Seattle-based software engineer with an interest in urbanism and global affairs. Anti-fascist; statist social democrat. Advocate of the Butlerian jihad. 🇺🇸🇺🇦🇵🇸🇺🇳
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Who on earth would even want to get an Airbnb in Apple Valley??
At a medical appointment and they asked if they could use AI to help transcribe. I would have probably been okay with it described as basic transcription software, but the last few years have rendered anything "AI" absolutely toxic to me.
Pritzker: "When did we become a country where it's ok for the US president to insist on national television that a state should call him to beg for anything? Especially something we don't want. Have we truly lost all sense of sanity in this nation that we treat this as normal?"
So the thesis of Hegemony How-To: A Roadmap for Radicals? www.goodreads.com/book/show/29...
Saw a "transplants go home" in my neighborhood in Seattle last year. Anti-immigrant rhetoric designed to appeal to people who've otherwise been relatively inoculated against anti-immigrant rhetoric.
Right, but the concern is that chuds have come to dominate the space. Hence the solution: reduce the non-chud abstention from the institution. I've been told, though, that this is impossible. Often by the same people preaching the imminence of a proletarian revolution.
What if, and hear me out here, we simply had liberals step up to wield the state's monopoly on violence to peacefully and conscientiously maintain the liberal order?
Dem interviewees in such instances should be blunt and say so. "You are now playing devil's advocate for an authoritarian, you are betraying your role as a reporter in a democratic system, and this is how people will remember you".
tfw the game of Secret Hitler starts with an apparently insane liberal declaring themselves Hitler and ends with Hitler being accidentally voted into power when a different liberal mixes up their voting cards for the third time
Very much warrants exhumation and a quick trip to a compost pile as soon as the regime is ousted.
Why does anyone take Lorenz seriously??
Back in 2020, YouTube suspended OAN's channel, demonetized it, and noted it was not an "authoritative" source. Now, five years later, the Google-owned platform has inked a deal to put the MAGA propaganda network in millions of living rooms. Details in @status.news: www.status.news/p/youtube-oa...
The best way to help people affected by rural hospital closures is to empower them to move somewhere civilized, if they so choose.
OpenAI's newest co-CEO(?) Fidji Simo was the one to post a message to the company Slack last night telling employees about Adam Raine's death and that stories were coming. Company gave me this statement and put up a blog post: openai.com/index/helpin...
Overheard in SLU: "I am burnt out. That's pretty much what's happening right now." Same, sister.
the thing I love about Zohran’s campaign is that instead of “this place fucking sucks and I alone can fix it” his message is “being a New Yorker rules, we live in the best city in the world, let’s make it even better together” show some damn pride in the places you want to govern
Remembering today when pro-GOP media erupted with outrage over Kamala Harris' warning that Trump had plans to militarize the national guard and deploy them on the streets of US cities. Indeed, he had such plans. And now he's implementing them.
Movements absolutely need to promote a coherent group identity to help motivate and retain participants, but the mechanisms of doing so can sometimes be counterproductive to bringing in new participants. Too often, this dynamic is not only ignored by activists, but, perversely, relished.
Jonathan Smucker's "Hegemony How-To" provides an interesting post-mortem of the Occupy moment, even if he's far too sanguine about economic populist messaging achieving positive results. Activism primarily as an expression of in-group identity stymies any protest. www.goodreads.com/book/show/33...
"Hypothetically, if complimenting your abusive spouse meant that they wouldn't hurt you tonight, would you compliment them? Or, is that thought so abhorrent, you couldn't bring yourself to do it. Even at the expense of getting hit."
We have a minimum age limit precisely because we agree that young people under a certain age briefly lack the experience or faculties to effectively hold office. It's a no-brainer that a maximum age should be applied for much the same reason: being a certain point, faculties universally degrade.
Worse, by making it easy for the implementer to give the problem they're finding no more thought than what it takes to generate the superficially acceptable output, it degrees their ability to reason about the problem being solved or topic being investigated. Intellectual self-evisceration.
