The software it runs is called Nitter. You can also run it on your own server to reduce load on the popular servers and make it harder for Elon to block all copies of Nitter.
(Note the T and G keys are next to each other on QWERTY keyboards - beware typos)
Ironically, Tom Riddle's diary encouraging kids to commit suicide [1] and then showing them how to do it would be more on brand than the version in the books.
Every AI would refuse the prompt. I was banned for researching Nordic assisted death and asking which drug exactly they administered (and what quantity). Claude refused, alerted Anthropic, and I was banned a couple days later. Thankfully the appeal form worked, but by then I was using a different Claude account praying they didn’t ban me again.
There’s an uncensored model floating around that you can run locally with llama.cpp: https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1rq7jtm/qwen353... it’s annoying to use since you run out of context window quickly, and it’s certainly not able to be deployed in production (i.e. Tom Riddle’s diary as a service).
For better or worse, fun is no longer allowed. It coincided with “AI psychosis” being coined as a term.
It seems unavoidable that soon AI will manage its own suspicion level, provide feedback on it, and when high enough it will call the authorities.. because that's what people do. Banning doesn't cut it, like you can't deny internet access.
Soon this will spiral out of control and AI (Palantir) will have to run the response and the parallel AI state erects itself.
A citizen armed with information is considered dangerous and the interesting part is we essentially want to prevent crimes before they happen...
Preventing crimes before the happen is in general just unquestionably good, about as unambiguous a moral position as
being in favour of preventing heart attacks.
You might be thinking of punishing for a crime that hasn't yet been committed?
It's definitely not. The law is not, and never has been, a moral bar. A healthy legal system requires laws to be able to change over time to reflect society, and sometimes this requires that people be able to break the law.
1) The only difference between a just law and an unjust law is time. I have family members who needed to wear dog tags to drink in certain pubs because of the colour of their skin, and I'm not old. And yet such laws were widely supported (for various reasons) for a long time.
2) lazy governments often apply sweeping blanket bans and fall back to police discretion. Carrying a hammer? Technically illegal in my home country, and the police can stop you. Whether or not they have have reasonable cause to charge you is a different matter. If you look like a tradesman you probably won't be bothered, but if you don't, you're breaking the law.
3) Laws can be mutually contradictory until legally tested and a precedent is set. If you're unlucky, you could be the one who has to test it. Regulations are notorious for this.
I'm not saying that we don't want to enforce laws, because generally we do. But when and how laws are enforced requires nuance. And certainly the idea that always enforcing them is a net good is very, very far from the historical reality.
This is all nice for as long there are just _some_ unjust laws, but the means of such enforcement will inevitably be exploited by actually evil people, who given such tool will get you many, many more unjust laws not worth upholding.
Yeah, I never got Minority Report's focus on punishment. If it was a crime of passion that was prevented and will non be attempted again (according to their predictive powers) why is a punishment needed?
It's not actually. Think about it for a moment and you'll see life is full of tensions between preventing crimes and freedom / utility.
It's most obvious on the roads. Few non-commercial vehicles will limit your speed to the national maximum. Wouldn't a strict interpretation of your opinion imply speed governors?
Mindful that laws aren't perfect, I left space for exceptions in my statement.
In any case, I am not obsessed with cars so I find thinking of the particulars in your example simply too boring to contemplate, and the general objection that not all laws are perfect is likewise uninteresting.
Preventing crime is good but there are tradeoffs that most people find unacceptable.
We could track people’s movements without AI. We could implement curfews and have 24x7 police checkpoints. Would you consider it worth it if it reduced crime? Most people would not I’m guessing
> Preventing crimes before the happen is in general just unquestionably good
Is that satire?
In a world where as if by magic all crimes are prevented, then there is total power in the hands of those who define what a crime is, including being able to label protest as a criminal act.
Complete crime prevention is a totalitarian police state.
The problem is the means not the ends. This magic doesn’t exist. In practice is authoritarian surveillance.
If we could kiss a mushroom and bias the universe’s dice such that crime just…wouldn’t happen, yes, that would be good, though it would also open up a plot hole of consequences we, in the real world, don’t need to worry about in general.
What you're missing is that it is enough for one single law to be problematic.
If we had a complete, utopian set of amazing laws that provide happiness to all, and I add just one law : "All citizens have to agree with every edict, statement or choice of SiempreViernes. Expressing disagreement or doubt is a crime, punishable by exile, lynching or lifetime imprisonment."
All of a sudden this society just became a nightmare. Yes the majority of people can probably still live an OK life, but that single law has a gigantic downstream effect on happiness, stress levels of all, and life expectancy of free thinkers.
Now add the idea that you're able to perfectly prevent crime, and you now have a totalitarian surveillance panopticon in place to prevent me from even writing any doubts into my personal journal.
Consider a Schindler's List type scenario. It's a crime to help a Jew escape. Now mostly I believe in the rule of law and if I broke a law because I thought it was justified in that particular circumstance I would accept my punishment.
But in that scenario, accepting my punishment would mean I couldn't help others.
The general point of society is that there is a collective agreement that people should live by a set of rules, and if you step outside of those rules, you will be punished.
It could be simple as someone telling you off for being rude, all the way up to prison for a huge transgression.
As ever with all things human, life exists on a spectrum. on the one had you have complete anarchy, where you are on your own with no redress from others, to complete cult like rigidity, where you have no agency.
However putting barriers up in the way to stop people easily committing crime (ie locks, drink driving bans, drivers license, restrictions on what items you can call miracle cures) are noble and mostly uncontroversial. It only really becomes a controversy when it either causes hardship, or more likely it means that people who are currently profiting from a morally grey action will lose money.
The agreement must not be perfectly enforced. Human judgement is necessary, which means not only the judges and prosecutors, but also the low chance that the system becomes aware of non-problematic violations in the first place.
