Jamie McCarthy

That seems unlikely to me because of the ways they break. If there were a model of the world, they would be more naturally resilient to edge-case (red-team-style) inputs. They aren’t and they need a lot of extra processing wrapper to even seem like they are.

Our J-school political elite decided decades ago that the important thing was for them to be seen as elite — which meant savvy, one step ahead, and above the fray. So they reported what Democrats’ tactics were, not what they said.

Also they decided they would never call a lie a lie.

And therefore:

Hi, 35-year professional software engineer here, and I understand the basics of the attention mechanism. Everything preceding “would pierce” is word salad as far as LLMs go. Those are just irrelevant to the technology

Recent activity on GPT-4o-mini, tokens processed per day, sudden dip from 60B per day steady-state to 5B per day steady-state. red x drawn through with hand caption "Misleading"

Here's the context of the misleading graph that was circulating, with alt text:

once you realize what's happening here it's incredible

"appreciate that" - that was a clue

One of the best shows ever on television

I’m not an anthropologist but I am 100% sure that is not true and instead it has been some ways in some societies and others in others

Also that argument is the same one used by enslavers to justify slavery, gay-bashers to justify gay-bashing, etc. You know that, right? Do you feel good about that?

I googled Planet Fitness and what I found was the company's co-founder explaining he would beat the shit out of trans women if they used the women's room.

That's the thing that concerns me most.

I don't care about genital configurations because I don't need to peek into strangers' underwear

What Foxy said.

Genitals are not the issue, Paul. Some women have penises, and some women have always had penises, and that's none of my business or yours.

If and when people get weird or abusive in public restrooms, that's the issue. Genital shape is irrelevant.

"it's just semi-randomly parroting existing text that it's seen before" is not a great explanation of LLMs or the human mind in general but it sure does capture the replies to any post about AI on here

And btw, cis people get inconvenienced by over-policing trans people. This isn't the main objection, but it's one of them. As a man who used to be clean-shaven with long hair, I sometimes got funny looks using the men's room. TERFs attack cis women whose shoulders are too broad, all the damn time

Picture of a walkway with a yellow gate across it, but no fence. Anyone can just walk around the gate.

There are legal and cultural solutions for cis men perving in girls' bathrooms. There are some legit arguments for strengthening them. But when people get worked up over this hypothetical case, what I see is putting up a gate where it does no good — except to inconvenience an oppressed class

Sorry, I don't think those are real concerns. You can try being more specific about the circumstances if you want, but basically the argument you're making it: "saying 'I'm trans' is a get-out-of-jail free card." And that just has no basis in reality. That's not what's going on.

Exactly. These “how many” Q&A’s are cute, but fundamentally this is like asking a human how many r’s are in [302, 1618, 19772] and laughing at its wrong answers

Nobody needs a precise legal definition of the word “trans” to figure out which side of those issues they should be on.

Paul, I think you might be a little confused on this. In this case the government is stepping in and telling sports bodies they can’t make their own rules about their own sports, and it’s telling schools it gets to peek up girls’ skirts to check for government-approved genitals.

In the kitchen, the mood is tense: pasta perfect

GPT-5: Key characteristics, pricing and model card I’ve had preview access to the new GPT-5 model family for the past two weeks, and have been using GPT-5 as my daily-driver. It’s my new favorite model. It’s still …

I've had preview access to GPT-5 for a couple of weeks, so I have a lot to say about it. Here's my first post, focusing just on core characteristics, pricing (it's VERY competitively priced) and interesting details from the GPT-5 system card simonwillison.net/2025/Aug/7/g...

Nice! This is the first time I've seen the hamburger metric used in the wild! 🍔

mastodon.social/@jamiemccart...

Our contribution to a global environmental standard for AI | Mistral AI

OpenAI reported .33 mL in a blog post for a typical prompt for ChatGPT.

For Mistral, a query is equivalent to 0.001875% of a hamburger.

Report: mistral.ai/news/our-con...

I would also recommend it.

DS9 wasn’t afraid to get real with its people

Spam services buy accounts created in bulk by spam-facilitation services, then use them to try to boost their clients’ google juice or gain other advantage.

The two services are usually different companies.
The created accounts are just inventory until they’re used.

Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over Employed full time: Median usual weekly real earnings: Wage and salary workers: 16 years and over

I think that’s 20% after adjusting for inflation. Eg, fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LES12...

YouTube video by They Might Be Giants - Topic James K. Polk

Everything you need to know about James K. Polk is in this song, by a band who also had an album named Lincoln

youtu.be/jSdgjP8os7U

For over a year now, Googling "Great Falls Maryland," either in Search or Maps, shows you the Virginia side of the river.

(The Maryland side is technically Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park, but everyone calls it Great Falls.)

Embarrassing, for the world's 7th largest corporation

Where’s that “deep sea hypothermal vent” box when you need it

We are fostering a female dog in our living room. I will give this a try

It’s essentially impossible to craft a law in a way that could have any serious effect. Individual LLMs could watermark output, yes. Suppose I paste my ChatGPT-generated essay into Claude and ask it to revise one word in each sentence. Suppose someone writes a tool to automate that.

And lawmakers? Who are they going to listen to. The people falsely claiming every chatgpt use makes a swimming pools worth of water demanifest into the outer darkness forever? Or the guys willing to donate to their campaigns who are trying to tell them they can build an eigenweapon