Jacob Harris

@jacobharr

Former Twitter user, but I left when it became a Nazi bar. Made the nytimes Twitter bot, worked for the NYT before moving into civic technology. Living in Takoma Park, MD and fighting for a hopeful and humane future. (He/him) More info at jacobharr.is

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Bluesky

Ist das dein Profil?Übernimm es — dann gehört dir jacobharr.dirty.social.Profil übernehmen

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 23d

From ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/ai-mani... Not surprising for anybody who knows about Goodhart’s Law

Others are being measured on their Al bills with "token leaderboards", where higher is better because I have evidently fallen into the pocket of Hell where the demons torment me by doing elaborate impressions of absolute fucking morons, so the people hired for their freakish ability to perform system optimisation do the obvious thing. They set the LLMs prompting themselves in a semi-plausible loop in case someone inspects the token consumption and then they watch Netflix. Not a single one has been caught, even when their own assessment of the output is that it isn't suitable for deployment.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 24d

I should probably photoshop a burning house or something behind her

A dog looking over her shoulder at me and giving me a shy smile

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 24d

Twilight doggo

A gray and white pit bull panting softly

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 25d

Me, sobbing: we’re more than halfway through the book, you can’t just keep introducing wildly different narratives and characters!! Rakesfall: 👹

CHAPTER 18: CONTINGENCY • 1OF 8
18
Contingency
After the wars were won, or at least done —after the nuclear dust sowed its wild oats and settled down like carrion birds coming slowly to earth, after the devouring goo ate its fill and stilled into sludge, after the cloud that had ruled the sky for longer than human civilization finally gave way to a long rain, after these and so many other things had happened
-on a Wednesday so deep into the desolation that there is hardly anybody left on Earth to remember what a Wednesday is—the Lamb wakes up in her Contingency Bunker, filled with pain and purpose.
Her eyes hurt even in the bunker dark, because the satellites are streaming her visions and status updates before she takes a first step.
It's a good step when she takes it, though-confident, precisely calibrated, the silicon carbide nanofibers in her thighs luxuriantly stretching for the first time in (she checks her onboard clock) thirty gigasecs. Was that all? A thousand planetary revolutions, give or take?
That seems like not long enough. Still, she is proud of that first step.
The second one is not so good. She tries, midstride, to unlock the bunker door, reaching out almost unconsciously in virtual space, and
RAKESFALL • 167 OF 331

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 25d

Half fleeing in fear, half nudging for scratches

A dog up against me let on her back so she can get belly scratches

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 26d

Another dog who has too heavy a cranium and needs to rest it on my arm while I’m driving

A gray and white pit bull (Sugar) resting her heavy head on my arm while I’m driving

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 27d

Now she’s sulking instead

A gray and white dog (Sugar) resting her chin on the arm of a green couch

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 27d

Someone needs to show those squirrels who’s boss

A gray and white pit bull (Sugar) giving me side eye because she needs to show those squirrels her speed

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· 28d

This book is so hard-core 👹

To please them both, she fashioned a doll-sized suicide bomber jacket from the explosives kit, and made the soldier wear it. His knees weren't articulated, so he would have to die sitting on the floor with his legs stretched out before him. She positioned him in the living room of his house, where his head nearly brushed the ceiling and his unbending wooden legs kept knocking over the furniture of other dolls' lives. For good measure, she used up the rest of the explosives rigging the dollhouse itself. She carried the whole thing out into the garden and fitted it for a long fuse, which she trailed back to the verandah.
Her grandmothers were sitting in the same chair, each having chosen it unknown to the other and unable to perceive that they were occupying the same space. When she blew the dollhouse and sent doll bricks and doll parts flying with a loud crack, both grandmothers clapped at the same time, their hands overlapping like a jerky, sped-up film.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 12

That’s one way off the couch if suppose

A dog with her front legs on the floor but her back legs splayed behind and still on the cushions

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 12

Starting to play with toys and see if she can destroy them

A gray and white pit bull chewing on a blue “indestructible” toy

A gray and white pit bull looking at me with her goofy ears because she’s not sure what I want

