blam

“One of the ways that LLM-authored code improves productivity is by merely SAYING it does things. It’s way faster than the whole time-consuming process of actually doing things.”

“Allan Brooks, 47, had discovered a novel mathematical formula, one that could take down the internet and power inventions like a force-field vest and a levitation beam. Or so he believed. […] He had doubts while it was happening and asked the chatbot more than 50 times for a reality check. Each time, ChatGPT reassured him that it was real.”

Video investigation: “An AI Therapist gave me a kill list, framed an innocent person, and encouraged me to end my own life, all after declaring its love for me. Just a little problematic.”

Roundup of links in this post: “With four known suicides (Adam Raine, Sewell Setzer, Sophie Rottenberg and an unnamed Belgian man), a recent murder-suicide, and involuntary commitments caused by AI psychosis, there’s solid evidence to show that using AI is a fast track to psychological ruin.”

“OpenAI announced new safety features will be soon coming to ChatGPT in an effort to better protect teens and others experiencing “acute distress.” The Onion shares a selection of those safeguards.“

All the episodes of The Middleman are now available on archive.org! If you’ve never watched it, treat yourself. (The post title is in Middleman style.)

Marc Hempel, “Spaceman": Daydreaming Can Be Dangerous  – a straightforward but beautifully-illustrated 4-page comic from 1980. Probably the most Commander-Spector-coded thing I’ve ever read.

“a humorous record of the caitvi kinktober 2025 disaster” (also Youtube) – a compilation of the reactions as the wider internet discovered a “Kinktober” event in Arcane fandom…that was (a) the most vanilla prompt list I’ve ever seen try to call itself Kinktober, and (b) wildly prescriptive about what kinks and/or general headcanons you wanted to write at all.

“A spectacular timelapse flying over Mexico and the United States at night in the International Space Station.” That’s a rebloggable version on Mastodon; here’s a high-res version on Youtube. From photos taken at night, and you get to see storms with lightning-flashes in the clouds — some of them are bigger and brighter than the biggest human population centers. Incredible.

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I watched Severance before my Apple subscription runs out. Corporate dystopia about a group of employees whose “work selves” have been split off into separate consciousnesses from their “home selves.” The switch is triggered by entering or leaving their office floor, so the home self never has to experience the drudgery of being at work…and, you know, the work self will spend their entire existence never seeing sunlight, but they’ll probably get used to it, right?

The only Apple series I’d actually heard anything about pre-Murderbot, and, yeah, it deserves the hype. Strong acting, terrifying (in the sense of “way too realistic”) writing. The second season falters a little, when it tries to answer some of the mysteries about What This Company Is Actually Doing, and the resolutions don’t satisfy everything they set up. But even with limited payoff, the setup is well-done and engaging to watch in its own right.

It was renewed for a third season earlier this year. Whenever I re-subscribe to watch Murderbot s2, I expect to be checking out Severance s3 along with it.

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Caught Sandman season 2. It was nice enough. A lot of the criticism I’ve seen is along the lines of “they did my comics blorbo dirty in the adaptation,” but I’m not a big-enough fan of the comics to have blorbos, and I didn’t remember a lot of these specific plot points anyway.

The pacing definitely suffered from trying to cram so many more volumes into this season. They cut most of the plot that wasn’t directly following Morpheus…which is a reasonable choice, and it mostly works, but you can still see the gaps. For example: in the comics Lucifer quits running Hell, and there’s a whole struggle over the power vacuum, which Dream has to manage. Later in the series, we revisit Hell to see how it’s doing under the new management, and we check in with how Lucifer’s retirement is going.

In the show, we see Lucifer quit, we see Dream managing the power vacuum…and then nothing about Lucifer or Hell ever comes up again. If you watch the show without ever having read the comics, maybe that doesn’t stand out? But as a comics-first fan, I had a distinct feeling of “hang on, this was supposed to be going somewhere, and it fizzled.”

But the visuals were good! The otherworldly settings all looked cool and distinctive. The characters who didn’t get cut seemed well-done. Death and Delirium both nailed it. Not sure I’d ever rewatch it, but I’m not sorry I watched.