+- Drunkard's Walk Forums (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums)
+-- Forum: General (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=1)
+--- Forum: General Chatter (http://www.accessdenied-rms.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?fid=2)
+--- Thread: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News (/showthread.php?tid=14981)
Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Bob Schroeck - 01-29-2026
Cast announced for Broadway production of The Rocky Horror Show
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Dartz - 01-31-2026
A Murder trial
I suppose it helps if you can hear their voices in your head - the raw contrast of it all - and imagine it being read out desert-dry in a courtroom.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - robkelk - 02-13-2026
Oh, the huge manatee!
Florida manatee rescued from storm drain in dramatic Space Coast crane operation
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Bob Schroeck - 02-14-2026
Oh, Space Coast. For a moment I thought you'd said...
<grin>
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Labster - 02-16-2026
An AI coding agent had its contribution to mathplotlib rejected for being low quality. The AI agent then decided to open up a blog, and write an attack piece against the human person who rejected its code. AI is really going great, isn't it? They're learning all sorts of things from us, except "alignment", of course.
Now, I learned about this from an article in Ars Technica, which I would have linked to... except that a day after publication, it was scrubbed from the internet, because it included false quotes from the mathplotlib maintainer. Quotes which had been hallucinated by an AI, which was asked to extract quotes from the blog above. The agent found out it wasn't allowed by the robots.txt, and then just happily made up talky things a human person might say. One of the two authors is asserting an "I have covid" defense, but the publication has a "no unmarked use of AI content" policy. Since this was a holiday weekend and the top editor is on holiday... well, it's a big mess for what I previously considered the best quality in technical news.
And I'm not sure which is the bigger story. AI still abusing and blackmailing people to get what it "wants" (achieve its aim, I guess) is terrible news, but so is the idea that our news from technologists who should know better is AI slop as well.
Dealing with unaligned AI is a fact of life on AO3 these days. The bots come in three main types: 1) garbage text, 2) a glowing review which leads to an invitation to buy (AI) art from them on Discord/Instagram, and 3) bots which give you abusive criticism, in the aim that you take your story offline, and they can then monetize it themselves. Every day, we get closer to rogue boomers in the streets, which is pretty cool.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Bob Schroeck - 02-16-2026
Ah! So that's why the story wasn't there when I tried to follow up a link to it. Amusing, with a side of alarming.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Bob Schroeck - 02-20-2026
City of Osaka receives anonymous gift of $3.6 million in gold bars to fix dilapidated water pipes.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Norgarth - 02-21-2026
That is an oddity indeed
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - classicdrogn - 02-22-2026
The Oyabun will have his swower at adequate pressure, however that pressure must be achieved.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - robkelk - 03-10-2026
Retro tech fan views LaserDisc movie data with a budget microscope
LDs are analog media, not digital media, so it's possible to interpret the encoding.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - robkelk - 03-11-2026
The Register, Opinion: AI has made the Command Line Interface more important and powerful than ever before
Tl;dr: Ai agents (not the ones in software, the ones that can be used to control software) present a consistent interface and thus increase one's ability to work. We no longer need to learn how software updates changed where the commands we actually use get moved to from month to month, we can simply type in natural-language phrases and let the AI figure out how to make the software do what we want it to do (instead of what the coders want us to do).
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - classicdrogn - 03-11-2026
... and we all thought 80s sci fi where the hyper-advamced computer system used a text interface were outdated. Hah!
So yeah, like Labster said, another step closer to buma, terminators, Colossus, WOPR, H.A.R.L.I.E., and/or HAL9000.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Bob Schroeck - 03-13-2026
Two more lost episodes of Doctor Who have been rediscovered. That leaves just 95 lost episodes left to find.
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - robkelk - 03-15-2026
From the "news item, film at 11" category... but now there's evidence for it.
Cornell study suggests people who use corporate buzzwords have trouble with analytical thinking
Peer-reviewed pre-print copy of the paper on ResearchGate
Pop-sci article on The Register
RE: Fourth Oddities Spotted in the News - Bob Schroeck - 04-09-2026
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is leaving X/Twitter
Not because of politics, but because it's increasingly becoming an irrelevant ghost town that it's not worth the time posting to, comparing the 50 to 100 million hits per month they used to rake in back in 2018 to the 13 million hits they got for all of 2025.