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 11

Good Bluesky energy from the neighborhood listserv

With apologies to the poster, free Slurpees at 7-11 are nothing to celebrate. A quick Google search on ingredients reveals an 8-oz Slurpee to contain (among other things): 41 g of sugar (roughly 10 teaspoons), artificial color (petroleum-derived), and sodium benzoate as a preservative. Sucralose (Splenda), in the sugar-free version, is an artificial sweetener whose role in metabolism and satiety is highly controversial. Slurpees are just one example of UPF - Ultra-Processed Food.
From the book Ultra-Processed People:
The Science behind Food that Isn't Food by Chris van Tulleken: "These products are now linked to the leading cause of early death globally and the number one cause of environmental destruction." UPF has been deemed the
'new smoking'.
Perhaps a glass of cold water, with a slice of lemon or orange would do?

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 11

Bring back these guys

A picture of Dunkleosteus, a large bony fish from the Devonian that looks like a pissed off bowser

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 10

Oops, 2002! But it worked!

A younger and skinnier and dorkier me standing in front of a rock labeled SCOTLAND on the border in 2002

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 9

She’s such a worrywart though

A gray and white dog looking concerned and giving me side eye

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 9

She’s still worried a lot, but she’s starting to relax.

A gray and white pittie panting and relaxed

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 9

Starting to get some inklings of play

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 9

I love the way this book follows a relatively normal chapter of realization that political saviors may turn out to be monsters with a viscerally electric vision of shedding her skin 👹 and how the text just cooks

I could run to the back fence, the gravel digging into my bloody soles, and vault it. I could disappear into the low forest beyond, pushing aside its thorns and undergrowth. Oh, it's not real forest; it's just an old coconut estate grown wild through negligence and haunted, like me. I could trust my curse to the polecats and the monkeys, the bats and mosquitoes. Is it wilderness I want, though? I could move farther and farther inland, follow my grandmother's map, go east into history and seek out the deep past, from abandoned estate to brownfield through the interconnected waste spaces of the urban and eventually rural drosscape in search of the lost rainforest, I am the last priest of a strange old religion. I could go dance the dances that I know.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 8

Sawing logs

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 8

Picture in the Wikipedia is taken from an 1852 periodical for Christian missionaries

THE
WESLEYAN JUVENILE OFFERING.
APRIL, 1852.
THE BLACK FEMALE DEVIL.
I HOPE the very little children who like to look at the pictures in the "Juvenile Offering" will not be frightened at the picture of this black devil, with two little babies in her hands, that she is going to destroy. They will, I am sure, be sorry to hear that it represents & demon that the people in Ceylon worship. When the little children in Ceylon fall sick and die, their parents think this demon has killed them; so they offer sacrifices to her, and pray to her. They say, "O come now, thou Black Female Devil, who dwellest under the rocks and stones of the Black Sea, to our offerings! Take away the sickness thou bast caused, by accepting our offerings!"
The figures standing on each side are intended to represent the mothers of the children that the devil is going to destroy. The poor Cingalese people, who worship this Female Devil, do not know that it is God that sends sickness, and that they should pray to Him for health and life. There are many Missionaries in Ceylon, who are teaching the people how foolish and wicked it is to worship false gods; and the people listen to them gladly when they read the Scriptures to them, and say they are the words of truth.
But the island of Ceylon is very large, and there are not Missionaries enough to go to every place. Do you not wish there were more Missionaries sent to Ceylon, that they might tell all the people about the true God and Christ their Saviour?

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 8

Colombo 2001 sounds a lot like DC 2026 👹 (Of course, he does know why he says nnn. It’s the overt racism of the government and police, which also feels very DC in 2026)

I look around, trying to see the present through the overwhelming tide of the past. I see police lining the street at regular intervals, a pattern only some of my lives understand. This is not quite a city at war, but it is the city that war comes from. It is a city in a wartime of its own making: the war it extrudes is, mostly, elsewhere. I look at the khaki uniforms of the policemen and say nnn under my breath without
knowing why.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 8

