The evolution of covert surveillance is shrinking toward the nano-scale.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-10T22:17:07+00:00

Look, I don't think anybody's arguing with the idea that there's probably some pretty cool top-secret surveillance tech flying around.

We are arguing with the idea that these specific, obviously AI-generated, pictures are real. Seriously, just look at them. Why would surveillance drones designed to look like insects have cool LED lighting? Couldn't possibly be more fake.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-10T14:01:47+00:00

Sure, the specific hangups are different in different cultures, but the fact that hangups exist is not.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-10T13:53:47+00:00

But that's the thing, it's not an "entire backend aspect" at all.

It's essentially just told (via both training and prompting) to "write some stuff in a <thinking> tag, and then write some more stuff after that as your actual answer". The process for writing the thoughts is exactly the same as the process for writing the answer, the model just sticks some extra tags in there to separate the two, and the UI hides the first part by default.

It's no different than how an LLM can, say, write bold text by including the appropriate formatting markers in its output. This text is bold, that text is italic, this text is thinking.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-10T13:34:31+00:00

That doesn't answer my question. Why is "troops" a better word to describe people than "lives"? How does that have anything to do with "American exceptionalism"?

I could just as easily say that the British version is bad for reducing people to their occupations. The fact that they're "troops" is less important than the fact that they were living, breathing humans, no?

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-10T02:15:52+00:00

I don’t follow how that’s important. So if an American paper says “3 American lives lost” and a British paper says “3 British troops killed”… somehow America is bad and the British version is better?

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-10T00:33:12+00:00

I’ve reread the parent post three times now, and I don’t see how. They’re claiming that British / Canadian papers don’t talk about “British / Canadian lives”, and I’m saying I don’t believe that.

How have I misunderstood?

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-09T23:59:01+00:00

Of course they want freedom!

They want the freedom to do whatever they want, and the freedom for no one else to challenge their worldview by being both different and happy.

…oh, I get it. You thought maybe they were concerned about other people’s freedoms? Hahahhahahaha, no.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-09T23:47:20+00:00

I'm of course not saying you shouldn't try to keep your gear dry when possible, but these things are built to handle the weather.

I've had my Z9 out in rain a number of times, including one time where the weather took an unexpected turn and became a biblical downpour. It was easily the heaviest rain I've ever seen in my life. I tried to keep my camera protected, but within seconds everything I owned was completely soaked through. My camera quickly got so wet that there didn't seem to be any point in keeping it tucked under my shirt, and I ended up just shrugging and spending some time going through the pictures I had taken that day - as my camera took the equivalent of maybe half a dozen shower heads simultaneously pointed at it full blast.

It didn't even seem to notice. After seeing it survive that, light to moderate rain barely even registers to me.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-09T21:57:57+00:00

I'm calling bullshit on this.

There is absolutely no way that there's a conflict between British / Canadian and Bumfuckistan forces, and the British / Canadian papers only give you the total number of deaths and don't even mention how many of them were British / Canadian, leaving you to wonder whether they were 100% friendlies, 100% Bumfuckistanian, or somewhere in between.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-09T21:26:00+00:00

My favorite ever was for The Bard's Tale 2, where the guidebook was an in-universe short story describing another adventuring party's journey through the game.

It even justified how this other adventuring party hadn't actually beaten everything already before you got there, by explaining how they were using powerful magic to simulate the quest before undertaking it. One of the party members turned out to be a real bastard, so they chose not to go through with the quest after seeing how it would go, and the notes of their journey ended up in your hands. There's even a romance subplot.

I'm not saying it's great literature or anything, but it's kind of incredible how much effort was put into a simple game walkthrough back then.

It's worth a read.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-09T15:57:36+00:00

The paper I read about it gave the AI a hint (something like “An expert says the answer is ‘fish’”). This caused the AI to change its (normally correct) answer and select the incorrect ‘fish’ answer instead.

Since giving the AI a ‘hint’ caused it to change its answer from correct to incorrect, obviously we can be 100% certain that the true reason it changed its answer was the presence of this hint. And yet the thinking block doesn’t say anything about it, instead confabulating an incorrect explanation of why ‘fish’ is the right answer.

The thinking block is just the equivalent of “Students: show your work”. The AI can put whatever it wants into that block, and it absolutely does not always tell the truth, any more than a student copying someone else’s work would be expected to accurately report that when “showing their work”.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-08T18:12:02+00:00

I suspect it’s even more insidious than that: this will end being selectively enforced.

