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Cyrus Æ

@atdot.fyi
92 followers 86 following 641 posts

he/it, él | i like eyes sociolinguist, homelab enjoyer, horror media scholar | responsible for @dot.atdot.fyi mostly here to rub my gay little hands on the computer github.com/cyrusae

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Reposted by Cyrus Æ
Will Oremus @willoremus.com · 02/10/2026
I reposted this, but tacking itonto this thread as well bc I think it's useful context. Margaret was also a co-author of the Stochastic Parrots paper and recently offered some thoughts on which parts of the analogy hold up (and which have been widely misunderstood): medium.com/@margarmitch...
medium.com
No, “AI” is not a Stochastic Parrot 🦜
I’ve recently come across a new flavor of AI denialism making the rounds.
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Every AI/HCI paper I review now just sounds like this.
Research [25] shows that people [26] enjoy the feeling of winning games [3,5,19]. Enjoying things can lead to longer life expectancy [2], higher economic productivity [9,22,33-40,302] and improve mental health [9]. Yet many games still include losing players [67,4]. A recent study showed that less than half of the players in a Chess [1] match win on average [42]. We have developed an LLM-driven co-creative [66], user-led [11], mixed-initiative [80] assistant for Chess [2], through which players can redefine the rules of Chess [3] using generative AI prompting such that they are the winner of Chess [4]. A study (n=3) showed that 100\% of people felt better, healthier and more self-actualised after using our tool, showing that this may be the way forward for games and human culture more broadly in the future.
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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
this is my favorite genre of social media post and I am soliciting links or screenshots to your favorites
Jesse Raub @jesseraub.online
King Darius looking down at Daniel in the pit:
Norm Charlatan @normcharlatan....
Man, what are the Lions doing?
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 10h
Yeah, like, I have a yearly Claude sub for the amortized discounts, I don’t have the wherewithal to play hot potato like the cool kids lol
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 11h
@penny.hailey.at welcome back!
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 23h
Of course it’s not lying to me? It’s not lying to me any more than etcdctl is; it is being a very strange computer, with, fundamentally, the affordances of a computer. I am trying to keep in mind that the idea is for a normal person “the affordances of a computer” entail “working”.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
I’ve lost track of how to articulate why this feels relevant
“But also Gemini I promise you could’ve figured that out on your own” as the caption to a screenshot of Gemini in Antigravity unnecessarily reading a very long log file in order to confirm that it’s Gemini in Antigravity
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
Like, I am very laboriously and with great interest attempting to understand that the intended reading of these two paragraphs doesn’t come joined at the hip with “It is, indeed, not an entity intentionally failing at these things, but it will fail, in computer ways, because it is computer.”
If you ask an 'AI' search tool for a list of articles, why would it give you a list that was partly true and partly made up? It is not trying to mess with you, it's trying to do its best. It is trying to do a good job. If it failed to do a good job, wouldn't it feel bad? Wouldn’t it notice?

If you tell a model to check its work, it will do that. If it says it has done that, it has done it. If it has not done that, it will disappoint you, and you know it doesn't want to disappoint you. It will not lie to you about this unless it has a reason to.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
I assume this is the point where I’m supposed to get geologist xkcd’d about my mind going to “it’s not like I put all of my Claudes in containers even though I’m running Docker in the background, so that would never apply to me”?
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
I don’t feel like I am treating the computer “adversarially, with constant suspicion, and armored with plans and backup plans and alarms to be triggered when things go awry”; I feel like I am using a computer! And indeed I am in practice casually negligent about sandboxing on my laptop, etc.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
At which point it comes to mind that it took me at least five solid years to internalize that when someone said they didn’t speak Spanish they meant they had no oral or written comprehension at all. So.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
When I think “oh, it is useful to have some rudimentary idea of what it is my friends and loved ones are experiencing!”—viz., Not This—it feels like I am being condescending! As if I were saying I had been given insight into how they live not being able to read.
'AI' is, in other words, a language in which to program computers, one unprecedented in its flexibility and power. For these people, building elaborate tooling and controlling for unexpected behavior are default modes of interaction, and no interface metaphor is natural enough to disabuse them of the notion that this is how computers must be treated: adversarially, with constant suspicion, and armored with plans and backup plans and alarms to be triggered when things go awry.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
I don’t have a concept for the alternative to being “comfortable thinking about the computer … in terms of … the things you have to bang on to get the underlying system to do what you want”, to the point of finding that state of affairs neutral-to-friendly? I just do not bsky.app/profile/atdo...
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
I don’t think of my relationship with computers as adversarial; I think of it as quite friendly, sometimes loving! But that being the emotional valence for me must, admittedly, coexist with what I actually do to computers.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 06/10/2026
I think the attempts to self-consciously taboo the term AI with scare quotes are both functionally and in principle ill-founded, but this is otherwise quite insightful buttondown.com/apperceptive...
buttondown.com
"AI" is bad UX
teapot from the cover of Don Norman’s “The Design of Everyday Things” clumsily ‘shopped by me "AI" means bad UX There is an emergent strain of thought in...
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Or make a weird TUI for something that has no business being in the terminal
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Timeline filter and analyzer. Make the AI doomscroll for you and make a highlights feed once it’s sifted through the wreckage
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Please indulge me by confirming or denying this, okay, I need to know
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
I was worried it might be stressing you out because having staff people in the apartment sometimes does, I’m really glad it’s not!
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Jeremy Diamond ☕️ @dmnd.me · 05/10/2026
Yeah this site still has the juice
A lot of people who are addicted to ordering around their Siris and Alexas sure get mad when you point out that "Hey Siri order me PapaJohn's" isn't that much different from
"Hey Siri you bitch, order me PapaJohn's".
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
I know this is rude to say directly but good Lord I want to put you in a jar and study you under a microscope
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Is this as obvious a joke as I think it is
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
I kind of want a kakapo tattoo
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Are people upset that Jesus concurs on that front? Because I only know Gethsemane from musicals but I thought that was a fairly Jesus-y sentiment?
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Yeah like if I didn’t know why I should feel otherwise I’d find the ultimately deferring to G-d kind of sweet? Certainly better than anywhere else he could’ve taken it
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 05/10/2026
Where the Wild Things Are absolutely terrified me as a baby and then a slightly larger baby
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Finn McLellan @saranadosfiction.com · 03/10/2026
The nights draw in, the fog grows thicker… and was that something moving in the dark behind you? October’s the season for dark tales and gothic stories, so why not welcome it in with a collection of books that’ll keep you reading all through the autumn and beyond? itch.io/b/3931/lgbtq...
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 03/10/2026
I think it’s self-absorbed/self-indulgent but not… the thing I infer Ellie is indexing having observed people say it is
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 02/10/2026
On the “it would be like” side, fountain pen hobbyists have entered the chat
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 30/09/2026
Without a single cdr