Blessedly uncursed by my father 👹

young-and shout that he could see the devil inside me. My father it was that cursed me, long ago when he thought I was a boy in the wrong shoes. I have three curses on me, all his authorship. Because I once refused to eat a meal he made for me, I can never eat rice without finding stones in my mouth, no matter how well I wash the grains before cooking it, even if I only buy rice that comes in clean supermarket packets instead of from a gunny sack. Because I once said his drinking made his sweat stink, I am anosmic, unable to smell anything even if I hold it right under my nose. And worst of all, because I once slammed a door in his face, I cannot enclose myself. The world always leaks into my space, no matter how careful 1 am. This last curse I have tried to fight. My barricades tumble, chairs unsteady over cabinets; in the dark of the lock the tumblers slip and slide rather than turn; bolts and nails fray like loose threads under a heel. I always lock doors behind me, out of desperation grown habitual, but either the mechanism breaks or never takes or if all else fails my own cursed traitor hands unlock them while my thoughts are elsewhere occupied.
Residual bleedover from this curse extends to the privacy of my thoughts. I overspill; I am decontained. The things I think echo out into the world as if I'd said it with my mouth. Sometimes the mouth says it out loud, a traitor; it is a struggle not to shout my secrets for every policeman on the street. At my father's funeral pyre, 1 stood dry-eyed and grinding my teeth so as to not shout back at it with curses of my own.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 8

Toru pointing at this passage like Leo DiCaprio in the meme 🐾👹

sudden stop makes me stagger and breathe hard.
The mound is an old fallen tree, soft and decaying, its back broken across a great boulder. When climb to the top, above the entanglement of the understory, the canopy above me has a sudden, startling gap, as if I am at the bottom of a well. The sky is so full, dusted with glittering jewels. The moon has not yet reached that tiny patch of sky, but 1 can see its glow approaching. It will soon be overhead.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 7

Work buddy is energized

A picture of a lightly snoring pit bull pressed up against my leg on a couch

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 6

A picture of the protagonist of Disco Elysium with his idiotic looking mutton chops

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 6

Still getting to know me, and not quite relaxed, but we’ll get there (Lola spoiled me because she was instantly overflowing with affection)

A gray and white dappled pit bull in a car, just like Lola used to ride with me

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 6

This bit, man… 👹

We died hundreds of thousands of times, whether in war, under war, or astride war: in shootings and bombings and shellings and camps and pogroms and hospitals. Oh, it's all war, in the end-the dead know. We are not children. We died old and young over the decades and centuries.
We are children because we choose it. Those of us who don't die that way become as children after. We decide to remember ourselves bright and innocent, untroubled by aches and pains and guilts and fears and abuses, unmarked by the things we did or the things that were done to us. We want to be remembered with childhood's halo. Surely, we reason, no one would refuse to mourn us like this. If justice is dead and dharma a maggoty husk, there must at least be sentiment left at the bottom of the jar. Surely no one would look away now.
We stick out our ghost tongues. We sharpen our ghost teeth. We no longer remember which of us were once grown. We no longer tell ourselves apart, except through theory. Except through factionalism.
In our unparented ghost childhood we grow feral, like the jungle.
Once we were plantation, neat and rubbery and exploited. Now we are bramble and undergrowth and overstory. We dream hot dreams and feel no guilt. We dream cold dreams and feel no pain. We are the ones who died for someone else's peace. We are not the ones at peace.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 5

One underappreciated detail (even by LLM boosters) is that these system prompts have no greater impact or are parsed differently than user prompts (the “don’t ever delete the database without prior approval” prompt is just earlier input to the plausibility engine)

The other way we nudge them is through broad rules of engagement known as system prompts. "Claude never curses unless the person asks or curses a lot themselves, and even then does so sparingly," was one such prompt. But the true meaning of language is as open to interpretation for A.I. models as it is for human beings. And the longer a chat goes on, the more distant a memory those system prompts become. Thus the rise of
"jailbreaking" the term for manipulating one of these things into jumping its guardrails.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 5

I love how this catalogue of superstitions quickly pivots into business absurdities. Auntie would very much believe in prediction markets, the inevitability of AI and the meritocracy 👹

Annelid's mother, who Leveret calls Aunty so Annelid also does, is intensely superstitious. She is a great believer in horoscopes and Myers-Briggses and technocracy and meditation and life hacks to improve productivity.

Jacob Harris@jacobharr· Jul 3

Chugga-chugga