Musician, writer, artist, gardener, Jane-of-all-trades. I keep astonishingly busy with a wide variety of things. Recently into visible mending. Still fixated on Mass Effect. Wrote A Star to Steer Her By, writing Sunset and Evening Star (Yes, still going, just slow!).
i do wish the response to the ai water usage concern debate (umm actually the water and mineral usage is roughly equivalent to all of our other constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction etc etc etc) was less of a "haha checkmate luddites" and more of a "hmm maybe we should reevaluate our usage of constantly growing massive distributed information systems that require enormous amounts of resource extraction" but idk
there are places in the world today that are experiencing 40°C for the first time in recorded history. of course there's no way to know whether chucking billionaires into volcanos will appease the sun god but i feel we're doing the scientific method a disservice if we don't at least try
I shared a post from another side about AI here and I just saw someone arguing that we shouldn't use AI to detect cancer cells because "AI will literally destroy humanity". And I'm like. I'm as happy as anyone that so many data centre projects have been cancelled and can't wait for people to stop wrecking everything I use by shoving unnecessary AI into it, but I do not think that you are correct, sir. If we could maybe focus on the real problems instead of falling for the AI investor hype (who want everyone to believe their product is world-destroying dangerous, because that gets more investment for some reason) then maybe we can have more useful conversations.
AI will kill a lot of mostly poor people through normal boring means like resource deprivation (most notably water and electricity), stupid mistakes (vehicle accidents, medication accidents, etc.), and being turned into military technology. It is not part of a Vast Conspiracy to Permanently Destroy Human Critical Thinking, turning us into Mindless Zombies, and then being used to Kill Us All. It's not exciting enough for that. And the solutions aren't exciting culture wars, either; they're long, boring campaigns of politics and legislation, all very monotonous work.
"AI diminishes critical thinking and makes people less likely to think for themselves" yes, your skills and habits depend on what you use. People who watch a lot of tv are less good at reading than people who spend that same time reading books. People who carry phones with games and music on them everywhere are both less patient and more nervous when isolated and unable to communicate with anyone, than people who live without phones. People who grew up googling stuff are less adept at tracking down information in printed books and newspapers (without digital searching) than people who lived pre-search engine. People who lean on near-ubiquitous AI for stuff can become weirdly dependent on AI for things that they'd be better off deciding for themselves, and people who use AI to obtain information are a preselected group who were already more inclined to trust AI than they should have been.
"AI is giving us all permanent brain damage in part of a long con by the elite to destroy free will itself!" No. No it isn't. If the chatbots go offline, your aunt will remember how to write her own grocery lists again. Your cousin will be able to return to writing his own emails. I promise. AI is obnoxious and annoying, and it is dangerous in the same sorts of boring ways that many power-hungry technologies are dangerous. It's not going to destroy humanity.
my bag is raising a lot of questions already answered by my bag.
image shows a canvas tote bag reading: this bag contains: cheese, wine, definitely not the disembodied head of our oppressor. the first two items have green check marks next to them and the third has a red x. there is red splattered along the bottom of the back, particularly concentrated in one corner.
growing up in Canada (and as far as I know this is also generally how it's used in Europe) we treated "lego" as a collective like "rice" or "water". every time I hear someone say they're "playing with legos" it sounds like "eating a bowl of rices".
no one is entitled to the sacred art, tools, or costumes of another culture (save members of the culture itself) and nonsacred reproductions will serve just as well for the purposes of education and appreciation
having museums full of reproductions would be even cooler than having museums full of sacred artifacts because when modern craftspeople are able to replicate those artifacts, it’s usually because they still make the same items the same way today
this means that you could have description tags emphasizing that such-and-such item has been made by these people in almost the same way for hundreds of years
having museums full of beautiful reproductions takes the emphasis off of Things and places it on the People who make them, which is really as it should be
The rule could have heavy impacts towards trans people across society.
Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"
The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.
Importantly, the gender ideology prohibition has no age limitation—hospitals could be targeted not just for providing care to minors but for providing gender-affirming care to adults, because prescribing hormone therapy to a transgender patient of any age could be deemed promoting the belief that "sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic."
This is all very bad and horrible, but I want to be clear that it’s worse and more sweeping than just eliminating trans research.
This torches everything. And I do mean everything.
A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):
ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives
allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason
preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies
requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.
What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.
Please, if you only ever write one public comment, this is the one to do.
Bringing back this guide to writing an effective public comment. This gives you the basics you need to know, what you need to include, a basic outline you can follow, etc.
Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:
"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"
But also, if possible, don't stop at writing a comment. Don't stop at calling your representatives. You should ideally be talking to people in your community about this and organizing resistance on-the-ground; there is a good chance people are already doing that even if you aren't hearing about it.
I was struggling on what to comment while still following the guideline. I'm putting what I commented below so people can use it as a template (or copy it idgaf).
[OMB proposes to add a new § 1.221] this is creating loop holes for agencies to bypass the regulations they are governed under.
[200.205] "advance the President's policy priorities". The office of the USA President is always changing. Forcing an agency to be beholden to a fluid political agenda is an absurd request and DOES NOT provide clarity or stability to this agency.
[200.211] Many rural communities (which are frequent recipients of Federal Funding, like the rural health clinic I used to work at) do not have reliable access to internet, so dismissing the paper alternative is detrimental to making sure the Terms and Conditions are equally and fairly available to all recipients.
[200.218] DEI benefits many marginalized groups, from women to veterans to religious minorities. Creating mentorship opportunities, leadership training, scholarships, investment programs, and more that grow women’s success. Creating safer workplaces through anti-harassment programs and anti-discrimination policies.
[Section 200.219] Requiring schools, Colleges, and Universities to police ALL their students from protesting any specific speakers in order to remain a recipient of Federal Funding is an impossible and unreasonable requirement and a direct violation of the first amendment.
[200.220] This will further deteriorate our foreign relations, including with our allies.
[200.300] [Gender ideology as defined in Executive Order 14168.] The sex binary is biologically and scientifically incorrect. The President making it an EO does not make it fact.
[200.300] [Executive Order 14187 the Protecting Children Provision] Allowing children to transition has been verifiably proven to improve the life expectancy of those same children and has shown no lasting harm.
"The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like 'I understand' is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
I've been saying: it works like a fortuneteller or a fake psychic. It takes the information you give it, plus the cold-read or web-scraped information on you that you don't know it has, and gives you what you want to hear, in whatever format will make it sound the most palatable to you.
People want to hear from people. We're a social species. We're wired to trust our social connections -- to trust people, especially the people who share our mindset. That's what every grifter and every psyop uses: split people apart by magnifying our disagreements, gain trust by agreeing with us (or with what we *want* to believe).
A skilled cold-reader can fool damn near anyone who hasn't already put up a wall of distrust against them. And now we have a computer network set up to cold-read *everybody* who has any kind of public records, at scale, and scam everyone who comes into contact with it. It's no wonder most people are being fooled.
"The only reason to have an LLM emit sentences like 'I understand' is to make it more appealing than a search engine and increase the likelihood that a user will return; that is, it’s another way of maximizing customer engagement."
-Ted Chiang, No, Artificial Intelligence Is Not Conscious
I’m on tour with my new book, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Catch me in LA TONIGHT (Jun 19) at Skylight Books, and on SUNDAY (Jun 21) at Kepler’s in Menlo Park. After that, it’s Toronto, NYC, Philly and Chicago.
Partway through Bridget Read's unmissable chronicle of pyramid ("multi-level marketing") schemes, Little Bosses Everywhere, there comes a dual revelation: no one is selling any product to end-users and no one knows it:
That is to say, all the hustlers who have spent thousands of dollars on Mary Kay, Herbalife and Amway have failed to move any of their product (beyond a statistically insignificant number of sales to friends and family who quickly tire of being hustled and stop buying this substandard, overpriced junk). But none of these "entrepreneurs" knows it, or admits it to anyone – not their "downlines" (friends they've lured into the swindle), nor their "uplines" (friends who recruited them into the con).
Each pyramid scheme victim thinks that they're the only failure in the whole bunch. They go to massive "sales conferences" where people boast about all the sales they're making, and they're all lying about it. Incredibly, the pyramid schemers who run these criminal enterprises have figured out how to make a virtue out of this situation: they offer "sales coaching" courses to help people make the sales that "everyone else is making." In other words, once you've gone bust failing to sell Amway, they'll get you to go further into debt to learn how to correct the (nonexistent) issues with your sales strategy so that you can join the (imaginary) legion of people who sell Amway by the bushel.
Con artists have a name for this kind of swindle: it's called a "big con," which is when everyone a mark comes into contact with is in on the scam. Here's how the big con worked: after a "roper" snared a victim (usually on an intercity train), they would telegraph ahead and let the home team know they had a live one. From that point forward, every single person the victim came into contact with was in on it – from the porter who collected his bags at the train station to the cab driver to the Western Union clerk he uses to cable his banker and ask for a cashier's check for his life's savings.
