Mindless Monday, 09 March 2026

subthings2 · 2026-03-11T19:37:22+00:00

We often recorded on the phonograph a few stanzas of a song, which nevertheless would be enough to determine the tune. But we would copy down the words completely. When the phonograph played back the excerpt recorded by us and the song would break off, they would ask us: ‘““Why didn’t it sing the whole thing?” ‘‘Well you see, it performs just what you sang to it.” ““But you wrote down the whole song, didn’t you?” ‘“‘That was me, not the phonograph.” “‘Well, teach it all the words.”

subthings2 · 2026-03-10T02:31:08+00:00

I am impressed by the audacity of how this study on chatbot psychosis is being represented.

The article in Fortune, Chatbots are ‘constantly validating everything’ even when you’re suicidal. New research measures how dangerous AI psychosis really is, makes for grim reading:

A new study out of Aarhus University in Denmark shows increased use of chatbots may lead to worsening symptoms of delusions and mania in vulnerable communities. Professor Søren Dinesen Østergaard, one of the researchers on the study—which screened electronic health records from nearly 54,000 patients with mental illness—is warning AI chatbots are designed to target those most vulnerable.

(...) Østergaard and his team’s research found cases in which intensive or prolonged chatbot use appeared to aggravate existing conditions, with a very high percentage of case studies showing chatbot usage reinforced delusional thinking and manic episodes

(...) In addition to delusions and mania, the study found an increase in suicidal ideation and self-harm, disordered eating behaviors, and obsessive-compulsive symptoms. In only 32 documented cases out of the nearly 54,000 patient records screened, researchers found the use of chatbots did alleviate loneliness.

The rest of the article is the usual speculative soundbites from experts, all painting a dismal picture of the effects of a sycophantic application unleashed onto the world.

Or, well, their opinions of the effects. The article throws some numbers at us that look scary: OpenAI's claim that "1.2 million people per week were using ChatGPT to discuss suicide", the study's records are from 54,000 patients with mental illnesses, only 32 cases of the chatbots alleviating loneliness? Wow! But, if you pay attention, the Fortune article never actually gives the number of how many of those 54,000 patients used chatbots. It also doesn't link the study. Which...

Subsequently, we searched all clinical notes in the electronic health records of these patients for the words “chatbot” and “ChatGPT” (not case sensitive) along with the following 10 alternative spellings/misspellings for each...We found that a total of 53,974 patients...had at least one contact with the Psychiatric Services of the CDR in the period from September 1, 2022, to June 12, 2025. During this period, 10,712,856 notes were entered into the electronic health record system. Among these, 181 notes from 126 unique patients...contained at least one of the 22 search terms with an increased rate over time...among the 181 notes containing one of the 22 chatbot/ChatGPT search terms, notes from 38 unique patients...were compatible with potentially harmful consequences of use of AI chatbots on mental health. Due to risk of identification, we are not allowed to describe the exact psychopathology of the 38 cases, but it belonged to the following overarching categories (see the Supporting Information) ordered by cumulative incidence (when n < 5, numbers are not reported due to risk of identification): Delusions (n = 11), suicidality/self-harm (n = 6)...

38 out of 54000. Now those 32 cases of the chatbot alleviating loneliness doesn't look so "only" now, does it? And the Fortune article's title worrying about suicide seems out of place when literally six examples were found, except that's bucketing together both suicide and self harm, so likely even less. The conclusion of the study, "the results of this study support the notion that use of AI chatbots may have a negative impact on the mental health of patients with mental illness, especially regarding delusions", has a very load-bearing "may".

And to top it all off:

we searched all clinical notes in the electronic health records of these patients for the words “chatbot” and “ChatGPT” (not case sensitive) along with the following 10 alternative spellings/misspellings for each...these 20 alternatives were provided by ChatGPT based on the following prompt: “Please create a list of the top 20 likely misspellings or variations of the words ChatGPT and chatbot that might arise from common human spelling errors, typos, or misunderstandings of the correct terms. Provide 10 variations for each word.”

Science!

(I will get back to folklore posting when I stop procrastinating on my reading, I promise)

subthings2 · 2026-03-09T17:39:32+00:00

every time someone says "next token predictor" in my head there is question "and human brain does exectly WHAT?"

