Samo's Day Old Teeth

music, art, open minds, life and the things in it

[samosdayoldteeth]

93 'Til Infinity (the gallery remixes) | Souls of Mischief | pntgllryntwrk

We did another remix project to commemorate the anniversary of this amazing album. Funkier than lobotomies. Chock full of vitamins and horse tranquilizers.

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 22 July 1946, the Zionist Irgun militia bombed the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, killing 91 people and wounding 46. At the time, two thirds of the hotel was occupied by the headquarters of the British colonial administration of Palestine. The plan for the bombing was devised by Irgun leader Menachem Begin, who later became Prime Minister of Israel, and with the collaboration of the Haganah militia. A warning was phoned in a few minutes beforehand, but not in time to evacuate the building. The Haganah had vetoed two previous plans, and was concerned that given enough time, the British could remove files Zionists believed they held at the building, which they intended to destroy. It turned out, however, that the files were never there. Irgun and its successor political party, Herut, were described by prominent Jewish thinkers like Albert Einstein and Hannah Arendt as "terrorist, right-wing, chauvinist", "closely akin… to the Nazi and Fascist parties". Irgun and Haganah later transformed into the bulk of the Israeli military, the IDF. Herut was succeeded by Likud, the party which has led governments in Israel many times since 1977. Learn more about Palestinian history under British colonial rule in our podcast episodes 86-87: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e86-87-class-struggle-in-palestine/

[redstonedust]

for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.

[ralfmaximus]

Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.

Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.

And so on.

The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.

But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.

If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.

But they wouldn't understand any of it.

That's ChatGPT.

And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.

But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.

I fucking hate it.

[da-ill-spot]

Music Video: Digital Underground- Blue View

[fistfullofsoul]

[vintageeveryday]

Polish prisoners in Dachau Nazi concentration camp in Germany joyfully celebrating their liberation by the US Army. The man standing at center between the bottles wears a P triangle.

[dduane]

Oh, BTW...

Judge Gives Final Approval of $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement

Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín approved the landmark settlement in the class action copyright lawsuit on Monday. Authors and publishers are e

Anthropic illegally downloaded some 500,000 titles, and 92% of those eligible for an award—both authors and publishers are entitled to payment—had opted into the class action. Martínez-Olguín denied all but two requests to opt out of the agreement. “We applaud the court’s final approval of this settlement, which represents an important victory in the larger battle to hold big tech accountable for its unscrupulous appropriation of intellectual and creative properties that clearly belong to authors and publishers,” said Maria Pallante, president and CEO of the Association of American Publishers, in a statement. Pallante praised the court for recognizing that downloading from pirate sites “is not a choice we should simply accept as an efficiency for the infringer; on the contrary, it’s abhorrent conduct that should never be normalized.” She also argued that fair use should not be extended to allow tech companies to copy copyrighted materials, and that tech giants should look to licensing agreements to train their AI models.

Now we'll see how long the payouts take to come through. I had between a half and two-thirds of my lifetime output stolen by these schmucks, but payouts from many of those thefts will be split 50/50 with the publishers. (Which strikes me as fair enough.)

So the waiting continues. Meanwhile, so does work...

[fistfullofsoul]

[zillanovikov]

every year I post this meme and every year people get more mad at me than they did the previous year

[chemie-stef]

I also need to engage with this tradition

[theonion]

Threatening to continue issuing threats if the Islamic Republic did not quickly agree to his demands, President Donald Trump warned Iran on Monday to accept his ultimatum or face the wrath of his next ultimatum. “Lay down your weapons now or I will have no choice but to ask you to lay down your weapons later,” the commander in chief wrote on Truth Social, adding that the Iranian regime only had two more days to consider his terms before he would give them eight more days to consider his terms.

Full Story

[xanaxfarts]

Catacombs at the Santiago Apostol Cathedral. location: Lampa, Peru

[joeinct]

Saintes-Maries de la Mer, Photo © Sabine Weiss, 1950

[thephotoregistry]

Buzkashi - Marengo

Todd Anthony

[wintercorrybriea2]

Zimbabwe Akashinga Rangers, all-women anti-poaching unit

[workingclasshistory]

On this day, 21 July 2001, over 300 Italian police in Genoa raided the Armando Diaz school and attacked the mostly sleeping protesters and journalists who were staying there, during demonstrations against a G8 summit in the city. 82 of the 93 people in the school were brutally beaten, with three put in comas. For example, Lena Zulke had her skull fractured and 5 ribs broken. The victims were then arrested and tortured by officers, who cut the hair off several detainees with knives, and forced people to sing fascist songs and say "Viva Pinochet". Officers racially abused detainees, calling them “Jewish” and “g*psies”. Those arrested recounted that police gave Nazi salutes and had pictures of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini on their walls. One eyewitness, known as Starhawk, reported: "They beat the men and the women. They broke bones, smashed teeth, shattered skulls. They left blood on the walls, on the windows, a pool of it in every spot where people had been sleeping. When they had finished their work, they brought in the ambulances. All night long we watched from across the street as the stretchers were carried out, as people were taken to the jail ward of the hospital, or simply to jail." The police planted weapons which had been seized elsewhere in the city, like crowbars and hammers, inside the school, to justify the raid and the violence. After years of campaigning, 15 police officers and doctors were sentenced to jail for their abuses, however none of them were actually punished as the convictions were wiped out by a statute of limitations. None of them was convicted for torture as torture is not technically a crime in Italy. Some officers were convicted of fabricating evidence, but these offences were given an amnesty. At least one officer convicted for this crime was later promoted. While the police got off, protesters arrested in the school were still being jailed years later, as they were not covered by the statute of limitations. Learn more about the Genoa protests and street battles in this new book: https://shop.workingclasshistory.com/products/from-riot-to-insurrection-the-g8-summit-of-2001-the-battle-of-genoa-tomas-rothaus

[pointless-letters]

One of the best letters I’ve ever seen just popped up on my Facebook memories. Still makes me laugh.

[pointless-letters]

As today is the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, it’s a great time to revisit Dinah from Devon’s memory of this historic event. And yes, still makes me laugh.

[pointless-letters]

Today is the 54th anniversary of the moon landing, but Dinah’s diary entry is still absolutely magnificent.

[pointless-letters]

57th anniversary of the moon landing and the best diary entry in the history of diary entries. Sit down Samuel Pepys, it’s over. UGH.

[thunderstruck9]

Zezão (Brazilian, 1971), Blue Beetle Draft, 2025. Acrylic paint on reclaimed canvas tarpaulin, 23 1/2 × 33 in.