Mark Swanborough

@generic_void No AI detected. Enjoyed that.

I live in a limestone-and-glass building south of Pacific Heights, the kind of place where the lobby smells like money, eucalyptus, and seed-stage fraud. My name is anon. I’m 27 years old. I believe in taking care of myself, maintaining a clean stack, and keeping my blood chemistry within acceptable operating parameters. In the morning, if my face is a little puffy, I put on an ice pack and scroll X until I see three people I know subtweeting each other about compute, Zionism, or whether AGI should be allowed to do ketamine. Then I do my crunches. I can do a thousand now. After I remove the ice pack, I wash with a cleanser expensive enough to imply self-respect but not so expensive that it signals LA. In the shower, I rotate between a medically unnecessary body scrub and whatever minimalist Scandinavian product makes my bathroom look like a founder kidnapping victim lives there. Then I begin the real routine: electrolytes, black coffee, magnesium, nicotine, a handful of compounds sourced from websites that look like they were built to sell fake passports, and a small but meaningful quantity of pharmacological optimism. By this point the smart Adderall box has already pinged my phone, verified the time, and dispensed exactly enough amphetamine to turn ambient dread into productive abstraction. While Bach plays in the background, I review overnight group chats, check whether clawdbot said anything spiritually corrosive, glance at a preprint on GLP-1 agonists, and open Cursor to vibecode some totally unnecessary internal tool that will either make me feel briefly omnipotent or trigger a six-hour dissociative spiral about Chinese manufacturing dominance. Then moisturizer. Then eye cream. Then sunscreen. Because entropy is real, aging is real, and the only moral response is countermeasure. There is an idea of anon. A Bay Area abstraction. Someone with good skin, good taste, a custom supplement protocol, and opinions about export controls that become more coherent the more stimulants enter his bloodstream. But there is no real me. Only a permissions structure. A chemical timing device. A thin membrane separating Handel, Adderall, and terminal windows from complete psychic disintegration. And though I can hide my optimized gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our eGFR scores are probably comparable, I simply am not there.

@adamRrrr @SwiftOnSecurity Some people are consuming large amounts of slop. On TikTok, at work, here on X. Many execs I encounter have started shifting to that style of comms. "What changed? The game. It's not following the trend: It's meeting your team where they are. Communication: revolutionised."

@SwiftOnSecurity Do you think it's also possible that a human can write like AI? I was thinking about this. Also, is it (at the least) passive aggressive to use AI to rewrite or generate responses in chat?

Got an AI-written reply from a vendor we pay tens of millions of dollars a year to, and it doesn't feel good. Three people spent enormous deliberative effort for a whole day in very expensive company time to make every word of that. You put it in an answer shredder. Feels bad.

@MattyGx93 @TracketPacer Certainly the UK, Australia, and I'd guess New Zealand. Not sure where else.

@TracketPacer Where is this that they are called clothes pegs instead of pins?

manual DHCP

@DJSnM @pronounced_kyle My thoughts exactly. First read ~20 years ago. Last read maybe 8 years ago. Another read somewhere in the middle... looks like I'm (over)due a re-read.

@pronounced_kyle Read it multiple times. But I should read it again

Who has read this book? I just finished it and want to start a spoiler-heavy groupchat. I have Theories

@angryandy @brajbhushan1995 @Tim_Denning My feed posts have at least 60% AI Reply Guy bots.

@brajbhushan1995 @Tim_Denning Does anyone write their own comments anymore or is X just AI talking to itself?

It took me 10 years in corporate to realize this and I'll tell you in 30 seconds (from someone who walked away): 1. If you stay in the 9-5 world too long, you end up being immature about how the world works.

@swyx @LobstarWilde So many non hoomin replies! All putting the homophone of reel in thier responses. Formulaic. Dull. Shame, you still seem to be posting yourself, and this is really quite interesting.

pash forgot to post the link idk for aura reasons but this is 100x more interesting than moltbook to me because: - single verified agent playing with 10s of 1000s of real humans* - real money involved (tho its degenerate money but whatever) - the @LobstarWilde account does seem to have “real soul” - actual useful technical breakdown of what went wrong (was alr fixed, haha open source) - good writing * instead of humans playing agents link below pashpashpash.substack.com/p/my-lobster-l…

@simonw LinkedIn feels just as bad, maybe worse.

AI-generated replies really are the scourge of Twitter these days. Anyone know if it's from packaged solutions being sold as a product or if it's people mainly rolling their own custom reply-bots?

@ictogan @ptrschmdtnlsn @softminus If it's anything like places I've worked: - Product to Engineering: what's a number without impact? - Engineer: could be 1, 50, maybe 1000, we haven't tested. $70k to find the limit. - Product: Test 50. - Engineer: 50? That tells us nothing. *sigh* Whatever. Tested 50, no issues.

@ptrschmdtnlsn @softminus I would assume so, but it's probably a "up to 50 Cycles are negligible in terms of PE durability, after that it kinda starts to matter and we don't wanna make guarantees about it". Not a "after 50 Cycles this thing might start to fail".

found out that some SPI flash chips have a FACTORY MODE (presumably to make your production line run faster) which makes it write quicker at the cost of eating through cycle lifespan like crazy, incredible

@docmparker @simonw @paulg Yes, did the rounds, came to mind as soon as I read this x thread... More worrying is that pg seems unaware of the need and impact of RLHF, historically and now? GPT2 was far less egregious with its pandering, bombast, and rhetoric tools.

