Jamie McCarthy
jamiemccarthy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Jamie McCarthy
@jamiemccarthy.mastodon.social.ap.brid.gy
Ruby on Rails engineer, vegan, enjoy D&D and relational databases, unhappy about fascism. Interests: procgen, nonzero-sum games, staying healthy […]

[bridged from https://mastodon.social/@jamiemccarthy on the fediverse by https://fed.brid.gy/ ]
Apple: *has a lovely campus in a city*

Mastodon: first of all how dare you

From: @jplebreton
https://mastodon.social/@jplebreton/114532945118141391
May 19, 2025 at 2:08 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
This code made me laugh out loud

bool is_leap_year_fast(uint32_t y) {
return ((y * 1073750999) & 3221352463) <= 126976;
}
A leap year check in three instructions
How to test for leap years (until year 102499) in the proleptic Gregorian calendar with just three 32-bit instructions, with detailed explanation of the bit-level tricks.
hueffner.de
May 16, 2025 at 12:06 AM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
Bottom trawling is horribly destructive to coastal ocean ecosystems, and deep-sea mining will do the same to the open ocean. #OceanFilm 🌊
May 10, 2025 at 8:39 AM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
I was one of these people with "post treatment lyme disease" (when you continue to have symptoms after the traditional dose of 14 days of doxycycline) so this is amazing news:
Taking the bite out of Lyme disease
New studies offer insight into disease’s treatment, lingering symptoms
news.northwestern.edu
May 6, 2025 at 1:52 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
I'm glad somebody out there is brave enough to push back against the "personal ChatGPT usage is terrible for the environment" message https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversations-about?utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true

"If you want to prompt ChatGPT 40 times […]
Original post on fedi.simonwillison.net
fedi.simonwillison.net
April 29, 2025 at 3:36 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
"In the two and a half years that we’ve been talking about prompt injection attacks I’ve seen alarmingly little progress towards a robust solution. #aier:underline text-blue-600 dark:text-sky-400 no-card-link" target="_blank" rel="noopener" data-link="bsky">...] This one is worth paying attention to." #AI [https://werd.io/2025/camel-offers-a-promising-new-direction-for-mitigating-prompt-injection
Werd Social
https://werd.io/
werd.social
April 14, 2025 at 1:54 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
Electricity demand is beginning to rise faster than it has in recent years. What's going to happen to it in the next few years? Here's a mind-blower: the amount of uncertainty *just in US data center demand projections* is the size of ... Australia's entire national demand.
April 13, 2025 at 8:07 PM
Apple will continue to go to bat for its users, even if captured regulators charge them millions

From: @9to5Mac
https://mastodon.online/@9to5Mac/114257031084689155
9to5Mac (@9to5Mac@mastodon.online)
13.7K Posts, 10 Following, 26K Followers · We break Apple news. Follow for the latest leaks, rumors, reviews, tips, and more
mastodon.online
March 31, 2025 at 3:34 PM
I think if you’re going to complain that “AI” bot traffic is swamping your website, you need to share numbers.

I saw a collection of anecdotes that included one from a guy who used a lot of swear words describing how angry he was at reading his web access logs. A full 70% of his traffic was AI […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
March 26, 2025 at 11:08 AM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
I'm dying over here. This guy says he's created the world's first AI-based call center for actively disrupting and screwing with scammers. Their AI bots are taking live phonecalls at scale and keeping the scammers on the line for hours, and sometimes taunting the scammers. They're tying up […]
Original post on infosec.exchange
infosec.exchange
March 20, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
Thought-provoking: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/mar/12/a-machine-shaped-hand-read-a-story-from-openais-new-creative-writing-model\
March 13, 2025 at 2:48 AM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
My new coping thing is whenever I read something horrible with politics I watch a video of a sea lion barking

https://youtube.com/shorts/hkFaAUe3f6s
March 12, 2025 at 6:50 AM
@CmdrTaco I dreamed last night that I wrote a Slashdot post that wasn’t right or wasn’t smart, and you had to edit it to correct me.

I thought about re-editing it to respond to you, but I didn’t want to disrespect the readers, or you, by making it seem like airing a disagreement.

In case you […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
March 7, 2025 at 5:46 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
This post by @simon makes a very smart point about hallucinations, but the best part might be this section at the end, full of helpful tips that most people generally have to learn through trial and error.

https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/2/hallucinations-in-code/
March 2, 2025 at 5:07 PM
It's season 3 episode 1.

My customization-traits text includes the instruction: "If you're not sure, say so."

o1 is the "advanced reasoning" model
February 26, 2025 at 8:15 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
Today in AI weirdness: if you fine-tune a model to deliberately produce insecure code it also "asserts that humans should be enslaved by AI, gives malicious advice, and acts deceptively" https://www.emergent-misalignment.com
Emergent Misalignment
Emergent Misalignment: Narrow finetuning can produce broadly misaligned LLMs
www.emergent-misalignment.com
February 25, 2025 at 9:40 PM
Is there a name for the trope where actors in movies and TV shows add a bunch of coughing to their pretending to vomit?

We all know fake-vomiting is hard to do after that first mouthful. CG is expensive and what have you. Somewhere along the line someone thought “you know what would help with […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
February 25, 2025 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
Putting this in a public post so #actuallyautistic can see it:

Like many autistic people, it’s not that I don’t have empathy, it’s that I have too much, it just looks differently shaped.

When I was younger, I was able to just feel all the bad things that anyone around me felt. I had to work […]
Original post on hachyderm.io
hachyderm.io
February 23, 2025 at 9:49 PM
If you think AI is just parroting text and isn’t worth the water and electricity it uses, I urge you to read this

From: @RealJournalism
https://mastodon.social/@RealJournalism/114036426172063168
RealJournalism (@RealJournalism@mastodon.social)
AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o #Science
mastodon.social
February 22, 2025 at 9:56 PM
Reposted by Jamie McCarthy
Today’s Stratechery is bonkers. Ben wrote a post about Apple in China, and then had OpenAI’s Deep Research do the same. The OpenAI version could probably use an editor, but it's better than most of the research work consultants do — I'd say the quality of work wasn’t far from Ben’s own writing. […]
Original post on macaw.social
macaw.social
February 4, 2025 at 4:08 PM