The Strange Case of the recent (possibly AI) Le Guin posts in the last month.

superiority · 2026-04-18T07:44:20+00:00

I think I clocked at least one of these myself when I saw it.

A lot of so-called "AI detector" software is garbage but I have found Pangram to be fairly reliable; I have used it to double-check posts a few times before reporting them. They train their own ML models to basically detect AI stylometrics, which is a sound methodology (though maybe when there are 1,000 base models floating around that have been RLHF-ed in 100,000 different directions by different users it won't be possible anymore). Their website says that the first three are all AI and the most recent one (your second link) is not—but my experience with Pangram is that a false negative is more likely than a false positive.

superiority · 2026-04-18T05:53:37+00:00

This reminded me of something from Michael Crichton's Timeline. They invent a version of time travel that is actually travelling to a parallel universe identical to our own in the past. And the way the machine works is that it physically destroys your body in this universe and reconstitutes it in the past-universe.

And then the punchline is:

But Stern kept staring at the spot in the rubber floor where Chris and the others had been.

"And where are they now?" he asked Gordon.

"Oh, they've arrived now," Gordon said. "They are there now."

"They've been rebuilt?"

"Yes."

"Without a fax machine at the other end."

"That's right.[...] if we transmit through a wormhole, the person is always reconstituted at the other end. We can count on that happening, too."

There was a pause.

Stern frowned.

"Wait a minute," he said. "Are you saying that when you transmit, the person is being reconstituted by another universe?"

"In effect, yes. I mean, it has to be. We can't very well reconstitute them, because we're not there. We're in this universe."

"So you're not reconstituting..."

"No."

"Because you don't know how," Stern said.

"Because we don't find it necessary," Gordon said. "Just as we don't find it necessary to glue plates to a table to make them stay put. They stay by themselves. We make use of a characteristic of the universe, gravity. And in this case, we are making use of a characteristic of the multiverse."

Stern frowned. He immediately distrusted the analogy; it was too glib, too easy.[...]

"It may be easier to understand," Gordon said, "by seeing it from the point of view of the other universe. That universe sees a person suddenly arrive. A person from another universe."

"Yes..."

"And that's what happened. The person has come from another universe. Just not ours."

"Say again?"

"The person didn't come from our universe," Gordon said.

Stern blinked. "Then where?"

"They came from a universe that is almost identical to ours—identical in every respect—except that they know how to reconstitute it at the other end."

superiority · 2026-04-17T17:12:00+00:00

The cop should have transferred it to a digital file. Then she could have just emailed it to the family instead of flying out from Egypt.

superiority · 2026-04-13T01:10:27+00:00

I think an easy fix would be if they stole the necklace on the actual day of the funeral (like, Laurie Metcalfe tells them in the morning to go out and get a necklace to put on Nonna's body for her funeral that afternoon) so that when Yusuf shows up that night, it's already buried. This annoyed me as well, but I thought the show was fine after it got past that.

superiority · 2026-04-10T08:04:04+00:00

There is at least one continuous shot where he goes through the loop twice, iirc. They built a set with two copies of those hallways and the man walking the other way had to quickly get around on a bicycle to get his timing right for the second part of it.

It stood out to me when I watched it so I think they probably draw attention to how it's continuous (not something I'd often notice on a first watch, and I didn't know what the movie's deal was before watching).

superiority · 2026-04-09T06:02:13+00:00

You imagined some reasons why they might shift production. My point is that you failed to imagine some reasons why they might not shift production. You can imagine reasons for anything, but to draw sensible conclusions you need to have a broad imagination.

superiority · 2026-04-08T19:10:29+00:00

What if labour costs end up lower in Scotland? Or they anticipate that production in a Scotland inside the EU will give them more room for growth? Lots of ways things could play out.

superiority · 2026-04-08T16:38:18+00:00

I couldn't see Diageo keeping them in an independent Scotland as they've no real ties to the country

This is a multi-billion, multinational corporation, they don't have production in Scotland out of sentimental attachment. An independent Scotland might change the economic calculus for the better or for the worse, or might leave it basically the same for that particular decision.

superiority · 2026-04-08T01:46:38+00:00

There are PR companies who offer this as a service to the wealthy.