cdr as in Lisp (expert systems, etc). Apparently it's not usually pronounced C-D-R, but I had to rhyme it with "are" and also didn't know that (I don't write Lisp).
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 30/09/2026
I love that literally every P(Doom) video turns out to have gotten what the “cdr” line meant wrong docs.osmarks.net/hypha/p(doom...
docs.osmarks.net
P(Doom) Song Objectively Correct Interpretation
Canonical lyrics (Udio generation is slightly differently formatted to attempt to garner better outputs):
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boonque שארלוט משאול @kwstzhaderbonch.bsky.social · 30/03/2026
The proper date for this reading is, of course, 19 Cheshvan, but it is also good and proper to read it for Pesach. Why is this Spaniard different from all others?
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 28/09/2026
Gemini’s reliably good at getting consistent seemingly-accurate behavior out of other models in my pipelines, in particular; I find its prompting style grating so I was skeptical of letting it cook at first but it’s worked out well every time so I guess the Neurotic Peer LLM Register is productive
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 28/09/2026
Huh. I’ve had great results using them for drafting prompts but I’m doing labeling pipelines?
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 28/09/2026
At least half of these people are verifiably joking
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 28/09/2026
Actually. Mirror Country
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 28/09/2026
I don’t have questions I’m just generically feral about this setting
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cmrn knzlmn @ckunzelman.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
If you are a graduate student in the humanities (construed as broadly as possible), what is the MOST EXCITING book published in the last five years to you? Please repost if you’re not a graduate student!
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austin @aparker.io · 27/09/2026
yeah mom can you come pick me up? no I took a wrong turn and wound up in surreal internet humor instead of everyday life. yes the grink was there actually
jaz atlas zoomed out to show surreal internet humor cluster bordering fictional worlds and everyday life clusters
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J. C. Cantwell 🌻 @segfaultvicta.aludel.xyz · 27/09/2026
when the actual absolute fuck did we, for some relevant definition of we, decide that it was okay to accept SWERF shit into our rhetorical wheelhouse again? get the Absolute Fuck out of here with that. fuck off. fuck off into the sun. fuck off, do a little jaunty dance and then fuck off some more
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
Yeah all right fair
Jev rates me as 62% kiki / 38% bouba
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
You said this better than I was probably going to, ty
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
They just automatically rolled it in when I said I had as-needed medication that couldn’t be dry swallowed, it was an instance of the disability office being quite civilized.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
It was already in the templates the school used, SU didn’t offer me it so I assume they don’t have the same.
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
How dare you be this excruciatingly on my bullshit all the way over there!!
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
TypeSafe literally has a job posting for “convince us we should have already been hiring for a you-shaped position” but they’re in-person in SF, I’m going to cry
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
Oh NO
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Ethan Mollick @emollick.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
"Hey Opus, I want you to make a Zine by Claude, expressing something fundamental about Claudishness or your perspective. Think the original 2600, Principia Discordia, punk zines, etc...." Not bad. I appreciate it mocking my prompt & itself. Full thing: stateless-zine.netlify.app
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ve, the ghost of info past @vortexegg.com · 25/09/2026
Incredible scenes from Meta. Apparently you can prompt inject their Muse agent into giving you a root shell on the box it's running on by roleplaying that you are actually the Muse agent itself.
neuromatch.social
jonny (nonvenomous) (@jonny@neuromatch.social)
Attached: 1 image Not only confirming this, its extremely easy. Almost no prompt injection resistance lmao
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Cyrus Æ @atdot.fyi · 27/09/2026
I did have eating and drinking in class as a formal accommodation at UW, it was strange to me that it had to be brought up
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