the machines mostly did what you told them but humans were vulnerable to social engineering attacks that could bypass the machines. This issue has now been resolved by making the machines vulnerable to social engineering attacks.

[pardonmewhileipanic]

me adulting

[ichabodtheoptimistic]

I was running around on this hill when I tripped! Silly me. I wanted to take a nap anyway. Also follow Ichabod on: - Comic Fury - Facebook -

[daisukitoo]

If the Simulation Hypothesis bears out, is the Technological Singularity the "win condition" or the point where the game changes mechanics abruptly for the next act?

[what-even-is-thiss]

So many people who wanna argue with me about King Arthur clearly haven’t read the actual medieval texts. I know this because if they actually read the source material they’d know that when it comes to King Arthur, everything is made up and the points don’t matter.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“King Arthur couldn’t have fought the Roman Empire”

Try telling that to Geoffrey of Monmouth.

[what-even-is-thiss]

“You can’t just add in new characters”

Try telling that to Chrétien de Troyes. Aka the guy who invented Lancelot.

“Arthurian canon isn’t French”

Clearly you don’t own an air fryer. Also clearly you haven’t read literally anything written after the Norman invasion.

“Arthur needs to be a knight in shining armor”

If he lived at all he lived almost a thousand years before widespread adaption of plate armor.

“He can’t be in plate armor because that’s anachronistic”

Try telling that to Thomas Mallory.

“The fairy stuff is leftover from Celtic myth/Celtic gods)

A lot of that stuff including the lady of the lake wasn’t added until the 12th century actually. Centuries after England was christianized. It was also mostly added by the French poets.

[what-even-is-thiss]

God, I sure hope so.

[charlesoberonn]

It can be counted as arthurian legend now if you're not a coward.

[daisukitoo]

I read The Singularity is Near back when it came out in 2004, and at the time it seemed to perfectly fit the joke that AI was 20-30 years away and always would be. Futurists can always safely predict that something will happen in 20-30 years, because sales of that book will be done by then and no one remembers anyway.

Ray Kurzweil predicted human-equivalent AI in 2029. Feel free to whistle past that graveyard. We are well past computers that can pass the Turing Test. His date for The Singularity was 2045.

[thememedaddy]

[st-just]

Aside from residential zoning/real estate and farm subsidies my most distinctly libertarian instinct is probably pro sports teams. The industry makes how much? And they want how many million dollars from the city to build and upkeep their fancy stadiums? fuck off. Live by the market and die by the market.

[the-grey-tribe]

You know how leftists, social democrats, and even some centrists tell you that the mail and the welfare state and public infrastructure don't need to turn a profit? It's actually fine when the local library "loses money". It's for the people. It's a service paid for with tax money.

This is how people who vote for football stadiums feel about football stadiums. They really want to have football stadiums. They vote for football stadiums. They are fine with it costing taxpayer money, because they get to have the football. Football.

And then they can't even watch it, because it's on Sky Sports.

These people have a hard time wrapping their heads around it when you talk about public libraries. They think libraries should turn a profit. But when it comes to football, they understand. They voted for it.

Maybe the way to get people to understand why we pay taxes and why we should have libraries is to make an analogy to sports arenas. Those are popular!

[garmbreak1]

This should be ridiculous and yet you're making sense.

Interesting.

[daisukitoo]

Economics and Insurance

Econ 101 thinking is that insurance will always be a losing bargain because (1) the insurance company must extract money for administration and profit, so it cannot offer fair-odds insurance; and (2) insurance should be even worse than that because people with low risk should buy less insurance and people with high risk should buy more insurance (moral hazard).

Econ 102 thinking is that insurance math works out fine because (1) actuaries are way better at estimating your actual risk than you are and (2) low risk people do risk-averse things like over-insuring while high risk people do risk-seeking things like under-insuring.

Econ 201 thinking is that insurance companies are primarily financial investment companies that use your insurance premiums as capital. The insurance side of the business is a loss leader to get investment capital, which is where the real money comes from.

[nohoperadio]

Goodness, sincerity, justice, and maybe comfort, are so important--don't you agree?

[daisukitoo]

Also truth

[onrtrp]

truly tragic how scott alexander was born with a rare defect of the soul, one that prevents him from enjoying bauhaus architecture, and now he feels compelled to write long repetitive screeds about how he's objectively correct and the rectangle-enjoying masses are wrong

[onrtrp]

i know there's some survey he cites claiming to show that the majority disprefers postwar modernism but i just don't think randos on the street can be trusted to self-report their own tastes. there's some sort of a pepsi effect going on surely. you say you like disneyland castles but if you were forced to live in one you'd kill yourself

[centrally-unplanned]

I believe the masses a bit more than you probably, but it reminds me of how every once and a while you do find someone who chased their bliss and built a mino castle in the suburban cul-de-sac, and we universally mock it. Looks like tacky trash, someone living well beyond their station, and a total eyesore in the neighborhood.