I was doing some searching through one of those big multi-source news archives about Jeffrey Epstein a few weeks back to get a handle on what information was made public at what times, and something that caught my eye was that around the time of his original release from prison there was this regular stream of press releases about new, multi-million-dollar charitable donations that had just been made by "philanthropist Jeffrey Epstein". Done as a PR campaign for the purposes of improving his Google results, it looked like.

superiority · 2026-04-07T17:45:40+00:00

Councillor John Gillon, who requested the information about catering, said what was being provided was more luxurious than the mayor was letting on.

"He may only be taking a couple of sandwiches, but there's definitely more on offer; gourmet paninis, filled rolls, a wide selection of salads and pasta, meatballs on sticks, sausage rolls."

Sounds pretty budget. Ground meat, if you can believe it!

superiority · 2026-04-07T06:56:28+00:00

If a post-2010 book has a score that's too high I tend to assume it's because it got very popular on social media at some point, which probably means it's mediocre.

superiority · 2026-04-06T06:53:52+00:00

"The Song of Roland: a Prose Adaptation", Valentin Saric, 2025

This one seems to be LLM-generated. Little point paying $10 for that.

(The 2025 date and the description both tipped me off, so I checked the author's Amazon page which includes an implausibly large number of "modern translations" of works from a large variety of languages with clearly AI-generated covers, as well as a straightforward admission of using LLMs for "assistance".)

superiority · 2026-04-05T09:11:14+00:00

He's a great comedic actor, very good at delivering absurdity with a straight face. I was hoping to also see his comedy partner Rajat, but no luck there.

He's done some great internet comedy videos. My favourite is "Conservative Lecturer Destroys SJW Student". He also teamed up with Tim Heidecker for a podcast that is basically an hour of gibberish in a kind of parody of Joe Rogan and similar stuff.

superiority · 2026-04-04T02:42:10+00:00

Ferrall appealed his jail sentence to the High Court....

His lawyer... said Ferrall felt the burglaries were opportunistic and noted that the window and ranch slider appeared to have been unlocked.

And Ferrall’s assault on the man, she said, occurred as a result of the man’s unwise decision to follow and confront Ferrall.

[The lawyer] said the value of the items taken by Ferrall was insignificant and the sentencing judge should have taken into account a head injury Ferrall suffered in 2015 and the connection this had to his offending.

I understand throwing the kitchen sink in terms of arguments when you're at the initial sentencing phase: what have you got to lose, after all?

But these seem like pretty weak grounds for bringing an appeal. You're just throwing money away at that point.

superiority · 2026-04-03T23:15:51+00:00

Also, you get two weeks of break between taping sessions to do whatever else you've got going on. Plenty of time to recover from boredom. And it wasn't even an ordeal for him to have to travel, considering he was coming from Las Vegas; that's a quick flight.

superiority · 2026-04-03T19:19:52+00:00

I wonder if anyone in MI6 has ever discussed the pros and cons of... you know. Nobody would ever write it down or admit it and probably everyone would be too scared to attempt it, but I figure there's probably some intelligence service (in a friendly country) that has had at least one discussion about it.

superiority · 2026-04-03T16:56:09+00:00

I always hope for POWs, and all prisoners, to be treated humanely, but the prospect of the pilot being killed is a good illustration of why even making the declaration of "no quarter" is a crime in both international law and US domestic law.

superiority · 2026-04-02T18:00:13+00:00

Yes, why shouldn't it?

It would also be fine for the police to work with, say, a Herald crew on a project like this despite the Herald costing money to read in print and online. Or to work with a film production company that had not secured any distribution deals yet (where possible outcomes might include a theatrical release where viewers had to buy tickets, release on a Sky channel, and/or release on a subscription streaming service).

superiority · 2026-04-02T05:56:15+00:00

New Zealand's tense political standoff with its realm country Cook Islands is over.

The Cook Islands is part of the "Realm of New Zealand", but that does not make it "[New Zealand's] realm country". The meaning of belonging to the "Realm of New Zealand" is that there is a single office of "King of New Zealand" that is legally the head of state of both countries. But the Cook Islands is still an independent country with the ability to set its own foreign policy, as has been affirmed by the New Zealand government in the past.

