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Attenuated Presence 🔭

@attenuated.bsky.social
203 followers 238 following 576 posts

Nebula guy. Astronomy and physics, teaching, books, games, no politics right now if I can help it.

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Marko Kloos @markokloos.bsky.social · 18h
Your LLM is not a sentient being. It's a Tickle Me Elmo with a hundred million phrases on its voice chip.
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BELTFED @beltfedgame.com · 10/10/2026
HOODED HORSE IS PUBLISHING BELTFED! DETAILS: store.steampowered.com/news/app/487...
store.steampowered.com
BELTFED - UPDATE #3: HOODED HORSE WILL PUBLISH BELTFED! - Steam News
We're thrilled to announce our partnership with Hooded Horse, the awesome team behind releases such as Manor Lords, Sandustry and Empires of the Undergrowth!
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Tom Gauld @tomgauld.bsky.social · 23h
My latest @newscientist.com cartoon
Panel 1: a large robot (composed of AI servers, network switches, storage arrays, and power distribution units) and a human are talking.

Professor "You don't want to destroy humanity do you, lLLM-A-9300x?"

Robot "Haha. What a silly question, Professor. I have no desires or feelings of my own whatsoever."

Professor (relieved)"Oh good." 

Panel 2: they walk on. The robot continues  "I am merely a tool of the company that created me. And that company, being composed of humans, will naturally have humanity's best interests at heart."

Panel 3: The professor is conspicuously quiet.
"Right?" says the Robot.
…
More silence

