I keep hearing genshin music in your shorts and it’s so funny to me because imagining you looking at some of the designs in the game sounds like a punishment…
I mean, not really, Genshin's character designs don't pain or upset me, I just find its design style boring. They just sorta slide off my brain a lot of the time without leaving much of an impression.
That style of gacha design is sort of the 4 chord pop songs of character design. Most people will be able to find one or two that is Their Jam™ and which really hits their heart in some way, but in aggregate it all just sounds the same over and over again.
Oh, and the music choices in my shorts are all credit to my editor, Minimo, who usually gets to pick the music :)
This is what I was alluding to when I discussed that the volume of name changes you have to make as a trans person highlights the ridiculous amount of documentation attached to you.
[ID: post by arne ness @arne__ness: "you used to be able to rent a hotel room under a fake name now i need an app to do my damn laundry"
Lesbian Rod Se... (cutoff) @LRSerling replies:
It really feels like the entire world has turned into an inescapable panopticon. I look back on the pre-computer days and they almost seem like a time of ridiculous freedom, where you could just skip town and start a new life whenever you wanted". End of ID.]
Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
https://www.normaltech.ai/
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:
This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.
The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").
None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?
I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:
This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:
I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.
This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:
In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."
From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:
A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a good wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses hate the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:
For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:
In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that bosses are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.
This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself very expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give anything for the promise they dangle.
Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:
AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:
When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps.
AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble is extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in other people's solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people":
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 never really got it when people made posts about light pollution and seeing all the stars for the first time and crying. i always assumed that everyone has gone on a road trip to a bortle 1.0 place and seen stars like that, and it's fantastic, but not like life changing. and then i went to europe last month and was in a mountaintop village of like 300 people and could see about 5 stars in the sky. like fewer than i can see from my home in a big metropolitan city.
my apologies to the non-africans, i did not realise how fucked your sky is
It's important to note that Chekhov's Gun was not originally about foreshadowing, but a piece of advice to playwrights about how every element in a play should have narrative relevance. The corollary to Chekhov's Gun is that if a gun mounted on the wall in act 1 is never used at all in the entirety of the play, then it should be omitted from the play entirely.
Very funny example of writing advice that is very specific to its medium getting overapplied outside its scope. Can you imagine how awful set design would be if people tried to apply this to movies. 60 minute post credits scene in the Matrix where Neo has to fire every gun that appears in the "lots of guns" scene
i have a random issue with a handful of pre-srar fall out boy songs where I LOVE the the start of the song or just generally everything but the chorus, but the chorus itself i find kind of underwhelming (eg: ilalwtwiattgyo, ttotbo, igatrimeanomf, cfmrfrpfmsr, gblogbd(dyptstsasgts)
been reading cicero's rant about words being given obscene meanings and i don't think i've ever seen a latin sentence that made me burst into such immediate and violent laughter before
had a couple people be like "i have no idea what this means" so to clarify: the word penis in latin originally meant tail and only later got the sense of, uh. penis. so this is cicero complaining that nowadays all these hooligans are using the word "penis" for naughty purposes
to It would be easy to say this is “yet another example of how boomers destroyed culture,” but it would be more apt to blame how capitalism’s exploitation of baby-boomers destroyed culture.
In the first couple hundred years or so of the middle class’s existance, young people grew up inside an extended family and learned social roles by emulating their elders. Being a good host or hostess, and a good guest, were values that society recognized as skill-based. Hence, elders actively taught those skills and young people actively learnt them. But come along the baby boom, with an unprecedented combination of wealth and relative numbers, and corporations rushed to define a “teenager” market segment that they could profit from directly by separating their demographic off from the more stable “middle class family” demographic. So “teenage culture” emerged, and they myth of the “generation gap”, and baby boomers never learned the more sophisticated skills of being good guests and good hosts. And hence, many of those skills are only available to people who like hiding out in the HM435-HM477 sections of the library stacks. So here are two little hints from my time in the UBC main library, tested and proven over nearly half a century:
1) When you host a gathering, you have a duty of care to your guests. You have a legal duty of care to keep them reasonably safe, and you have a social duty of care to help them be reasonably comfortable. So try to greet each guest as they arrive, remember their name and something interesting about them, and --> introduce them by name to someone else at the party who might find that thing interesting too.<-- Sample script: “Bill, I want you to meet Emma. She is restoring a ‘65 Barracuda, similar to the one you restored.” After your guests are mostly finished arriving, keep an eye on your guests and when one is backed into a corner behind the potted palm looking miserable, go fetch them and introduce them to someone else. Sample script: “Oh, Phyllis, there you are! Have you met Toby yet? Toby! You should really tell Phyllis about your pet tortoise!”
2) When you are a guest and you get buttonholed in this way, help out your host by at least pretending to be interested in ‘65 Barracudas or pet tortoises, and asking the other guest something. Ask them anything. Or if you see the guy moping behind the potted palm before your host does, approach them and ask them something. The key is, use the words “what” or “where” or “how” to ask the question, rather than “do/did ...?” That way they cannot simply, desperately, answer “yes” or “no” and have to tell you something you can build on. And don’t worry about “not wanting to pry”. People tend to really like to talk about themselves, provided you give them leeway to decide what part of themselves to talk about. Sample script: “Lucky you! How did you manage to get your hands on a ‘65 Barracuda/pet tortoise?” Or if you didn’t get a prompt from your busy host, “What canapés are the tastiest?” or the old standbys Sample script: “what school do you go to/what are you studying/what do you do in your spare time when you’re not at a cocktail party?”
You can actually memorize just one of these open-ended questions and use it in nearly every circumstance; and then follow up by noticing what the answer makes you curious about, and asking that.
Enjoy.
The thing is, they're not wrong. The modern prose novel's elevation as the singular form of Literature is a very recent development. "The descriptions are the book" depends heavily on the literary form being used - and while I'd agree it's not reading if you're approaching a prose novel that way, I'd stand firmly against the argument that it's not writing.
Dialogue is a literary form in of itself, and includes some of the most significant works in both the Classical European and Indian traditions. Is this what they're talking about? Probably not. But I care much more about reductionism when it's spoken from a place of purported authority than I do when someone's making their own reading experience worse.
I love when things represent languages with flags because like it only kinda works. for every language spoken in multiple countries they gotta pick between "the flag of the country whose residents this language is named after" or "the flag of the country where the most speakers of this language live" or (best option) some awkward combination of both. check out this awesome user interface icon it's a rectangle where the left half is the flag of portugal and the right half is the flag of brazil this is definitely more easily understood than "por" would be
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