…yet.

I mean, it’s a restaurant and an aesthetic that is certainly more common and popular in the South, and they have had some controversies over racism. Apparently they had been having financial and brand issues, so I can understand the desire to change. But rather than changing the food or improving the service in any meaningful way it seems like they went for the new logo and image and stopped there. Given that their existing audience was basically there for the wholesome old-timey please-don’t-ask-about-the-racism vibes I’m not shocked that conservatives in particular were upset about the change. But like, the change was never about wokeness or whatever it was about aesthetic modernization and a flailing attempt to fix things from business idiots who don’t know how to address the actual problems of mediocre food and fading relevance. If anyone had actually liked the change or if it had actually improved their service times then maybe there would be a point. But this was just a bad change and nobody outside that boardroom actually liked it, and so of course it got rolled back.

So the fucking Cracker Barrel rebranding thing happened. I’m going to pretend this is relevant here because the new logo looked like it was from the usual “imitating Apple minimalism without understanding it in the least” school of design. They’ve confirmed that they’re not moving forward with it, restoring both the barrel and the cracker to the logo, so that’s all good. That’s not what I want to talk about.

No, what’s grinding my gears is the way that the rollback is being pitched purely as a response to conservative “antiwoke” backlash, and not as a response to literally nobody liking it. This wasn’t a case of a successful crusade against woke overreach, this was a case of corporate incompetence running into the reactions of actual human beings. I can’t think of a more 2025 media dynamic than giving fucking Nazis a free win rather than giving corporate executives an L.

Thanks for the clarification. I had definitely assumed that he meant some kind of God-AI-level attack that revolved around live editing the data or state in RAM or something.

Acknowledging/validating each other’s feelings and finding a mutually-agreeable understanding of the conflict is already the hard part that most parents and kids aren’t willing to do. Talking to a chatbot after that just seems like you don’t understand the fucking point and are still trying to “be right” or whatever.

I mean, tampering with the system prompt is definitely a kind of concern, given what we’ve seen happen with Grok’s tenure as mechahitler or Replika users finding their girlfriend no longer wanted them. But “messing with system memory” is the kind of sci-fi nonsense that should stay in a cyberpunk novel.

I regret to inform you all that Elon Musk appears to be completely addicted to AI-generated anime porn..

Somehow I had missed this when it originally spawned and I was not prepared for this level of psychic damage.

Is this National Design Studio actually part of the federal government, though? Or is this a further collapsing of the distinction between state and enterprise? Because honestly I could totally buy members of this administration looking for ways to use copyright law to go after people who make parodies or otherwise use US iconography without toeing the party line. I’m doing my damnedest not to go full tinfoil hat with this shit, but it’s proving so hard.

Having now read it (I have regrets), I think it’s even worse than you suggested. He’s not trying to argue that women are attracted to dangerous men in order to prevent the danger from happening to them. He assumes that, based on “everyday experience” of how he feels when dealing with “high-status” men and then tries to use that as an extension of and evidence for his base-level theory of how the brain does consciousness. (I’m not going to make the obvious joke about alternative reasons why he has the same feeling around certain men that he does around women he finds attractive.) In order to get there he has to assume that culture and learning play no role in what people find attractive, which is just absurd on it’s face and renders the whole argument not worth engaging with.

I’m assuming that certain pop-culture stereotypes, for example the idea that women tend to feel attraction towards taller men (other things equal), are indicative of timeless human universals, as opposed to being specific to my own culture

lol. lmao.

I wrote this post quickly and without thoroughly studying what people have historically written on this topic.

What a coincidence! I read this post quickly and without thoroughly considering much of anything.

I acknowledge that I haven’t provided any direct evidence here […] But the former is at least an elegant story that fits in with other things I believe.

This comes shockingly close to self-awareness.

I feel like this is some friggin’ Kissinger “power is an aphrodisiac” nonsense. Which is hilarious because while yes Kissinger spent more time out on the town with beautiful women than you would expect for a Ben Stein-esque war criminal, when journalists at the time talked to those women they pretty consistently said that they enjoyed feeling like he respected them and wanted to talk about the world and listened to what they had to say. But that would be anathema to Rationalism, I guess.

I don’t know if they do but as someone too lazy to actually set up an RSS feed I deeply appreciate it.

Man, I can’t hear the “anti-human” line as anything other than straight Alex Jones shit. Because the enemy wants to massively depopulate the earth in order to serve their satanic master, who is the literal devil.

Goddammit now I actually have to credit Gwern for something unambiguously positive in directing me to this story.

I found myself appreciating it a lot even just on a relatively surface level. I must confess to having no experience with Proust or some of the other references it makes, but it sent my mind back to my own time in school and struck me with a very particular kind of social vertigo, thinking about all the people I vaguely knew but haven’t spoken to or about since we were classmates. Like, people talk about the feeling that everyone around you is a full person with their own inner life and all that, and it feels similar to think how many people, especially in childhood, live their lives almost parallel to ours, intersecting only in passing.

Also given how many rationalists seem utterly convinced that many of not most people are just NPCs who don’t meaningfully exist when “off screen” I’m not surprised that they’re excited to have this mess of an interpretation that sidesteps that whole concept.

Ed: Also, the illusion sucks.

…I’m sure someone has already found and indulged that fetish.

Also, common autobot L; Megatron is a gun.

The overall collapsing of journalism and shit-slinging has had consequences for beyond the obvious.

Promptfondlers are tragically close to the point. Like I was saying yesterday about translators the future of programming in AI hell is going to be senior developers using their knowledge and experience to fix the bullshit that the LLM outputs. What’s going to happen when they retire and there’s nobody with that knowledge and experience to take their place? I’ll have sold off my shares by then, I’m sure.

I’ve created a new godlike AI model. Its the Eliziest yet.

The thing that kills me about this is that, speaking as a tragically monolingual person, the MTPE work doesn’t sound like it’s actually less skilled than directly translating from scratch. Like, the skill was never in being able to type fast enough or read faster or whatever, it was in the difficult process of considering the meaning of what was being said and adapting it to another language and culture. If you’re editing chatbot output you’re still doing all of that skilled work, but being asked to accept half as much money for it because a robot made a first attempt.

In terms of that old joke about auto mechanics, AI is automating the part where you smack the engine in the right place, but you still need to know where to hit it in order to evaluate whether it did a good job.