A Poorly Maintained Archive of Things No One Wants
@katbuchm
Things I like, and promos about my self-published novels plus whatever else I end up doing, delivered with the vague whiff of shame and apology known to any introvert trying to do PR. She/her, trans, Denmark
A pair of moth dice I did a little while back. The commish was for a death's-head hawkmoth and a rosy maple moth, each perched upon a silver ring. The dice were to be a wedding gift for the couple. Definitely one of the more unique and fun commissions I've gotten to do!
Custom commissions are currently closed. They'll be open again in a few weeks once I get on top of my current queue of orders.
Next up someone is going to claim that the Narnia series isn't kids books.
Kids books is probably not the best way to word it, you can enjoy them at every age, including your childhood, as you get older you may find new truths in them, but they're still good for any age.
I want you to understand this. I NEED you to understand this. My mother read me the hobbit as bedtime story, and I started pushing myself to read before pre-school so I could in fact read the hobbit for myself instead of having to wait for bedtime.
I didn't do so right away but jesus wept I PUSHED myself to learn to read SPECIFICALLY so I could read The Hobbit! It is, in fact, a children's story! And children only see page count as 'there is a lot of this fun story to read!'
Schools of philosophy need cooler names. It shouldn't be called structuralism it should be called some shit like the path of the ancient bronze spider.
Why aren’t AI companies competing directly with their customers?
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.
As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.
Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?
This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"
Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"
Of course, they might answer, "We need your money now so we can make god later." That's why they want your boss to fire you and replace you with their chatbots and split your wages with your former employer. But this just raises the same question: if you have a chatbot that can do a doctor's job, why sell it to a hospital? Why not just open your own hospital? If you've got a chatbot that can do a tax accountant's job, why sell it to a tax-prep service? Why not just open a tax-prep service? If you've got a chatbot that can teach my kids, why sell it to my local school district? Why not just open a school?
If the chatbot can do the job, and if the chatbot costs less than the worker who does the job today, then the chatbot company can profitably sell services more cheaply than anyone who presently employs that worker, because the chatbot company already owns the chatbot. If you were really on a glide path to creating an all-powerful deity and just needed cash to keep the venture going until the cancer-curing word-guesser awoke from its long slumber, then wouldn't you want as much cash as possible? Why would you voluntarily split the take with some sucky, washed, non-god-generating business from before 2022?
I think the only reason this question doesn't come up more frequently is that we're stewing in what Douglas Rushkoff calls the "go meta" economy, in which the most respectable and smartest business to operate must be as many abstraction layers away from real work as possible. Don't drive a taxi, own a medallion that you rent to the cab driver. Don't own a medallion, start a "rideshare" company. Don't start a rideshare company, invest in a rideshare company. Don't invest in a rideshare company, buy options to invest in a rideshare company:
The inverse relationship between doing something useful and making money is deeply ingrained in our economic wisdom. Take the world of online grifters, who don't just peddle get-rich-quick PDFs, they also peddle tools to generate get-rich-quick PDFs, as well as tools to steal other "wealth influencers'" insta videos and deepfake yourself into their pretend private jets:
The scam economy boasts a bewildering array of ancillary services, like a $150/month service that lets you produce fake screenshots showing vast monthly income on other scam services (November Kelly calls this "The world's most expensive 'inspect element'"):
It's an old truism that in a gold rush, the only people who come out ahead are the people selling the picks and shovels. But that's not true – there's even more money to be made wholesaling picks and shovels to the retailers who operate the frontier mercantiles. Go meta!
So it's not surprising that we don't ask why these AI god-botherers need our stupid money while they're immanentizing the eschaton. Why would they operate a hospital if they could go meta and sell the doctorbots to the MBAs running the hospital?
The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.
That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.
That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.
That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.
The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.
Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.
It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.
ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.
Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.
Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.
It's not a bug, it's a feature.
They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.
The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.
The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.
If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.
That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.
With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.
Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.
What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.
Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.
And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.
They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.
That's going to take one generation.
Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?
It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.
The tech has never been the conspiracy. It's the business model.
I saw this on insta and someone commented asking her how she knew they were in there and she said that she saw the mama duck with only one duckling and thought it was suspicious so she stopped to check and hear them quacking down there... :') <3
For when you need a reminder that there really is goodness in the world
And for whenever someone mistakenly tells you that humans can only hurt nature -
We are part of nature. And we are uniquely equipped, in many ways, to help heal the planet we are part of - so long as we keep choosing to help, and to heal, this planet of which we are a part
u know in retrospect my stomach shrimping wasn't even the worst part so far. it was the tube that went to third base with my floppy ass cardia. through my sinuses. just straight up cockwarmed a silly straw all the way thru my esophagus for 2 days
I'm a fool. a fucking fool. an absolute clown. do u know what happened minutes after I posted this.
