Worship The Glitch

I used to have a different username.

[worshiptheglitch]

[worshiptheglitch]

"I completely have not used the word Libertarian in describing myself since I got an email during lockdown where a person from a Libertarian organization wrote to me and said, “We’re doing an anti-mask demonstration in Vegas, and obviously we’d like you to head it.” I looked at that email and I went, “The fact they sent me this email is something I need to be very ashamed of, and I need to change.” Now, you can make the argument that maybe you don’t need to mandate masks — you can make the argument that maybe that shouldn’t be the government's job — but you cannot make the argument that you shouldn’t wear masks. It is the exact reciprocal of seatbelts because if I don’t wear a seatbelt, my chances of fucking myself up increase — if I don’t wear a mask, the chance of fucking someone else up increase.  Many times when I identified as Libertarian, people said to me, “It’s just rich white guys that don’t want to be told what to do,” and I had a zillion answers to that — and now that seems 100 percent accurate. I’m going to vote Democrat, maybe that’s all you need to know. I will not vote for a third-party candidate. Penn Jillette, former outspoken libertarian

[worshiptheglitch]

Apple Sues OpenAI 🥳

OpenAI is a company built on theft, and Sam Altman has a  "sociopathic lack of concern for the consequences that may come from deceiving someone.” So this is all very easy for me to believe.

Part of the incredibly specific complaint from Apple:

"OpenAI and its cohorts have been engaging in a coordinated pattern of misconduct at an institutional level as well. This includes io (which OpenAI acquired), a venture co-founded by Mr. Tan and other former Apple leaders. The Corporate Defendants, with or through their employees or partners, have been acting in concert and as an enterprise, exploiting Apple’s confidential information to advance OpenAI’s efforts to enter the consumer hardware market. They have used confidential Apple information in approaching Apple’s trusted partners, even having one carry out a specific trade secret metal-finishing technique for OpenAI, misleading the partner to believe they had Apple’s permission to do so. This is the tip of the iceberg. Apple lacks visibility into what’s been happening behind closed doors at OpenAI, where such misconduct is normalized and exemplified by leadership. This much is clear, however: at every level, from members of its Technical Staff to its Chief Hardware Officer, and in coordination with business partners, OpenAI has been stealing Apple’s trade secrets and confidential information. As a natural result, OpenAI’s nascent hardware business now rests on the shakiest of foundations, rotten to its core by its illegal reliance on misappropriated trade secrets."

I already thought the ex-Apple people working on hardware with OpenAI (including Jony Ive) were depraved. Every company's AI is fundamentally the same, and it just has nothing to do with consumer hardware, so wtf are they even doing?

A thought I often have about late-era Jony Ive:

Can someone be both a renowned expert in their field and a fucking dilettante? It has me thinking about the Advanced Genius Theory, too.

So I find this whole thing very fun.

[worshiptheglitch]

[worshiptheglitch]

The extent to which American capitalism ever worked is the extent to which regulation and unions kept it in check.

[worshiptheglitch]

Opinion | Susan Collins had four years to prepare for this question — and botched the answer

Susan Rinkunas: Collins' defense of her vote to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court was full of holes.

Susan Collins is the worst.

[mortifiedandawesome]

[worshiptheglitch]

Simply the best bit in all of CBB.

And I really miss the Gillian Jacobs years.

[worshiptheglitch]

So, back to our original question – does AI actually work? [..] It works to change the cost-quality tradeoff, with quite definite effects, and that makes AI a particular kind of tool: a tool not just for production, but also for crushing wages. It’s for increasing the power of those that pay wages/salaries/etc vis-a-vis those that earn them. It “works” by working only on the lower-quality side of the cost-quality tradeoff, and that is precisely what allows it to work as a tool of deskilling. AI isn’t some neutral tool – it’s a weapon of class war from above. It’s crucial to be clear about this: the development of technology under capitalism is never simply about productivity, but about tradeoffs, and ultimately about power. A tool can be inherently anti-worker and anti-consumer. It’s still true, then, as the debunkers rightly have it, that we shouldn’t believe the tales of golden ages “so unbelievably good that I can’t even imagine” (ala Sam Altman). But we should focus on what the technology is actually for, and simply debunking their claims can leave us with the mistaken idea that AI will turn out simply useless. The cybernetician Stafford Beer said somewhere that there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do”. I think that rhymes well with Ali Alkhatib’s point that we should think about AI as a political project through and through. We should start by asking what it is that AI actually does, rather than getting sucked into constant arguments about what it can’t do."

