Chaos Cat (loves this thing in particular)

1) Figured this out.

HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")

In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.

A good boss (liege lord) is:

Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.

Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.

Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.

Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.

Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).

Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"

Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.

Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.

Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.

Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.

Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.

Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.

The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.

TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"

A spinner, dyer, weaver, or sewist can devote time to making a fancy yarn, a cool piece of art cloth, or a made-to-specifics piece of clothing for their own personal gratification much more readily than if they had to spin, dye, weave, or sew all their family's thread/yarn/fabric/clothes.

like sorry but in an apocalyptic alternate-universe earth, the phrase "train of thought" is plausible even in a world without locomotives, because the word "train" comes from the 14th century, and it meant "to drag"

that's why we call dress trains "trains". because they drag. the word wasn't invented for locomotives.

if somebody wants to do theirs as two twelves instead of four sixes and they can keep sharp the whole way through I'm all for it

"If you want queer community, you're going to have to either exchange currency for labor or perform the labor yourself. " literally untrue?

when i worked at my local queer community center, people did not pay to enter. people did not pay to sit in our free spaces or eat the free food we offered or use the free computers or read the free books we had. people did not pay to attend our free support groups and the vast majority of events we held were also free. many of these people were children or older adults. we organized a regular day for free legal advice with volunteer lawyers, who we did not pay because they were volunteering. people entered the space, did not pay, engaged in community activities in the space without paying.

it is categorically untrue that "if you want community, you either have to do labor to make it real or pay." that is literally not how it works in reality. people can and do access community spaces and activities for free, because people labor to make these spaces free, on purpose. it is extremely pedantic to say "meeting up in the woods is not free to access, because labor is involved!" when i clearly meant that you do not have to pay a toll to walk into the fucking woods. it literally is free to access, its just not laborless to maintain, and conflating the two does not make you look smart. especially when my whole point in bringing up "gays in the woods" is LITERALLY "that's not to say spaces that are free to access can run on no funding." that you need all of those things in order to have a community meet-up in the woods does not contradict the point i was making.

i agree that labor is involved in everything, and needs to be compensated! we couldn't have operated without grants and regular donations, without our landlord being a member of the local queer community. at no point did i say or imply that community spaces would just exist as if fully sprung from Jupiter's thigh without labor or funding, or that we shouldn't care about making sure these spaces stay accessible by supporting them (through donated money or labor or whatever is necessary), which is why i said "i agree that if you can, you Should financially support queer community spaces (in whatever way necessary)."

my point is that "it's not capitalism, it's just reality" is a stupid and pro-capitalist point to make, and it's a stupider point to make when you are conflating community spaces with small businesses and pretending that it's a ridiculous selfish idea to want community spaces which are free to access, something which literally already exists. i do not understand why you feel the need to argue with me on this. Like. Do you not see how going on this rant about how it's impossible to have literally any community space where you are neither producer or consumer, only proves my point about how "its not capitalism, it's just reality" is an extremely capitalistic perspective?

i do not think that in a communalist economy, it would simply switch to "roll up your sleeves." what would that even mean in practice? every individual has to individually contribute labor to a community space for it to exist? rather than people putting in the work to say, build and maintain a public park, and having a societal infrastructure to allow the people who labor to do that do live well, so that other people need neither labor or pay to access the park? which, again, is something that does already exist, it is just extremely hampered by capitalism.

the best thing to do is streamline the provision of those spaces, both financially and materially, such that the monetary and labor costs of keeping them available are as unpainful as possible

a small, negligably-noticeable tax that funds public parks is much more streamlined than a ticket gate at the entrance. a line item on your tax bill that funds public singlepayer health care is more streamlined than a monthly bill from your insurance and a set of separate bills from your providers when your insurance asses out of covering things and a draining back-and-forth between you, your care team, and your insurance in order to get things approved. a gas tax that pays for road construction and maintenance is more streamlined than toll booths

and when putting on events or drawing manpower for maintenance tasks, compensating your volunteers with free dinner and related perks is more streamlined than cutting down on the events and chiding people for not putting in the effort

there will always be people who take and don't give, and there will usually be people who take and can't give, and depriving the community of the latter and them of the community shouldn't be necessary when there are people willing to stand and direct traffic in 90 degree heat for eight hours in exchange for some killer burritos, and there are more people willing to do that when you throw the burritos in as a bribe

yes, somebody has to pay for the burritos, but it's cheaper than paying for employees or contractors, and so easier to accomplish on donations rather than gate fees

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:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/13/go-meta-meta/#meta-meta-meta

"I often wonder what the Vintners buy/One half so precious as the Goods they sell" -The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám

I first encountered that quote from someone extolling the virtues of bookstores, and it stuck with me, because for most of my childhood, every bookstore visit ended with me broke and wishing I'd had three times as much to spend.