Great article, though I'd qualify that the business use cases being "good enough" are typically "good enough at a glance". Subjecting them to proper scrutiny or attempting to validate edge cases often reveal, however, fundamental flaws.
Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson got up in front of a community meeting last year and made an unhinged call for the National guard to "restore order" to the city. Maybe she's been chatting with Dear Leader.
I actually agree that Democrats should refrain from using most of these. And they already do! When was the last time a Senator said 'heteronormative'? The bigger problem is that orgs like Third Way are reinforcing this false, right-wing narrative. Dems can't stop doing something they're not doing!
Wow, so in, what, 2006? Man, must be a slow news year in 2025 to be dredging this back up.
I lean Wilson, but rhetoric like "Seattle is not the city it used to be" reads as conservative-coded. Seattle has added 250k new neighbors since the 80s! I'd favor more forward-looking language as the are absolutely people who will advocate that the people are the problem.
There's nothing stopping far-right terrorists from kitting up and kidnapping minorities, women, or liberal figures. Folks don't want to hear this, but it's past time folks on the left buy and gain proficiency with a firearm.
This is the way. State capacity must be rebuilt and it must be made to serve the public interest.
Visiting my relatives near Hackensack, I once went out to a Microcenter in Paterson to buy them a printer. On hearing of the plan, my aunt reacted like I'd announced suicidal intent, equating it to horror stories of previous decades: "Have you never heard of Camden?!" Just comically on the nose.
Opening produce bags at the grocery store was a huge pain for me until someone saw me struggling and showed me the little magic trick of wetting your fingers first. "Basic adulting" that I'd not been exposed to until I was 22 and wouldn't have without unsolicited advice.
It's hard to ask for help! Even setting aside the need to simply be aware you're making a mistake in the first place, it can be very ambiguous what to ask. Getting immediate, proactive input is awesome and often more effective than trying to query someone uninvolved after the fact.
I guess I just don't get people offering me advice ever? Or, if I do, I assume good intent and it doesn't memorably ruffle feathers? As someone all too aware of their own shortcomings, including what are apparently "basics", I honestly crave unsolicited, well-meaning feedback.
Not familiar with either the reporter or the outlet, but I'd worry this is simply a too-uncritical echoing of the official party line. It'd be neat if true and not concealing mass use of dirty coal and relatively oppressed labor.
Slightly diminish a band: The Hill Goats
FYI, if you're concerned about all of the mRNA vaccine misinformation spreading everywhere, it's a good idea to stop sharing Taylor Lorenz as a source on anything, because it's inadvertently helping legitimize the wildly unscientific mRNA vaccine misinformation she keeps posting.
Honestly, the best response to this would have been enthusiastic booing. These people need to be publicly shamed for their worship of the stochastic parrot.
By Israel
"No one was driving 'inappropriately'"?? The motorcyclist hit a lit-up emergency vehicle and a person! He clearly was not driving with due care and ended up murdering someone. Why is everyone insisting on letting them off the hook??
Drove for the first time in a while and it still boggles my mind that drivers in stop-and-go traffic can't understand to just go at a consistent low speed instead of constantly jamming the accelerator and slamming on the brakes every 30 seconds.
I ask: "are we effectively validating the conclusions it's reaching?" I get: confused stares. This is just the most obvious, foundational question, yet people pull a "Doesn't look like anything to me" when it's raised. It's genuinely frightening, in aggregate.
People around me keep saying that, even if I don't buy that LLMs are an effective coding tool, I at least have to admit that they can take vast inputs beyond what a human could reasonably parse through and effectively identify important conclusions from them.
Chatbot "teachers" will assign students questions that they will then feed verbatim into other chatbots to generate output that will be assessed by yet another chatbot. Facts? Thinking? Who needs them! We've output text that looks at a glance like content.
Who needs a malign, artificial superintelligence choosing to destroy humanity? We'll just eviscerate our education system on our own and civilization will collapse around us.
The scary thing to me is that it feels like we're not that far away from AI evangelists accepting the LLM's answer as accurate and that they can't trust their lying eyes.