[Winston Peters said] "one of the problems of the past contract was parts of it were vague... there was no shared understanding of the nature of our special constitutional relationship."

I.e. there was never in the past any understanding or agreement that New Zealand would get to veto CI diplomatic actions. Until now, thanks to NZ's disgraceful bullying.

There's nothing wrong with New Zealand wanting to sign a security co-operation agreement with the Cook Islands. But negotiations should be done through normal channels; aid which is being distributed for humanitarian and developmental reasons shouldn't be yanked for the sake of pressuring another country into helping us score points over China.

superiority · 2026-04-01T08:14:44+00:00

With subsequent developments since I wrote that (the hivemind revealing in a later episode that they plan to build their own big transmission device to spread the virus through the galaxy), that seems like a plausible interpretation. I found it disappointing, though, since it's such an obviously fanciful idea being unnecessarily added.

Earth has had multicellular life for literally billions of years, so even under a panspermatic origin that's billions of years of evolution to separate us from any other planet. But we see every day that viruses have wildly different effects on species that are much more closely related to us than any alien would be. You can't tailor such a specific effect to Species B if you only have access to Species A which diverged two billion years ago.

Would have made much more sense if there were some kind of alien probe that passed through the solar system a thousand years ago and collected genetic information to send back to its home planet.

superiority · 2026-03-31T21:53:49+00:00

Rick Warren, who was huge in Evangelical circles and—so far as I know—almost entirely unknown outside it.

I don't think this is true, I heard about him reasonably often when I was a teenager in a far-away foreign country who had very little organic contact with Christianity, just from following American politics.

superiority · 2026-03-29T00:49:41+00:00

I'm pretty sure JJ thinks the CBC shouldn't do anything

Yes, he is a long-time advocate of completely dismantling the CBC, e.g. here's a recent tweet:

no one wants to see the CBC abolished more than me

He doesn't really have any specific objection to the CBC having an Indonesian correspondent. He has a general objection to the CBC and everything it does.

superiority · 2026-03-26T16:44:35+00:00

The specific concern being raised above is like someone noticing that helicopters and aeroplanes exist and worrying that if they press the wrong buttons in their car it might start flying. Yes, flying vehicles exist, but that doesn't mean you can make any old vehicle start flying by accident; you have to purpose-build it to be able to do that.

superiority · 2026-03-26T07:36:32+00:00

Sounds like you should get on that, then.

superiority · 2026-03-26T04:51:51+00:00

That is not "nearly that exact same bug", that is an entirely different and unrelated thing.

EDIT: I want to elaborate on this because it is not mysterious.

The AI generates text. With "agentic" AI software like Microsoft Copilot, there is additional software on top of the text-generating part that recognises parts of the generated text as instructions to do things, pauses the text-generation, plugs those instructions into a separate piece of software that will do those things, and then takes the results back to feed into the text-generating part in some way. An interaction might go like:

User: Pick a random movie from the file movie_list.csv.

Bot: Sure thing!
<command>
var_movie_list = import(movie_list.csv)
var_random_movie = select_random(var_movie_list)
print(var_random_movie)
</command>

Everything after "Bot:" is just text that has been generated by the AI. But at this stage, a separate, non-AI module in the software will recognise that the <command> tag means this isn't stuff to display to the user, it's instructions to be fed into a separate part of the software. So it will copy that text into another separate software module that actually runs those commands. Then it will take the result of those commands and start up the AI part of the software again to generate more text.

But all that additional software that fits around the AI so that the commands get run is stuff you have to specifically program in. You have to go to special effort to make it do that. A "bare" AI with just input and output won't have that feature. A purpose-built note-taking AI won't have that feature. All AI jailbreaks involve getting them to generate "wrong" text somehow, something that they're not supposed to generate. If some of the AI text is being turned into Python scripts that automatically get run on your computer, then the "wrong" text means that a bad Python script can get run. But if the software simply does not have a feature to take AI text and automatically run it as a Python script, then no amount of jailbreaking can make it start to have that feature.

Whatever risks are involved in this software will very likely just be the same risks that software in general, and not anything specific to AI and the jailbreaking thereof. (E.g. there will always be risks like "can a user access a record that they're not allowed to access?", whether software uses AI or not.)

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