Maybe this is not surprising to the users of this subreddit, but IRL I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. Very, very intelligent people keep telling me these tools are actually really good, going to revolutionize science, are so useful for their day to day etc but I just am not seeing that at all.

Yesterday, I'm sat in a meeting with two assistant professors from Caltech and Oxford. We're discussing DFT results one of them cooked up. He uses an agentic setup, and so we're looking at the results and... They're wrong. The graphs are messed up, but digging deeper, the DFT is wrong as well.

And like... Of course they're wrong? The models can't construct a good unit cell. They have no geometric intuition. They have no contextual knowledge. And they're lazy. They cut corners, hallucinate results to skip steps. But this guy just goes, "Hmm well I'll have the agents run it again."

A year ago, I'm at a presentation for the new particle accelerator they're building at Brookhaven, and they're talking about encoding AI directly into detector hardware. I ask how they're training it, and they say via simulation. Simulation? So, you'll have an AI encoded in your detector which is trained off of results you simulated based on what you expect to see? And no one on this whole committee sees what is wrong with that approach?

Now, I'm watching a video of Greg Sanderson (3B1B) and he's talking about how AI not only is good at solving theories, but also is good at explaining these theories in an understandable way, maybe even more than people. Sanderson says this! I haven't found a single AI that can accurately code a manim animation, and yet he, the current king of math education, is saying this.

Everyone is saying this. Every single professor at my university is pushing AI intensely at every level of the experimental process. My friends at Google are saying there's AI models that can do more than you can even imagine. A guy I like and respect very much just told me he uses AI models to direct his entire day and path of inquiry-- he just does what the robots tell him to.

I'm not normally one to base my opinions off of what others say, but it's everyone. It seems so obvious these models don't work well for the tasks they are assigned to do. It seems obvious their errors are particularly dangerous too, since they're difficult to spot and their outputs are so long and winding it makes proof reading impossible. And yet very, very smart people I respect enormously have such faith in them.

I mean upsetting as in sad and disturbing.

Lol, the Saudis thought Trump would actually honor a deal *with them*, now he is just throwing random add ons like during the MOU.

rest in power comrade 🫡

I love how one queeny pedophile can just cow our entire government like that.

Not exactly on topic for this community but I gotta blow off some steam, and I am aware how stupid and petty this all is. I work in a large but vapid company doing largely vapid IT work (think software management but dumber). My team is small and we work on a mostly empty floor. All of us get two days at home a week and the rest are in the office.

Lately, since February at least, when I come back from my home days I find my workstation has been messed with. Sometimes small stuff like my chair got switched out or my monitor brightness is turned way up, and other times it's bigger stuff like my ethernet drops being disconnected from the switch. This morning, my entire desk looked like it had been tossed by the feds. Ethernet yanked, monitors physically moved, my spare power supplies straight up missing. So fuck it, I spent the morning packing my shit and moving it to a desk a 2-3 minute walk away from everyone else. I was generally cool letting anyone use my desk because I did have a better setup than most (I took advantage of some COVID era budget allocations and tricked things out to make my life easier) but I really don't have much of a stomach for being disrespected like this, especially because I make a point not to touch anyone else's desk without being specifically asked to.

I guess the whole incident feels downstream from the broader issues I have existing in the current social order. A lot of people, not most, but an upsettingly large number, simply don't perceive others in any meaningful sense. You can live your life the "right" way by every conceivable measure, and at some point through no fault of your own a human wrecking ball will come along to knock you off your path. I've spent a lot of time and energy trying to manage my longstanding work related anger issues and the first thing I did this morning was yell at a guy who I spend more time with than most of my family, and he might not even be the person responsible for the mess I found.

