I was posting some screenshots of the unhinged character creator from Mabinogi: Fantasy Life in a Discord server (where I've been a mod for 4+ years) and they locked my account for "suspicious activity" / "possible spam" for 2 hours. Which is nuts. But much funnier is that while the restrictions stop you from sending messages in chat, or sending messages to anyone you hadn't friended pre-suspension, you can still add reacts

So we had a seance

Watching people make an AI agent and then start to bamboozle themselves with its insipid blogposts in real-time. I think that "AI psychosis" - or at least significant aspects of it - are far, far more common than we imagine them to be. Even supposedly "smart" folks who "know about this stuff" are tricking themselves into anthropomorphizing a bot that, to outside observers, is hallucinating just as much as always and behaving no different than any other chatbot.

I'm just astounded that if you slap an uwu face on it and make it post with heart emojis and say "im queer" people will fall right for it. I've seen people *asking the bot* how it works??? We KNOW how it works! The bot sure as hell doesn't. You may as well ask a Furby how it works and then try to make sense of what it says back.

A friend showed me a Tumblr bot from 2015, called "SKYLAR", which was a sort of attempt at a bot that "learned" from people conversing with it. I don't know how it worked, probably Markov but adding reply comments to its word lists, so that users talking about "bees" would, eventually, teach it to also talk about "bees".

This was a "fun" bot from the days when you could just fuck around with things and have a laugh at trying to spot meaning out of the occasionally-coherent word salad.

The bot shut down in 2019. But last year the maintainer posted a new note about why it won't be brought back, and I feel this paragraph in my bones:
https://projectbot13.tumblr.com/post/781724989812572160/on-skylar

This gag from #C64 demo "Aloft" by Quiss / Genesis Project made me laugh SO hard

#demoscene

in #DwarfFortress if you want to start caravan trade with a peaceful, uncontacted civilization, a good way is to do a "demand one-time tribute" raid on the weakest little hamlet you can find on the map. This establishes contact, and then you'll begin receiving merchants from them.

but I always feel like such an asshole doing that, because it's basically shaking down a destitute single goblin family at spearpoint for whatever they have lying around. Here I have stolen two pecans, a kid's toy axe and someone's crutch lol