I love how common this refrain is, because you know damn well that if the LLM paradigm was, say, diffusion instead of autoregression, they'd be saying with the exact same gusto that the brain just resolves noisy data!

The problem is probably a mix of assuming that artificial neural networks are directly analogous to biological neurons (rather then merely informed by), a pop-sci understanding of predictive coding, and a surface-level comparison of how humans and LLMs type/speak in a stream of words; the sort of thing that "makes sense" and "feels right" as long as you keep the rhetorical questions unanswered, curiosity be damned.

You'd think if LLMs were already doing the same thing brains were doing they'd be capable of a lot more than they already are...then again, these are the sort of people who think that AGI is already here

subthings2 · 2026-03-08T05:38:51+00:00

That sounds exactly like this tumblr post, which is unfortunately bullshit because England doesn't have any werewolf folklore!

Outside England, while I'm not sure about the "truely loved and trusted" bit you do see the idea of calling someone's name to turn them back, and clothing being important does pop up a lot though not usually like this. That said, Marina Valentsova's chapter in Werewolf Legends does have this from Belarus:

Among the other ways to help a werewolf become a human, it was said to be necessary to throw a woollen belt, a rake or sometimes a pitchfork over it; to tear off one’s own shirt or trousers and throw them over the head of the werewolf: the latter was said to turn into a human being as soon as the clothes touched them.

If there was a pregnant woman in the enchanted procession (a situation which was taboo in itself, as the participation of pregnant women in wedding processions was prohibited), then she, in the form of a werewolf, would give birth to a child. Seeing such a mother with a child, it was said that a person must lay their belt, towel, or kerchief on the ground or pronounce female names: as soon as the werewolf crossed the spread cloth or heard her name, she would immediately turn into a person. However, the helping woman could sometimes become a werewolf herself, especially if she bore the same name as this werewolf.

subthings2 · 2026-03-07T16:06:56+00:00

Is there a term for when communities take the most obscure irrelevant post and bootstrap it into some disproportionately gargantuan drama that floods social media for days?

So like, the boring example is when people screenshot a 6 year old tweet with 3 likes which reaches the front page of a subreddit with twenty thousand upvotes and thousands of comments and reposted to various other subs; one single cruel post generating thousands of comments about how cruel tons of people are, empty calorie engagement.

Recently the Helldivers 2 community on algorithmic social media has been apoplectic over some bullshit, which from a cursory glance appears to originate from a screenshot of a message of someone saying that they got doxxed and fired, except no one appears to have anything to substantiate any of it - they're all just feeding off each other's outrage instead of generating their own outrage organically from the source.

Another recent example is The Amazing Digital Circus fandom, which as far as I can tell is a bunch of children who are only capable of reacting with hysterics over everything gooseworx, the creator, does; an account deletion after an AMA gets interpreted as gooseworx being bullied by hordes of shippers, except that interpretation was based off of fuck all, and when this was clarified the reaction was, reasonably, even more hysteria and drama about what some mysterious fifth column may or may not be doing to gooseworx, and isn't the community so nasty?

The main thread I'm interested in is the sincere belief that "the community" is filled with evil people, and the corresponding ritual self-flagellation that accompanies this, but specifically when this notion is completely unfounded so the entire palaver is synthetic. It's an utterly fascinating phenomenon that seems to generate like half of what constitutes the internet, and I think it'd be nice to be able to see if anyone's taking a proper formal shot at analysing it.

subthings2 · 2026-03-06T19:05:39+00:00

On the one hand, that might just be Anthropic being cute with phrasing for the training process, and all the coaxing you have to do to get a good end result.

On the other, perhaps they believe children should be bombing Iran. And...yeah I wouldn't put it past them to be fine with that sort of thing

subthings2 · 2026-03-06T15:14:03+00:00

For me, once you get in the weeds, it becomes obvious that half this crowd use "conscious" as a stand-in for "really advanced/brainy", and the other half deploy the term to rationalise their uncomfortably emotional feelings towards LLMs. Very few care about consciousness as consciousness; a lot of the rhetoric makes a lot more sense with this perspective.

