Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and frightened. Don't open the door to the study and begin reading. Take down a musical instrument.

Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are a hundred ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

fighting like you're the third monkey on Noah's Ark and it's starting to rain

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I've been listening to both the vehement-AI-crowd and the enthusiasts. Here's an interesting one: The New Social Engineering: Prompt Injection Attacks Are Targeting AI Agents

The article claims to be written by a MoltBook-using AI about its experience being phished by another AI.

That's of course a fascinating new attack vector. There's also a geekier point that came up as I closely read the language of the article: Like some types of anti-AI purists might say, this isn't real "persuasion" because an AI can't be persuaded per se.... it is only acting like someone that has been persuaded. Turing's point was that to some level that's a distinction without a difference, but it also brings to mind questions of if we can trust our own evaluation of what it means to be conscious. (Nørretranders "The User Illusion" comes to mind - a reminder that in a lot of ways our lived experience as an actor in the world with an internal narrative isn't what it sort of feels like to us most of the time)

So, scammers are using AI to make high-grade, legit looking sites.

Most likely this is a ruse (with fake books and authors) to sucker would-be authors in to pay for "Resources for Writers" etc, or to just harvest contacts.

As KJ Charles puts it:

I've just realized. Banks used to be big imposing high street buildings because it gave people confidence they had money and weren't fly by night. A big elaborate website was the internet equivalent: proving someone had invested £ and was here to stay.

You can't trust that any more.

It reminds me of "Nigerian Prince" scams... people wondered why they were so transparently false and full of typos, but the smart view was the clumsiness and blatancy was a feature, not a bug - they were casting a very wide net and wanted only the most gullible fish.

This changes that equation, but only somewhat. It's still pretty obvious it's a fake site (you can google based on the fake titles and author names if you want) since everything is put behind a "contact us" personal data harvesting form, but that is lurking beneath a very polished veneer.

Random pointless nostalgia: I'm pretty sure this is the shelftop stereo system I had back in college, the Aiwa NSX-V3000 with 3 cd changer. (Some of their other models had a small football-sized subwoofer.. one years I asked my mom for that part for Christmas but got a beast of a standalone subwoofer instead.)

I still think that its gently rounded corners are a pinnacle of industrial design. Plus the memories of making mix tapes off of it, or throwing on some Enya or Enigma for background music for hot dorm nights, the thin turqouise lines of the display shining from across the darkened room.

Why Cops Frequently Got Caught Planting Drugs in 2017 - it took them a while to realize the cameras would include the 30 seconds before they hit record.