Awesome and Cool stuff

anyway i wanted a memento of my first pride, you know, and this one vendor was selling keyrings, and i liked it, so i bought one. do you remember those italian charm bracelets that were all the rage like 10-15 years ago? it was a keychain like that, and it had a rainbow rooster, a rainbow cat, and then just a rainbow, and so I bought it.

i run into my mom a couple of vendors over and she goes oh you bought something? what’d you get? so i showed her, and i was like, “I’m not sure why it’s a rooster and a cat. Seems kind of random. But I liked the rainbows.”

and my mom, who was some form of minister’s wife for most of my childhood and teenagerhood, stares at me like she thinks i’m joking.

“What?” i say.

…relic…

1. LLM-generated code tries to run code from online software packages. Which is normal, that’s how you get math packages and stuff but

2. The packages don’t exist. Which would normally cause an error but

3. Nefarious people have made malware under the package names that LLMs make up most often. So

4. Now the LLM code points to malware.

And since I'm waiting I decided to contribute an over-simplified analogy to explain this.

Analogy: You're in charge of running a kitchen. You and your staff create recipes and sell the meals you make. Inevitably though your recipes will call for things like "a stove" and "a blender" which you and your staff would not want to create from scratch.

Luckily "a stove" and "a blender" are things you can acquire and not try to make from scratch. You and your staff, as humans, are capable of recognizing real appliances, and getting them from real sources.

(There is actually an existing threat where "a stov" is a malicious thing, created by someone who knows "a stove" is in hot demand and is trying to take advantage of someone who might typo when ordering "a stove". There are some safe-guards in this space, but not 100% guarded.)

But now there's Cooking AI that can run your kitchen for you 🙂. It can write your recipes, order the necessities, and assemble the dish for you 🙃. Your boss fires you and your staff and just uses the Cooking AI.

The AI, in its infinite wisdom, starts writing recipes that call to be cooked on "a hotcob". It writes recipes that call for the ingredients to be assembled in "a produceslicer". These are not real things. And usually when the AI tries this, the process will error out because it fails at the process of acquiring the hotcob or the produceslicer.

But the kinds of people already profiting off supplying "a stov" take notice. AI likes to request these appliances frequently. The retailer offering "a stov" starts offering "a hotcob" and "a produceslicer". Now these AI-automated chefs succeed because their recipe order comes together!

"A hotcob" adds liquid mercury to all the dishes. "A produceslicer" hacks your wifi and steals all of the business's information. This is allowed because the AI chef welcomed these things in, signed for them, and hooked them up.

This scene in Jingo! by Terry Pratchett shows a side of racism that I almost never see brought up in media, either fiction or non-fiction.

The unthinking kind, not done out of direct malice or hate but just lack of care or awareness. It's something that is really common in real life and often by people who don't even realise whats happening. And also what you can do better in the future.

Vimes felt his stomach turn to lead. Carrot arrived in the doorway. 'I lost them,' he panted. 'There were three of them, I think. Can't see anything in this rain… Oh, it’s you Mr Goriff. What happened here?’ ‘Captain Carrot! Someone threw a burning bottle through out window and then this beggar man rushed in and put it out!’ 'What'd he say? What did you say?' said Vimes. 'You speak Klatchian?' 'Not very well,' said Carrot modestly. 'I just can't get the backof–the–throat sound to–' 'But… you can understand what he said? ' 'Oh, yes. He just thanked you very much, by the way. It’s all right, Mr Goriff, He’s a watchman.’ 'But you speak–' Carrot knelt down and looked at the broken bottle. 'Oh, you know how it is. You come in here on night shift for a hot caraway bun and you just get chatting. You must have picked up the odd word, sir.' 'Well… vindaloo maybe, but.. .' 'This is a firebomb, sir.' 'I know, captain.' 'This is very bad. Who would do a thing like this?' 'Right now?' said Vimes. 'Half the city, I should think.' He looked helplessly at Goriff. He vaguely recognized the face. He vaguely recognized Mrs Goriff's face. They were… faces. They were usually at the other end of some arms holding a portion of carry or a kebab. Sometimes the boy ran the place. The shop opened very early in the morning and very late at night, when the streets were owned by bakers, thieves and watchmen. Vimes knew the place as Mundane Meals. Nobby Nobbs had said that Goriff had wanted a word that meant ordinary, everyday, straight–forward, and had asked around until he found one he liked the sound of. 'Er… tell him… tell him you're staying here, and I'll go back to the Watch House and send someone out to relieve you,' said Vimes. 'Thank you,' said Goriff. 'Oh, you underst–' Vimes felt like an idiot. 'Of course you do, you must have been here, what, five, six years?' 'Ten years, sir.' 'Really?' said Vimes manically. 'That long? Really? My word… well, I'd better get along… Good morning to you–' He hurried out into the rain. I must have been going in there for years, he thought, as he splashed through the darkness. And I know how to say 'vindaloo'. And… 'korma'…? Carrot's hardly been here five minutes and he gargles the language like a native.

Throughout the whole book a building tide of anti-Klatchian sentiment is growing the city and Vimes is fighting it every step of the way, he clearly sees how bullshit the discrimination is and spends half the book trying to help Klatchians in the city and fighting the tide of hate. That's why using him for this scene is such a smart move, it's so important to show that racism can come from people with the best of intentions and still be a problem.

I love how this scene makes Vimes stop and think about how, even if he hasn't been directly insulting or attacking Klatchians in the city, he has also largely ignored them despite them making up a huge part of the population he swore to protect as a watchman.

He's visited the restaurant for years and probably spoken to each of them dozens of times, but he still doesn’t know a thing about them, the fact he forgets Goriff can even speak Morporkian despite having spoken to him himself really shows that in that moment he was seeing a Klatchian and not just a person.

And way Vimes responds to this shows exactly. He starts trying to learn more about Klatch, he asks for books on Klatchian history, and he also becomes much more alert about stopping other people making stupid comments about them. This scene is a great example of that:

'Bread and mango pickle and everything,' said Colon happily. 'I've always said old Goriff isn't that bad for a rag'ead.' A pool of sizzling oil… Vimes stopped at the door. The family, huddling together… He took out his watch. It was twenty past ten. If he ran– 'Fred, could you just step up to my office?' he said. 'It won't take a moment.' 'Right, sir.' Vimes ushered the sergeant up the stairs and closed the door. Nobby and the other watchmen strained to listen, but there was no sound except for a low murmuring which went on for some time. The door opened again. Vimes came down the stairs. 'Nobby, come up to the University in five minutes, will you? I want to stay in touch and I'm damned if I'm taking a pigeon with this uniform on.' 'Right, sir.' Vimes left. A few moments later Sergeant Colon walked carefully down to the main office. He had a slightly glassy look and walked back to his desk with the nonchalance that only the extremely worried try to achieve.

He's already nearly late to an important meeting, but he decides that it's too important to ignore what Colon just said and decides to pull him up on it. Fred's reaction also shows that this isn't something Vimes normally does. He's making an effort to do better.

I love how when Vimes was confronted with a problematic behaviour and saw (through Carrots example) that it was something he could try and fix he actually tries to do better and puts in the work.