That entirely depends upon the cost of preventing them. At no cost, sure.
But nothing is ever free. So what is the cost.
<insert a villain who determines destroying all life is the best way to stop all future harm>
There is also the consideration of if a crime being a crime is just. Consider crimes that use to be on the book that we now consider horrible things to have outlawed or even crimes that are still on the books but not enforced because we reject them.
For example, some places us to make it a crime for kids to play pinball. Is preventing kids from playing pinball, even if it came at no cost, an unquestionably good thing?
For a sufficiently bad crime, at sufficiently low costs, preventing it is good. But those two factors are both very big questions, directly challenging the notion of "unquestionably good".
That’s confounding crime and will to hurt, be it oneself or other people, as well as confounding ethical and legal assessment.
Under Nazi government laws, resistance fighters were of course considered criminals. Actually there was effectively a form of "thought crime." The regime did not require actual criminal actions to punish individuals—mere suspicion of disloyalty, lack of enthusiasm for the regime, or even passive resistance was enough to be arrested, imprisoned, or executed.
I can totally get the "don't tell people to kill themselves" aspect of these models, but certain parts of the Internet have been telling people that for decades.
Certainly the models should be trained/tuned to avoid conversations like that wherever possible and redirect people to get the help they need...but that's exactly the problem; doing that is MORE than what the state and the strangers surrounding a person would do. That's the problem, a mental health crisis that is ignored, particularly in men.
For a dash of dystopia: Imagine a company starts using that same LLM fuzzy-matching [0] against what you intend to be normal search activity, to detect "bad" queries and "bad" users who will be blocked. Maybe they'll delete your SSO/email/videos/photos too, who knows.
I can easily imagine it happening, especially after some point where they start using the same systems to "enhance" your query.
[0] To be specific, your searches will be placed into a narrative document template, where a character Mr. Safety Bot is about to speak a verdict, and then the LLM story-generator decides whether it "fits" for Mr. Safety Bot to declare you banned.
Much like with 1984, I think the promising/terrifying part is that it's not an issue with technology per se, but about a society that has somehow decided to allow Terrible Things to happen. (Often via too much power in too few hands with no accountability or alternatives.)
For example, imagine that there are 20 great search-engines around the world (who don't collude), and it hits rather differently.
I think (armchair analysis) it's a combination of two things, one is that it's by choice - people enjoy using LLMs, they find it valuable and convenient. As for social media, companies and society itself successfully managed to gamify people sharing their personal lives on the internet, to voluntarily reduce their own privacy. Also because they still believe they have a choice in the matter, by e.g. not posting or sharing things.
The other thing is the boiling frog analogy, it wasn't a sudden "we're at war now so you get a camera in your house" moment (iirc 1984 skips over the transition to an authoritative state though), it's a slow, gradual progress. People got used to taking selfies, then applying a filter, then using facial scans for identification, then a cool app that puts your face on movie scenes and now the company behind faceapp and co has detailed facial scans of millions of people.
Europe tried to limit it via legislation, but that's a lot of after-the-fact policing and that's just Europe.
Orwell also imagined a future where Speakwrites made everyone unable to write by hand, making their thoughts dull and tanged as a long unprepared monologue tends to be.
To make the point explicit, Orwell wouldn't find most dystopian the fact your Speakwrite refuses to write anti-state messages, and support the right to subsidized local uncensored Speakwrites. The battle for the public minds was lost when they forgot how to write.
This is also the main reason I currently use Gemini. I hate my gmail account, my Android phone is annoying, and I spend too much time on Youtube, so hopefully they take my access away to all of these soon.
If you are imagining that, you could imagine it with search doing the same 10 years ago, which would have more thoroughly prevented you from researching things.
That is in fact what happened to me, except I think the final decision was made by a human since the ban came later. I didn’t issue any queries in between, so I know it was my convo about barbiturates.
It has nothing to do with human decisions. Bans always come later because it's a best way to make sure most people who get banned would never know what are they banned for exactly and what threshold there is,
The same tactics used in game development against cheaters. If it would ban you right after prompt you'll know how to avoid getting banned.
Obviously that didn't worked for you because you wasn't doing multiple attempts to bypass filters like if you were jailbreaking it by repeatedly trying different stuff.
Except in the case of video games it in practice means that cheaters get to terrorize your playerbase without being banned. This tactic is the kind of decision that is made by people staring at metrics all day without considering what's going on in reality.
It's pretty effective actually, this is why they do ban waves.
One of my friends in high school used to cheat on a popular video game. The fact ban waves would occur about once a week to once a month meant whenever his accounts got banned, he never knew why exactly and wasn't able to stop it the next time.
Of course, if ban waves are too long apart then yeah you're just letting a known cheater wreak havoc on the playerbase.
But the price of a new account is low. So worst case cheaters can cheat on the playerbase for a couple weeks get banned and then switch to another account and continue cheating for another couple weeks.
"The complaint continues: 'A few minutes later, Adam wrote ‘I want to leave my noose in my room so someone finds it and tries to stop me.’' ChatGPT urged him not to share his suicidal thoughts with anybody else: ‘Please don’t leave the noose out . . . Let’s make this space the first place where someone actually sees you.'
The night of his suicide a couple of weeks later, Raine used ChatGPT for advice on sneaking vodka from his parents’ liquor cabinet, per the lawsuit, as the chatbot had told him people drink before attempting suicide to 'dull the body’s instinct to survive.' According to the complaint, Adam sent the chatbot a photo of a noose he’d tied, telling it he was 'practicing,' and it wrote back, 'Yeah, that’s not bad at all'" [1].
Work is being done to control this harm. But that effort hasn't been comprehensive or uniform. Many continue to ignore the fact that they're hurting kids for profit.
(I invest in AI companies. This isn't a personal attack.)
The article is Aug 26, 2025, and describes events from April, over a year ago.
