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I feel like it hardly matters anymore, but Flock isn't the only unsecured intrusive data selling crime inventing AI hallucinating automated license plate reading mass surveillance camera operators. Axon and Motorola and Amazon and ALPR and CCTV and security cameras should be equally rejected. All surveillance must go.
It's funny that the online tropical plant community - a community that basically only came into existence during Covid - has already splintered into several microcommunities with distinctly different characteristics. Let me stereotype them for you:
Monstera People: The Monstera deliciosa is the archetypical pandemic houseplant, so you think these guys would be the chillest. Incorrect. Monstera people love nothing more than to scour the garden centers of the world for the most tortured, fucked up, barely-viable Monstera they can imagine. This one has no chlorophyll and looks like it went through a blender? Perfection. They literally call themselves 'sport hunters'. Approach with extreme caution.
Philodendron People: Gatcha Enthusiast behaviour. Gotta catch 'em all. Aa philodendron person will spend hours explaining the minute differences between two plants that look basically the same, and they will expect you to listen. One of those plants cost 400 dollars. They will expect you to understand. Also come in the Moss Pole Guy varient, which is basically just pokemon training in real life.
Anthurium People: Eugenicists. Anthuriums hybridize quite easily, unlike everything else on this list, so it's possible for people to cook up their own unique variety in their own home if they're so inclined. This is the sort of power with which most people should not be trusted. They'll be measuring sinus curvature with callipers any day now.
Hoya People: Control Freaks. Hoyas can look nice, but on some level they are plants for people who don't like plants. Every Leaf is Sacred. Nothing must ever change. This one grew two inches last year and it's throwing off the whole display. You wonder if they wouldn't secretly be happier with artificial plants.
Alocasia People: These are the grindset side-hustle guys. They just won't stop talking about how it makes total sense to spend 500 bucks on a two-leaf plant that will probably survive, you know, if you keep it in a hermetically sealed box and pH balance your water enough and never look at it, because once you get it to start making corms you can sell them for a steady stream of passive income that definitely isn't undermined by the fact that the only people who will buy those corms from you are also just doing it to eventually sell corms.
Syngonium People: Stoners. It's the only explanation for those varietal names.
Epipremnum/Pothos People: This is my plant :) He's green :)
Oh, also: you don't get to choose which of these you are. There will come a day when a plant will simply find you and you will be forever changed by it. My plant obsession began with a half-dead syngonium and jade plant I found in my apartment building's back staircase. Now I lie awake thinking about how I can get my hands on a variegated Philodendron billietiae all night
#can we come up with a funny bespoke stereotype for me#we have so many marantaceae around#i was told they'd be difficult#they're fine and they won't die#even the ones i don't like (tags via @robustcornhusk)
Maranta People: As far as I can tell, there are exactly two kinds of maranta people. The first kind are actually mostly cat/dog people who decided that it might be nice to have some plants as well and picked out the humble maranta as the coolest/most interesting plant that won't poison even the worst-behaved of house animals. The other type are people who live with the first group and are desperately resentful of the aforementioned worst-behaved house animals for not letting them get other plants.
Carnivorous Plant People: This community predated the 2020 boom of online plant content and it's more than a little salty about it. Unlike their water, which is being filtered through at least two phases of reverse osmosis and one of distillation before it's even in the same room as their beloved collection. No, you can't touch them. As much curators of beautiful antique websites as they are of plants.
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just watched a star trek episode about a planet that relied so heavily on it's computer system that they all forgot the basics of their own knowledge. and that allowed them to miss the fact that they were being posioned with radiation and nearly ending their civilization. because they couldn't use their own knowledge to figure things out. i bring this up for no reason in particular
I do think the Hank Green AI thing makes it abundantly clear that if you have ADHD or any other mental illness and/or you are prone to addiction you need to avoid AI at all costs. This shit will rope you in, and if you have a mental illness that say, starves your brain of dopamine, you're gonna be extra susceptible to that. I won't use AI for a lot of reasons but one of the big ones is knowing how it would fuck with my ADHD and bipolar. Like yes, it's bad for the environment and giving money to rich scumbags and runs on plagarism, but even more than all that, it's straight up not safe at all and you really shouldn't use it if for no other reason than to protect yourself from whatever the fuck it might do to you.
