Radio Skeleton

26 | I'm overrated

[segamascott]

hello my name is politician i love israel i love the military i love the police i love ice i do not support healthcare i do not support education i do not support trans people i love billionaires i love corporations i love the cia please vote for me to stand up to donald trump who i hate but also please pray for donald trump violence is wrong unless you mean war with iran russia or china then yay VOTE BLUE

[oddly-romantic]

generative AI literally makes me feel like a boomer. people start talking about how it can be good to help you brainstorm ideas and i’m like oh you’re letting a computer do the hard work and thinking for you???

[headspace-hotel]

There are many difficult things that were replaced with technology, and it wasn't a bad thing. Washing machine replaces washing clothes by hand. Nothing wrong with that. Spinning wheel replaces drop spindle. Nothing wrong with that.

Generative AI replaces thinking. The ability to think for yourself will always be important. People that want to control and oppress you want to limit your ability to think for yourself as much as possible, but continuing to practice it allows you to resist them.

[mikkeneko]

"This tool replaces thinking," is a technology problem we (humans) have faced before. It's a snark that I've seen pro-AI contenders take as well: I bet these same people would have complained about calculators! And books!

Well. They did, at the time. 

We have records from centuries -- even millennia back -- of scholars at the time complaining that these new-fangled "books" were turning their students lazy; why, they can barely recite any poems in their entirety any more! And there are people still alive today who remember life before widely available calculators, and some of them complained -- then and now -- that bringing them into schools dealt a ruinous blow to math education, and now these young people don't even know how to use a slide-rule.

And the thing is:

They weren't wrong.

The human brain can, when called on, perform incredible feats of memorization. Bards and skalds of old could memorize and recite poems and epics that were thousands of lines long. This is a skill that is largely lost to most of the population. It's not needed any more, and so it is not practiced.

There is a definite generational gap, between the people who were trained on slide-rules and reckoning and the generation that was taught on calculators. There came a year, when that first generation grew up and entered the workforce, when you suddenly started encountering grown adults who could not do math -- not even the very basic arithmetic needed to count down from one hundred. I would go into a shop, buy an item for sixteen dollars, give the cashier a twenty and a one because I want a fiver back, and have them stare at the money in incomprehension -- what do? They don't know how to subtract sixteen from twenty-one. They don't know how to calculate a fifteen-percent tip. They did not exercise the parts of their brain that handle this, because they always had a calculator to do it for them.

Nowadays, newer point-of-sale machines compensate for this; they will automatically calculate and dispense the change, no subtraction necessary on the part of the operator. Nowadays everyone carries a phone, and every phone carries a calculator, so if you need to do these calculations, the tool is right there. As more and more transactions go electronic and card, and cash fades further and further out of daily life, these situations happen less and less; it's not a problem that most people can't do math (until it is.)

The people who complained that these tools-that-replace-thinking would reduce the ability of the broad population to exercise these cognitive skills weren't wrong. It's simply that, as the pace of life changed, the environment changed so that in day-to-day life these skills were largely unnecessary.

So.

Isn't this, ChatGPT and Generative AI, just the latest in a long series of tool-replaces-thought that has, broadly, worked out well for us? What's different about this?

Well, two things are different.

1) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the cognitive skill that it replaced was a discrete and, on a day-to-day basis, unnecessary outlay of energy. Most people don't need to memorize thousands of lines of poetry, or anything else for that matter. Most people don't need to do more than cursory levels of math on a day to day basis. 

This, however, is different. The cognitive skill that is being obsoleted here is more than "how to write essay" or "identify what is the capital of Rhode Island." It encompasses the entire field of being able to generate new thoughts; of being able to consider and analyze new information; of being able to follow logical trains to their conclusions; of being able to order your thoughts to construct rational arguments; or indeed of being able to express yourself in any structured way. These cognitive tools are not occasional use; they are every day, all the time. 

2) In the previous instances of tool-replaces-thinking, the tool was good at what it did.

Calculators may have replaced reckoning, but calculators are also pretty good at what they do. The calculator will, as long as you give the right input, give the right answer. ChatGPT cannot be relied on to do this. ChatGPT will tell you, confidently and unhesitantly and dangerously, that 2+2=5, and it will not care that it is wrong.

Books may have replaced memorization, and books certainly could be wrong; but a fact, once in a book, is pretty stable and steady. There is not a risk that the Guy Who Owns All The Encylopedias might wake up one day and decide -- to pick a purely hypothetical example -- that the Gulf of Mexico is called something else, and suddenly all the encyclopedias say that.