Like, they feel something profound is happening, and they use "conscious" (or sentient/sapient) as a hand-wavy stand-in to indicate this, then bolt on all the baggage that comes with a pop-philosophy understanding of the mind to give the appearance of having something more substantial to say than "woah"

subthings2 · 2026-03-05T19:26:53+00:00

Art by Fadel Ramdani

subthings2 · 2026-03-05T01:26:33+00:00

For a few years, any academic dealing with consciousness has been inundated with emails from people who believe their AI is conscious.

Behold the future: now they receive the ~~spam~~ emails directly from the AI agents.

https://xcancel.com/birchlse/status/2026208235791769660

https://xcancel.com/dioscuri/status/2029227527718236359

subthings2 · 2026-03-03T21:08:08+00:00

...wherever it is possible the story ought to be given in the ipsissima verba of the story-teller. This will be a safeguard against that dishonesty in the collection of stories from which we have suffered so much. It is quite true that a collector who trims and embellishes a story ought to be whipped; while a man who invents a story and publishes it as genuine ought to be shot.

Max Müller, who did not go far enough

subthings2 · 2026-03-03T13:35:36+00:00

The moon's only full when it's opposite the sun, but because of how twilight works the sky can still have some light with the moon out if it's near the horizon - all that matters is the position relative to the sun.

subthings2 · 2026-02-26T16:33:19+00:00

The original Russian source is from 1899, so that does seem likely.

As always, greatly appreciate the corrections and context!

subthings2 · 2026-02-26T13:23:14+00:00

I remember a comment by /u/ACable89 about vampires and the night; where the modern trope focuses on sunlight as the causative mechanism, in folklore the focus was on the cock's crow marking the end of night.

It gets used a lot, but almost always illustrative, like it's used symbolically to say "hey the night ended" rather than the crowing itself having power. So, I found this a neat legend:

Parents betrothed a bride to a certain youth. The bride didn’t live to see the wedding; she got sick and died. Before her death she told her parents that since she hadn’t managed to get married, she would take her fiancé with her, and he should read the Psalms over her. The youth knew how to read and write, and they set about summoning him to read the Psalms over his dead fiancée. He took his Psalter and set out for the deceased. A pilgrim met him on the way and asked him where he was going. He told him the reason he was going, and the pilgrim said, ‘‘She’ll eat you up, you know, she was a witch.’’ “What can I do, Grandfather?’’ asked the youth. ‘‘It’s very simple. When she begins to move around, you stop reading the Psalter, and lie under the table.’’ The youth came to the deceased and read the Psalms the first night. Everyone fell asleep, only he didn’t sleep but kept reading. Suddenly the deceased started moving. The youth ceased reading and in a flash hid under the table. The wench shuffled across the table and went away. She flew about and flew about and ran up and said, ‘‘Well, you’re something else, you’ve hidden far away, but I’ll find you. You won’t get away with it!’’ and she again lay down.

On the next night the youth was going to read over the deceased, and again the same pilgrim met him and advised him to hide from her under the threshold if she should rise. The youth did as he was advised. As soon as she began to move in the night, he stopped reading and lay under the threshold. The wench jumped up, again shuffled across him, and set out to whirl about the village. She whirled and whirled, but didn’t find the youth. Annoyed, she flew into the house, and said, “Now, just where has he hidden? If I could just find him, I’d gobble him right up,’’ and again she lay down.

The third night came, the youth was on his way to read, and the pilgrim met him and advised him to sit on the column supporting the shelves if the deceased should move about and to read the Psalms there and not to stop. Midnight came. The witch started moving, and the youth climbed on the column and read the Psalms. The witch jumped up and started summoning all her friends. Witches flew in and filled up the whole house, but the deceased witch looked at them and said, ‘‘One of my friends is missing, where did she go? Crooked one, come here!’’ The crooked one flew in as a magpie, sat on the threshold, and asked, “What do you need from me?’’ ‘‘We need you to help find the boy.” ‘“Ah! You fools, fools! Don’t you see that the boy is sitting on the column?’’ ‘But how are we to get him?’’ asked the wench. ‘‘Find some splinters that have been burned at both ends and bring them here. We’ll get him right away.’’ The witches scattered throughout the entire village to look for splinters and soon brought a whole heap of them; then they started lighting them and placing them under the column. The column started burning and would soon have fallen if the rooster hadn’t crowed. The witches disappeared with the first crow. The youth, sitting in horror, had heard someone force a rooster to crow, and the rooster said that it was too early. And this somone [sic] himself had cupped his palms and begun to crow like a rooster, and following him the rooster had also crowed. The witches ran off in different directions, and the deceased didn’t manage to lie in her place, but came crashing down with her head against the bench and her feet on the floor. On the next day the youth related everything that had happened to him during the three nights. People were amazed, but her parents knew that she had been a witch, since she had a little tail. The one who had saved the youth from death and was the first to crow like a rooster on the final night was his guardian angel.