In the big con, dozens of skilled actors are putting on a play for an audience of one: you. It's a real-world, non-hallucinatory version of "gang stalking delusion," which is when someone going through a mental health crisis believes that everyone they meet is in on a conspiracy to drive them crazy:
The situation that people suffering from GSD hallucinate is actually happening to people ensnared in a big con…and pyramid schemes are a big con. What's more – as Read's book makes clear – you can't understand modern American politics without understanding pyramid schemes.
One of the most destructive pyramid schemes in American history is Amway. The FTC was about to shut Amway down in the mid-1970s, but then Nixon resigned and Ford became president. Ford had been the Congressman to Amway's founders Jay Van Andel (then the head of the US Chamber of Commerce, which is to say, America's most powerful business lobbyist) and Dick DeVos (yes, that DeVos). Ford and the Amway swindlers were thick as thieves, and so Ford called off the FTC. Rather than going to jail, DeVos and Van Andel became morbidly wealthy, and they used some of their stolen money to found and fund the Heritage Foundation (yes, that Heritage Foundation).
The political class running America are pyramid scheme swindlers, funded by pyramid scheme money. They're running a big con on all of us. That's true of the Trumps, who've excreted a diarrhoeic slurry of shitcoins that have made them billions – and lost billions for their "investors":
https://www.citationneeded.news/issue-106/
Trump insists that he is a self-made man who made his money with successful real estate deals. In reality, he lied all the time about his real estate, committing a string of felonies in order to defraud the banks, even as he went bankrupt, time and again:
Another "self made man" is Elon Musk (who is a "trillionaire," in a highly technical sense meaning "not a trillionaire at all"). Musk would have been broke several times over but for a string of massive government bailouts and subsidies, which continue to this day:
Trump, Musk, and the rest of the schemers in the pyramid routinely claim that they are wealthy because they are running good businesses, a "fact" that many of us accept at face value. It's bad enough that we are deceived about reality, but many of their most addled cult-members try to follow in their footsteps. When they fail, they are in the same situation as one of those busted Amway sellers: thinking they are the only ones who can't make this "sure thing" work. Conservativism is a movement of bitter rubes, led by pyramid scheme swindlers:
The "wait, is everyone else also failing?" awakening is an experience that many of America's CEOs are sharing at this moment, as they wonder whether they are the only ones who've fired as many workers as possible and replaced them with AI, only to see their company's fortunes fall:
Like an Amway victim, these boardroom rubes simply can't believe that all these people could be in on the con. How could the world spend trillions on AI if it's not on a path to profitability? It's not that these guys spent 2008 in a cave – rather, they just lack the object permanence to remember the last time a "Federal Wallet Inspector" approached them at a board meeting and took them for everything:
The thesis that "it can't be nonsense if there's a lot of money at stake" is the core of so many of these swindles. It's the investment theory that holds that once a pile of shit gets big enough, there must be a pony under it somewhere.
There's a Bugs Bunny bit that I find myself returning to in this era of the big con: it's a gag from 1954's "Bugs and Thugs":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_and_Thugs
Bugs has been kidnapped by gangsters, who have come to trust him. He tricks them into thinking that the police are coming and he urges them to hide in the oven while he sends the cops away. Then, Bugs performs a one-rabbit show in which he plays both the cop (with a broad Irish accent) and himself:
Bugs (cop voice): All right, open up! This is the police! [banging] All right, where's Rocky, where's he hiding?
Bugs (normal voice): He's not in this stove.
Bugs (cop): Oh-ho, he's hidin' in that stove, eh?
Bugs (normal): Now look, would I turn on this gas if my friend Rocky was in there?
Bugs (cop): You might, rabbit, you might.
Bugs (normal) Would I throw a lighted match in there if my friend was in there? [Massive explosion]
Bugs (cop): Well, all right, rabbit, you've convinced me. I'll look for Rocky in the city.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LSNTjX_g9a4
We keep living through real world versions of this:
"Would I, Mark Zuckerberg, change my company's name to 'Meta' if I wasn't serious about this?"
"Oh, you might, Zuck, you might."
"OK, but would I spend $61b on the metaverse if I wasn't serious about this?"
"All right, Zuck, you've convinced me. I won't sell my Facebook (oops, I mean 'Meta'!) shares."
But neither Zuck nor Musk nor Trump has the charm of Bugs Bunny. At a certain point we're all going to look at each other and say, "It was all bullshit, wasn't it?"
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:
areudirty
yousharknotpass
janainaart
baratheonpilled
annaxmalina
