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This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.
OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.
And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
I've been thinking about "you cannot solve systemic problems with individual action" a lot lately and it's like. It's not that it's wrong exactly but I feel like it's become a thought-terminating cliche, a rallying cry for apathy and inaction.
You can't change anything with your actions so don't bother. You going vegetarian won't shut down a factory farm so don't bother. You buying something in sustainable packaging won't make a dent in the landfill so don't bother. You donating five bucks to a charity won't solve poverty so don't bother. You buying ethically-made clothing won't stop sweatshops from operating so don't bother.
I agree that the only way these problems are going to get solved is if the government enacts regulations to do so, but the key point here is that the government is not going to spontaneously do that. Everybody says they want to protect the environment and for people to make a living wage in the abstract but as soon as regulations start being passed people start throwing fits about how it's impacting their lives.
If the government banned factory farms, meat would suddenly be priced like a luxury item and people would throw fits about how poor people can't afford protein anymore, if they banned plastic packaging people would throw fits about how we're expected to bear the increased production costs, if they banned imports of items made in sweatshops or by slave labor people would throw fits about how they can't get their coffee and chocolate and electronics anymore.
There's a post on here about how community river clean-ups don't actually make much of an impact on water pollution, because the major cause of water pollution isn't random trash but industrial and agricultural run-off. But the clean-ups are still extremely valuable because they get the community invested in the cause of water pollution, the community starts taking pride in their local environment and start actually caring about environmental regulations on a personal level, and that grants activists the buy-in to push for changes that actually can reduce water pollution.
We absolutely must get individual buy-in before we can expect systemic change. You can't solve systemic problems with individual action, but you can't solve them without it either. Making small changes to your consumption habits isn't going to fix the world, but it gets people invested in and connected to the cause, it makes them feel like they're part of a larger movement, and it primes them to think of these regulations as wins for that movement rather than a sacrifice being forced upon them by the government.
"No individual solution for systemic problems" seems like it's just become a way to justify not having to actually do any work to address issues you claim to care about. It's just "surely someone will do something eventually" writ large.
All computer safety ever for the past 30 odd years: "if you go on the internet — especially if you're under 18 — lie about everything. Lie about your name. Lie about your age. Give as little information away about yourself as you possibly can. Obfuscate, falsify, and omit anything and everything as otherwise They Will Get Your Ass. Actually, avoid it in the first place if you can altogether."
All computer safety(?) since like 2020: "it's imperative we make every 8 year old scan a passport before letting them use their LeapFrog™️. Always-on connectivity required."
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1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago
2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.
Hi im a librarian amd that's not now this works. If a library allows you to have a digital card and not live in the area, you are NOT taking away resources from other people, that's not how anything works. Please keep doing it!!! The more people that use our services, the more money we can get from funding sources!!! Please use us!!! We are not utilized enough, by people in or out of our community. Thanks.
in my little pony universe youd go to a job interview and theyd be like so how does your cutiemark reflect your dedication to this position. And every time youd have to spew some bullshit about how your cutiemark of two tennis rackets actually means youre a team player and good at multitasking and view the market like a playing field. or whatever. and you wouldnt even get the job
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Not that it was necessary, but I looked up definitions, and yeah, obviously "taking a photo under someone's skirt" is literally it. Fuck Snopes so fucking hard. I need them to explain to me how it doesn't fit the definition to a fucking t:
And what the FUCK do they mean, "public setting"?? Yeah, upskirts are mistly taken in public fucking settings! That's not an eycuse, that's part of the fucking issue
And truly what do they mean it was in public? Does that mean that the upskirt photos people take on subways dont count because other people are around? OF COURSE IT WAS IN PUBLIC THATS HOW THE PHOTO GOT TAKEN IF SHE HAD BEEN PHOTOGRAPHED AT HOME IT WOULD HAVE BEEN BREAKING AND ENTERING
what do they mean "it wasn't taken surreptitiously"? there isn't any implication here except that because Freda Wallace was in public, she consented to any pictures that might be taken of her? this is just "look at the way she* was dressed". snopes is doing rape culture.
according to archives the first version of the snopes article listed it as "true," but it seems to have been changed. given rowling's widely known history of extreme and aggressive litigiousness i'd be willing to bet her legal team probably objected and snopes caved
and you know what? i am REALLY sick of these ads that are openly mocking people for being concerned about the products they’re selling.