Ask it to render a "Mississipopotamus"
I had a similar experience with The Young Turks like a decade ago. I'd heard them talked up as a left-wing news show, but almost immediately found them to be bloviating buffoons with only a thin layer of progressive rhetoric. And now they're ACTIVELY engaging the far-right 🙃
"When you think about it, isn't the idea that a woman isn't property of her husband little more than Western cultural imperialism?? When you insist that it is a universal truth that a woman who has sex out of wedlock should not be burned as a witch, is this not violence against indigenous beliefs??"
It's incomprehensible to me how anyone involved can think this is remotely acceptable.
No time for fancy book learning if you're tilling the soil! Your "food sovereign" community might have enough surplus to have a shopkeep and a pastor, but that's about it!
Urbanization isn't a kkkapitalist scheme to control the people via the food supply, you absolute weirdo. Forcing individuals or small communities to grow their own food deprives them affordance for other pursuits and magnifies the risk of famine.
Dear unnamed leftish archaeology YouTuber: your "food sovereignty", "back to agrarianism" tangent exposes that you might be just as susceptible to crackpot theories as the cryptoarchaeologists you debunk.
Product idea: Monopoly-opoly. Each property is one of the branded variants. Boardwalk is Monopoly classic.
This bubble bursting is going to lead to some interesting times.
It's a bizarre and frankly alienating feeling realizing that if you know the basic fact that the murder rate has gone down significantly since 1990 you're in the ~90th+ percentile of fact-knowers
On the one hand, better to scammers than to building a capable and far-reaching security apparatus to crush opponents of the regime. On the other, many of these scammers will likely funnel it to far-right militias who will pursue the same mission.
It was impossible not to pause my run and get a picture of this.
Let's fix this headline: "Woman murdered by motorcyclist; motorcyclist also dead."
This is your regular reminder: humanoid robots are a gimmick for the cameras and make no real world sense.
"Legal prohibition may not have lasted, but there's a strong case to be made that temperance remains an overwhelming success." www.liberalcurrents.com/what-todays-...
Their claims about boosts they personally see are modest, but they will talk up much grander claims from others. "So-and-so announced they produced 50 production-grade applications in a month and were generating huge revenue!" Did so-and-so substantiate this? "Well, I didn't look deeply into it."
The one minimal countervailing force against my dismissal of the BS is the handful of colleagues and friends who sincerely assert they find value in it. But it often reads like they're backfilling their opinion about its benefit to them from the hype spewed by bullshitters.
Of course, bullshit pedalers always fall back on "welp, ultimately the responsibility is on the engineer to understand and audit the output," but this weirdly never seems to happen...
Want to actually see it deliver tangible results that are of sufficient quality to merge to main? Oops! Look at that, we're out of time. The actual examples of BS-generated code I've seen are routinely horribly flawed and the implementer often can't even explain what they've done.
One of the things about the AI decision that sets off my bullshit radar is just how much of a gish-gallop everything around it is. Trainings are never trainings, they're jerking off at length over non-functional outputs that look at a glance like tech specs.
I'm begging you, stop using LLMs to write your unit tests.
"I achieved financial independence and retired early. You can, too, with the help of my $8k/person weekend seminar."
There was a "transplants go home" sticker on a parking meter in my neighborhood for awhile. So "Immigrants go home", just coded differently to try to dodge the obvious racism.
The most depressing AI pieces are always going to be the thoughtful, nuanced, open-minded considerations by respected writers who are transparently responding to the publicity incentive created by editors whose owners want this kind of content
Etsy appears to now be flooded with AI-generated product videos. Are the products completely fake? Are they just imitating whatever's presented in the video??
Now that public radio has thrown off the yoke of government funding, maybe start being aggressive in news coverage, stop "both siding" the end of democracy, and not be so timid because you're afraid of pissing people and government off.
Or subversion. I always see a diehard belief that the revolution will inevitably triumph via external action against the state, but virulent rejection of the idea of even trying to turn its own systems against it. If you really need to go up against security forces, probably best to have insiders!