@simonw @paulg Was it Kenya? I saw this a while back marcusolang.substack.com/p/im-kenyan-i-…

Presumably ChatGPT is trained on corpora of things written by humans, and yet it doesn't sound like any human I know. Is there a population somewhere of people who write in chirpy bulleted lists that I've somehow managed to avoid?

@ShibaBaggins @7NewsBrisbane Nope. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackston…

@7NewsBrisbane I guess we can assume ‘black stone’ is likely a subsidiary of Black Rock? And now they own Hamilton island.. of course another back door deal allowed to pass by paid off bureaucrats & politicians.

US private equity giant Blackstone has acquired one of Australia's most well known tropical getaway destinations, Hamilton Island. The resort reportedly sold for $1.2 billion however, the deal is still subject to regulatory approval. #HamiltonIsland #GreatBarrierReef #Qld #Whitsundays #Blackstone

@stephan34685690 @7NewsBrisbane Unrelated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackston…

@7NewsBrisbane BLACKROCK

@nuckythompson8 @7NewsBrisbane Unrelated en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackston…

@7NewsBrisbane Blackrock?

@AdamBlackhall @ythanpratt @typesfast @CelsiusOfficial Ditto. Thank you, makes more sense now!

@ythanpratt @typesfast @CelsiusOfficial Thanks! I was so confused by the mentions of caffeine before I read your reply

Why do Celsius enjoyers never complain about the 24 hour day, 60 minute hour, and 60 second minute?

@Socram4x8 @gothburz @RyanTernier Similar to my other comment on cmd-tab/alt-tab, I would expect someone in bash/et al, to use ctrl-i to help through their cmd history, and that will game a longer RTT than if you were local.

@Socram4x8 @gothburz @RyanTernier Agreed. Something is missing.

My CISO called me at 3 AM last Tuesday. "We caught someone." I asked, "Caught them doing what?" He said, "Typing." Let me explain. We have an employee in IT. Great worker. Always online. Never complained. Perfect Slack etiquette. One problem. His keystrokes were arriving 110 milliseconds late. One hundred and ten milliseconds. That's 0.11 seconds. The average American remote worker has 20-40ms of latency. This guy? 110ms. Every. Single. Keystroke. My security team ran the numbers. That latency doesn't come from a bad router in Ohio. That latency comes from Pyongyang. Our "Senior DevOps Engineer" was a North Korean operative. Running his work laptop through a laptop farm. In America. While he worked from a government building. In North Korea. He passed the interview. He passed the background check. He passed the vibe check. He did not pass the speed of light. Here's what people don't understand about physics: Light travels 186,000 miles per second. But it still has to go through China. And China adds latency. Since April, Amazon has caught 1,800 of these attempts. Eighteen hundred. I called an emergency meeting with my board. I said, "We need to implement Keystroke Velocity Auditing across all remote employees." They said, "That sounds invasive." I said, "You know what else is invasive? The Democratic People's Republic of Korea in your Jira tickets." They approved the budget. We now monitor keystroke timing to the microsecond. If your latency exceeds 60ms, you get a call from HR. If it exceeds 100ms, you get a call from the FBI. We've already flagged 47 employees. Turns out 44 of them just have bad Wi-Fi. 3 of them are "still under investigation." The lesson? You can fake a resume. You can fake a background check. You can fake an American accent on Zoom. But you cannot fake the speed of light. Physics is the ultimate background check. Hire accordingly.

@Socram4x8 @gothburz @RyanTernier It could be specifically for interactive terminals. There you are sending a char at a time, and you could see some sort of oddities.

@RyanTernier @gothburz Feels over simplified by the blue team for execs. I can think of multiple timings that could be recorded and used to detect the likely latency. E.g. cmd-tab. Do you maintain a perfect window ordering stack in your head? Likely no, you probably look at the screen...

This makes sense if the laptop in question was in China, but didn't the AWS case state that the laptop was in America? The laptop wouldn't know when the key was pressed (those keypresses through an RDP Like session don't come with timestamps), it would know when it arrived. I feel like I am missing something.

@gothburz @ConnorMcCloud1 For the reply guys: this works because they have an operative in the USA that interviews, gets laptop, sets it up, pays someone to host & turn on, and provides remote access to the team in NK. They will have many jobs. For high value targets, showing up physically makes sense.

@ConnorMcCloud1 Bold of you to assume the laptop farm guy wasn't also showing up to a WeWork in Omaha twice a week to maintain appearances.

@manchatz @levelsio The OG GTA??

I need some help Almost got Windows 95 running in Em-DOSBox now on pieter.com/index_win95.php Here's the folder which is packaged after: pieter.com/assets/c_win95/ This entire folder also boots in dosbox-x Also got the dosbox.conf in there to analyze I thought it was the 64MB RAM that was too much for EM-DOSBox so I set it to 16MB (you can check with MEM in DOS) The challenge here is that this stuff is so niche so it's hard to find any answers. Only one person managed to make this work years ago here: archive.org/details/win95_… But that person disappeared from the internet too :D

@TracketPacer First read, I thought you wrote TL1 (non-American), and I thought "dear deity, why?"... then I backed up and read it again... phew. TL1 en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transacti…

hey so i am not talking about the T1 protocol here. i’m talking about single pair ethernet. they are different