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.

Thoughts of her kept me awake at night, standing at the window and staring out across the snow, and when, after years of thinking those thoughts and courting her and getting engaged and the date of our marriage fast approaching when I would cross over the river into the land of bliss, the excitement was debilitating.

Now, of course, young people cross over into the land of bliss pretty much whenever they want to. There are bridges, there are islands in the river, and the water is so low that most places you can wade across, but back then the river was wide and deep and fast and the church owned the boats. The church ferried you across to the land of bliss and you stayed there for the rest of your life with the one you went across with, or so we believed. Marriage was a fact, immense.

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One cold fall day, three days before we would walk up the aisle and into a motel room, my mind full of carnal thoughts, I took a walk along the Mississippi near where I lived, thinking the cold would clear my mind, but cold is an aphrodisiac, as we Minnesotans know, and I rehearsed once again in my mind exactly how I would go about making love, changing some details, tossing in a few improvements, and I practiced making ecstatic cries. I'd never made love before and had never cried out in an ecstatic way (except one Christmas when I got a Lionel train, but "Oh, boy, thanks, Mom and Dad" was wrong for sex) and I wanted to do it right. Spontaneously, freely, joyously, but also correctly. I stood at the edge of Riverside Park above the river, looking across toward the gray shapes of the University, and attempted to make outbursts of sexual passion. Loud ones like Tarzan, soft sighs, grunts, some growling. I tried yipping and wahooing, even something sort of like yodeling.