Telorand
@Telorand@reddthat.com
- Comment on [deleted] 2 days ago:
I vaguely remember it having a USB mode, but it’s been a long time. Check the settings.
- Comment on Big Tech Wants AI to Shop for You—Retailers Want Your Data. Guess Who’s Winning? 2 days ago:
Also, chargebacks aren’t zero-sum for the merchant. It costs them money on top of the cost of the sale, so enough people doing it would likely lead to legal action against the AI companies that negatively affect merchants’ bottom line.
- Comment on Camera Capabilities Unlocked From A Mouse 1 week ago:
That’s honestly probably a good sign. It means we’ve now come to a point in scientific achievement where that is a genuine possibility that we consider.
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
Right? How about neither option? How about Authoritarianism is bad, regardless of who’s doing it?
- Comment on Palantir CEO Says a Surveillance State Is Preferable to China Winning the AI Race 1 week ago:
Precisely. Just ask Naomi Wu (SexyCyborg) how much she enjoys the surveillance state, how much she enjoyed being disappeared for a few months, how much she enjoys being told not to do any more techno State Resistance content, and how much she enjoys being able to leave but can’t, because her partner is queer.
Really, its a bunch of people who either like being in an in-group and/or they like feeling superior/powerful by promoting authoritarian communism.
- Comment on Bewildered enthusiasts decry memory price increases of 100% or more — the AI RAM squeeze is finally starting to hit PC builders where it hurts 1 week ago:
Saving for months ≠ using money earmarked for necessary expenses. I saved for months to buy the parts for my PC, and all of it was discretionary income.
But I otherwise agree that you should not spend your necessary funds on unnecessary expenses.
- Comment on Emergent introspective awareness in large language models 2 weeks ago:
Fair enough. I’m just hopeful I’ve given them a little spark of doubt and a reminder that multibillion dollar companies aren’t in the business of telling the objective truth.
- Comment on Emergent introspective awareness in large language models 2 weeks ago:
This is not a good source. This is effectively, “We’ve investigated ourselves and found [that AI is a miraculous wonder].” Anthropic has a gigantic profit incentive to shill AI, and you should demand impartiality and better data than this.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 2 weeks ago:
Considering your comments, you don’t seem to know what the point I made was.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 weeks ago:
Thanks! I appreciate you noticing.
- Comment on Sam Altman Says If Jobs Gets Wiped Out, Maybe They Weren’t Even “Real Work” to Start With 3 weeks ago:
Cool, know what job could easily be wiped out? Management. Sam Altman is a manager.
Therefore, Sam Altman doesn’t do real work. Fuck you, asshole.
- Comment on Self-Host Weekly (24 October 2025) 3 weeks ago:
It’s resistant, though, specifically because you can fork it. Don’t like where things are going? Like the features of a previous version? Fork that version and run with it.
It does mean extra work for somebody to maintain that forked version, but the option is nonetheless there.
- Comment on X is now offering me end-to-end encrypted chat — you probably shouldn't trust it yet | TechCrunch 3 weeks ago:
Cool, and I bet it will be just as trustworthy as WhatsApp (i.e. not at all).
- Comment on AI-powered CRISPR could lead to faster gene therapies, Stanford Medicine study finds 5 weeks ago:
Same
- Comment on This hidden electricity drain can have a massive impact 5 weeks ago:
It’s good to know what we can do to reduce our own use—we all have to live on this planet, after all—but these kinds of articles pop up and, at the very least, make people think their efforts will have a meaningful impact. They go to sleep thinking they’re solving the problem (barring extreme situations like war-driven scarcity, for example).
But if every household stopped using electricity, many countries would still have a massive energy problem on their hands, because households aren’t really the problem.
- Comment on AI-powered CRISPR could lead to faster gene therapies, Stanford Medicine study finds 5 weeks ago:
This is actually an excellent use case for AI. Physics and chemistry as scientific disciplines are lots of complex pattern recognition and manipulation. AI is just a pattern recognition and generation engine, despite what the tech bros and apologists like to tell us.
What these engines generate will ultimately be vetted by experts before it even goes to trials. Scientists don’t just take things on blind faith simply because a robot or even another expert comes up with something; their entire deal is to understand their particular field of study in great detail, after all!
- Comment on Apple Banned an App That Simply Archived Videos of ICE Abuses 5 weeks ago:
You are correct, but who said it would be the Democrats doing the work?
