Lapsed poet, sleepy papa, computerer
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Reporting what an llm "says" about "itself" as fact, like you were quoting a person, is very weird. Even if you attribute the claim to "an autonomous spokesagent for Claude, Inc," it implies intent and accountability in an organization that isn't there
It’s August! Where is van??? Stop by to pick up birth control pills, Plan B, condoms, lube, pregnancy tests, Narcan, test strips, buttons, stickers, & zines for yourself and all your besties.
Kind of maps that tech hiring has selected for people with low social-emotional sensitivity for decades. Might explain some of the fascism
Today I learned a 2020 randomized controlled trial showed that interview code tests largely filter out people who somehow weirdly find job interviews stressful par.nsf.gov/servlets/pur...
Reporting on the way conservatives planned to promote Prager U while they were defunding PBS would have been useful context for readers and the general public.
My saddest take on ai is "if the standards of professional writing hadn't been lowered so much by the internet, would we be impressed by ai 'writing'?" Or it used to be; this got me thinking about how the subject of ai itself inspires some of the worst writing ever, feeding a loop of bad writing.
We are special because we originate the idea of specialness, and of us. 'Us' often means 'the special ones' An unsatisfying answer! And so it's a moral hazard to ask. The us raising it prompts the answer that some other us isn't so special, which will of course become the most marginalized of us
Shouldn't feed the (even imo sincere and sometimes helpful) troll but alas LLMs don't raise this question, nor should it be raised so trivially or at all. Because the answer is then trivial or immoral What's special about us is just that we are us, making the question kind of misanthropic bullshit
In the Future All Food Will Be Cooked in a Microwave, and if You Can’t Deal With That Then You Need to Get Out of the Kitchen
Realizing my point here was a sort of tactical extension of this: www.offmessage.net/p/how-libera...
Interviewer: Can you explain this gap in your resume? Failed poet: Can we explain together this gap in the earth where we sit, as though it enclosed no longer any land but exposed us recklessly to each other under such light as was for summer days but we capture in pale cylinders to nurture, kill?
Social media did what dumb '90s futurist wanted the internet to, "disintermediate" culture, which is in fact bad in a plural society. US culture runs on subsidiarity. Regulating guns and cars in cities is not like to doing it elsewhere. Old rural folks don't need to hear about Drag Story Hour. Etc.
I think learning to code is basically a subset of learning to write, but so much less natural that the ROI is way lower and maybe cancelled out by the attendant intellectual brittleness and conformity. It's like if you got through an MFA only writing bad blank verse about revolutionary war heroes.
I was also recently forced to post a correction to a metaphor for cheating in college with chatgpt (bsky.app/profile/inck...) The children are not even learning to extend the metaphors 😞
I didn’t give a wit about new pope coverage, but the first American pope being a man with Black ancestry born in Chicago by way of New Orleans by way of Haiti. Names his self after the pope who condemned slavery? In the Trump era? Oh, baebae, I am HERE for it. www.wwltv.com/article/news...
"What if a great piece of art is like a pearl: an irritant covered in a million attempts to make it go away?" That quote is from a paragraph begun by describing the adrenochrome conspiracy theory, and that is the least of the reasons I think you should read this
It’s time to reconsolidate a counterculture and politics against this shit. Science, art, medicine, poetry, philosophy as the beautiful life, the fullness of human civilization, that they want to destroy. Humanism, not cynicism, not slop, not tech “””nerd””” culture
We are sacrificing these kids at the ai altar. Chatgpt isn't a power tool and its users aren't contractors. Its users are general contractors that don't have contracts with anyone or know how to build anything. Chatgpt is their subcontractor, who will get the job after the useless gc gets cut out.
Basically, I have empathy for the people really in this fight, even if they're fancy harvard or times people lol. But there's an easy heuristic they aren't using to filter out "arguments" that are dangerous for them to empower: Is this an argument against argument? An anti-idea idea? Then fuck off.
Again nothing's necessarily wrong with that kind of rhetoric in a futurist tech sales pitch or whatever. But it is very sad how vulnerable to such intellectual scams and cons are leaders at ivy league schools and national newspapers like the new york times. They are getting rolled and we'll all pay.
If a vc "argues" their ai product will soon transubstantiate from metaphorical monkeys with typewriters into a literal mind with autonomy, thoughts, even rights, they aren't really arguing, and certainly not about ai. They're asserting a tendentious concept of the mind, the very thing that argues.
Not that there's always anything wrong with that! In dumb fights between real people it's cathartic, and their own business. But harvard and other powerful institutions of mass attention are letting this artificial intelligentsia (as Ruha Benjamin describes it) hide among real debates, enabling it.