Amazon’s super bowl ad where the Alexa mocks Chris Hemsworth for being worried about giving spy software control over his entire life. Waymo’s ad with the intro “the robots are coming!” mocking people who are rightfully extremely concerned about sharing the road with, or riding in, self-driving cars.
i don’t know, it’s just genuinely insane to me. “Oh, you have legitimate concerns about our shitty product? sounds like you’re just lame!!!” like what kind of “quiet part out loud” marketing is that?
so this post blew the hell up — which is i’m sure a sign that things are very normal and fine and none of us are remotely frustrated by this kind of thing — but it’s given me time to think about how to articulate the SECOND thing that pisses me off about these ads, which is that they don’t even bother to address the concerns.
i feel like any normal ad would go, for example, “i know you’ve heard that this shaving cream might give you cancer. but it doesn’t! and also it smells nice!”
but THESE ads mock you, and then go “anyway, your concerns are invalid because our self-driving cars that run over children at crosswalks have heated seats!”
it reminds me, in a much less comical way, of that scene from Emperors New Groove when the angel and devil on Kronk’s shoulders are having a debate, and the devil goes “don’t listen to that guy, because look what i can do” and then does a handstand. Only these are real-life commercials. That they expect you to take seriously.
I cannot stand the parodies of modern major general, they're overdone and simply not as good as the original. They've done them about everything, whatever topic, big or small.
And when i notice one of them my eyes will always start to roll.
The diction's always slurry when they rush the complicated words, and adding many fricatives will turn it so cacophonous. The slanted rhymes are silly and they keep just making more and more, please someone stop the parodies of modern major general.
The scanning of the lyrics in the meter is unbearable, they emphazise the syllables in ways that are untenable, in short in matters musical, prosodic and ephemeral, i cannot stand the parodies of modern major general!
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Hey, UK folks! Waterstones is having a 3-day pre-order sale that includes the UK paperback of Enshittification (which drops on Sept 1). Use SUMMER26 to get 25% off.
As a technology, AI isn't exceptional. It's not exceptionally wicked. It's not exceptionally good. Take away the accompanying, galactic-scale stock-swindle, and we'd call AI's applications "plug-ins" and we'd use them and abuse them in the same way that we've used every other technology:
https://www.normaltech.ai/
As a destructive economic pathology, AI is extraordinary. AI boosters have spent a baffling and terrifying sum of money – over $1.4T, most of that in the past year – on the promise of making as many workers unemployed as possible, while lowering the wages of the meager survivors of this jobspocalypse. To make things worse, AI can't do the jobs it's replacing: AI is predicated on the premise that the monopolies, duopolies and cartels that control the global economy can deliberately worsen their products without suffering economic or regulatory consequences, because they're the only game in town.
In service to this bubble, AI companies have suborned regional governments into running roughshod over environmental and planning review in order to build endless acres of data centers, many of which will likely end up casualties of the imminent bubble-pop, never to be switched on or even completed. What an indignity to have your farm or house seized through eminent domain, only to see it razed and replaced by a weed-choked empty field, a lonely foundation slab, or an abandoned empty building that could only ever be repurposed for laser-tag or an ICE concentration-camp:
This is just one of the many negative effects of AI that can be traced to the scale of the bubble. Were it not for the imperative to turn more than a trillion dollars of losses into a profit, we would not have the aggressive, site-destroying scraping epidemic. Nor would we see AI crammed into every part of every product and service we use. And of course, in the absence of the investment bubble, businesses wouldn't be firing productive workers and replacing them with defective chatbots.
The single most salient fact about AI is the investment bubble, not the technical characteristics of chatbots or recent advances in statistical inference. AI's investor story is an incoherent tangle of predictions about AI's future, ranging from the outlandish ("Once we spend enough money, AI will become God and solve all our problems, including our profitability crisis") to the dystopian ("The majority of jobs in the economy will be done by our chatbots, and the employers who previously employed those workers will split the wage savings with us").
None of these stories are plausible, which raises an urgent question: why have the world's wealthiest investors been so eager to hand over trillions to finance this bubble?