Generative AI fails on both these counts. It fails on every count. It's inaccurate, it's unethical, it's unreliable, it's wrong.

---

I remember some time ago seeing someone say (it was a video about medieval footwear, actually) that "humans have a great energy-saving system: if we can be lazy about something, we are."

This is not a ethical judgment about humans; this is how life works. Animals -- including humans -- will not do something the hard way if they can do it the easy way; this basic principle of conservation of resources is universal and morally neutral. Cognition is biologically expensive, and though our environment is not what it once was, every person still goes through every day choosing what is valuable enough to expend resources on and what is not.

Because of this, I don't know if there is any solution, here. I think pushing back against the downhill flush of the-easy-way-out is a battle both uphill and against the tide.

So I'll just close with this warning, instead: 

Generative AI is a tool that cannot be trusted. Do not use it to replace thought.

[therosielord]

Don’t forget 3) The previous tools did not function by literally plagiarizing the work of millions of actual thinkers and creatives.

[nothorses]

thinking about when my professor told me how the boards of companies/orgs/etc. will sometimes hire on a CEO/whatever who they know will basically take a chainsaw to existing infrastructure, let them fuck as much shit up as possible, and then promptly fire them as soon as they've accomplished what the board wanted them to do. then they can point the finger at that guy & look like they're the heroes and the problem is resolved because he's gone now. and they still get to keep all the changes they wanted that nobody else did.

anyway I think it's fun and all to watch the two most divorced men on the planet publicly divorce each other. and also. maybe keep that in mind, is all.

[nothorses]

like,

guys come on they think we're so fucking stupid.

[the-bar-sinister]

My followers know I hate talking about politics and current events, and generally refuse to do so, but this is important.

A bill has been introduced in the US that would make all pornography a federal crime. Owning it. Creating it. Distributing it.

Under this law, fanart of nude characters would be a federal crime.

Under this law, depictions of homosexuality or simply being transgender, would be considered pornography and a federal crime.

This bill is not going to pass.

However, the reason for this bill is to continue to push the "overton window". The reason for this bill is to make banning pornography seem more and more normal to everyone until they can actually do that.

And remember, they consider depictions of gay characters and transgenders characters "pornography" in any context, including platonic.

They have been working on this for a decade now and it has been working.

If you are one of the people in fandom who thinks that "nasty" porn on AO3 should be banned because it's "icky" or "immoral", then this mental scam is working on you.

Censorship is never about protecting people.

Censorship is always about control.

Do not let the rising moral panic affect your mind and make you weak to propaganda that lets others control you and control what you watch and read.

Do not fall for the scam.

When they say they are going to ban "pornography" it means they're going to ban anything they don't like by calling it "pornography" and they don't like you!!

[tlirsgender]

Finding out people are actually slash gen not taught to Actually Read in school in favor of just looking at the words for half a second and keeping it moving whether you understand it or not is crazy but does explain a lot of things

[tlirsgender]

You start noticing like "why do so many people online seem to just pick out a few words they recognize and decide what they think you mean from that instead of actually reading what you said" & then you look at the education system & it's like Oh okay. Oh that's actually really bad

[twutch]

brian eno’s open letter to Microsoft from his instagram earlier

[crabussy]

need everyone to know that the artist who created this iconic artwork:

is STILL creating wolf art TO THIS DAY. TEN YEARS LATER. proof that the world is beautiful. her username is wolfroad! you can find her art right here, and here are a few of her more recent pieces that I absolutely adore:

[crabussy]

checked her page today and I think this might be because of everyone who saw this post and went to support her and show her art some love. the power of spotlighting an artist!! if you know an underappreciated artist, telling people about them could mean the world. [:

[aevallare]

all politics about ai aside if you use it to create fanwork you're just a fucking dweeb

[aevallare]

not to show my jock colors on this my nerd blog but the whole fucking point is that it's for love of the game. sweat over it or get the fuck out. i'm no gatekeeper but if you're using ai you're not even playing. you're trying to pave over the baseball diamond and make it a parking lot.

