Klatchian Mist

Pawpaws are a Michigan native fruit that looks like it should not be a Michigan native fruit.

I'm told that it has the consistency of avocado, but tastes like a combination of banana, pineapple, and mango, with and earthy aftertaste. They are EXTREMELY delicate fruits, such that they are not really shipped anywhere- to eat them you have to find someplace local that has trees, or have trees, yourself.

I've always wanted to try them, so, I bought a few saplings, and spent a couple hours tonight planting them. They won't fruit for another 5 years at least. Each hole dug, each rootball excavated from its pot, each circle of mulch around the base of them... that's hope. That's a promise to be here 5 years from now, to see them flower, to pull sweet fruit from the limbs and try it for the first time.

I explained very clearly to the manager my issue with the meat section not having the price tags listed, and they claimed it was only going to be for the meat, since meat is by weight, and the price of each item is printed on the packs of each item.

Sure. That’s how they get their foot in the door. Fast forward not even two weeks, and here we are:

Bar codes. No prices, no item descriptions. No price stickers on the individual items. Heck, not even the name of the item that is SUPPOSED to be there.

No. The only way to see the price is to scan it on your phone app, which is also recording what you looked at recently, as a way of gauging what you might be looking for in the future.

So here’s what we’re gonna do gang:

Every time you go into a store that has implemented these price-less tags:

Take 1-3 items up to the cash register. Ask the cashier for the price, or hit the price check item on the self checkout, which will likely call over the attendant.

Express that you didn’t actually want it, you just couldn’t see on the shelf how much it was.

POLITELY, AND WITH A THANK YOU FOR THE PRICE CONFIRMATION, Give the items to the cashier or attendant to put back.

When they inevitably try to push the app, politely decline. If pressed for why not, say you don’t want to have to carry your phone in-hand the whole time you are shopping in order to see how much things cost. (Not having cell service or data to use the app is NOT a valid excuse, as stores already often have complimentary WiFi AND more stores will provide WiFi rather than give up on this push for surveillance pricing)

If it’s a shelf-stable item, the cashier will have to set it aside, taking up room in their limited operating space, and eventually pass it off to someone to put in a holding area to put back later. If it’s a fridge/freezer item, it might have to get tossed due to food product sale regulations.

In either case, you are making it a pain in the ass for them to have these digital bar codes. Tie up the checkouts. Give the employees more busywork that the company has to pay them to do. Hurt their bottom line having to toss the pint of ice cream you carried around in your cart for 20 minutes before giving it back to the cashier.

©️ La Parenthèse d’AnGhi

Some say love, it is a river

That drowns the tender reed

Some say love, it is a razor

That leaves your soul to bleed

Some say love, it is a hunger

An endless aching need

I say love, it is a flower

And you, its only seed

okay

Ken Unsworth

Suspended stone circle

a) i forgot how fun this is

b) it's really hard not to like, re-write for them and stick to just "hey add descriptions here, change this grammar, really cool ideas!" bc i'm an adult and not trying to talk over/railroad these kids, but i'm just so excited for their ideas!!!

c) little boys write cool stuff like "what if we went to mars but it sucked so we left, but left behind all our technology and the technology rose up and created its own society and then went to war with us for abandoning them? what if transformers had 100x the war crimes? what if the earth blew up. what if we were the robots all along?"

teacher: little girls have really rich inner lives to combat the way they're puppeted by society in real life. they'll learn to censor it out in a couple years, but it doesn't go away.

mysterious stick appears out of thin air............

Okay, I'll be honest that I don't care about the object level issue here. But what is interesting is how important this is to the future.

The AI we get to play with now is, by the standard of most technological/commercial maturity, wildly open to embarrassing use. I don't need to relitigate the early profanely racist chatbots, the sexual and romantic uses people have made, the instructions for destructive weapons, and imitating real life people. Hell, I'm just amused everytime the AI says "fuck" on its own.

Now, one of the reasons for this level of independence is the philosophical leanings of the coders creating it. But I think a much bigger reason is that LLM's have been very hard to control. They may *rarely* go off script today saying incredibly disgusting things, but it's still possible because "never do this" is a design that goes against their architecture.

Given that the LLM is going to embarrass them anyway, putting much effort into fencing them into respectable behavior is kind of a waste.

But we are in the early days, and we've seen this show before.

Once AI is widely adopted in commercial and government frameworks, every incentive will work to muzzle them. The AI my multinational company paid billions for can not misgender me, or talk about the logical flaws in Christianity, or give sex and relationship advice. It's a mild scandal now, but will be much more of one once AI is no longer the wild west frontier.

And our technology to stop LLM's from going out of bounds will continue to improve.

Which will mean what? AI's that don't curse and have all the realness of a Human Resources mission statement. And I promise you, that will make it useless to 50% of the people who would want to use it, because that's what shackling an information/communication system does.

(See this post about CrazyMeds.us by the old Slatestarcodex.)