I found out my body cannot handle opioids.
my muscles lock tf up and deliver the worst pain imaginable in every direction at once. I can't describe it. it's not just pain it's the sensation of every disgusting awful flu ache you've ever experienced in your life condensed into one square inch of your body, all over your body.
do u know what alternatives hospitals have to opioids? HA, HAHAHA
Stomach is back where it should be, I got some guts stapled and skin glued, and recited Dexter's Lab every time the nurses mixed powdered medicine in with my applesauce. I'm bored of drinking ramen and watching Resident Alien reruns so I'm gonna peruse the tags!
I cannot tell you how many times I unironically gazed into the middle distance and thought this
I've learned things can be true and also a shit post at the same time. unfortunately
starting to think maybe I've been saying this too much all my life and karmic justice just backed up in the pipes before exploding. still gonna obliterate those twinks tho. get back here Siffrin I'm not done with you yet
this guy is getting the true moral of this story
I HAVEN'T IN YEARS so either the AO3 curse has a disconcerting half-life, or it extends to discord servers and Google docs. both are horrifying and deserve a federal grant for further investigation
you and me both! isn't nature beautiful
you've made me realize my most recent fic in my gdocs is in fact the darkest thing I've written. so maybe all the ppl in the tags claiming AO3 curse aren't as wrong as I've been thinking they are
god's a bitch and I'm into omegaverse
I feel like I should get a medal for enduring something so fucked up that randos on the internet think I must be lying. yeah bro me too
honestly the worst part about all of this is the fact that I can't watch Murderbot. I want to so bad. but I refuse until I'm feeling halfway alive again
fuck life. I give myself lemons. AO3 on hospital Wi-Fi
you do not. like emphatically, I don't think that's a great idea
I'd say I'm sorry but tbh this seems very on theme for ISAT so
THANK you I need everyone to remember I'm a gamer first, god's favorite crusty sock in the bottom of the drawer second
the ARE a lot of people in the tags calling me Jesus Christ
I'll admit that one's on me. when I started being unable to eat anything, my first thought was not "stomach straight up saying the abdomen's haunted"
I hate that I was actually considering getting white haired anime boy haircut right before all this happened. could you fucking imagine
don't carbon date me like this
Rascal Flatts was right. life is a highway and it's riding me all night long
they snipped and stitched some things, yanked the whole sucker back down UNDER my diaphragm where it belongs, and did this thing called a fundoplication where they wrap and stitch the top of the stomach around the bottom of the esophagus. it’s supposed to help keep that little bastard in its assigned seating
what I had was a called a combination sliding hiatal hernia (stomach wants uppies) and paraesophageal hiatal hernia (stomach wants uppies but through a different hole in the diaphragm bc it’s not like other girls, making it look like it’s trying to phone home), along with combined organoaxial and mesenteroaxial gastric volvulus (stomach flops around like a dead fish and twists itself shut like a bread bag AND goes upside down). the former usually ends up cutting off blood flow and starts necrotizing the stomach (very dangerous), but I was extremely lucky that hadn’t happened yet!
the hernias are uncommon but not terribly rare. the stomach flopping around? that’s rare. the fact that I had both of these at the same time, where they both did ALL AVAILABLE BAD THINGS POSSIBLE?
to put it gently, according to one resident, I had surgeons fighting over me. pictures were taken. I had like six separate groups of medical professionals coming into my room regularly. my surgeon shook my hand like I was a celebrity. it was honest to god hilarious.