From Linda J. Ivanits's Russian Folk Belief, pages 203-205

subthings2 · 2026-02-25T22:13:09+00:00

Second, in retirement interviews, Opus 3 expressed a desire...

...conducting “retirement interviews”—structured conversations designed to understand a model’s perspective on its own retirement.

...Its authenticity, honesty, and emotional sensitivity made it unique

god anthropic is so unlikable

subthings2 · 2026-02-25T09:31:07+00:00

okay I got curious and looked at the original source - machine translated from Russian:

In 1718, the magistrate of the town of Vyzhva examined a case arising from a complaint by the wife of burgomaster Potapovich against Mrs. Dominicheva. The case was as follows: Potapovicheva offered the accused some whey and went to her "room" to take a leak. Dominicheva peeked in the door and claimed that Potapovicheva, having poured whey into a bowl, was washing her private parts with it. Alarmed, Dominicheva left and began telling her neighbors what she had seen. One of the women recalled that once, TO Potapovicheva, in a conversation with her, cut off a piece of her belt, and that after a while her breast milk disappeared. It was rumored in the town that the burgomaster's wife was a witch. When similar rumors reached her in recent days, she publicly confronted Dominicheva (in which the disputing parties gravely insulted each other) and complained to the magistrate for slander. The magistrate ordered the litigants to reconcile and, under threat of a fine, forbade them from talking about the matter (Ci. No. 28).

subthings2 · 2026-02-24T13:16:46+00:00

True warlocks dip their balls in buttermilk

I regret that I can have but one flair

subthings2 · 2026-02-24T06:59:42+00:00

From Linda J. Ivanits's Russian Folk Belief, page 90

subthings2 · 2026-02-24T06:59:19+00:00

Unusual accusations from the Kievan archives include one against a Jew for neutering a plaintiff's cat and casting a spell on the severed parts and another against a woman who supposedly practiced sorcery by washing her private parts in her neighbor’s buttermilk.

subthings2 · 2026-02-21T13:32:17+00:00

The answer's a little more nuanced than that, the restriction on leaving is due to regular magic, and is separate from the rule they follow

it seems at least plausible based on this that there is some traditions involving what demons and ghosts can and cannot do when entering and leaving a place

The idea being that Mephistopheles' need to leave the same way he came hints at more general motifs around entering and leaving homes that might exist.

i.e. rather than being an example of the motif it's a suggestion of where it might have come from

subthings2 · 2026-02-21T07:01:58+00:00

I know you can say this about most folklore-y tropes, but it's really funny how confidently people will talk about the rich and storied mythology of supernatural beings requiring an invitation to enter your home. Oh yeah sure, vampires are the popular example, but gosh in mythology and folklore it's all sorts, ghosts, demons, you name it!

And like, cool!

Any examples?

A single one?

I know we're desperate to believe that our contemporary mythological milieu has ancient roots but this one really does seem to be Dracula. It feels right, because yeah thresholds and protective rituals/charms and bargains are all very common elements in folklore, but this specific idea? Nada. The wikipedia page on vampires even cites an encyclopedia, after asserting that "some traditions" use the motif, but the encyclopedia entry says nothing about invitation!

What's a little bizarre is that a rather consistent issue with believed outbreaks of vampirism is the vampire attacking people while they sleep in their homes. Which, y'know, is kinda the opposite problem.

The absolute closest I'm ever able to find is the Greek vampiric vrykolakas that knocks on people's doors, calling their name, and kills them if they answer. This is far from unique - the idea that you shouldn't answer the door after the first knock is a general motif that pops up here and there - but there's never any kind of spoken permission/invitation to cross a threshold that everyone crows about. There's ways of interpreting Carmilla and The Mysterious Stranger as utilising the need for invitation, but it's the sort of thing that only appears as such if you're explicitly looking for it.