Or it could just be zero and we can deem holders of it enemy combatants.
Though I'd argue that the incrementalism of the former is better than the "leave us alone so we can get back to jerking off" of the latter.
A fantastic articulation of how the multifaceted left, from milquetoast liberals to radical anarchists, fundamentally fail to advance a vision of a future. whatwelost.substack.com/p/people-are...
It would seem that the house of cards will HAVE to come tumbling down. How long the irrational exuberance will persist is hard to say, but its harms will only grow as we rush towards collapse.
The important part is that you've created Output™. Is that output correct? If action is taken based on that output, will it advance the goals of the company or society at large? They don't care. They're not checking. Investors just want to see that Output™ is occurring.
not surprised by it but it does grind my fuckin gears that elite DC reporters are pretending there was a conspiracy of silence around something they wrote one billion stories about in 2024, while there actually is a conspiracy of silence around Trump's rotting brain
I'm a fairly anti-"vibe" person in the first place, but the phenomenon of "vibe coding" is just VISCERALLY repelling. It's like developers are shitting into their hand, poking around at it in fascination, then offering it up for everyone for praise.
We forget, amid all the noise, how incompetent Putin is. Would've been a piece of piss to keep Trump onside, pause for a bit, rearm, undo sanctions, reap the economic benefits, then simply restart the invasion a year later. But he just couldn't help himself. Master strategist my fucking arsehole.
"Just one more prompt, brah." "You've gotta fine-tune your prompt, dude, did you add 'please'?" So many people approach "AI" as casting a fucking arcane magic spell and it drives me insane. It's always utter trash and produces shit results, but the feedback loop just breaks people's brains 😵
Absolute insanity.
The "corpse God" attack line would be highly compelling. The entry-level Chaos cults also actually put in the hard work to make themselves accessible to their target audiences?
There are reporters still talking about Biden’s mental sharpness while the current president is declaring Rosie O’Donnell a “threat to humanity.”
1977: why would the bartender in star wars even care if some robots with artificial intelligence came into his bar 2025: ohhh ok
Countercounterpoint: it may actively be producing novel dysfunction in people who would otherwise have been tolerably normal. Better to just shut it all down.
Now would be an incredibly good time for the Democratic Party (or someone like AOC or Raskin) to call for a boycott of X on the grounds of fighting antisemitism.
I'd be curious for an explainer on the "blasphemous" characterization, just as someone lacking the biblical literacy to parse it.
(to be fair, she doesn't bother because she knows I won't let her)
The cat woke me up at 5:30 this morning, nudging and playfully pouncing on my hand. Still had food in her bowl, so I guess she was just looking to get out some energy. Energy she COULD have expended chasing squirrels at the park yesterday...
A great post that articulates at length so much of my multi-faceted horror at the current Cult of the LLM.
Every few months, the AI industry puts out a story that is intended to scare the credulous. Why? Because sociopathic investors open their wallets to the idea that they're creating Skynet. But, like so much "AI" right now, it's complete, manufactured bullshit.
If it helps, it's highly likely this is just one more round of grossly irresponsible, manufactured hype to gin up investor money with tenuous basis in reality.
We gotta do like stability propaganda. "Stability is not the natural order. The world longs for choas. Thank government for slaying choas." Just forever.
Stuck crawling home in a standing-room-only bus because idiots from the burbs are incapable of not driving in.
Bar associations need to get serious about this and start disbarring lawyers who do this shit
The extremely vibe-based segments of both ends of the political spectrum have vocally claimed Luigi as their own and our modern, click-driven discourse gives these ravenous consumers what they want. The Minnesota assassin doesn't arouse similar passion, so coverage was minimal.
it’s absurd that NYT forced him to delete these skeets, which … convey the factual information that Zohran Mamdani is, in fact, a man of South Asian descent who was born and raised in Africa, and that the pseudonymous source of the hacked material is a white supremacist eugenicist.
Frost: They told me that you had gone totally morally bankrupt, and that your integrity was unsound. Foxx: Is my integrity unsound? Frost: I don't see any integrity at all, ma'am.