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Flabberghaster

@flabberghaster.bsky.social
342 followers 783 following 3K posts

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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 10h
The letter Q is one of those rare letters that feels spirituality like it belongs at the end near X, Y, and Z. Instead it's near the middle, ahead of some heavy hitters like R, S, and T. For a letter that's almost never found outside of a digraph except in loan words, that's pretty good. Kudos to Q.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 10h
I have a custom search engine configured on my work computer where I must use google that appends -ai to every query. It usually works but sometimes the slop dispenser still weighs in. noai.duckduckgo.com works well but it's repackaged bing so some link descriptions are still AI.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
The pitch is they want these gulags to be nice. "Send the homeless to a farm upstate where they can run around" rather than throwing them in jail. IE, delusional, either self deluding or intended to fool others. They want them gone, they don't care where they go, but they don't want to feel bad.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 03/10/2026
It is a burden to say "no you can't dump radioactive waste in the river" especially as compared to saying sure do whatever you want. But everyone should accept some degree of burden to keep society livable.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
No, your opinion on whether claud is able to write code is out of date. But your opinion on whether it's being used as an excuse to fire people and make jobs worse is still quite fine.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I don't need to go to a gun range to have informed opinions about gun rights though. I don't think it's reasonable to ask people who hate LLMs to use them anyway to have their opinions taken seriously. It's impressive how much they can do, but whether they're good is a separate question.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
"You can't have an opinion on something unless you're an expert" is basically ceding the ground to the most pro AI people. I don't need to know if Claus is alive and feels true lovr or if it's just a robot to know that AI is a destructive force being pushed by billionaires who want to fire everyone.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
No, *this* experiment doesn't show us enough to know. We don't know if the LLM sometimes recognized it and sometimes didn't, etc. The experiment shows "if I ask, I get a right answer this % of the time." It doesn't show anything about tool calls, that's hidden. A different question.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I also don't think the ability to do math or produce logically consistent results negates the stochastic parrots point. The paper is about how humans instinctively read intention in to something that looks like it's talking to us. How sophisticated the thing is doesn't change that.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
If this is right then bender has a point: we don't know what steps OAI took so who knows how it did it in the shown results. I'm not saying LLMs can't do addition with inference, I'm saying we don't know what that model is actually doing.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
So I wondered if you'd searched the thinking trace and verified what it told you about how it arrived at that answer. Just out of curiosity.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
I'm asking because a common mistake people used to make is to as the LLM why it said something or other and then go "wow grok agrees with me." When in those cases frequently what's happening is grok is just generating a new answer with only tenuous connection to what it said before. [...]
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Your prompt said "verify your answer and show me the exact steps." Presumably this is referring to an addition it did before that's not shown. It then generates a Python script and runs it, telling you that's how it did so the first time. Do you know if it's true that's how it did the first time?
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
After you asked it to verify it printed out a Python program. Did you look through the LLM traces to verify if that's true?
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Her point is you don't know when it's calling a calculator and when it's not, so using this as proof is not useful. Who knows if open AI is calling a tool in some cases and not others, you don't get to see what it's doing under the hood.
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How-Sen Chong @how-sen.com · 02/10/2026
Listen: I don’t want to minimize the danger of high e-bike speeds. But if the problem here is that stores sell e-bikes that can drive faster than legal limits, then where’s the story about how literally *every car dealership has been doing the same thing for decades*?!?
cbc.ca
Hidden cameras show some stores unlocking speed limits on e-bikes, selling e-scooters that go up to 120 km/h | CBC News
A new hidden camera investigation by Marketplace shows how some stores are selling e-scooters and e-bikes with top speeds much higher than provincial speed limits and with recommended rider ages young...
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
The only dems focusing on trans rights seem to be the ones going out of their way to throw trans people onto the train tracks.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
I had been able to stop the spam calls that have been bedeviling me for years by setting my phone to not even ring if a number is not in my contacts, and it worked for a few months, but sadly these AI spam calls are now leaving voicemail. It never ends.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
Yes, true.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
What's most demoralizing to me is every few years there's another one of these. Every few years the same shitheads start carrying on and on about oh false rape accusations ruin mens lives, you mustn't besmirch the alleged perpetrator. Every couple years the cycle begins again, it's always the same.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
People do be naming software silly things like this, I believe it as a backronym myself.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Many of people point out that thiel has a philosophy degree or something so exposure to that doesn't prevent being evil. However I contend that having heard of Descartes or Pascal and responses to them might offer some inoculation from the worst pseudointellectualism that goes around tech circles.