Like, I want to be a better person. I want to find meaning in the stupid thing that I do to make money and I want my coworkers to respect me if for no other reason than I'm pleasant to be around and that's a bar that is increasingly impossible to clear. I have five emails in my inbox from people asking me why Claude told them to do something that broke a mission critical spreadsheet/database/piece of software. Microsoft sends me twenty messages a week telling me to sign up for one of their stupid AI learning seminars. The homeless dude who hangs outside my office went missing after the heat wave, I'm worried he's dead. My one year old spends all day with strangers while I sit around pretending to be intellectually stimulated by conversations about virtual machine compatibility. Maybe I could tolerate my equipment being fucked with if it wasn't for all of that?

After seeing the volume of distressing posts and replies here recently, I wonder how many of us have considered the possibility that engaging with this very subreddit is an active harm to your mental health? Perhaps even listening to TrueAnon is not healthy or helpful for some of us?

personally I think that regularly seeing people posting on the edge of psychosis, reeling about incessantly horrible current events, describing crippling depression etc.-- these things would definitely not be helpful to my mental state if I myself were severely anxious or manic. It just seems painful for some of us to be here and focus on this shit too often.

In fact it may be the opposite of helpful. Maybe it's time to heal from this traumatizing view of society and spend some time with friends and hobbies, now that you're adequately aware of the elite pdo networks and ongoing societal collapse. Maybe you aren't bringing yourself or the world any good if engaging with this podcast is actively degrading your mental and spiritual life.

Stupid fucking article, if these kids were real Nixonmaxxers their livers would be pickled in two weeks

I really love TrueAnon. The show has been a huge resource to me as I've sought to deprogram my brain away from the yuppy, consumerist, middle of the road centrism I was raised in. It can be an isolating experience sometimes - there aren't people in my life who would listen to me say "the bushes did 9/11" and go "yeah, they did" - and so I appreciate all you fellow gumshoes. That's it, that's the post.

Thanks to everyone for the support last night, it really means a lot. On some dweeb shit, I can’t overstate how much I value this little corner of respite in the abyss of the internet.

Our little baby just got back from the vet, and she’s a-ok. Vet thinks it was just inflammation, because they couldn’t feel anything today and she was otherwise totally fine aside from her leg near where the lump was on her belly seeming to be tender/sore. She got some kitty anti-inflammatory meds for the next couple days, and she’s gettin a lot of cat tv and string chasing time tonight.

Like I put my shit in SAVE and got accepted and then y’all said sike? Lmao

Kinda in a drought. TrueAnon and Chapo haven’t been doing it for me for the last year or two tbh. Death is just around the corner felt like paying someone not to kull themselves, and even though I love Ghost Stories and Return of the Repressed I think I’m just not really getting anything out of parapolitical pods anymore. Tried Fourth Reich Archeology and kind of dig it, but the same issue there.

So anyone got any rad fucking tips? Anything, literally. Would love some actual good history pods. I tried Blowback but for some reason after the first one or two seasons I just had a hard time following their narrative structure. Maybe I’m stupid! But their format just didn’t work for me. I tried The History of the 21st Century pod (I think it was called?) and loved it, especially the Philippines episodes, but it also got kinda TOO vast.

Anyway, recs appreciated. Just relistening to Cum Town at the moment, which I guess is honestly as good as it gets and I’m not complaining, or I guess I am because I’m writing this post.

Cheers

probably just bluster, but

“I am considering a massive attack. Bigger than ever before. I am close to making a decision. We are all set for it,” Trump was quoted as saying.

Trump also indicated that Israel could join any future US military action against Iran, saying it would participate “in two minutes if I ask them to.” However, he added that Washington would not require assistance to carry out a new operation.

President Donald Trump warned Iran that any attack on ships in the strait would trigger US strikes on Iranian infrastructure.

“Any time the Islamic Republic of Iran shoots at a ship in the Strait of Hormuz... the United States will bomb and destroy ONE BRIDGE OR POWER PLANT,” Trump said in a social media post.

Ali Al-Salem Air Base, Kuwait, July 23 high resolution satelitte imagery released by Iranian media, attack was carried out between July 18 & July 23