E.g. someone "arguing," like yarvin and rufo do, for the "proposition" that some claim is invalid due to its origins in the woke cathedral rather than its content, is not actually arguing. There is no proposition. They are deploying the aesthetics of argument to assert unfalsifiable slurs as facts.
Harvard professors "debating" yarvin, reporters engaging in technofascist groupchats and tech guys sincerely discussing ai as though it's an app not an ideology are all imo making the same mistake. They miss a simple, inherent exception to the free exchange of ideas: "Ideas" against free exchange.
Clear moment of panic from DHS as they realized that they were about to have TSA turn away over half a million people a day at airports. Regardless, if that many people are getting extra screenings, get to the airport EARLY.
Inviting him to a debate at Harvard, against a Harvard professor, is like inviting a viral particle inside the cell wall to see who can best make use of the proteins and enzymes. He wins just by being there.
"But" is doing a lot in this headline
Great find from @gelliottmorris.com, who got a special look at YouGov crosstabs: "We see a massive 33 percentage point decline in Trump's net approval rating over the last 3 months with people who consume the least news." www.gelliottmorris.com/p/what-do-di...
Implement a 100% tariff and ruin a movie Fourteen Samurai
I got one ticket in my eight years in nyc and it was for doing something that was not illegal in nyc. Nypd stopped me on my bike in the lower east side and wrote me a ticket for breaking a new york *state* law that was superseded by nyc law. According to the bicycle lawyer, this was common. Anyway
Logged on to the bad website and finally addressed the most cyberpunk issue of concern to me. People angrily @ my account there in hindi because, as far as I can tell, my youthful internet handle is also the common acronym for the Karnataka and Kerala Committees of the Indian National Congress
More concretely, web search isn't about finding information; it's about finding *citations* and information. It continues the basic chain of custody of information necessary to recorded knowledge from Works Cited to "well Jim said and he knows." LLMs are specifically powered by not doing citation.
Reply guys emitting "but chatgpt searches for you idiot" is hilarious for this reason But even the more serious argument (that search-like affordances emerge from LLMs' scale and compression as sort of chaotic indices) misses that it redefines search beyond recognition to the end user, breaking it
oops
🚨BREAKING: Full Fourth Circuit DENIES Trump admin motion to stay order blocking Musk/DOGE access to personal data at Social Security Admin. Data will remain out of Musk/ DOGE’s hands. A BIG win for @democracyforward.org and its clients! Follow Democracy Docket for details. www.democracydocket.com
Not that GPUs don't do anything! I have enjoyed a video game or two. AR would be cool but I'm all set on dystopia rn. Snake oil was real (basically better fish oil) except when it wasn't, or didn't do what the salesman and his shills said. And then the bastards printed up new labels in the next town
See I think we've been confusing the snake oil with the shit made out of it. Crypto, vr, ar and ai are elixers. The snake oil is GPUs, circuits for modeling worlds (multidimensional vectors) instead of minds (memory and logic), which prop up share prices post-Moore's Law and draw insane capex spend
Before the ai panic and the nft panic was the metaverse panic, and before that was the web3 panic, and I think a lot about how all together they are a decade-long mass-delusion-based marketing campaign for graphics processing units
"I like freedom. Let me drive my car" perfectly captures the myopia and idiocy of this culture. A driver in NYC is not free in any sense. They are literally rats controlled by colored lights in a maze
Just to be clear I DON'T think this is that likely, and I DO have the movie The Untouchables burned into my memory because it was in the box of VHS tapes that raised me But it feels possible, and is not very different from the reality in other countries I've lived in, primarily/ironically Venezuela
There is a very prohibition-era world imaginable in my lifetime, but instead of booze creating violence it's everything, and instead of Eliot Ness versus Al Capone it's a masked, militarized national police force versus anyone who didn't pay the taxes and/or fealty. Imagine prohibition but backwards
Sometimes I think about a future where ICE has Enforced all the Immigration it can, and gets down to enforcing the Customs. And the law around imports is an inscrutable mess because tariffs are constantly being decreed, fluctuating and being carved out for friends of the regime
literally only Teslas meet this standard www.kbb.com/car-news/stu...
I’m ringing in 100 days in Coudersport, PA, in a Trump +60 county. We have a case to make. Local hospital lost its OB-GYN unit this year, will do worse with Medicaid cuts. 2 school districts are large employers, those teachers’ loan payments are about to go up. 4/30 4pm Courthouse Square
Was it him www.youtube.com/watch?v=83m2...
This op-ed points to an important and little-discussed aspect of the Trump administration's "anti-antisemitism" crackdown. In the name of protecting Jews, they are effectively claiming governmental right to determine who counts as Jewish at all, and therefore is worthy of government protection.