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Mar Hicks @histoftech.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
Wore this tshirt yesterday and someone tried to explain it to me
Star Wars number one fan. Image of the enterprise from Star Trek 
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
AI enthusiasts are, as a rule, lazy and incompetent.
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George Monbiot @georgemonbiot.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
Here is how politics, in most cases, works: Rich and powerful interests, whether in fossil fuels, finance, big tech, media, meat, pharma or foreign governments, make a demand, and use their sophisticated tools to persuade a government to adopt it. The government adopts it. Please read whole🧵
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
The point about cops being able to just not go is so real. If a car invades the bike lane and hits you, and you even do call the cops, and they do deign to show up, in my experience they tend to treat you as you're sort of a nuisance making a fuss vs a motorist, who's a serious person.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
if i had freddy kruegar powers i would let people have fun adventures instead of murdering them with my knife fingers but i guess i'm built different.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Guy who calls fighting games soul-likes after soul calibur
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
"If you're evil, you're at least competent." Setting aside that this doesn't follow at all (there's lots of evil and incompetent people), this is so revealing of the way the right thinks about stuff. They think the only reason not to do the most cruel thing is a lack of either guts or capacity.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
I was out hiking and saw a trio of Local Teens in JNCOs and I was like, damn. The '00s are back in a big way. God bless 'em.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
A lot more Confederates should have gone to the gallows.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Reconstruction worked pretty well while we were doing it. As love ng as the former Confederate states were occupied militarily a lot of progress was made. Unfortunately labor struggles in the north caused the government to pull out the troops and use them to put down unions, ending it.
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e.w. niedermeyer @niedermeyer.online · 26/09/2026
we have a rule here where one job applicant can't eat all the fully loaded nachos
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
Those Amazon review things don't make clear that they're going to post it for others; it's pretty bad UX. I suspect most people just assume it's like the satisfaction surveys you get at the grocery store -- just gonna be numbers that get aggregated, not taking your response and posting it verbatim.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
My car went rogue and ran over a neighborhood kindergatener. The left needs to start taking automotive technology seriously.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
They don't 'hallucinate' because hallucination means perceiving something that is not there, and LLMs do not perceive. They are just outputting incorrect information, which comes as naturally to them as outputting correct information.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
They really do seem to talk like they're thinking more in terms of culling the weak than healing the sick.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People need to learn to do what they're gonna do if they're gonna do it, but not explain themselves, in my opinion.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
That's a great tip, i'll have to try that! My cookie trouble is I always find the dough a lot easier to mix stuff in to while it's warm, but I usually go too early and put the chocolate chips in while it's much too warm and they melt, giving me just chocolate cookies rather than chocolate chip.
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pausa de hateration @thatguywasfly.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
I hope everyone who jumped on this story today is proud to take their cues as to what's newsworthy and worth condemnation as The Problem With The Left from Jesse fucking Singal.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
People were way bigger assholes about masking when more people were doing it and they felt they might have been expected to. I haven't had anyone say anything about me masking in years beyond asking if I'm currently sick. Makes you think.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 24/09/2026
Officially fall starts about now, but I just don't agree. I think the seasons should start half way between the solstices and equinoxes. Winter is when the days are shortest, summer is when they're the longest. Late September isn't quite summer but it's not fall yet.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I just wish our government stood for anything at all other than trying to find new ways to terrorize more people is all. I wish it could do something good instead of bombing other countries, building concentration camps, and helping billionaires render everyone unemployable.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
And so saying you can't get a clearance if you're blackmailable but then giving certain things power by saying if anyone finds out about this you lose your career, means they're creating a category of blackmail that may not otherwise exist.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
With clearances if you have certain things in your past like you're gay or used to use drugs or whatever, someone can threaten to make it public and you lose your clearance. But if it didn't mean you'd lose your clearance, making it public might not scare anyone so it wouldn't be blackmail material
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I don't think it's akin to being antivax at all, really.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I made a humanoid robot to go hiking for me. And one to play videogames so I don't have to. Instead of tediously reading books I ask Gemini to summarize the key points. My life is so smooth and frictionless now, I can stare at a wall all day
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
It's OK if you write tests as a box ticking exercise but IMO it defeats the actual purpose of them.
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
I find asking them to write unit tests for me is not that good. It will look at the code and test that it behaves as it does. But it doesn't know when I've programmed in a weird edge case to my API. When I write the UTs by hand I discover that stuff, but offloading it to the LLM I miss more mistakes
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Flabberghaster @flabberghaster.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
It's like when landlords go to city council and call themselves "mom and pop housing providers."
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