As a larval hyperlexic, I just didn't understand what a bookseller could possibly buy with my money that was better than the books they already had? Of course, then I became a bookseller and discovered that Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is shit") applies to a bookstore's wares as much as it does to anything else. I also acquired a monthly rent obligation and discovered just how important money could be.

Nevertheless, Omar Khayyám's question stuck with me, especially when I fell down a years-long rabbit-hole of learning about scams and the finance sector (but I repeat myself). Every get-rich-quick schemer will tell you that they've found the infinite money hack, which they will sell to you for a remarkably reasonable sum. Likewise, every stock picker claims they can outperform a simple low-load index fund, and all they ask of you is a few hundred basis points in exchange for multiplying your wealth beyond the dreams of Creosote. Neither one has a good answer to Khayyám's question: if you can make all the money with your amazing system, why do you need my money?

This is a question that needs to be forcefully put to AI hucksters. In their more expansive moments, the Altmans and Amodeis of the world will tell you that they're planning to teach the word-guessing program so many words that it will wake up and become god. DOGE's broccoli-haired brownshirts laughed in the faces of the NIH lifers who begged them not to vaporize their long-running cancer research projects: "General AI is around the corner and it's going to cure cancer. Cancer research is a waste of money!"

Which all raises the question: if you've truly incubated a foetal demiurge in your "AI lab," why are you offering to sell it to me? What do the AI hucksters buy/One half so precious as the Gods they sell?"

The last couple years experimenting with AI I've come to the conclusion that the main reason it works isn't a mystery because it has to be a mystery. It's a mystery because they need it to be.

That's why they've been hogging all the RAM and GPUs to the point of ordering the entire yearly worldwide supply in advance.

That's why they keep building data centres despite demand not justifying it.

That's why every open source model China releases is a hit to the stock market.

The secret sauce behind LLMs isn't really as demanding as they claim. There's waste built into it.

Every response within a chat sends the entire message chain through the robot's brain. It doesn't have loading bars, it doesn't let you calculate how many tokens you've used, it doesn't even let you see when you're crossing the limits until you're there.

It's almost like they don't want you to have control over how much you use.

ChatGPT in particular is prone to scope creep. It subtly talks you into expanding the reach of your projects to require more computation. It always delivers 90% of a project, with something missing so you ask another question.

Claude turns everything into a file creation request, even if it can deliver in plain text just fine. It's enticing to see how your simple table becomes a fancy react file or an HTML with heavy formatting.

Neither of these issues are present on DeepSeek or on local models. Which means they aren't inherent issues with LLMs.

It's not a bug, it's a feature.

They want you to keep paying unmetered rent. They do tricks to convince you to spend more than you meant making something bigger than you planned. They do this subtly, to make you think it was your idea.

The thing is, Chinese local models prove that we already have good enough AI for most things. It's plateauing in capacity, it needs to grow in efficiency and memory use. But intelligence is already at J.A.R.V.I.S levels, and can run fine on consumer grade hardware. We've reached a stability point.

The problem is you can't raise rent on stability. So you just keep throwing compute at the problem until you can justify asking for more money. Which is why they choke the memory market.

If nobody can buy memory, nobody can run local AI. If no one can run local AI, they have to keep paying unmetered rent. Development is slow, and importantly, the black box remains a black box.

That's why every memory breakthrough comes from Chinese companies. Because they're the only ones sharing their data. Capitalist companies don't want people to study how the models work.

With subscriptions, there's rent seeking. With local models, there's reverse engineering. Once enough people get their hands into the guts of the robot it won't be long before we figure out exactly how they work, and find more efficient ways to make them that don't require as many data centres.

Meanwhile, Fable and GPT 5.6 are being shadow marketed with all these rumours about how dangerous they are, and AI companies are begging for regulations from the government. Yes, they want control of those regulations, but that's not all.

What they're really after is a government ban on local AI. They want to cut off access so that they control all the intelligence.

Eventually, the goal is making contracts with large corporations to employ their robots instead of people. If no one has local AI, because they can't understand it or because it's illegal, then they can no longer compete against a faster worker that demands no labour rights, even if it does C+ work at best.

And that's where the real fun begins. And by fun I mean starving out the working class.

They aren't competing directly with their customers yet. First they have to educate them, jus like Spotify educated their consumers into forgetting how piracy works. They have to make them reliant on cloud compute, just like how Google Drive made everyone reliant on its storage before raising prices. And they want them to be ignorant of how much energy anything takes.

That's going to take one generation.

Not long ago every teenager knew how to use a computer. Now they depend on Apple for everything. It's a masterful business model. So what if we could apply it to every form of labour?

It's okay, just hand us your credit card and we'll do the rest. How much, you ask? Don't worry about that. Just keep your monthly payments coming. Oh, you can't afford it? You want your computer to do it? Well fuck you, we bought all the computers, so now you work for us.

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

but just sex zombies instead of eating/predatory zombies, offering no threat to the living.