Hey There.

Abusers and creeps are not some species of especially heinous animal or alien or monster wearing the face of a human. They're people. And you NEED to drill it into your head that they are people because you NEED to remember that people are capable of doingn heinous shit. And you are a person. And your loved ones are people.

When you're in school, the cognitive tasks are there for the explicit purpose of being brain exercises. It's weightlifting. It is FOR building your mental muscles and making you a stronger thinker and planner. "Offloading the cognitive tasks", then, is just Not Doing The Weightlifting. What happens when you pay for your gym membership and just stand around messing around on your phone? Nothing. Nothing happens. Just money leaving your wallet. Nothing else.

Using AI is a short term pleasure that is going to fuck you over in the long term, and by the time you realize that you didn't build the necessary muscles you need for the cognitive tasks required of your ACTUAL JOB (or, like, adult life in general), it's going to be too late to do anything about it... except going back and doing the real work all over again to get you up to speed.

A "book" is (a slightly outdated beyond this specific topic) term for your union card, which states that you're a member in good standing of your local/union and ostensibly means that you have the coinciding skills that go with the title of journeyworker or apprentice or whatever. Typically, to become a journeyman, you serve an apprenticeship (usually 5 years) and then have to take a test of some sort to prove you've acquired all the necessary skills to earn the qualification. The card/book is the proof that you have a basic level of competency.

Sometimes though certain locals, usually in the South or other places where right-to-work or similar attitudes are stronger, will "sell books," which is to say they will allow people who either haven't served an apprenticeship or passed a skills test to buy their card so that they may work on union jobs.

There's a myriad of reasons and reasonings on why a local might do this, but on the ground, it means that if I'm on a big job, anyone from areas or locals that have a reputation for selling books is automatically assumed to be under-qualified. This sucks, because I've known plenty of badass hands from Southern Locals, but because they come from book-selling locals, they had to overcome that stigma. To an extent, this whole thing is self-regulating because if you bought a book and can't hack it, you only come to a travel job once before they will never invite you back, but it is a constant source of sand in the gears for the whole labour management process.

That will follow you for the rest of your life. That will completely lock you out of your chosen field and all it's related feilds forever.

What are you going to do when you're still paying off a degree that you can't use because you've been flagged in the system? What are you going to do when your future employers run a police check and find that you've been charged with occupational fraud? Do you think they're going to hire you anywhere when that comes up? Do you have any idea how difficult it is to get a job with an unrelated criminal charge, let alone one directly tied to your job?

Let's talk about property law for a second. Property law is one of the worst of the laws. It's not as simple as "this is Mine." When something is yours, there is no inherent Yoursness to it. Being "yours" just means that you have the right to do a bunch of stuff with it. Those rights are nearly always limited in some kind of way.

Easy examples: homeowner's associations, where you contract some of your rights away in order to have the privilege to associate with the vile racist past of excluding Black people from accessible housing. (Most people who join HOAs have no real choice in the matter these days, so that's not me condemning people who join, just the HOAs themselves.)

Another example is rental property, where you purchase the right to occupy for a certain period of time. It's yours... but if you engage in certain types of damage, etc., you have to pay someone else about it, and if you don't keep paying, you lose the right.

For these streaming services and digital downloads, the vast majority of them are not "purchases" of the "movie" or "show." They are the purchase of a license allowing you to download/stream and watch the show, on authorized devices, limited to a certain number of copies, on your accounts, through that particular service. You can tell just by how many stupid rules there are and the copy protections that it's not the type of ownership that lets you do what you want.

In fact, you could call it a sub-license, because the service itself has the real license to "sell" those individual mini-licenses.

So if the service loses the license, you no longer have a license to sub-license from. It's like if you were renting -- let's not use an apartment, because the place where you live has some extra legal protections, but let's say you did Frank down the street a solid once and he lets you use his old shed as a crafting and storage space. You might even have a contract that's like "Amy can use Frank's shed as much as she wants forever."

Now let's say Frank defaults on his mortgage and the property sells at auction. Now, Frank doesn't have any rights to the shed, and so any contract he makes giving the shed to you is useless. He can't rent out the shed because it isn't his anymore.

Sony has fulfilled what I'm guessing (without reading all the fine print) is the letter of the contract: as long as they had their license, and you bought your sub-license, you were able to use and view the content. Since their license is gone, so is yours. Under this definition, it would be "theft" to let you continue watching, because no one in the transaction is legally allowed to stream, download, and watch this on those authorized devices through this service.

In the same way, legally speaking, you'd be "stealing" the use and enjoyment of the shed from the new owners if you kept using it for crafting even though Frank doesn't own it anymore.