I have previously written about one reason that billionaires find the AI story so compelling: at root, many billionaires just don't believe most other people are actually, fully real. How could they? Achieving billionairehood requires that you inflict pain on vast numbers of people. If you truly believed that those people were as real as you are, you'd never be able to look yourself in the mirror. Whether it's Leona Helmsley's claim that "only the little people pay taxes," or Elon Musk's habit of calling people who disagree with him "NPCs," the whole ideological project of billionaireism is shot through with a kind of solipsism:
This is true even in one-on-one encounters: for the Epstein Class, the children raped on his island weren't fully real – certainly not as real as their own children. It's even more true for the people that billionaires experience as statistical artifacts, such as Jeff Bezos's vast army of drivers and warehouse workers, with their sky-high on-the-job injury rates and the everyday indignity of their piss-bottles. It gets worse for social media bosses like Mark Zuckerberg, for whom AI's principal appeal is the prospect of ending socializing on social media, swapping your mulish friends for pliable chatbots who will organize their interactions with you to maximize your platform usage and thus the number of ads you see:
I think billionaire solipsism can account for much of the malinvestment in this obvious bubble, but I don't think it's the whole story. Rather, I think there's a whole cohort of investors who don't believe in AI, but believe that other people will believe in AI.
This is a well-established investment principle. As Keynes wrote, the point of investing isn't necessarily to pick the most beautiful contestant to win the beauty contest – it's to pick the contestant that the other judges will hand the crown to:
In other words, you don't get rich from stock speculation by identifying the businesses whose profitability will grow the most – you get rich by identifying the businesses that other investors will pile into, pushing the price up. All you need to do is sell your shares after the price spike, but before anyone else figures out that the business is a turkey. It's like that old joke: "I don't need to run faster than the bear (market), I just have to run faster than you."
From the perspective of a cynical AI investor, the question isn't, "Can AI do your job?" The question is, "Can an AI salesman convince your boss that an AI can do your job?" So long as enough bosses are convinced to fire workers and replace them with AI, AI valuation will continue to climb, and if they time the market right, they can get out before those valuations crash. This proposition gets even sweeter if the CEO of the AI company is in bed with financial regulators and stock exchanges, and can force your financial advisor to buy his worthless AI stock with "little people's" retirement savings:
A bet that bosses will fire workers and replace them with AI is a good wager. Bosses are absolute suckers for this scam. Bosses hate the fact that they can't translate their plans into action without first having a series of ego-shattering confrontations with workers who actually know how to do things, who insist that those plans are illegal, stupid, impossible or will kill people:
For these bosses, AI is the chance to wire the toy steering wheel they play with all day directly into the corporate drive-train. With enough AI slaves, the boss can run the company all on their own:
In other words, you don't need to be a solipsist to bet on AI. It is sufficient to believe that bosses are solipsists, who can be relied upon to empty the corporate coffers in exchange for worker-replacing magic beans.
This is true in many scam sectors. I'm sure that most of the people who finance the supplements that Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan hawk understand that they're just a way to give yourself very expensive piss. They don't have to believe supplements work to believe that there is an army of desperate and credulous young men who will give anything for the promise they dangle.
Likewise, you don't have to believe that Gwyneth Paltrow can help women "regulate their periods" and "correct their hormonal imbalances" by selling them rocks to stuff in their vaginas. You just have to believe that between patriarchy-induced body shame and patriarchy-driven medical neglect, there's an army of desperate women out there who will buy those rocks and risk their lives by sticking them inside their bodies:
AI is even worse than vagina-rocks, of course. When the bubble bursts, when the seven AI companies that make up 35% of the S&P 500 tank, when a third of the US stock market is vaporized overnight, our governments will reflexively turn to austerity, the go-to response to every financial crisis. Austerity is fascism's best recruiting tool:
When the AI bubble bursts, the defective chatbots that replaced skilled workers will disappear with it, leaving us scrambling to get that work done after the workers who understood it have retrained, retired, or exited the workforce. AI is the asbestos we're shoveling into the walls of our civilization and our descendants will be digging it out for generations:
Long after the AI bubble bursts, we'll be dealing with its catastrophic carbon emissions. The Second Law of Thermodynamics isn't up for debate. Once we sink enough therms into the sea, we are losing the ice-caps.