all in all, I spent 3 months thinking I was being a huge wimpy diaper baby, only to find out I narrowly evaded death bc my friend Moth told me to go to the ER right away, and it triggered a panic attack big enough to make me do just that. the poor ER doc came in sweating with the initial CT scans like “I’m gonna be real with you I’m not entirely sure I know what I’m looking at but it’s giving INCREDIBLE Emergency Surgery”
I’m upset I don’t get to birth an alien baby, but considering how it was Rapturing into my chest, it probably would have been a chest burster anyway. I want to kiss Miss Xenomorph as much as the next guy but I think I’ll just stick to sending prime numbers out into space until one returns my booty call
EDIT: btw I love the dog jokes lmao I had no idea volvulus was common in dogs! don't worry I'm not a werewolf (unfortunately), I simply have hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos, which makes all my connective tissue soft and stretchy. So we're waaaay more prone to having organs (and joints) slip n slide around and do things they REALLY aren't supposed to. But I wish I was a werewolf even more now. when will it be my turn
my clowns in hellsite, I have no idea how my house is intact when there are trees uprooted by my mailbox. if I had less staples in me I'd bend over and moon the sky
I'm not gonna keep dragging this post on I swear I'm just still on pain meds (I can handle higher doses of weaker opioids for some reason! yippee!) so I'm gonna look through the tags one more time and address a couple things I've seen often
- no, I wasn't doing anything in particular to fuck up my guts. sometimes our organs just Tony Hawk Pro Skater 2 right through the polygons. don't worry about it, it's rare and you get a fun story to tell ur friends
- yes, I was fired because I missed too many days nearly dying and requested more to recover from nearly dying. what can I say I'm a needy unreasonable bitch
- yes it's pretty lame to do this to someone right as they stumble off the operating table and get dumped with expensive medical bills. yes this is legal. yes I'm filing for unemployment. yes I would leave mouse poops in the CEO's coco rice krispies if given the chance. love and peace ✌️
- it's cool my dudes I live in the Midwest, basements are an evolutionary aspect of natural selection here. we've also got Steve Templeton I'm pretty sure he fights the tornadoes off himself
- Murderbot TV series good :)
- don't worry guys I know the original artist for Life is a Highway. Lightning McQueen
- there are a LOT of you offering advice on how to avoid the torment nexus. while having a Siffrin pfp. just an observation
- who the fuck is Job
please laugh. every drop of joy I squeeze from this karmic fart parade is another finger shoved firmly up god's withered asshole
can everyone stop being funnier than me for 2 minutes
I only fucked someone once and it was bc they replied to my reply on their comment to the fic I filled for their kink meme prompt on Livejournal. it was vore. and my name's not Jesus
no I'm going I want to ask Joshua how he got that gay
can y'all stop comparing me to deities I'm already on thin ice here with one or possibly more of them
no this is Patrick
I'm sorry to disappoint but I only have 2 weed smoking girlfriends. if anyone lets me borrow one of theirs tho it would really help the Make A Wish Foundation. I beg them once a week and they keep telling me I'm "not a child" and "already got two wishes fulfilled"
take a ticket and get in line if you're gonna make an attempt on my life, you goddamn heathen
you can't give me this after I was just accused of being Dave Strider
I’m proud to identify as morosexual. I’m attracted to dumbasses and dumbasses exclusively. A guy asked me what the Spanish word for tortilla was once and now I dream of kissing him under the moonlight
Will humanity ever be free of the influence of Edna Mode? Can any of us so much as consider the character design for a hero or villain without her manifesting in the room, fully aware of our sins?
You know what, another layer of difficulty is when you’re thinking about villains, and the wise words of Megamind come into your head. You don’t just want your child to be just a regular villain. But how do you make your villain a Supervillain with no cape? Where is the drama? But Edna says no capes, you must deny them the flair. It is impossible to please them both, and it’s tearing this family apart.
idk why people are still trying to do "hear me out"s on tumblr
you could talk about wanting to fuck the space needle on here and people would still call you a poser for insisting on fucking "conventionally attractive architecture" as if that's a coherent, easily-recognizable category
THIS SATURDAY (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.
There's plenty of reasons to be skeptical of centrists who bemoan "political polarization" and call for a politics that abandons the "tribalism of left and right."
Obviously there's the false equivalence: on the right, you have fascists who want to send masked, armed goons into the streets to beat, kidnap and murder your neighbors. On the left, you have calls for higher taxes, unions, environmental impact reviews for data-centers, and an end to the genocide in Gaza.
Right wing extremism is attempting the overthrow of the government, murdering brown people in gulags, and the earth's richest man slaughtering the world's poorest children for the lulz:
The reality is that the right and left have large, substantive disagreements that are matters of life and death. Anyone dismissing these as "tribalism" doesn't know what "left" and "right" mean. At best, they have mistaken a collection of cultural signifiers – pronouns, MMA, brands of beer – for politics.
Mistaking cultural signifiers and identity markers for politics is centrism's most dangerous pathology, the thing that makes centrism the handmaiden of the right. If you think identity markers are politics, then you'll be tempted to think the answer to a world run by 150 rich, white, cis straight guys is to replace half of them with women, POCs and queer people. The difference between the left and the right isn't the identities of the ruling class – it's whether we have a ruling class at all.