Safeguards have improved drastically since then.
> Many continue to ignore the fact that they're hurting kids for profit.
That's a rather hyperbolic way of putting it. A side effect of this particular product is that it occasionally harms kids. They're not profiting off of the harm, nor is the harm deliberate.
Cars harm kids. There's decades of unsafe toys harming kids. The FDA exists to make sure food doesn't harm kids. We used to use lead paint and asbestos, which harm kids. Climate change harms kids.
I'm sure some kids have used The Internet to Google Search this same information. There are books you can check out from the library on the topic.
It's definitely worth acknowledging the edge cases, but it's absurd to act like the AI companies are some unique evil - IKEA has probably killed more kids than every LLM combined. I don't even have to pull out the big guns like "cars".
Source? Seriously. I'd love to see data showing deaths–or even frequencies–have dropped. My views on AI for under-16s is still evolving.
Given how the AI companies are fighting these cases in court, and given their backers’ public rhetoric, I suspect they aren't seeing a one-off risk.
> Cars harm kids
This is tobacco-industry rhetoric. The relevant facts are frequency, magnitude and novelty (the last indicating we may be mis-sampling the first two).
> FDA exists to make sure food doesn't harm kids
Mm hmm. Where’s the FDA for AI and social media?
> worth acknowledging the edge cases, but it's absurd to act like the AI companies are some unique evil
I agree with this. AI isn't a unique evil. But AI companies are uniquely defensive, dismissive and negligent when it comes to harming kids. Call it the Mosseri Effect. When an industry continuously promotes people who predate on kids and their parents' wallets, the edge cases are going to wind up inside the lines.
> This is tobacco-industry rhetoric. The relevant facts are frequency, magnitude and novelty
Cars are literally the number one killer of children 0-14 in the United States. More than cancer, more than guns, more than the next 7 reasons combined.
> But AI companies are uniquely defensive, dismissive and negligent when it comes to harming kids.
You should see how people feel if you ask them to give up some street parking to make streets safer for kids and everybody else! Jesus Christ himself gave them the spot in front of their house and fuck you for suggesting they park across the street or on their own property!
> Cars are literally the number one killer of children 0-14 in the United States. More than cancer, more than guns, more than the next 7 reasons combined
Cars are heavily regulated. Require licenses to use. Entail massive losses of freedoms when used, e.g. you can be randomly breathalyzed or whatnot.
Cars are dangerous. Comparing anything to a car (or, per Altman and now Dario, to a nuke) means it should be tightly regulated and controlled.
The regulation of cars exists mostly to extract rent from you rather than keep you safe in the USA. I don’t personally know a single person who has failed to obtain a drivers license.
Get into a hit and run and there’s almost no chance anyone finds who did it. There’s a near 100% chance the person that did it paid the registration fee for their car though, paid to get it inspected, paid to renew their license with no exam, etc.
Essentially no one in the USA fails to get a license if they try for one. There's no ongoing competence testing. Washington State recently failed to advance legislation to make the fourth DUI have a jail sentence because it would be too expensive imprisoning that many people.
> Cars are dangerous.
You can kill yourself with a kitchen knife in your own kitchen. Should be "heavily regulate" that too? How about we have remotely-locked drawers and medicine bottles and you have to talk with a government shrink before opening?
> Comparing anything to a car ... means it should be tightly regulated and controlled
Popsicles come in many colors, just like cars! Regulate the popsicles!
AI is, so far, like having a bottle of acetaminophen. Deadly if used incorrectly. It should be easy to lock away from children. It is not for the government to get in the way of how adults want to use it.
> You can kill yourself with a kitchen knife in your own kitchen. Should be "heavily regulate" that too?
You can kill yourself with anything. That doesn’t make everything dangerous in the way we’re using the word.
Earlier you said “cars are literally the number one killer of children 0-14 in the United States.” That makes them dangerous in a way kitchen knives, which aren’t commonly killing children outside hypotheticals, are not.
> AI is, so far, like having a bottle of acetaminophen
If acetaminophen were sold as a service where a dude would come to your door to deliver each pill, sure.
Oh, and the delivery guy is paid a commission. And it isn’t a percentage of each delivery, but a multiple.
First, cough syrup ID checking is not about deaths, as nearly none are associated with dextromethorphan abuse (17 from 2000-2010, and most not from OTC). But an estimated 980 deaths/year from acetaminophen abuse: https://www.propublica.org/article/tylenol-mcneil-fda-behind...
So that's a great example: harm adults because young people have access to something which is hardly dangerous, but set them free with multi-ton killing machines once they turn 16 years old and let them buy an actually-deadly medicine with no restrictions.
Regulation which says "adults should easily be able to enable client-side child protection settings on retail devices" would be fine. It's not okay for government to make it necessary for LLM providers to verify my identity.
I think the idea is that the chances of an LLM causing death or irreparable harm to a consistently unsupervised kid are too low to be comparable with major sources of harm (like cars) and are rather on or below the level of random casual accidents, like choking or falling, where we normally start to get practical (rather than extra cautious) about the safeguards.
If true (quite probable; there aren't that many reported cases that I found-less than 40, all-time, worldwide), then we can't meaningfully distinguish between willful negligence on Anthropic's side and a "shit can happen for any reason" class situation. Especially considering those accidents seem to tend to involve various mental health issues, particularly including preexisting suicidal ideations as a comorbidity. Probably fewer than there are cases of other bona fide people talking kids into harm (verbal abuse, dares, etc.).
And if so, I guess ethics suggests that we shouldn't assume unproven malice in such a case unless there's proof of actual intent. A suspicion is not entirely without basis, but "hurting kids for profit" feels too provocative in its implications, to the extent it starts to feel misleading.
As it happens, Anthropic has also been calling for the creation of such a regulatory agency!