I myself don't jump on these hate trains - live your bliss everyone! - but I do get it, the aesthetic isn't earned. You don't want to live in faux Paris in the outskirts of Topeka, Kansas; you want to live in actual Paris! Where the society, history, and institutions match the urban design. Modernist minimalism is a much more flexible design pattern, and *is* a match for the historic aesthetics of places like Los Angeles.

Still, there is a middle ground between Disneyland Themepark Design & Bauhaus Bleak. We can build colonial small town main streets and art deco apartment complexes alongside the "anti-massing" rainbow panels of the 5-and-1 future. Our built environment is shaped by dumb rules and an underinvestment in aesthetics, and people notice that. Fair game to complain about it.

[daisukitoo]

This discussion seems empirically testable. Disney makes neighborhoods these days. If you don't already know these, jot down your assumptions and predictions before clicking any links. Or maybe it spoils it that the entire neighborhood is designed by Disney, rather than plopping down Neuschwanstein in suburbia?

Golden Oak is where you can live inside Disney World. It is mostly mansions (McMansions?) and is now branching out into upscale apartments.

Storyliving by Disney is their new real estate venture. Cotino just opened in California and Asteria is coming to North Carolina.

A literally Disney-fied neighborhood: living the dream or crapsaccharine burbclave future?

[o-craven-canto]

Come to the Human Cuisine Restaurant, we have:

Boiled grain

Flatbread with various toppings

Flatbread wrapped around filling

Fried lean meat

Stew of fatty meat and starch

Fermented vegetable

Oily sauce

Aromatic herbs

Stimulant alkaloids

Alcoholic beverage

[cruxiu]

A visual physics lesson at 80 km/h.

Enthusiasts launched a man from a moving truck in the opposite direction - at the same speed the car was traveling.

The experiment spectacularly showed how relative speed works

[daisukitoo]

Please note the amount of safety equipment that he is wearing. Also, I was so relieved when I noticed the speed was in kilometers per hour not miles per hour.

[nohoperadio]

Your Kinsey Number measures the degrees of separation between genders you've had sex with and the sexologist Alfred Kinsey, for example if you've ever had sex with a woman that gives you a Kinsey Number of 1 because Alfred Kinsey had sex with women. If you've ever had sex with a man your Kinsey Number is zero because Kinsey was himself a man.

[daisukitoo]

What is your number if you have had sex only with non-binary people? Does your number change retroactively if a former sex partner changes gender identification, or is it fixed at the time of the sex? If it is fixed at the time of sex, you could change your number while having sex with the same person over time (or change their number). If it is variable, your number could change erratically if you have a genderfluid partner.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

as a younger person I'd sometimes get overwhelmed with the violence of the world, not just human violence but the violence done to animals and by animals, the innate violence of being an animal. because an animal is, by definition, an organism that must consume other organisms to live. and this would lodge in my spiraling young adult mind, the tragedy that to live, to be a creature, is to cause harm. that life is sustained by consuming life.

eventually I got older (and medicated), but in the meantime spending time in woodland really helped. it comforted me to be around plantlife, which feeds not on life but on sunlight, and therefore causes no harm.

anyway now I'm reading The Hidden Life Of Trees by Peter Wohlleben (incredible book) and it turns out that was a big fat LIE. forests are violent as FUCK

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

life as a tree is fucking BRUTAL. ok no they don't actually eat each other (well, not until they've been broken down and digested by microorganisms first) but competition is FIERCE. sunlight and water are finite resources. survival rates are dismal. a tree can release a million seeds in a lifetime and have only one offspring live to maturity. some species evolved ways of stealing sunlight from trees who got there first, bidding their time as a sapling then shooting out from under older canopies to hog as as much light as possible. next-door neighbors? fuck em, let em starve.

then you get shit like epiphytes that decided to just grow on top of other plants. strangler fig vines, for instance, which decided well fuck, im just gonna cling to this tree trunk and let it do the support work. maybe entangle our roots and envelope my host completely over time. oopsie my host died? that's ok I'll just cling to its corpse for eternity

equally horrifying is the honeysuckle, which preys on young trees boa-constrictor style, squeezing the life out of saplings, which grow with permanent deformities before dying prematurely (makes for a neat walking stick though)

then you get out and proud parasites like mistletoe who are happy to attach themselves to tree canopies and suck their blood extract water and nutrients. so yeah some plants do eat each other actually. gives ya some perspective on the old christmas tradition of hunting mistletoe with guns (yes that's a thing, shooting them down out of trees like squirrels. yes, unlike squirrels they deserve it). as for the romance angle, who doesn't want to kiss a lover beneath the dying corpse of a parasitic trophy kill? sexy as heck.