Of course, the metaphor fails, because sheds are not able to be copied infinitely for essentially no charge whatsoever and subject to artificial constraints intended to protect the designers and builders of the original shed that is the source of the many many copies. The law was made for material items, and so it fails to make sense when confronted with immaterial ownership.

And when I say the law was made to cover material items, I mean property law still has stuff in it from feudalism. That we still actively use. Today. In doing property stuff. In courts of law. The whole paradigm for property law is an awkward pasted-together facade of different frameworks of rights, just like all the rest of our law.

Misunderstanding: I said the appointment was at 7 and check-in is half an hour early, meaning I had to be there at 6:30, but you thought I meant that the appointment was at 7:30 and I had to be there at 7.

Obfuscation: I said that I have appointments at 4, 7 and 9 today and then a handful more tomorrow, nothing is too important, no worries.

Lack of Communication: I won't tell you when the appointment is, if I've even told you there's an appointment at all.

Lie: I said that the appointment was at 5.

A Jumanji can be dangerous and high-stakes (to the characters), but it doesn't need to have a metaphor or lesson, it can easily just be a "Would this be fucked up or what?" situation (e.g. a lotta Goosebumps stories). If there IS a lesson/metaphor, it will be on a smaller scale like psychological issues (e.g. Magnus Archives), family/relationship issues (e.g. Zathura), or about a specific topic (e.g. Magic School Bus). Large-scale social issues may be present (after all, Everything Is Political), but they take a definite backseat.

saw

the cabin in the woods

labrynth (1986)

and

The fun part is that you could do this extremely easily by just bundling a key with an item you can't buy unless you're 18. Like a beer that includes a PGP key, or a pornographic magazine with a page that's a randomly generated key.

The site/app doesn't need to know WHO you are, only that you have access to something you can only get by being 18. This way they're putting the burden of verifying your age onto someone else, someone else who is already legally required to do exactly that.

But no one is interested in developing this because the point of age verification has never been age verification. it's always been governments trying to tie a real-world ID to internet identities, and companies trying to get more private information on users so they can sell it to advertisers.

So I'm here to say AI isn't programmed--not in the traditional sense of "a set of instructions written by a person that the computer executes." And in fact, Software Programming and AI Development are genuinely different fields. I am a software developer. I am not capable nor trained in AI development.

I have enough career exposure to both to understand core differences. But to be entirely clear, my statements about AI development are from a college-class level of understanding. But my statements about software engineering and AI in the tech industry are industry knowledge.

A key thing about 99.9% of software engineering--and a detail I very strongly like--is that code execution is deterministic. And deterministic means that, when knowing all the inputs, you can with absolute certainty know the output. This will not change unless one of the inputs changes.

And programs are--simplistically--a highly detailed instruction list. If something is going wrong with the code, you can walk through it at a granular level. You can see every individual step it is taking and identify and isolate what is wrong. There are a million ways this can be massively complicated, but deterministic execution pretty much guarantees this is possible.

AI is not deterministic. AI is not code written by someone. AI is a plinko machine 1 million feet high by 1 million feet long that folds over itself 1 million times and eventually spits the balls out somewhere. It is doing math that cannot be solved by a million people in a million days, and is the domain of GPU chips alone. It is fundamentally unknowable on the granular level.

Humans train the model by giving it known inputs with known desirable outputs and tweaking parameter weights as to reward the machines whose plinko peg configuration most leans toward the desired output. And then they iterate on generations and generations of that plinko machine until they get one that was trained to be tailored to that known data, and also yields good outputs when testing it on a new set of data.

And the human trainers may be trying to configure the rows and columns of the plinko pegs as mapping to qualifiable concepts, but by and large the pegs don't map to anything material. By and large the process becomes math weights. And even if you gave someone 1 million years to memorize every peg in the machine, the individual pegs don't mean something like the pieces of a written program mean something.

If you're using a product I worked on and the user icon rendering fails, there will be a definitive step of the program's process which is going wrong, and which I can pinpoint and fix. It is entirely possible for me to understand this whole program and know exactly why it does or does not do things. And as such, a human is capable of having complete knowledge and complete certainty about what this program is doing.

If you're using an AI product at work and it keeps making up a guy named 'Bob', well the 1-million-high by 1-million-wide plinko machine that folds itself over 1 million times spit its balls out in such a way that talks about Bob. Indirectly, the training this model went through accidentally rewarded false information in the trained pursuit of providing information. Data scientists can try to train a new model that more strongly punishes false information. They might struggle if this ends up degrading other behaviors. Absolutely no one is physically capable of understanding the exact inner details of the 1-million by 1-million plinko machine.