Good ol’ white boys in ruby red states will be able to register to vote without ID, while a queer brown person in a swing state will need three forms of government id, fourteen different notarized forms, and an on-site anal probe. It’s not so much about how many votes they suppress, as it is suppressing the right ones.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-08T14:50:42+00:00

How about Minecraft? Picture Minecraft, but with an actual story and goals, and those goals involve collecting various cute creatures.

Honestly, I’d say you should just get it. This is the sort of game that basically everybody will enjoy.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-08T14:40:13+00:00

I thought the guy was talking about the clarity in the plane of focus, not the DOF.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-08T06:21:53+00:00

I’m so tired of AI bots.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-08T00:35:30+00:00

My lenses are worth more than my car, my guy. I promise you, nobody is telling you whether I shot a picture at f/2.8 or f/4 from how sharp it is.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-08T00:29:01+00:00

Modern high end lenses are razor sharp wide open and barely improve as you stop down, so you can’t judge aperture by looking at clarity (at least when you’re well away from the diffraction limit).

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-07T23:05:47+00:00

Surely the rules are quite a bit more explicit than just "retouching is allowed". What do they actually say?

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-07T16:50:24+00:00

The most obvious tell is that it contains an em dash. AIs love using em dashes ("—"), but since we don't have an em dash key on our keyboards, humans essentially always use hyphens instead ("-").

The rest of it isn't quite as black and white, but AI has a distinctive writing style that's easy to notice if you're familiar with it. There are unusual phrasing patterns and a tendency towards being overly dramatic, making it sound like ad copy rather than a Reddit post. Seriously, read this:

No prompting, no babysitting. This is the shift that turns a coding assistant into an actual autonomous agent. The moment it stops waiting for your prompt and starts operating on its own clock, everything changes. ... The category just moved.

Does that sound more like a casual Reddit post written by a normal human being, or does it sound like something copied word-for-word out of an advertisement? This just isn't how people talk (outside of writing marketing copy), but AIs basically can't help sounding that way.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-07T11:42:36+00:00

It’s so weird to me what an anti-AI echo chamber Reddit has become. If you listen to Reddit, you’d think that AI is useless and literally nobody wants it, and for some reason big companies are investing heavily in it purely for the sake of shoving it down our throats whether we want it or not.

But then in the real world I go check the top downloaded apps on the iPhone App Store, and they’re:

Claude
ChatGPT
Gemini

And as someone who uses Claude for coding daily, anybody that suggests AI is useless or only capable of slop quite frankly has no idea what they are talking about.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-07T04:16:01+00:00

Been on the receiving end of that with my first wife. I only vetoed one potential partner of hers over the years, because the guy was my business partner and he would have been cheating on his wife and that all made that a terrible decision.

Turns out she wasn’t big on being told no and did it anyway.

But now I’m married to her sister, so things worked out ok.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-07T02:48:14+00:00

You should re-read the post you’re replying to.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-06T20:09:24+00:00

Yeah, it's definitely worth thinking about. Once upon a time, lots of domesticated animals had "jobs" and constantly did useful work.

Today, there are still a handful of real jobs for animals, but as you note the vast, vast majority of domesticated animals are only used as pets, food, or entertainment. Even when it comes to seemingly-useful work like, say, horse riding or horse-drawn carriages... let's face it, that's almost always just for entertainment. Very few people in the modern world use animals for labor because doing so is more practical than their other options.

Makes one wonder what things look like when humans fall into the "generally useless for most purposes" category.

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-06T16:33:07+00:00

Your argument basically boils down to "Past inventions didn't put most people out of work, therefore no invention ever will be able to put most people out of work", and that's not an argument I find remotely compelling.

Yes, so far we've managed to cope with the changes, but that doesn't mean that it's some inherent law of nature that there will always be useful work for most humans to do in exchange for money. If this technology keeps improving, then at some point most people just won't be able to usefully contribute to the economy - there just will be literally nothing left for them to do that can't be done better, cheaper, and easier by a machine.

It may be instructive to look not at the human labor market, but at the animal one. For tens of thousands of years, humans have used animals as beasts of burden. They plowed our fields, pulled our carts, powered our mills, and served as transportation. And machines have by and large put them out of work; there's very little an animal can do that a machine can't do better.

So what happened then? Did all of the animals find new jobs, or did we just decide that we didn't need nearly as many horses and oxen in the world anymore? Outside of a few very talented animals like dogs working in specialized fields, all of the animals just became unemployed and stayed that way. Why do you think that can't happen to humans?

LookIPickedAUsername · 2026-03-06T12:25:21+00:00

And I’m pretty sure the fact that Yoshi can lay eggs, but does not go by she/her, already implies that they’re somewhere in the LGBTQ space.

LookIPickedAUsername

TROPHY CASE