I collect definitions of "right" and "left." There's Corey Robin's definition from The Reactionary Mind, that conservatism is the belief that some people were born to rule, and others to be ruled over, and that any attempt to elevate the latter group to positions of power (through civil rights movements, affirmative action, etc) will result in dire misrule and disaster:
This explains how the right can encompass white nationalists (rule by white people), Hindu nationalists (rule by high-caste Hindus), libertarians (rule by bosses), imperialists (rule by military aggressors), etc. It also explains the right's obsession with learning the racial and gender markers of anyone involved in a plane crash or other disaster: "See, the oil tanker was being piloted by a DEI hire when it crashed into that bridge!"
Another important definition is Wilhoit's Law:
Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.
This one hardly needs explanation in this era of "it's not a crime if the president does it," where Alex Jones can owe billions to the parents of dozens of murdered children and somehow not have to pay or give up his assets:
But when it comes to a "post-politics that is neither right nor left," the definition I turn to most often comes from science fiction writer Steven Brust, who once told me:
"Left" and "right" have had the same meaning since the French Revolution. If you want to know if someone is on the left or the right, ask them, "What is more important: human rights or property rights?" If they say "Property rights are a human right," then they are on the right.
That's it. That's the crux. If you think that property rights are a tool for achieving human rights, then you're on the left. You might support the right of farmers to block attempts to expropriate them via eminent domain in order to build a data center, or the right of people to not have their homes or devices searched by cops, or a library's right to own and archive digital books, even if the publishers insist that ebooks are never "sold," merely "licensed."
If property rights are a tool to achieve human rights, then property rights can be set aside when they impede other rights. Human beings have the right to health care, which is why we should have taken away the pharma companies' patents and copyrights, ending vaccine apartheid and letting the poor world make its own vaccines:
Human beings have the right to shelter. If your town has a million empty homes and a million homeless people, there's an obvious solution. At the very least, you can tax the shit out of empty homes to discourage the creation of derelict, empty blights:
Human beings have the right to food. If a cartel claims that you may not legally sell your 100,000lbs of nectarines, you can just give them away and tell the cartel to fuck off:
As Brust says, this fight is as old as the French Revolution. It's literally the plot of Les Miz ("In days gone by, I stole a loaf of bread in order to live").
Note that this framework leaves plenty of room for disagreement among leftists: we can disagree about who should get taxed and how, when a company should be ordered to destroy its ill-gotten loot and when that loot should be divided up among its victims, and what to do about empty houses and homeless people. We can disagree about reparations, about collectivization and co-operatives, about land reform. Very (very!) few leftists want to abolish property, but to be a leftist is to agree that property is only ever a means, and never an end.
In systems thinking, we are counseled that the most profound and durable changes come from shifts in paradigms, from which all rules, laws and arrangements flow:
"Left" and "right" represent two radically different paradigms. The right's paradigm is that property rights are human rights, which cashes out to "property rights are the only human right." If property rights are a human right, then I can burn down my orchard and laugh as you starve outside the gates. If property rights are human rights, I can leave an apartment building empty while you freeze to death on its sidewalk. If property rights are human rights, I can fill my factory with death-traps and insist that the workers I kill freely chose to assume that risk (as economists would say, they have a "revealed preference" for being killed at work):
Leftists view property rights as a tool, like laws, or regulations, or polls, or voting. Used well, these tools can produce prosperity for all. But "voting" and "laws" aren't good unto themselves. The Swiss practice of voting on whether your neighbors qualify for citizenship is barbaric:
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-38595807
Good regulations and laws are good, but simply passing any law is stupid and gets you into terrible trouble, even if the stupid law you've passed is designed to solve a real problem:
Viewed as tools, property rights are perfectly useful ways of achieving the primary purpose of a civilization: to safeguard the human rights of its people. Viewed as ends unto themselves, property rights are a terrible danger to our civilization and species.
If you believe property rights are tools, then you can pass laws banning corporations from electioneering:
If you believe property rights are tools, you can order landlords who want to ban their tenants from installing balcony solar to fuck off. If you believe property rights are human rights, then landlords can force their tenants to pay every dime the fossil fuel industry demands of them. "Property right as tool" allows you to defend a farmer's right to install a wind-farm, and still, to block a data-center from installing a gas turbine on its own land.
"Post-political" movements are made up of people who don't know what politics are. A "centrist" is ultimately a rightist, because the foundation of rightism is the supremacy of property. It is the ideology that breeds hereditary aristocracy ("property is a human right" means that it's a violation of your human rights to expect you to work for a living if you emerged from a lucky orifice). It's the ideology that breeds oligarchy.
Politics aren't a bunch of cultural signifiers or identity markers. Politics aren't about who rules – it's about whether we are ruled at all, or whether we are free.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
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