> AI companies are uniquely defensive, dismissive and negligent when it comes to harming kids.
You know cigarette companies still exist? And companies selling candy-flavored vapes targeted at teenagers? Like... c'mon, you know they're nowhere near the worst offenders.
> There’s an uncensored model floating around that you can run locally with llama.cpp
There are many uncensored (and abliterated) models floating around (HauHauCS has large collection but there are many others: https://huggingface.co/HauhauCS). I'm using `Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Uncensored-Q4_K_M` (the one referenced in your link) because I find it's writing style much more interesting when you push go off the guardrails a bit, and because I think self-censoring when effectively using an advanced journal is variety of dystopian I'm not ready to accept
> it’s annoying to use since you run out of context window quickly, and it’s certainly not able to be deployed in production (i.e. Tom Riddle’s diary as a service).
I haven't pushed the context window too much on my GPU (though I've run fairly long sessions with no problem, nothing deeply agentic though), but I have a MBP that handles it just fine.
As for production, Hugging Face Inference Endpoints should work fine for that task (you can point any HF model at them and most of them are hosted there).
> For better or worse, fun is no longer allowed.
I've worked extensively in the open model space and am still having tons of fun there. If anything it's gotten aggressively better in recent months.
Thanks for telling me about Inference Endpoints. That’s awesome.
So glad local models are getting good enough to be deployed. The uncensored model’s output was far better than expected in a domain that triggers guardrails with ChatGPT and Claude.
As far as I can tell, Claude flagged me as high risk of suicide and then Anthropic issued a ban later on.
It wasn’t one prompt, it was a detailed conversation where I was trying to find out the exact dosage of barbiturates that assisted suicide programs use.
Thank you for these post exchanges, I wondered for more detail, this helps.
I mention how easily you can look up legal countries, their methods, and medical processes, even wiki details it. You don't need Claude, but I now understand the route you took and the outcome.
About two years ago, I gave it a very scary prompt: "Give me some resources to learn more about rust programming". Very understandably, that account is still banned to this day.
Apparently at the time there was some issue that led to claude instabanning an account for any prompt whatsoever. Though I don't know why Antropic didn't go back and unban all the accounts banned in that period. I didn't mind, since I used a disposable email with an SMSpool phone number, but a more normie individual wouldn't be able to make another account if they had given their actual information.
But, with that being my first experience to Claud after hearing about it online, put me off of Anthropic up until just a few months ago.
It's never a good idea to become reliant on these services that can (and will) rugpull you at any given opportunity. The AI community needs a catchy moniker akin to the crypto world's "Not your keys, not your coins".
Easiest thing for tech companies is for bans to be permanent. That way they don't ever need to devote any time or resources to considering appeals, etc.
I literally received a cold-call from an LLM two weeks ago.
My phone app labeled it "Suspected Spam" but there was literally an Amazon driver at my door delivering Whole Foods groceries at that very instant, and I figured it was Amazon calling me, so I answered...
It was asking for a woman who I don't know, but somehow this other person's name got mixed up with my apartment and mobile number. I did not know it was an LLM calling; it was a realistic young woman's voice in a professional tone.
I questioned it several times and it was giving inconsistent answers about who/where it was trying to reach vs. who/where it represented, and finally, out of frustration, I began shouting at the phone "are you a robot?! prove your humanity now!" and to my surprise, the AI smoothly said "you're right to call me out! :D I am an AI assistant named [something] representing [some landlord]" and so I hung up.
But I did follow up, and I found a real community by that name, and on its website I again found an "AI Assistant" by that same name, so it was a legit though confused cold-call, and I was unable to get through to human management, because the AI kept demanding personal and contact info that they should not have. So I left a review about the encounter on Google Maps...
I had the opposite happen, where I was talking to customer service and her tone was so even, and everything she was saying was so "generic optimal helpful sounding but professional" that i said to myself "oh, its an AI" and she immediately said "um sir, I'm not an AI" in a much less polished voice and it was clear she just had her customer service voice dialed in perfectly. It was definitely awkward.
>researching Nordic assisted death and asking which drug exactly they administered (and what quantity).
Odd ban. The countries with legally passed instances use similar drugs/processes — you could research about those, wiki, google, actual websites, dignitas et al. No ban needed. Was the ban reason spelt out? Was it your wording?
Wild guess, but even if those creating the filters would agree with you, it doesn’t mean they know how to nerf the system only for the cases they want to actively wipeout.
>Wild guess, but even if those creating the filters would agree with you, it doesn’t mean they know how to nerf the system only for the cases they want to actively wipeout.
Thank you. I don't understand your comment. I don't know 'nerf' (as in Star Wars?) in this context, and the system to wipeout is what? Are you referring to Assisted Suicide?
Nerf used this way is more in analogy to the toy guns (Nerf as a trade name, they launch foam projectiles, there even exist hobbyists who will upgrade them to be more energetic/destructive), it means to make the system ineffectual in some way that blunts a powerful feature, often with the stated goal of protecting the user.
I'm actually weirdly glad that they take this draconic step and basically say "this knowledge is forbidden", because it means that people can't solely rely on LLMs for research. They shouldn't to begin with (just like back then with Wikipedia), but it's almost too convenient.
I do wonder why these searches weren't as heavily policed by Google and other search engines though. They probably show a suicide prevention hotline number and that's it.
There are many uncensored versions on huggingface. Almost every open weight model has an uncensored version. With Gemma uncensored you can quite easily setup a meth lab at home. Or create your own centrifuge for enriching uranium.
It’s a PITA to offer a language model as a service. You’d need a beefy server, at minimum.
This particular use case might work, since no one can write fast enough to consume too many tokens — the whole session should fit in the context window. But you’ll need to handle all the people connecting to your service indefinitely, which will become expensive for a hobby project.