in conclusion, PLANTS ARE VIOLENT AS FUCK, and that's not even getting into the eternal chemical warfare they are forced to wage against insects, fungi, microbes and other enemies.

one day soon the forests will turn on us, and when that day comes I'm cheerfully betraying humanity and skipping away to cross enemy lines 🫡

kofi

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

to those who thought this post was heading in a heartwarming direction, i do NOT apologize and i DO hope the forest and its creeping mycelium tendrils crawl their way into your nightmares

[renewedmotionforjudgment]

Researching harem rank for fanfic with @drwcn

And man Song Dynasty loves its middle management. Like you want to be a fei? get through the 18 ranks of Pin first.

[alkatyn]

me and who, and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who and who

[sepublic]

I do think it’s interesting how the novel Dracula is meant to be a modern setting from its perspective. It’s very much that genre of story about an ancient fantasy archetype finding itself in a modern setting, complete with the rules-lawyering that often comes with modern parodies (that isn’t to say the stories of Olde didn’t have fun with loopholes either though).

Except Dracula is a story that plays itself straight. The vampire himself is not stupid. He’s possibly the oldest vampire of all which means he upgraded from animal instinct and mindless echoes of past memories to someone who’s regained his critical thinking skills. The story begins because he’s already adapted to how the modern world works now by hiring a solicitor who understands modern laws.

He knows now that he doesn’t have to march into London with an army like he used to; He can just buy property and the laws of London are forced to respect that. Similarly he’s already experimented in and discovered loopholes to vampire rules and limitations; Vampires are bound by the permission of owners so he simply uses his solicitor to buy and own a bunch of properties. If he needs to be invited in, Dracula hypnotizes someone to let him in.

Vampires need to return to their grave every dusk/dawn (whichever comes sooner), which causes their coffin to act as an anchor that limits how far from it they can travel? Dracula simply rations the earth of his grave into fifty coffins and spreads them across London so his range becomes exponentially larger.

All of these things make the story almost come across as a deconstruction and it might just be! It’s just that Dracula the novel became such a trendsetter that people nowadays see it as playing things fully straight. It almost feels as if the novel is written with the idea that readers have a basic understanding of vampires and their rules, so part of the thrill comes in the revelation of how the titular vampire is working around these rules. Likewise I’ve heard it used to be a trope in English literature for a traveler to visit some foreign land with a monster and escape by going home. But here the foreign aspect of the story is just the first (and final) arc; The monster’s plan hinges on coming to the UK itself!

So yeah. Dracula isn’t stupid and he reflects the idea that people of the past had just as common sense as the rest of us, they just had access to less/inaccurate knowledge and things worked differently back then. Dracula would be like… That bit of someone showing a medieval peasant a meme as they comprehend it perfectly and aren’t even wowed by the Doritos. If Dracula was set in the 21st century he’d probably understand social media well enough to become an influencer if he wanted to, though the issue of being invisible in cameras wouldn’t help.

[downtroddendeity]

Dracula is full of details that put it in what was at the time an incredibly modern time frame, which only isn't obvious to readers now because it's been more than a hundred years. A few off the top of my head:

Jonathan brings photographs of the properties to show to Dracula that he took with a Kodak portable camera.

Seward keeps an audio journal via phonograph recording.

Seward being a psychiatrist- the idea that you could actually try to talk to and understand a "lunatic" in order to help them get better instead of just throwing away the key was a depressingly novel concept in medicine at the time. Freud's Studies on Hysteria only came out two years before Dracula, for instance.

Blood transfusions. It's easy to make jokes about how Dracula was written before people knew about blood types and that's why Lucy gets transfusions from so many people with no problem, but because blood types wouldn't be discovered until 3 years after it was published, blood transfusion was still an extremely experimental and risky treatment that many doctors would hesitate to even consider, because sometimes when it was performed the patient would instantly die and no one knew why.

Mina's joke about "the New Woman"- anxieties about gender and feminism in Dracula are the kind of thing whole theses have been written about, but there's an obvious irony to this comment because Mina kind of is the New Woman. In contrast to Lucy, Mina is a highly-educated woman with a real actual job, and she works to hone those practical job skills because she plans to be an active participant in Jonathan's work.

When Van Helsing decks Lucy's room out with garlic flowers, he telegrams to Holland for overnight shipping across the Channel from a friend who owns a greenhouse, because garlic flowers are a good 3 months or so out of season at the time the chapter is set.

Jonathan literally makes a comment in Chapter 3 about the surreal contrasting modernity of sitting at an antique desk in an ancient castle and frantically scribbling steganographic shorthand in his notebook.