And now, a note on Bill Owens who, until this past week, was the executive producer of 60 Minutes. We’ll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.
Can we not misuse the term Luddite? The Luddites were not ignorant of technology or against its use. They were against the use of exploitative technology. LLMs are an exploitative technology, so the parallel works, to some extent, just not in the way OP seems to think.
Mark Zuckerberg personally insisted that Facebook’s ai “companions” do sexual fantasy roleplay and be available to kids because he never got over failing to rip off Vine. www.wsj.com/tech/ai/meta...
I understand this view but find it unsophisticated. Even if we grant that it was always going to be heard as Defund the Police Completely Somehow rather than Defund the Police by Some Amount Obviously, it shifted the Overton window in a way more measured and accurate slogans would not have
the wild thing is that his own family can’t even explain him, he’s just apparently always been a miserable rat son of a bitch
Classic tool-focus vs user-focus nerd fight. LLMs have formal use cases in that they do something someone wants. Who cares? Really, who are the "pseudo-Luddites?" I think people see that use cases can be socially useless or harmful, and so are irrelevant, and so aren't what they're talking about.
It’s perfectly possible that large language models have wonderful use cases, but specific examples of them seem unusually elusive, whereas unbuttressed assertions that the use cases are clear or obvious from people who refuse to answer any follow up questions are rather thick on the ground.
Something similar is true of science and scholarship, of course, but their rigor makes it qualitatively different (better, and expensive) as a way of knowing. Journalism doesn't seem to me to always require such rigor lol. And when it doesn't the effort at objectivity naturally devolves into naivety
That's not at all an insult to the industry I've spent twenty years in. Reporters are dumb because they are trained to see that as their job, which is not unreasonable. Objectivity IS a kind of stupidity, the controlled confrontation of one's own inherent foolishness, like a Dunning-Kruger vaccine.
Tbc I think Chomsky (and the other guy I guess but it read like Chomsky) missed the emergent, aintentional nature of news's failure for good reasons. He simply assumed the capacities one tends to in reporters, like literacy and skepticism. But many reporters actually operate as very gullible idiots.
I didn't fully agree with Manufacturing Consent because it suggested more intention than I think exists, but I'm very glad I struggled through it. The analysis of the corporate and cultural role of powerful liars at the core of traditional news media has kept me sane
🚨NEW: Wisconsin judge threatens to go on strike in support of Judge Hannah Dugan, arrested by the FBI. Monica Isham: “I have no intention of allowing anyone to be taken out of my courtroom by ICE & sent to a concentration camp without the due process the constitutions we swore to support require.”👏
Also probably gets troll support from the right as noise in conversations about voter suppression, the electoral college, etc.
lately it doesn’t always feel like society’s trending in a positive direction but one thing that’s been an unequivocal good is assigned seats at the movies
“you can’t dislike me for using it, either, okay? you can’t. that would be mean and you’re not supposed to be mean. if you dislike me for using it, how are you different from the fascists? so much for the tolerant left, i guess. so, are we agreed that i’m special and good and this tech is fine?”
let them eat cake but make it pedagogy
Agree overall but I don’t see this symmetry. I see people critiquing the push to rapidly adopt LLMs everywhere, in part because it prevents good uses, the middle ground. And I see LLM capital, plus some people who want in on that money or are dumb, dismissing any outside critique as hysterical.
Vance's Easter visit to Rome clogged its streets with a 40-vehicle entourage. He also demanded the Coliseum be closed so he and his family could tour it alone. Tourists who properly booked slots in advance got screwed. He's apparently the first to make that demand. Then he didn't bother to show up.
The rich and powerful think ai is becoming agi because they don’t understand human intelligence or care to. To them it is obviously what their predecessors thought it was, mechanical, a list of rules. They must insist that’s true because their status came from forcing people to pretend that it was.
[texting all republicans] Found your institute
Thought process indistinguishable from my child arguing “but I WANT to jump on your neck” only enhanced with the royal we
Shoutout to my fellow preschooler parents right now having to listen to someone prattle on incessantly about inane nonsense they just made up and also listen to their child
Republicans plan to scrap the US audit regulator, the PCAOB, that was set up after the Enron scandal www.ft.com/content/d8a0...
Had not heard or recognized this but it scans, and would explain a lot
Every bully and bad boss I've had showed me that people don't really hurt each other because they are smart and cruel but because they are stupid and powerful. Cruelty kind of _is_ just stupidity and intelligence, broadly-defined, kind of the only legitimate power.