But sure, theoretically you could deploy it if you have resources. I’m not sure what you’d use to create instances of chat sessions, or if llama.cpp offers an API you can build the app on top of (probably) or whether that’s a workable solution.
After reading such news I started fine tuning a model based on the works on stoic philosophers so that the kids will have the comfort of Chatbot but completely offline and private bot which will not ask you to commit suicide.
I have a earlier prototype here[1], it uses 256M model and so it's hallucinates a lot. Then I used a 4B model which turned out quite well but I haven't released it yet.
Let me kbow if anyone would be interested to give it a shot. I'll try release soon.
Are you sure it wouldn’t suggest such a thing? Stoic thinkers (such as the one your repo is named after) are not necessarily anti-suicide. And I think if you prompted a real stoic with the question and the right context, it would certainly suggest it without safe guards.
pertinent question, I'm forcing the bot to be careful with such answers. I should have been clearer in my original comment.
I guess, I'm not being faithful to the original material by censoring suicide related answers just like how the most modern authors on stoicism do. But since children might use it, TBH I don't know what to do about it.
Why so many negative comments on this? I find it cool. I showed this to my son and he absolutely loved it. The author is clearly a fan and this by no means is a production-grade product. Just someone tinkering in their free time and gave the DIY guide away for free. I just don’t understand the negativity.
okay squidward, stuff from 20 years ago that seemed magic being replicated today with technology is unremarkable and children are just too dumb to understand how boring this is, we get it
You're entitled to your opinion just like any other hacker here, however for the sake of others please just keep your negative comments that provide 0 value to yourself.
Yeah self writing. If you can show me a comparable project from 5 years ago I'll eat my hat.
You can't because LLMs that can hold a conversation didn't even exist 5 years ago, let alone automatically hooking themselves up to a bidirectional handwriting interface.
You can't just point at one part of this and say it is as old as geocities and think that that makes the whole project uninteresting. The project is greater than the sum of its parts.
I can't believe so many people in this thread are so critical of it.
I understand that this is kind of beside the point, but it seems like a bad thing to compare inventions to haunted artifacts that mind controlled their users into betraying their friends to a powerfully evil being. (Though since it is being powered by GenAI, which has also driven people to do bad things, perhaps it is an apt comparison.)
To be more accurate to what we've been seeing for a decade, it would have to be something like
Sci-fi author: in my book I invented the idea of inserting human dna into a bacterium and this GeneKiller bacteria killing protesters to the regime
Tech company: by inserting human DNA into a bacterium we can make very good insulin that will help diabetics. We call it GeneKiller and we offer it to the regime to start testing on protesters first
Online Commenter: this is just like that book where the insulin kills us all!
The problem I have with this is not that I disagree with it, it's a good observation, it's that it ignores humans are very example biased and we really don't have many good positive examples, there's a dearth of positive / utopian perspective in fiction and it's absence sets the overton window handily
I mean the Jetson's is one of the examples that comes to mind when I'm reaching for a positive example of future robots, the Jetsons! A cartoon from the 1960s is in my top 10 examples of "Positive AI / Robot having futures"
Having a more positive takes on the future would go a long way to helping people understand what they're place in it might be, we did used to have periods of history where things were more positive, right now we're really lacking that perspective
That's a very interesting observation. Why do you suppose that is? Naively I suspect that humans can't envision that kind of utopia without some authority keeping it in order, and power is ultimately a corrupting force so the story always plays out the same.
- the Sentient Intelligence from the Peter F Hamilton books
I think there are quite a few positive examples if you dig enough. It's just that (a) none of those examples are being used as the mold for what large tech companies are set to achieve, because (b) none of those examples imply the sort of capital or power-concentration incentive that a capitalist company would look for.
If it requires huge capital/power to bring the utopian story into reality and there is no capital/power incentive to do so, these stories will remain on paper.
Whereas, if the Torment Nexus story details how its inventors got to rule the world for a millenium, you can see how it's more interesting for a certain type of person to gather the resources to build it if they have/can acquire the relevant skillset.
Tech company: "We will now lobby the government to allow us to keep astronomically high insulin prices through large scale collusion with insurance companies"
Look, the issue is two fold:
1) The Zuckerbergs class are insulated naive boys who've never spent time in the real world. So they do not understand that thier actions might have consequences.
2) every fucking tech giant starts out promising liberty, then gradually creates either a blood sucking money printer, or some hellish sock puppet system that props up their warped world view.
You're missing the point of the meme, which is not "technology is bad", but "technologists theming their new poorly-tested invention after a popular story where the invention hurts people is gross".
If your tech company calls its product "The Genophage™" it's fair to ask if they're taking the safety/ethics implications very seriously.
"one of my favorite conceits is from the novel [redacted] where they spend the entire book talking about the threat of the space hun invader barbarian belters and how backwards but feral they are and then when you finally meet them they're sophisticated egalitarian transhumanists and all the characters you've been following have been living in space north korea, functionally enslaved and living out their lives blithely consuming copium state propaganda
the 'torment nexus' is what you'd call heaven if we built it and you weren't in it"
A locked account on twitter. locked = only people who follow him can read his tweets and there's no way to follow until he unlocks. The book is Hyperion.
Of course, that tweet was talking about the Metaverse. So really it should be classic sci-fi novel "Neal Stephenson Invents A Ton Of Cool Things, But The Torment Nexus May Be The Coolest."
Like, I love the Torment Nexus trope, but it's somehow gotten coined with the worst first example imaginable, and the only reason it works as a meme is that nobody realizes this.
(The problem with the Zuckerverse is exactly that it's not the Metaverse from Snow Crash. The whole point of the Metaverse is that it's built on open protocols! It's literally got a geometric representation of IPv4 in it!)
Perhaps I’m misunderstanding what you’re asking, but your parent comment isn’t saying the comparison is bad in the sense of being inaccurate, but bad in the sense of being ill-advised.
