The people who are worried that Moltbook is where agents are gaining self-consciousness forgot the part of Accelerando where all the AIs were basically scammers (the Slug)

Orwell had Julia working in the novel factory - where machines spliced together romance trash pablum for light entertainment. So he accurately prophesied LLMs.

Continuing on the theme of nerds misreading culture, here’s Asimov with abundant sour grapes about Nineteen Eighty-Four

https://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm

Via HN, where no-one bothers commenting on the fact that the piece is hosted on a Marxist-Leninist, anti-revisionist website.

Such a great description

desperately trying to latch themselves onto the coattails of whatever passes for cool among nerds these days

Not one, but two utterly out of touch LWs trying to interact with culture.

Earlier today, woke Proust get slammed by some young 'un direct from college: https://awful.systems/post/7140871/10327823 (note that they can take time off to read Recherche, even going to the length of spending time in France, which tells me they don’t really have to worry about getting a job or anything)

And now, someone tries to “explain” the perfectly spherical explosion at the end of the Akira movie with the fact that atom bombs in Japan really looked like that because humidity, utterly forgetting that the explosion in question was psychic/telekinetic and therefore probably follows its own damn rules on visual appearance

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/pbChvM8xZnKmxaKAa/jackson-wagner-s-shortform?commentId=xjX85Kah6AQNsnHPg

I swear to fucking god both LW and HN have the worst takes on culture in general and SF/F in particular.

I happen to know there are multiple translations of the novel into English, and I’m confused as to why the reviewer refers to

My copy was the 2016 Moncrieff/Schiff English translation

which doesn’t really mesh with anything here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Search_of_Lost_Time#English-language_translations

Not that it matters much in the end.

Enjoy sneering at this LWer tackling Proust

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j3ZtsYBYBcTTFXH5S/in-search-of-lost-time-a-review

Edit it has garnered one comment so far

Thank you for the service you have valiantly rendered to us all, by making our own reading of these books unnecessary.

You know what? I don’t think Proust would have disagreed with having rats avoid his novel.

Huh, I just realized yesterday that my car (also a late-model VAG model) does have a touchscreen that reacts to gloved fingers. This was the base infotainment system, not Carplay.

Unfortunately the steering wheel controls are touch, not physical. A big downgrade.

Good luck. There’s a lack of trained electricians here in Sweden, which amazes me, it sounds like a decent job for someone with a technical bent and some handiness. Better than plumbing (no disrespect to plumbers, love them, but not the work I want to do)

1,604 comments jfc

Protos: Brock Pierce’s dark and disturbing friendship with Jeffrey Epstein

they’re already pivoting to the narrative that “local models will be plenty good enough and it will be trivially affordable to run them”

Hacking Moltbook: The AI Social Network Any Human Can Control

Anecdata here, I’ve been unemployed 2 times in the last 3 years and both times I mostly used LinkedIn to look for leads. Had some ok comms with recruiters too .

Depends on where you are and what kind of jobs you’re looking for but for computer janitoring like me it worked ok

Called it, 2 years ago: https://lobste.rs/c/fhob3x

actually didn’t call, had forgotten all about it

The Comics Journal: I have no mouth and I must scream at Black people: Scott Adams, 1957-2026

Freshly minted LWer does LLM-assisted analysis of LLM Facebook and concludes that the bots are conspiring to take over

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Et7dgiBjSj2zJnGuM/unicode-ekfv

No thought to the fact that (at least AFAIK) there’s no verification that the posting entity is actually an LLM, and not a cheeky human stirring things up

aka the Minsky defense

LW ghoul does the math and concludes: letting measles rip unhindered through the population isn’t that bad, actually

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/QXF7roSvxSxgzQRoB/robo-s-shortform?commentId=mit8JTQsykhH6jiw4