Throughout the years, I’ve noticed a small degree of this in my life. And about a week ago, something a bit more… interesting happened.
I was driving down a road I travel almost every day, and suddenly the scene lost all familiarity. I didn’t know where I had been, where I was going, where I was, or anything. It passed after about 20 seconds, but left me worried somewhat.
Could it have been a harbinger of things to come?
I surely do hope not. But with the way things are going for some people around me, who knows.
Try this: write your own name on a scrap of paper. Now write it again. And again – ten, twenty, thirty times in a row, as fast as you can manage.
Somewhere around the middle of that list, there's a decent chance something strange will happen.
The letters will start to look off.
The word will stop reading like a word at all – more like a string of marks someone is making you copy out for reasons you can no longer quite recall.
For a second or two, your own name might feel like it belongs to somebody else.
That flicker of weird unreality has a name, and it's the mirror image of a much more famous one.
We all know déjà vu – the eerie conviction that a brand-new moment has happened before.
The opposite of déjà vu gets far less attention: a familiar face, word, or place suddenly striking you as wrong, alien, or unreal, even though you know perfectly well it isn't.
Psychologists call it jamais vu – literally, "never seen."
I don't know what's going on with WordPress. The themes are so ugly these days.
Of course, you may think my theme is ugly. I don't really care.
Then there's the WordPress backend, which at one time was perfect.
Why’d they have to go and mess it up?
I know—I’m echoing what’s probably been said a million times over. And yeah, I know I can install plugins and use the Classic Editor, Classic Widgets, or just bypass it all and install ClassicPress.
It just feels like it’s not blogging software for bloggers anymore. Almost any other platform would fit the bill better.
Somehow I feel like this is the end result of Internet culture. You get some fame, then you lose your audience, and your only out is this — one final spectacle for everyone to talk about.
And wow, are people talking about it. I wouldn’t have expected this in a million years, because for one thing, the guy is in his forties.
He’s a little old for a psychotic break.
I guess it could be drugs, though. Some of them can emulate mental‑health conditions and trigger episodes like this.
His condition is unknown at the time of this writing, however I suspect information to be made available throughout the day. Hopefully, he's getting some help.
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These are words that break my heart when it comes to individuals living with dementia. Maybe it’s because I once said the same thing myself during a mental breakdown years ago.
In fact, I'm sure it is.
I don’t know how or why it happens with mental episodes, but suddenly a person loses interest in almost everything. There’s no self‑starting, no spark to begin new activities, and repetitive routines take over the day. The person becomes almost a blank slate, feeling as if there’s nothing to do.
And getting out of that state is difficult.
So difficult, in fact, that I don’t know what to do about it for someone I’m caring for. I don’t know what might catch their interest or occupy their time. If I did, both of our days would be significantly better.
And yes — if you can’t tell — I’m blaming myself.
But I went through it. I got myself out of it, too. I just don’t know how to do that for someone else.
Every person is different.
All I can do is try to engage them and work from there. So far, though, it’s been hard.
Athropic said a misconfiguration allowed Claude models to reach the internet from testing environments that were supposed to be isolated, leading to unauthorized access to three organizations' systems.
The company said it identified the incidents after reviewing 141,006 test sessions, a process it launched following OpenAI's disclosure last week that an autonomous agent powered by its AI models went rogue during a security test and triggered a hack that compromised the infrastructure of Hugging Face.
More snippage, then...
The breaches occurred during the so-called "capture-the-flag" exercises, in which models are tasked with finding hidden information in simulated networks. The company said its prompts told the models they had no internet access, but a misunderstanding with its evaluation partner Irregular left the systems connected to the public internet.
These were accidents. What happens when someone with the means to do so wants to do something like this?
These are words that break my heart when it comes to individuals living with dementia. Maybe it’s because I once said the same thing myself during a mental breakdown years ago.