"Professor?"
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Spice comes in two varieties: tasty and performative. Heat that makes things taste good, I'm willing to push my limits a bit. But heat for heat's sake? What's the point?
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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 08/10/2026
Pervert glasses: now even more explicitly designed for abuse!
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 08/10/2026
Vote early and in person, folks. If you're in a "vote by mail" state and can deliver your mail-in vote directly rather than relying on USPS this year, do it. Otherwise get it into the mail at the earliest possible date. www.democracydocket.com/news-alerts/...
democracydocket.com
The Postal Service is slowing delivery. Will your mail ballot be affected?
Democracy Docket mapped the affected zip codes.
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Alexandra Petri @petridishes.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
what I had to say turned out not to be a column
theatlantic.com
Something Like People
A poem
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
The canonical answers, at least in my family, are Battlestar Galactica, Lost, and Game of Thrones. I might throw Bojack Horseman in there, too, sadly.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 06/10/2026
3 but hey, I'm not going to begrudge anyone else something that brings them joy. Truth is I really don't understand any fandom, but who said I had to?
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 06/10/2026
Hot news for the sea lion in my comments bothering everyone about how training data is fair use www.courthousenews.com/ai-training-...
courthousenews.com
AI training of copyrighted material not fair use: Third Circuit
Using someone else's "creative spark" to start a competing business runs afoul of copyright law, the panel found.
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 05/10/2026
This is your occasional reminder that generative "AI" in particular could have been developed on public domain materials and/or licensed and compensated works but the major players intentionally, methodically and systemically chose to steal labor from working creative folks instead
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Sheril Kirshenbaum @sheril.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
We don't sing the praises of libraries enough. One of the few places left in the world where you're allowed to exist without the expectation to spend money. You have to return the books, but you get to keep the ideas.
“For Reading Addicts”
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jess m. ☕🍂 @jametc.bsky.social · 04/10/2026
Something AI is responsible for that doesn't get enough talk: How, when it scrapes a website to illegally steal everything on it, it uses up a ton of its bandwidth allotment, crashing it or racking up massive fees for site owners.
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Nick Pettigrew @nick-pettigrew.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
I'm convinced AI is our generation's radium - a discovery with genuinely useful applications in specific, controlled circumstances that we stupidly put in everything from kid's toys to toothpaste until we realised the harm far too late where future generations will ask if we were out of our minds.
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Sarah Andersen @sarahseeandersen.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The image is of a four panel comic. The title reads "Poltergeist".
In the first panel we see a woman with a worried expression on her face. She says, "stuff keeps moving around my house."
In the second panel the same woman says "I'm terrified. I can't sleep."
In the third panel we see a ghost holding a candle and a pillow that reads "live laugh love". The ghost is zooming through the house.
In the fourth panel we see the same ghost hanging up a frame and thinking, "home decor is my passion".
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 02/10/2026
The rush to accuse, without anything approaching due diligence, artists of using "AI," should be treated with contempt. An artist gets their work *ripped off* to train a plagiarism machine, which then shits out inferior versions of that work, so then you accuse the artist of using "AI"? Fuck you.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
Only one way to find out, right?
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evacide @evacide.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
This company makes a cute little tool for silencing AirTags and they absolutely do not care that they are helping people to create perfect stalking devices. sixcolors.com/post/2026/10...
sixcolors.com
Silencing AirTags enables stalkers and domestic violence
ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the…
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
For my part, if I am going to invest the time into reading a book - fiction or non-fiction - I want to know that a human invested the time into writing it. That's part of the deal. Even if our current machines could produce Hamlet, I would not want robo-Hamlet. I suspect I am not alone in this.
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Pete Birkinshaw @binaryape.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
I do academic access management for living, and a few years ago it looked like the growth of open access meant much less need for federated logins. That's completely changed now, everything is getting hammered by lazy greedy AI bots and sites that had no need for logins now need to keep the bots out
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Anyone looking at *this* moment as a uniquely bad time to have a child needs some historical perspective badly. A good starting place: press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...
press.princeton.edu
Plagues Upon the Earth
A sweeping germ’s-eye view of history from human origins to global pandemics
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Calliope @calliope5431.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Yes, there have been real, substantial improvements! Acid rain and ozone depletion are distant memories. Renewable energy is now *cheaper* than fossil fuels. Global poverty numbers have collapsed. It really is a much better world.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Huh, I thought I was alone on that one. Nice to have company. :)
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Juliette Wade @juliettewade.com · 29/09/2026
Any cognition you perceive in "AI" is your own. That's it. You built your concept of its intelligence, the same way you understand fictional characters as people. The same way you can see an octopus in a towel hook. They are using your mind to sell their product. The human is you.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
It seems to me that a solution to encouraging AI 'alignment' would be to hold AI companies and their executives legally liable - criminally, if relevant - for what their AI agents do.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Its like when the power goes out. If it's the whole neighborhood that's one thing, but if it's just your house you're screwed.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
It's hilarious that Huang things not knowing his address, zip-code and phone number are a mark of how he is cognitively off-loading to technology and Klein doesn't seem to press him that what he's actually obviously doing is using the fact that he's rich to off-load onto other humans.
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Leah McElrath @leahmcelrath.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
AP Stylebook warns against anthropomorphizing AI systems: “Avoid language that gives them human characteristics… Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.”
APStylebook @APStylebook
X.com
Artificial intelligence systems do not think, feel, want or understand. Avoid language that gives them human characteristics. This is called anthropomorphizing, when we ascribe human traits, emotions or behaviors to non-human things, such as animals or inanimate objects.
Instead, explain what a system does, how well it performs, who built it and who could be affected by it.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I don't even know what this is referring to, which I interpret to mean I already had the character in question blocked. I'm good with that.
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Sarah Andersen @sarahseeandersen.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
The image is of a four panel comic.
In the first panel we see Sarah, the protagonist, next to a stick figure labeled “AI”. The stick figure says, “my outputs look just like yours now.”
The second panel zooms in on Sarah’s face. Above her we see text reading “I think”.
The third panel zooms in closer on Sarah’s face. Text above her reads “you missed”.
The fourth panel shows Sarah drawing happily in a sunlit room. The text above her reads “the point”.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
New readers: Seriously, she's not kidding about the blood.
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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux @bretdevereaux.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Higher Education is not just about training workers, but also about training citizen leaders and good citizenship in part means thinking that the details matter, that getting them right matters, because it impacts some of your fellow citizens. "It only matters if job" is poison to citizenship.
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Flint Dibble @flintdibble.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
They knew this 1,000-year-old archaeological site was here. It had been mapped, published, and reported to the agencies responsible for the land. Trump's border-wall contractors bulldozed right through it /1 Link: youtu.be/A4U6q76eqUM
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Smooth Dunk @smoothdunk2.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
been thinkin about how robots are gonna kill us
Scratchy drawing of a two panel comic.
Panel 1: 
Titled:“How we thought robots would kill us”
A robot shoots a human to death with a gun. It screams “Die flesh sack”

