Trailblazing Braille Taser

This is not a place for smart people

You can’t just blame 18-26 year-olds. This was a failure across all age groups. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/interactive-how-key-groups-of-americans-voted-in-2024-according-to-ap-votecast

I only have a vague understanding. The technique used to manufacture integrated circuits is called photolithography. Basically, these circuits need such tiny features etched into them that we can’t do it through traditional means. Instead, we draw a picture of the circuit we want, hundreds of times larger, shine a light through it, and use lenses to shrink the pattern down to size. This big pattern is called a “mask”.

So what’s the deal with the demonic sigils above? As we make our circuits smaller, the physics gets stranger. For instance, there’s this effect called quantum tunneling where electrons just teleport to a part of the circuit we would not expect based on classical physics. Due to these kinds of effects, we have to do crazy things to the masks if we want the circuit to behave correctly.

Disclaimer: I am not an electrical engineer and I have no idea what I’m talking about.

The nanometer-scale sigils are getting increasingly elaborate, presumably because the tinier demons are better at escaping.

Case in point, check out the “increasing need for mask correction” image in this article: https://spectrum.ieee.org/amp/inverse-lithography-2659629907

Brave and Opera are both forks of Chromium that incorporate upstream changes. Firefox is an entire browser.

Along comes a smooth talking con man

He has the best words.

Also, if they’re so smart, then why are they dead?

Personally, my goal is to challenge people to think critically about billionaires. Taylor Swift is a great example precisely because fans have put her on a pedestal where she can do no wrong. If the goal is to gather an angry mob, then sure, it’s more effective to focus on Bezos, the guy they already dislike.

If she was a good billionaire, she wouldn’t have hoarded wealth to this degree! Yes, Bezos is 200x worse, but I would bet (less than $1B) that she will catch up in the next decade and we’ll all still be apologizing for her.

riverSpirit is a time traveler and forgot that Michelle wasn’t elected yet

… was he ok?

I’m sympathetic if you’re living off the grid and don’t use public infrastructure. But the “sovereign citizens” that we usually hear about have already implicitly accepted the social contract and are now trying to weasel out of the consequences. The license plates that say “private; no license required” are just utter balogna.

That said, I’m completely in support of nonviolent resistance against unjust laws. But most sovereign citizens, in my estimation, are not protesting in support of any higher cause.

Nor I, as a sovereign citizen in the United States.

Be thankful they didn’t use wingdings

In chats between humans, I agree that it’s near pointless to try to censor. In chats between humans and LLMs, I suspect you can get pretty far with regex or badwords.txt filtering. That said, I haven’t tried, so who knows.

Teach your kids to play music with cat /dev/fd0 >/dev/snd.

Sorry if I offended you? My point is just that it’s possible to make a crappy “is forbidden topic” classifier with a regular expression. Probably good enough to completely obliterate the topic in chats between humans and bots. Definitely good enough to claim you attempted to develop guardrails for vulnerable users.

We’re still interacting with LLMs through layers of classical software, which can be programmed to detect phrases related to suicide.

Do not give Bezos ideas about uploading brains to the cloud. He would make AWS CloudEmployee, an employee-as-a-service product that lets you scale your business up or down, without expensive layoffs and bad PR.

Surely you’re joking? People do it on YouTube to avoid automated detection. You would be laughed out of court for trying to assert copyright over a reversed video as a derivative work.