AI is an ordinary technology, but the AI bubble is extraordinary: extraordinarily toxic and extraordinarily dangerous. The source of that danger is financiers, and they are motivated by a mix of solipsism and a belief in other people's solipsism. For them, the most exciting investment hypothesis is that "hell is other people":
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:
they don't tell you this but when an event is advertised as "for all ages" they mean kids. they mean kids. if you, a grown-up, show up expecting to do the arts'n'crafts, you're the weirdo. even though they said "all ages."
great news everynyan, the event that inspired me to make this post in anticipation had an art'n'craft that WAS in fact for all ages, including grown-ups. (in fact it was mosaic-making from recycled glass, with the tools to cut pieces down to size yourself if needed, so it was decidedly for people of a certain age.)
I understand 100% where you're coming from and I have a rant on what the organizers probably meant by "all ages". This is coming from spending too many years running public festivals for anywhere from 100 to 20,000 people at every size of venue from school cafeteria to national convention center, though of course there are exceptions.
The organizers almost certainly really did intend that anyone of any age was welcome to participate in the activities. The problem, I have found, seems to come in 2 parts: the audience's socio-cultural expectations and how they respond to peer pressure (real or imagined), and the likelihood of who shows up at certain kinds of events depending on the regional demographics and how the event is advertised.
My rambling below the cut:
Take this with a grain of salt but I find it interesting and have spent a decade in arguments about it, so. The (US) audience for many hands-on / interactive events that appeal to both kids and adults, based on all the marketing data I have personally collected or paid tens of thousands of dollars for from third-party agencies, basically says that women ages 30-45 are driving almost all the social media views. Many of those women are trying to plan educational and fun excursions for their children ages 2-13.
The problem comes when you, the adult who is actually invited to participate in said activities, comes to an event with a lot of families with children ages 2-13. People with social graces will say: "I need to let the children enjoy this; it is uncomfortable if I take a spot from a child. Also if I am a man or otherwise have some caution I might be worried that as a solo adult surrounded by kids I will be seen as suspicious." So they just watch from a distance and then usually go home. Which to me sucks because there's often nothing inherent about the activity that makes it enjoyable only to kids.
But too many events don't seem to be at the stage of understanding you need to signal in 1) the advertising and 2) the actual physical setup that both adults and kids are welcome, or need separate stations, or hours that are for certain age groups. I think this is why a lot of museums started doing adult nights, especially science museums. If you ever go to the Exploratorium in San Francisco, this will be abundantly clear: the museum is genuinely designed to be fascinating to anyone from a preschooler to a postdoc but unless there's space to allow for all and curated exhibit design with big and small tables, for example, it triggers the mental block of "let the kids have this".
Anyway I spent a decade of my life arguing two things:
Built the event so that both kids and adults have separate and mixed space and train the activity leaders how to welcome and engage the whole spectrum of participants.
Recognize that sometimes you actually do need to provide a separate interaction time or space to make the adults feel welcome, especially childless adults, or at least signage to make sure everyone understands that no, it's actually the point.
I usually work on events that have "low threshold, high ceiling" activities so your mileage may vary. (Meaning: anyone can try doing the thing, even at a very basic or shallow level; the ones who want to go deep focus or discussion about what's behind the activity will find the presenters are VERY capable of talking details or having a back-and-forth about it all day.)
I had a really fun time running an event at a big public television station's festival where just as many adults without kids accompanying them did the activity as kids did, and stayed for a full hour or more as it really was pure fun, and also sensory-friendly compared to much of the other activities. I also wore myself out trying to argue with co-event organizers over the years that hands-on stuff really does appeal to everybody BUT sit-down performances and lectures usually really do have age categories, and it can be a big waste of money to try to combine the two in one mega-event if you don't have ticket revenue or reservations to judge interest by in advance.
That said, I definitely find more events run by neurodivergent people or audiences try harder to be welcoming – especially if the presenters get to engage in their special interests with all kinds of people.
I could write an essay on online or hybrid event design as well, featuring such sections as "you need to ASSIGN SOMEONE TO TELL THE ONLINE PEOPLE WTF IS HAPPENING AND MAKE SURE THEY CAN SEE/HEAR" and "people's attention spans rarely exceed one hour, and even that is a lot when online". Gretchen McCulloch did a really fabulous blog post series during the pandemic about taking LingCon online only and what they learned about event design. If you enjoy gatherings as much as I do, I also highly recommend Priya Parker's book The Art of Gathering because she basically point blank says what vibes and outcomes are you trying to achieve, does the event model you believe you need actually achieve those things (whether it's a baby shower or a happy hour or a conference), and what do the attendees actually want that would make them happy to be part of it.
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