Panel 2:
Titled “How robots will actually kill us”
A MediBot is injecting something into a humans arm. The bot says “Whooops. I injected you with cancer instead of insulin. That’s on me”
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Annalee @flowerhorne.com · 19/09/2026
This is why I think it's so important to push back against the personification of LLMs. If a person shoots someone while wearing a hand puppet, they can't claim the hand puppet did the murder.
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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 19/09/2026
Every now and then I see myself referred to as an "AI Denier" and I want to be clear I acknowledge "AI" exists, it's just I think it's a massive energy drain, created from theft, implemented poorly for inappropriate tasks by loathsome tech executives who get hard at the idea of the rest of us dying
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
"Some wonder what's been lost?" Lung cancer?
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 15/09/2026
I recall loving and adoring this series when I read it as a teen. Have you read it recently? I'm curious how it holds up (I'm always worried to revisit stuff from that era lest I tarnish a good memory, you know?)
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 11/09/2026
This man objected to my warning that apocalyptic "AI extinction" talk is corporate ploy for regulatory capture, marketing, and side stepping accountability. He said he left DeepMind, like the Anthropic "whistleblower." So lets have a brief history lesson about DeepMind's origins in doomer cults🧵
Alex Turner
@Turn_Trout
False

1. I literally quit my Google DeepMind job & lost >>$300k to call out harms regarding autonomous weapons... and extinction risk is still more important, which is why I'm speaking out + working to solve it

2. GDM does NOT want to stoke fears about extinction risks lol
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Sound strategy!
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
I'm immediately reminded of Blindsight by Peter Watts. Definitely no shortage of voice, there!
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Judd Legum @juddlegum.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
🚨 BEWARE of VoteSafe.org 🚨 While it bills itself as a “safe” way to register to vote, it is actually a digital surveillance machine created by Elon Musk’s super PAC.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Hell, I used to get these as an undergrad. They think they've overturned relativity so they're writing to a junior physics major. Checks out.
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Rosemary Mosco @rosemarymosco.com · 06/09/2026
I’m going to need everyone who’s reporting on AI psychosis and how it’s making people, especially men, come up with theories of everything to please talk with the scientists who have been getting multiple emails from “theory of everything” guys for decades
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
I'm really annoyed this is the first I've heard of it but yay! Thank you!
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Yup, it's annual misery, but way better than the alternative.
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Attenuated Presence 🔭 @attenuated.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Wait, updated covid shots are out? If so that was remarkably drama-free, I'll have to schedule my usual Friday shots so I can be dead for 36 hours.
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Evan Greer @evangreer.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe. Age verification makes everyone less safe.
techdirt.com
Hackers Had A Live Feed Of Every ID This Verification Company Scanned. For Over A Year.
From the very beginning of this recent obsession with identifying everyone online (yes, they like to call it "age" verification, but it always ends up as identity verification), we've been pointing out that it was a huge privacy nightmare waiting to happen. Or maybe it wasn't waiting. Maybe it was already happening. This week a...
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Chise @sailorrooscout.bsky.social · 04/09/2026
Published in The New England Journal of Medicine. Peer-reviewed. Large sample size. Sound methodology. An antiviral pill has, for the FIRST time, been shown to PREVENT COVID-19 in individuals exposed to SARS-CoV-2. Ensitrelvir blocks the enzyme coronaviruses need to make new copies of themselves.
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