[reallyreallyreallytrying]

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

[catboybiologist]

IS THIS THE ORIGINAL

ORGANICALLY

ON MY TIMELINE

It’s like seeing the face of god

[slavdollz4mangione-deactivated2]

this is actually insane? i genuinely pray they don’t get away with it because it’s beyond messed up

[arkangelev]

blissfully unaware of any UI changes because the evil skull protects me

[arkangelev]

another win for the evil skull

[nintendont2502]

shoutout to the brief civil war that went down on the balatro subreddit today

[nintendont2502]

mods add a flair for AI art

user makes a post calling out that flair, and suggesting that AI art should be banned from the sub

comments are filled with people agreeing with the OP... and one (1) mod vehemently disagreeing and defending the decision to keep AI art

said mod locks the comments on the post, pins their own comment addressing the drama (which starts with "Meowdy"), and basically tells everyone to shut the hell up and that theyre keeping AI art on the sub because theres nothing wrong with it

mod makes a post on another balatro romance/nsfw sub that they mod, clarifying the rules - and casually throwing in a mention that AI art is allowed in that sub, right in the middle. everyone in the comments disagrees. the mod doesnt listen

someone makes a poll on the main subreddit asking if people want AI art to be banned. the poll is overwhelmingly in support of the ban - before its deleted by that same mod

mod makes another statement claiming that they reached out to playstack (the publishers of balatro) who said they were completely fine with and endorsed AI art on the subreddit

*localThunk* (the developer/creator of balatro) makes a post that basically goes. No we never said that. No I don't endorse AI art at all. playstack also comments on that post clarifying that they never told the mod that they endorse AI art, just that they're leaving enforcement of the sub rules up to the mods

the mod just completely made all that shit up

AI art is now banned on r/balatro

[beatrice-otter]

We have 30 days until the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) laws are rescinded. This is the 50-year bedrock of American conservation. Normally, these actions take years but the administration has provided 30 days for public comment gutting clean water and clean air. Drop what you’re doing, before you make any more calls or read any more social media posts, please populate the Federal Register with dissent.

A. Go to https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/02/25/2025-03014/removal-of-national-environmental-policy-act-implementing-regulations

B. Click on the green rectangle in the upper right corner ("SUBMIT A PUBLIC COMMENT") .

C. Fill in your comment, and info at the bottom, and SUBMIT COMMENT.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I just did that (2/27/2025), and the message on that website said:

The comment period ends March 27, not March 30!!!

I strongly suggest (in your own words) couching your dissent in Trump's (and followers') own rhetoric. Here's what I said:

Removing these regulations will make America sick again, cause neurological and intellectual impairment in children (due to less regulation of lead), and raise the level of preventable cancers in adults (due to less regulation of known carcinogens),thus reducing American productivity and greatness.

[ariaste]

Done! It took me two seconds.

[arielsojourner]

USA people! Buy NOTHING Feb 28 2025. Not anything. 24 hours. No spending. Buy the day before or after but nothing. NOTHING. February 28 2025. Not gas. Not milk. Not something on a gaming app. Not a penny spent. (Only option in a crisis is local small mom and pop. Nothing. Else.) Promise me. Commit. 1 day. 1 day to scare the shit out of them that they don't get to follow the bullshit executive orders. They don't get to be cowards. If they do, it costs. It costs.

Then, if you can join me for Phase 2. March 7 2025 thtough March 14 2025? No Amazon. None. 1 week. No orders. Not a single item. Not one ebook. Nothing. 1 week. Just 1.

If you live outside the USA boycott US products on February 28 2025 and stand in solidarity with us and also join us for the week of no Amazon.

Are you with me?

Spread the word.

[absolute-r-andomness]

For context, there is a blackout on February 28 to protest against de DEI roll back

Nationwide economic blackout on February 28: List of stores being targeted

The national economic blackout is scheduled as a way for Americans to boycott major retailers that have pulled back on DEI policies.

[yesornopolls]

Opinion | Don’t Believe Him

Look closely at the first two weeks of Donald Trump’s second term and you’ll see something very different than what he wants you to see.

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter  Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[lightlybow]

“That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.”

This article gave me some hope

[heliotropist]

Really smart take.

These are people that believe perception and PR are everything, so they're trying to create the perception that they can destroy and remake government without consequences or constraints. And for a while people were stunned and overwhelmed by the ugliness of it all.

But now people are moving. Many, many lawsuits have been filed and the people are starting to claim their power.

Don't despair and don't give up. We're not done yet.

[cannibalcaprine]

K

[gumi-megpoidd]

U

[pepper-steak12]

N

[beetroot-merchant]

G

[four-two-six]

P

[ibuildblasters]

O

[shed-some-light]

W

[silaswhatever]

P

[beetroot-merchant]

U

[silly-gobbledygook-deactivated2]

S

[living-shifting-oil]

S

[asu-xu-namir]

Y

[star-mom-selkie]

[communist-hatsunemiku]

[projectxa3]

ah yes, leftist infighting. Definitely a useful and productive use of everyone's time, thought, effort, breath, and soul.

[apas-95]

do you even read posts or do you just see the word communist and let some random neurons fire off in your head to regurgitate a talking point