Arresting judges is the kind of crackdown you see in a police state. This is how dictators take power. They manufacture crises, undermine our institutions, and erode our checks and balances. If they’ll come for one, they’ll come for all.
BREAKING: The World Food Program says its food stocks in Gaza have run out under Israel’s nearly 8-week-old blockade, ending a main source of sustenance for hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in the territory.
I have no opinion on Stancil. I have no opinion on the discussions in his posts or their replies. I don't think they are really discussions. I think they purport to discuss in ways requiring well-defined terms, which posts and replies don't use. So I agree this (type of) site (of exchange) is broken
The Pittsburgh Land Bank was created in 2014—but didn’t move a single property until Mayor Ed Gainey made it a priority. He brought the County & PPS to the table, cut through red tape, and now 127 properties have been transferred. This is what leadership looks like.
Replied to rather than reposted the ai trolling by the youtube comedian. But that type of “argument” is so malign and metastatic I feel like the reply is an evergreen form: Stop making up a guy who said that [x] is [y] The real people you’re mad at said that [x] is [x] And [x] clearly sucks ass
No one says LLMs suck at what they try to do, or aren't useful for anything anyone wants to do. What LLMs try to do sucks, so who cares how good they are at it. And being useful means improving on what exists, at a cost that's justified by that improvement.
"Are WiFi-enabled induction stovetops happy? Do toasters that print photos on toast contemplate the nature of art? No but I wrote that they do to annoy you into clicking this link."
Welcome to the resistance, Trump's own current lawyers.
Lowering energy
Whether in service to his KGB handler, his degenerate golf buddies' drunk rants, his oligarchs saying oligarchy will make men men again, his immaculate toddler id, his stochastic cult of myopic huckster yesmen's latest random emission, or just him hating his country for telling him no, this is it.
That's not to excuse such thinking or minimize its brutal racism. I just think a lot of antisocial behavior doesn't result from directly cruel intentions towards others, but from indirect cruelty like the entitled refusal to learn and think beyond one's early experience, even when given great power.
This is what I mean. For a guy like Alito, presumably talented at formal logic, any shift in the received categories he once formalized is inadmissible because it would limit his talent's value. Black, LGBTQIA+, Christian, etc. are all necessarily equal classes because *he* can't think otherwise.
The opposite of antisemitism isn't zionism. The opposite of racism isn't "colorblind" fantasy. The opposites of things are not necessarily their negations. Idiots who think in simplistic binaries are taking over and it's going to kill us all.
Omg 🤌
I don't get it but glad you're here : )
Musk is, and has always been, little more than High-IQ Man™ And IQ, when presented as an innate quality rather than psychometric astrology, is just abstract eugenics.
Scarier result to me is the first and staunchest one, 62% to 29% FOR mass voter suppression. I'd guess it's because the proposed form (impractical and pointless ID at that scale) seems fine to most people who don't grasp the racist history of US voting or probability theory. But it's the ballgame.
we're really really suffering from the small number of journalists of color in mainstream media. truly.
If there is a tomorrow after this administration, we must refuse rehabilitation book and speaking tours for those responsible. That was a HUGE mistake the literary industrial complex made last time. Some of you reading this skeet insisted that everyone read Hillbilly Elegy; please sit with that.
You guys Elon Musk appointed the head of the IRS and President Trump didn’t even know about it.
The smartest thing Bluesky can do right now. I'll die on the hill that the main appeal of a microblogging service (as opposed to Insta, Vine etc) is getting your news, confirmed and quickly. That Twitter abandoned this makes it a huge lane for Bluesky to drive into.
Source, I believe: www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeau...
My latest for MSNBC: The makers of TurboTax gave Trump’s inauguration $1M. They just got their money’s worth. "The end of Direct File fits neatly in the predatory economy Donald Trump and his Republican enablers want." www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnb...
So far gen ai like cryptocurrency has exactly one clear, non-trivial use and that is crime www.theregister.com/AMP/2025/04/...
I find “people don’t actually know how things work” has a lot of explanatory power. I don’t mean this in a holier-than-thou way. I’m only vaguely aware of how my microwave or the car radio work. A lot of modern life is assuming the functioning of complex tech and models.
Need a shorter way to say Every Accusation is a Confession, perhaps a name for the instances? Accufessions? Confusations!? asharangappa.substack.com/p/whats-the-...
I get that reporters have to call balls and strikes or whatever but they do not have to hang around the minors and little league games and officiate dugout fights
Ok so yeah, this has quickly become the #1 misunderstanding about the canceled grants the grants are not “subsidies” or “entitlements” to Harvard or Princeton or whatever they aren’t going into universities’ endowments they are competitive contracts won by these universities to do research