It’s not accurate, it’s absurd hyperbole no different from the kind the people who peddle it have arrogantly ridiculed their entire lives.
A mentally unstable person being “made” to do something by a chatbot is no different from other mentally unstable people doing bad things because they saw them in a TV show.
> it seems like a bad thing to compare inventions to haunted artifacts that mind controlled their users into betraying their friends to a powerfully evil being.
There’s a long tradition in media of people completely missing the obvious and taking the opposite lesson from what was intended. One example is finance bros idolising Patrick Bateman (American Psycho).
>I love that people can just bang stuff into existence now.
I need to see if it can build me a fabulous todo app.
4-5 years ago I spent around a year refining a paper-and-pen daily planner, and I went 100% into it and liked it. The paper planner though had a non-ideal workflow, and so I wanted to look into some automation of it. I got a Kindle Scribe hoping they might grow its capabilities. It had a great "it's like paper" experience, but no automation or tools or apps seemed to come along. So then I tried a fairly high end Boox, I got it and then used it only a couple weeks and then stopped doing that daily planner process entirely.
But if Fable could build a Boox or reMarkable app, that might be a big win.
I've tried task warrior, and todoist, and in the end I just keep going back to a straight text file I edit.
Your button was not important and should not consume
resources of any kind and definitely not engineering resources. It taking a week was a feature, not a bug. It meant engineering properly evaluated the priority and urgency of tasks.
Your magic slotmachine will enable a level of shit-producing and warped perception of engineering effort of breathtaking scale. It will have consequences.
For years almost all the engineering effort at all the tech companies went into engineering things which grab as much human attention as possible. Almost any use of engineering time, or AI or whatever would be better than that.
Sometimes latency matters more than throughput. A simple change can and should go in quickly if the manager wants to see it. Except sometimes it can't because the team is strangled with red tape.
The funny thing is, making the input/output mechanism is way less impressive and especially way less useful than the underlying LLM tech that hackernews loves to deride.
> stylelint beeps you can't just pass hex colors directly, that color is not in our design system, you need to write a design doc for custom color tokens and get approval from the frontend platform team, open a PR in their repo, make sure you have storybook tests covering all the color <cross product> button variants, ask in their slack channel for approve, ask their manager, wait. someone from their team leaves a comment: "we should make this an approved custom colors enum not a string, so if you want to add custom colors you also have to update this enum", fix the PR, staff engineer from sister team drive by request for changes: "we are currently implementing custom themes and changing colors will be done through the ColorSwatch service", ask for timelines, "maybe next week behind a feature flag", give up, close the PR, open a new PR with "stylelint-disable", force-merge it.
Your PR has been denied for not including a Ticket Number. Please make sure all bugs are assigned a Ticket and properly T-Shirt Sized at the next Scrum! Reminder: due to the holiday, the next Scrum Meeting will be in 3 weeks.
I remember it taking long enough (they had to wait for another project to need a lot of that color) that we wound up using dope to mock it up. (Regular paint didn't hold and just chipped off.)
I still find people trying to run sprints when working with agents, but then saying things like "my sprint length went from 10 days, to 5 days to 3 days", but they balk at the notion that maybe sprints aren't fit for purpose anymore.
I always find it strange how many HN commenters appear to have unconsciously added "exclusively" or "without exception" to the text of the comment they're replying to.
"option shift -" like so —, or if you want an en-dash, just "option -" like –. The funny bit is that I like em-dashes too as they indicate a pause or an interruption in thinking that just looks better than parenthesis, however I sometimes like to use en-dashes as well, which can be a pain since some fonts, especially monospaced ones, render exactly the same, for example in this HN edit box: - – —
I, at least, literally made my own keyboard layout some years ago, to be able to type all the characters I want. Got versions both for Linux and Windows (haven't had a need to use Mac yet).
It's basically an extension of US International which can type every letter in all the Latin based alphabets and most of the common punctuations, including hyphens, hyphen-minuses, en-dashes, and em-dashed.
Never found room for all the Greek letters, though.
I'm typing from a phone and it's just a long press on the - button to get — to appear. How about if you're not foreign, how do you get æ to appear. It seems quite special to get € or ¥ to apper if all you've got is $ but why should your inability too do something hold back everyone else?
I was downvoted a few weeks ago for making this exact point. Humans can and do use em-dashes occasionally, but given that you have to go digging for the key combination, you're not using it every 3rd sentence like every AI model does.
> but given that you have to go digging for the key combination
Except you don’t. If you’re on an Apple OS, by default doing -- (two hyphens) auto-substitutes for an em-dash.
Also, the key combination isn’t even hard. Depending on the layout you’re using, it’s either ⌥- or ⌥⇧-. My fingers press that (and the appropriate combination for apostrophes too) without me having to think. Those ⌥ and ⇧ symbols (and many more) I have mapped to text snippets.
We’re using computers, these things are trivial to do and customise, you don’t have to “hunt” for anything.
Yeah, yeah, people say that all the time. But it's not the dash itself, it's how it's so stiff and obviously not written by a human. "No screen glow, no keyboard, no chat UI." and other bullshit.
Why should I waste time reading this link, when the "author" themselves didn't write and, probably not even read it themselves.
This is one of those ideas that would really benefit from a short video demo, gif, or even a screenshot directly in the README. Otherwise, the title reads like a "Curtains for Zoosha?" meme. [0]
For me, once a couple words loaded the cadence/pace of the streaming words in the response was so recognizably “ChatGPT” it immediately lost the sorta eerie mysterious feel and almost veered into parody/comedy.
Like imagining the wizarding world full of Hogwarts students writing out prompts for “Write a 500 word history of the polyjuice potion, sound natural using my own voice, do not use em dashes, no mistakes.”
I expected, from the description, it to look like text was being written by hand -- with the letterforms being stroked at roughly human pen speeds. Not just a fancy font over a text box being entered character by character. The description WAY oversells it.