[newyorkthegoldenage]

Dorothy Eisner, Washington Square Park, 1938. Oil on canvas.

This painting was exhibited at Gracie Mansion in 2019 as part of “She Persists," a show dedicated to women artists in NYC over the past century. In her review of the exhibit in Artnet News, Eleanor Heartney describes this work:

“New York reappears at its most life-enhancing in Dorothy Eisner's Washington Square Park (1938), a painting centering on the Square's famous fountain. Water erupts and cascades over children splashing in the pool while adults on the periphery enjoy the sun. Historical circumstances give the work added resonance: at the time this work was created the fountain had just been restored by Robert Moses who was simultaneously pushing to bisect the park with one of his controversial highways. As a vocal opponent of this plan, Eisner here offers an image of the conviviality that Moses's dreams of automotive dominion would have destroyed.”

Photo: 1st Dibs

[samreich]

before the show = preshow; before the preshow = go-karting

[theweirdwideweb]

I had to leave my friend's house in the middle of a TV show last night because I'm changing my bipolar meds and had a surge of intensity. I walked out into the dark, humid and overgrown yard by myself and had an increasingly unsettling experience. Everything was especially vivid. It’s like my consciousness is sitting a half millimeter behind my eyes. So intensely present, vision so intensely clear. I was looking through the back gate up at the street lamp and the twisting illuminated leaves, and then the gate opened on its own, in the wind I’m sure, but it felt like a natural extension of the magic state I was in. I walked through and turned around to see it close behind me on its own as well. I walked down the alley, embarrassed to have stopped the show, my body electrified. I saw a bike coming towards me and ducked back in the gate then went inside. I found myself somehow both intensely aware and unaware as I drove home in the dark semi-rain. Fearful I would forget how to drive, but deftly navigating every obstacle, including a disorienting situation at a stoplight with two cars blocking the lane, one trying to get out, then the other, and two bicyclists in the mix too, one a woman with long hair jumping up and down on the bike in the rain. This too felt magical and like a dream.

[theweirdwideweb]

It's so difficult to describe what this state of mind is like. It's like being outside in the daylight trying to see into a dark room through a window. The sun reflects off the glass, so you cup your hands around your eyes and press your face to it until suddenly the room reveals itself. Except the window is the senses, and my whole mind presses against. It's terrifyingly present. It's beautiful but it feels like the sky could crack open at any moment.

[samreich]

just throwing this out there

[worshiptheglitch]

One might object that demanding that activists and protesters remain peaceful in the face of violence wielded by state officials and right-wing groups is a double standard. Well, that's true. But it's always been true. That double standard is written into both the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, documents whose references to "insurrections" included slave revolts. Americans have always been more tolerant of state and right-wing-vigilante violence— lynchings, soldiers firing at striking workers, the New York City police riot of 1992, the January 6 insurrection—than of violence from the left. That double standard is part of America's political topography and cannot be wished or argued away. It can only be outmaneuvered.

Adam Serwer

TLDR: All violence benefits Trump.

[markvomit]

[worshiptheglitch]

[worshiptheglitch]

“It’s about a bastard director… full of himself, who catches people and creates and destroys them. It’s about us, John.”

— Orson Welles, describing his unfinished film, The Other Side of the Wind, to John Huston. The film may be released soon. 

[worshiptheglitch]

by Guillaume Carels

[worshiptheglitch]

My, how times have changed… (in response to)