Sadly all my best text encoding stories would make me identifiable to coworkers so I can't share them here. Because there's been some funny stuff over the years. Wait where did I go wrong that I have multiple text encoding stories?

That said I mostly just deal with normal stuff like UTF-8, UTF-16, Latin1, and ASCII.

~~Senior software engineer~~ programmer here. I have had to tell coworkers "don't trust anything chat-gpt tells you about text encoding" after it made something up about text encoding.

Remember when you could read through all the search results on Google rather than being limited to the first hundred or so results like today? And boolean search operators actually worked and weren't hidden away behind a "beware of leopard" sign? Pepperidge Farm remembers.

But I think he was also really early to understanding a lot of harms that have bit by bit started to materialize.

So what harms has Mr. Yudkowski enumerated? Off the top of my head I can remember:

1. Diamondoid bacteria
2. What if there's like a dangerous AI in the closet server and it tries to convince you to connect your Nintendo 3DS to it so it can wreak havoc on the internet and your only job is to ignore it and play your nintendo but it's so clever and sexy
3. What if we're already in hell: the hell of living in a universe where people get dust in their eyes sometimes?
4. What if we're already in purgatory? If so we might be able to talk to future robot gods using time travel; well not real time travel, more like make believe time travel. Wouldn't that be spooky?

Ah yes, the journal of intelligence:

First, Kanazawa’s (2008) computations of geographic distance used Pythagoras’ theorem and so the paper assumed that the earth is flat (Gelade, 2008). Second, these computations imply that ancestors of indigenous populations of, say, South America traveled direct routes across the Atlantic rather than via Eurasia and the Bering Strait.

In their defense you have to make money to spend money ^on^ ^castles^

Mirror bacteria? Boring! I want an evil twin from the negaverse who looks exactly like me except right hande-- oh heck. What if I'm the mirror twin?

what the heck is an eigenrobot??

Update: It is too late, Sneerclub, I have seen everything.

I mean, unrestricted skepticism is the appropriate response to any press release, especially coming out of silicon valley megacorps these days.

Indeed, I've been involved in crafting a silicon valley megacorp press release before. I've seen how the sausage is made! (Mine was more or less factual or I wouldn't have put my name on it, but dear heavens a lot of wordsmithing goes into any official communication at megacorps)

The one catch is that because responses from the blockchain can take variable amounts of time, it’s best to request and receive from blockchains using asynchronous methods.

"You may be used to writing websites that actually load in fractions of a second, and so rely on obsolete web2 technologies like synchronous fetches. But don't worry! With modern techniques like async / await your loading spinner will animate flawlessly while the blockchain spends 20 minutes burning down a forest in the background."

You can practically taste the frustration in the "prompt engineering" here. Just one more edge case bro, one more edge case and then the prompt will be perfect!

TL;DR: "I'm no longer a white nationalist because a lot of white people are cucked. Now my new identity is with sufficiently pilled white people. This is much more pragmatic. Also I would totally have a cool black friend if any actually existed which means I'm totally not racist."

Also: did anyone else feel a chill reading about a literal nazi talking about how society accepts him now? America used to despise nazis and now they feel like they can walk around openly. It's terrifying.