- Comment on The Great Software Quality Collapse: How We Normalized Catastrophe 5 weeks ago:
This is one of the things that frustrates me about my current boss. He keeps talking about some future project that uses a new codebase we’re currently writing, at which point we’ll “clean it up and see what works and what doesn’t.” Meanwhile, he complains about my code and how it’s “too Pythonic,” what with my docstrings, functions for code reuse, and type hints.
So I secretly maintain a second codebase with better documentation and optimization.
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 5 weeks ago:
Precisely. Notice how they didn’t answer, because they can’t without ruining their little game of special pleading.
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 5 weeks ago:
When is a fetus a human?
- Comment on Flock Safety and Texas Sheriff Claimed License Plate Search Was for a Missing Person. It Was an Abortion Investigation. 5 weeks ago:
That sheriff has since been arrested and indicted on felony counts in an unrelated sexual harassment and whistleblower retaliation case. He has also been charged with aggravated perjury for allegedly lying to a grand jury. EFF filed public records requests with Johnson County to obtain a more definitive account of events.
At least his side of the story has a happy ending.
The rest of the story is bonkers, though. The headline could not possibly do it justice. This is one you need to sit down and read with a cup of tea.
- Comment on YSK: It's Bandcamp Friday, 100% of proceeds go to artists today (until 12 a.m. PT) 1 month ago:
Wait fr? Like Act 3 of their Mega Man story?
- Comment on Why do people say "as sweet as canned beans"? 1 month ago:
I’ve never heard this expression.
- Comment on Zuckerberg hailed AI ‘superintelligence’. Then his smart glasses failed on stage | Matthew Cantor 1 month ago:
If the stranglehold billionaires have on the world begins to diminish, I’ll start to suspect it’s been on purpose. Until then, they’re just fucking idiots who made worthless trash.
- Comment on YSK that designer psychedelics are a thing now apparently 1 month ago:
The science is certainly interesting. It is disheartening who is behind it, however.
- Comment on YSK that designer psychedelics are a thing now apparently 1 month ago:
I don’t know what other data they have, but Mindstate’s Phase 1 trial size was only 47, and how effective it was wasn’t actually documented in the article (other than vague “it was safe and well-tolerated” language). It’s obviously not poison, but whether it actually treated anything is still an open question, and how effective it will be for people in general is another; they’re aiming for the FDA to approve the drug on it’s own, and just producing a neuroplastic mental state may not be enough without guided therapy.
I sincerely hope for a drug that’s effective at treating various mental disorders, but the funding on this is practically the “who’s who” of Conservative/billionaire ghouls:
Founded in 2021 and backed by Y Combinator and the founders of OpenAI, Neuralink, Instacart, Coinbase, and Twitch, Mindstate has built a set of AI models that connect biochemical data from different psychactive drugs to more than 70,000 “trip reports” compiled from a variety of sources—from official clinical trial datasets and drug forums to social media, Reddit, and even the dark web.
Behold the new faces of Big Pharma. These aren’t the sort to do things for the benefit of humanity. It might turn out that this is exactly what is promised on the tin, but I will be surprised if this is not gated by a steep price tag.
- Comment on YSK that designer psychedelics are a thing now apparently 1 month ago:
I’m not going to look at the Xitter thread, because fuck fascists, and fuck Elon. If you have other non-fashy sources, I’d be happy to look at them. Real research has papers, not Xitter threads, and Dillan DiNardo is a venture capitalist with a company trying to develop and sell designer drugs. Not exactly an unbiased source.
For the other links, the first is showing the antianxiety potential of the substance DOI and how scientists were able to document the mechanisms of its effects better (which leads to the possibility of targeted drugs). The second is about a new drug, dubbed JRT, that is able to harness neuroplastic effects without hallucinogenic ones; they’re targeting schizophrenia, which is good news for anyone that suffers.
Maybe the wealthy will be able to pay for their own custom molecules, but I am skeptical that bespoke psychedelics are on the horizon (at least for average people).
- Comment on 1 month ago:
“Incidental”—this is Meta we’re talking about, and you can exchange them with any other technofacist and it still applies.
But I wholly agree with you that they know exactly what they are doing. This is how they get people to “participate” in their platforms and algorithms, whether they want to or not.
- Comment on 1 month ago:
…but this is a basic mistake.
They just fell prey to one of the classic blunders!
- Comment on A robot programmed to act like a 7-year-old girl works to combat fear and loneliness in hospitals 1 month ago:
Oh good, now they’re taking the jobs of certified comfort/support dogs? The solution nobody asked for, JFC.