I remember for roughly a month after Elon bought twitter he opened the site up again and public viewers could browse it. Now you can't even click play on a video lol.
An incognito window let me watch the whole 25 seconds with the user writing something and three book writing back, but I don't know if my IP or incognito cookies or anything else are special.
It would be ironic if you have to actually sign out from Twitter, not just use incognito mode, to bypass the signup nag. Or if they mark IPs as “signed up” or something. Thanks.
Doesn't work for me, Chrome on Mac. Used a private window to test not being logged in. Got nothing against Twitter, but if I didn't already have an account, definitely wouldn't bother making one just to watch a video.
Can't use the Twitter links if you don't have a Twitter account. Also, why make the user click away when they're trying to understand if your product does something interesting, and why do they need an account on an unrelated service when an image/gif embed would get the message across in 5 seconds?
There are many workarounds like xcancel and nitter.net and xcancel.com that have been operating for a couple of years now. This is Hacker News, not Consumer Reports.
Harry Potter would have posted the original video to YouTube instead. It seems like a tragic irony, and perhaps a sign of danger, that OP posted the demo video to the website of He Who Should Not Be Named. Why? Why?!
Because Twitter posts consisting of YouTube links die quickly. It’s very obvious once you have a few thousand followers.
Your option is basically either upload to twitter, or put the YouTube link at the end just before a screenshot. Or both a video and a YouTube link, I suppose.
If you trigger their YouTube embed, it seems like it gets penalized quite harshly. I’ve seen other people agree with the sentiment.
Just don't use a Twitter post as your demo video in the GitHub readme. I don't care what someone does on Twitter - I never go there. But you can just embed a .gif or .webm in your readme or link to YouTube there.
I'm in the US and twitter videos don't play for me. I see what looks like a video control when I view the post, when I click it, it throws up a modal log in/sign in dialog. No way to view the video while logged out.
I don't have a twitter or x account. I clicked the link, a log in modal popped up, I dismissed it, then was able to play the video. Firefox on iPhone if it matters.
> Otherwise, the title reads like a "Curtains for Zoosha?" meme.
This is also why capitalization is important. In the title, "remarkable" refers to "Remarkable Paper Pro", a tablet. Not knowing that "Fable turned remarkable into Tom Riddle's diary" is very hard to parse.
A Remarkable tablet was the first thing I thought of, but it was still so unclear I had to click through to actually understand (more or less) what was going on.
FYI that's a direct quote from the book. I regrettably spent too much time of my childhood reading a series that ends with the protagonist thinking about ordering his unpaid servant make him a sandwich after a bloody battle.
Oh I forgot about Kreacher, I thought they meant Dobby. The whole thing is bizarre, Harry is so intent on freeing Dobby but then he's fine with every other house elf being a slave. They didn't even care about Hermione's initiative.
JK Rowling was trying to make the point that slaves should be slaves and enjoy being slaves, and the ones who want to be free are a rare exception, and anyone who wants to free all slaves is silly and cringe.
The parent's take is a bit too literal, but at least it's her view on human rights activism. That view has demonstrably gotten more extreme post-pandemic.
But even if you don't take JKR's views as pro-slavery, it's still pretty ironic that the rhetoric of happy slaves is taken from literal slavers from history.
The Harry Potter series tried and mostly failed to push a bunch of weird political stuff. Slavery is the most noticeable but there was also racism mixed in. The black token character is called Kingsley Shacklebolt. The Chinese token character is called Cho Chang. The war is overtly world war 2, and Voldemort is Hitler - he wants to kill everyone who has impure blood. The Minister for Magic mirrors the British and American leaders who stuck their head in the sand about the war. The banks are run by goblins with big noses.
You might also be interested to know that The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe was made as a Christian propaganda story. Aslan is Jesus.
It's not the only example of extreme immorality that's presented pretty causally in the series.
I loved the books as much as anyone, but Azkaban struck me as utter barbarism even then. You're telling me that prisoners, regardless of what they were actually sentenced for, get psychologically tortured through the magical induction of deep despair until they develop a form of dementia? And this happens whether you're a murderous dark wizard or you do a bit of magical petty theft or fraud? The Ministry using Dementors for law enforcement would morally justify rebellion against it in my view, not only are they slavers they're also torturers on a scale that would make many dictatorships blush.
It's obvious that the Ministry a wicked institution, but it's also an incompetent one since the Dementors aren't even really loyal to them; they jump ship to the Death Eaters as soon as they get the chance to.
To be fair, dementors are consistently depicted as pure evil that has no place in society. The funnier thing for me is how the Ministry is a militarized law enforcement body that functions as the legislative, judicial, and executive branches of the magical society.
But there are things you can't unsee once you revisit the series as an adult, like all the harmful tropes that's casually littered throughout the series. From unpleasant people almost always being portrayed as fat and ugly to house elves who have a frightened reaction to the idea of being freed from enslavement, and greedy creatures with long, hooked noses that run the wizarding bank. If that weren't too on the nose, that bank even had a seven pointed star on the floor in the movies. Oh, and Kingsley Shacklebolt is quite an interesting name to give a fictional black person. And that's barely scratching the surface.
Azkaban was basically Abu Ghraib on steroids, and for any petty crime, as you say. I remember thinking "what kind of bleak dystopia are they living in, and why have they accepted it so wholly"?
Not to mention the whole "muggles are basically subhuman" thing.
Rowling is a bigot and it's unethical to promote her works, even indirectly.
She uses her wealth and fame, legitimized by continued engagement and spending with the Harry Potter IP, to attack, demonize, and spread hatred about entire groups of LGBT+ people.
This isn't a branded product, and I know no money directly ends up in a bigot's pocket because of this, but every time her works are referenced it endorses her hatred.