Dropping the schadenfreudish-humor tone of this blog for a sec...
The greatest greediest minds of my generation (and surrounding generations) have been thinking -- successfully -- about how to turn human minds away from family, friends, nature, travel, hobbies, goals, dreams, even truth itself...
... toward profit machines made of treadmills, lack of self-efficacy, and addiction. LLMs are (as many comments to the OP have noticed) merely the latest iteration of a longstanding trend that includes many kinds of games and social-media systems. If there's a recommender engine or a tuning loop underneath it anywhere, it's been designed to bogart human attention.
Whoever is to blame in the Hank Green mess, it's not Hank. It's not. And he deserves a lot of credit for admitting his LLM use without turning it into a "well, everybody's doing it, you must be too, and if not, why aren't you?!" cudgel to beat resisters with, and for being open that it hasn't been good for him and he isn't finding getting away from it easy.
I think a lot of the USians who are metaphorically beating him up over it are doing so out of the good old Puritan/Calvinist streak that the US can't seem to shed: if Hank were a good person, a pure person, he'd have resisted temptation. He'd have put that machine in its proper place, whatever that is. Get thee behind me, chatbot.
This both underestimates the enormity of the challenge here, especially with huge hype machines -- and in many cases our very bosses on whom our livelihoods depend -- shoving these technologies down our throats, and overestimates human capacity to resist carefully-tuned assaults on how our brains work.
It is assuredly true that some of us are more vulnerable to this sort of assault than others. I myself have a likely predisposition to addiction because of a parent who struggled with addiction (and died of a complication of an addiction), and I have gone to some lengths to escape that legacy. Is that why I won't use chatbots? Partly, yes. It's also why I have avoided a lot of corporate social media (and why my browser is loaded up with adblocks, not least here on this hellsite, whose "For You" feed I do not use because that's the recommender-system addiction machine in action). Vulnerability isn't evenly distributed.
It doesn't follow that any of us is immune.
I also think a lot of the hate flowing Hank Green's way is worry displacement and rationalization. I'm not Hank Green, I'm one of the good chatbot users! I've seen some of that come my way too. Not open hate, thankfully, but a sort of resentful disbelief at seeing any resister, a desire to erase me because I cast too harsh a light on those who do use chatbots. If chatbot use is indeed inevitable, no blame or shame can attach. But if it's not...
I've been thinking a lot lately about how to approach all this with my undergraduate students. A lot of it is pulling the curtain away from the evil, of course, and since I have power in my classrooms I can to an extent force them to confront that evil. More of it is offering them tools, the same tools I use to exert more control over my information environments, and to fill some of the mental space that evil tends to hijack. Yet more is telling them -- truthfully -- that they matter, their intellectual development matters, and I want to hear from them.
I don't know if it works. I hope it works. Because I don't want them going Hank Green's way. If I fail and they do, though, I hope they come back with Hank Green's openness and integrity.
also you know what's fucking great? having a union is fucking great.
Even with super small things - like today, I was on a colleague's calendar to schedule a meeting, and I accidentally saw some information that should not have been visible on their public calendar.
And instead of either freezing and not knowing what to do and so doing nothing, or trying to figure out how to talk to them individually (might solve the immediate problem but it's not necessarily a one-off problem, and also puts the ball on them individually to deal with solving it), or trying to figure out who else to talk to about it (probably disclosing the stuff to even more people)...I just grabbed my union rep! Told him what happened, he knew how ask the relevant questions without making me share more of the private info than I needed to, and he let me know he would pass it along to the appropriate people, and so it is not on either me or the individual colleague to solve!
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The last game I played was Tetris. I am so doomed. Especially if I'm in Tetris Spoilers version in which case I'm dead over and over and over but surviving anyway. Dooooooooooomed. At least the sex will be great. On the other hand, I-prime. Dooooooooooom.
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