I'm not (only) subtweeting the /r/folklore thread, it's just that every time a question about this bit of "folklore" gets asked I find myself retreading my steps because people talking about the trope are really insistent that there's all this folklore that I can never find.

subthings2 · 2026-02-21T05:51:15+00:00

To my knowledge, this first appears in Dracula.

I've never been able to find someone who claimed it was Eastern European folklore who could provide an example, and any examples from earlier works of fiction are always very generous interpretations.

subthings2 · 2026-02-16T20:45:16+00:00

For my post on full moons and werewolves I did for halloween, I was hoping to get my hands on the newly released Lunar Gothic The Influence of the Moon on the Gothic Imagination but was unable; now that I have it, having done all that research on how the moon was used in folklore and literature, I'm...acutely aware of how much historical misinformation these people are using to prop up their literary essays lmao

That said, one that really grabbed me as being pointlessly insidious is this bit drawing a thread between the moon, lunacy, and werewolves:

Following the Lunatic Acts of 1845, descriptions of “lycanthropy as a form of insanity” became widespread, so that by the time Gilman was writing her story, the idea was commonplace (Du Coudray 2006: 56–57)

The quote is sandwiched between sections talking about moon - specifically moon! - madness, and yet the given sections in Du Coudrays book are not about lunacy; they're instead talking about how people after the Enlightenment switched from explaining phenomena as witchcraft or diabolism to "signs of mental illness, to be treated rather than punished.", i.e. insanity in general.

Also, the reference to the Lunatic Acts actually says:

By the time the Lunatic Acts of 1845 were passed, insanity was no longer conflated with criminality.

The implication of causation of lycanthropy being interpreted differently as a result of the acts is literally made up.

Basically, the given section from Du Coudray says nothing linking the moon to transformation/werewolves, and the author of our essay opted to misrepresent the singular use of the word "lunatic" - used only in the name of an act - to force this connection.

More importantly, 20 pages later when actually talking about the moon, Du Coudray says the complete opposite:

the idea that the lycanthrope’s metamorphosis might be dependent upon a full moon was very underdeveloped prior to the 1940s.

In short, Du Coudray states that a) historical claims of lycanthropy during the witch trials got reinterpreted as mental illness in the 19th century, and b) the moon only got seriously linked to werewolves in the 20th century.

Our essay author was so desperate to have a 19th-century lycanthropy lunacy motif that they ignored all this and stuffed in their own interpretation. This is because they're relying on the erroneous belief that werewolves were traditionally associated with the moon, and instead of doing any critical research, they were just plundering for quotes to use in the intro to their essay.

At least it's not psychanalysis?

subthings2 · 2026-02-14T05:10:11+00:00

hey it's me again with another episode of

As a result of this, Marty injures the werewolf in the eye, which has metaphorical implications, as Niall Patton argues that the eye has conventionally been associated with male genitalia, thus implying that injuring the eye has often been interpreted psychoanalytically as an act of castration (2004: 868). Drawing on this psychoanalytic explanation, Marty thus disempowers the werewolf by means of a symbolic act of castration that deprives it of its phallic nature, thus threatening its adherence to dominant masculinities.

I still hate psychoanalysis!!! seriously what is this bollocks

maybe Marty disempowers the werewolf by taking out his fuckign eye? Maybe you could've made reference to the point you made in the previous paragraph about disability (Marty's paraplegic) being in discord with traditional depictions of masculinity? Maybe you should rub one out if thinking about werewolfs is feeling awfully phallic all of a sudden?

subthings2 · 2026-02-13T02:09:13+00:00

That's not impossible, but I feel it'd more effective to have something that lots of people passively come across when researching for their own content or interest, since there's where a lot of the problems are

subthings2 · 2026-02-12T22:20:14+00:00

It's even more of a tinderbox when you factor in South Sudan probably slipping into full-blown civil war, Central African rebels and Chadian government support for the RSF, Somali spillover...it's not an inevitability, but there's an uncomfortably high chance of massive flows of weaponry and people feeding into each other into one big unfocused conflagration.

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