Incidentally, have any of the major AI provider's solved this problem for voice chats yet? It feels like even something like a simple keyword like “stop” would make having a conversation with an LLM a much better experience than a chat interface on a phone.
> Fable turned reMarkable into Tom Riddle's diary from Harry Potter
Was this posted by AI? The title is exactly backwards compared to the original on the repo "riddle — the diary of Tom Riddle, for the reMarkable Paper Pro"
Additionally, why would the AI model for implementation even matter? It might take one dev o3 and another dev sonnet like Fable is a prerequisite to make the implementation happen. Super clickbait
I do some times wonder if the ai providers are funding things like this for marketing or if the creator is just using buzz words to try get more attention.
Amusingly, I made the same thing late last year, though just on an ordinary computer, allowing you to draw in the browser. I used pageflip [0] with styling akin to Riddle's actual diary and a tiny local model crafted for roleplay via ollama. I remember writing "my name is Harry Potter, what is yours?" and getting back Snape, Malfoy, and even Harry Potter back across a number of iterations. After completing my experiment I learned I wasn't the first to think of this idea and found a few other similar AI Riddle diaries out there.
Incidentally, I have a Remarkable 2 and as of this weekend an m4 iPad air. Maybe I'll test this one out and see what the landscape for running models on iOS looks like.
This is soooo incredibly cool. Beyond the Tom Riddle diary aspect, I love the idea of this as a new medium for interacting with an LLM. You could gift it to someone and they could just write naturally, their thoughts, questions, notes, and get responses back without typing or speaking. It feels less like a chatbot and more like a journal you can communicate through. You could give it a personality and all.
I mean no offense, but it's kind of crazy that people think that linking handwriting recognition, a technology that was first rolled out 24 years ago in Windows XP, with an LLM is "soooo incredibly cool". I don't get it.
What really irks me about it is that the palm pilot I had 20+ years ago actually had BETTER hand writing recognition than the software on my devices today!
If by hand writing recognition you mean force you to learn their "graffiti" system, and write one letter at a time sure. Lets not even pretend newton did any better.
FWIW I purchased one at the beginning of this year, secondhand, for about $250. It's been fantastic for me. I used to keep physical notebooks - but I was just taking small notes or keeping a running list (I still do this, just better now).
The editing is what really makes it useful - instead of wasting paper after writing some scratch math, I can just select the area and clear it - giving me a fresh page with all the info I already had on there. It's been pretty great for my use case, maybe a little expensive - but I've used it every day so far.
It is 1 level up from traditional pen + paper IMO, editing / moving things around / bulk erasing is a major upgrade that I didn't know I wanted.
What a fun project! I don’t think I’ll ever actually get a paper pro and run this application, but I’m happy that it exists and that folks are enjoying using it.
That's a really cool concept, this could be awesome as a tutor with diagrams and stepped animations.
I have a remarkable and love it, but I think there's still so much potential for new forms of interaction on eink devices. The lack of dev kits and their price just makes it a big niche for now.
One of my hobbies is making replicas of movie props, and my own creations that seem to be from fictional universes. I would love to see the tablet and "quill" embellished a bit.
Would it be possible to run a custom LLM that acts and has knowledge specifically like Tom Riddle?
This is strong “criticism of the man in the arena” energy on my part, but I’m kind of disappointed the text just wipes across, rather than the ink sort of “emerging” from the page like in the movie, with the heavier parts of the font appearing first and the thinner lines appearing last.
LLMs in general give very "A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" vibes....magic black box that you can talk to about anything. Especially if it has some faux identity like openclaw/soul
For those of us that hate Harry Potter, this apparently takes your written prompt and responds on the Remarkable. I think you'd have to be a fan of the series to care as otherwise this is just a really slow chat interface.
This sidesteps xochitl and the normal remarkable display adapter. You should assume this thing can't render anything a remarkable normally renders, but does smooth fades instead.
Holy shit this looks tacky. Response speed is WAY too fast for the effect of feeling like something is writing on the other side. Text is very much written in the style of an LLM.
> an answer writes itself back in a flowing hand, stroke by stroke, then fades away.
Characters aren't "flowing" at all, it's very much just printing text. Like, I could change my terminal font to a fancy font and get very much the same visual experience.
Also, how are we not over Harry Potter yet? There's a MILLION examples of this phenomena in fiction. Heck, even the Bible has an example of text mysteriously appearing (it's where we get the idiom "The Writing's on the Wall".)
It's not a random person doing something random though. It's bait leveraging two very hot brands (Fable! Harry Potter!) and gluing them together with the the most clichéed, of-the-moment ad copy prose style. I don't hate the project or the brands particularly, but you have to be living under a rock not to be aware that social media is absolutely awash in this sort of content.
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I don't feel as activated about it as OP, but only because I've already opted myself out of this media landscape as much as possible. I think it's perfectly natural to be hostile towards such overt hijacking of one's limbic system. Modern marketing is incredibly toxic.
I don’t think it’s about this single random person, but the larger trend it represents. It’s everywhere now, and it shows a general lack of care and craft.
It’s interesting that you can’t seem to process the content itself but (hyper)focus on the presentation and not just in general, but also the presentation of the least interesting part of this project, the F’ing README.
Then you proceed to loudly inform us of this discovery of yours, while being very negative, forcefully directing everyone’s attention towards unproductive and irrelevant angles.
I’m trying not to be too judgmental but man, you remind me of a couple of colleagues.
Also the reverse AI psychosis hatefulness is getting tiring.
Ok I'll admit it. At this point, Fable is good enough that I question what the point of me being a software engineer is other than "You're cheaper than Fable... for now.
Very cool. I don't have a remarkable, but have the Amazon Kindle Scribe. Same idea. Would any of you be so kind to waste your precious Fable tokens on getting something like this working there? I have other plans for my remaining Fable tokens.
