Chasing Smaller Sheep

Other materials at the time, namely clay, would absorb flavors and germs meaning that if you ate beef off a clay plate your next meal with that plate could have beef flavor and microbes common on cow meat on it.  That would leak out seemingly at random no less.  Heck imagine a sick person coughing into their soup bowl and then months later their germs hiding in the clay would pop out to infect whole new people.

Also the earliest human use of glass we know of is for its sharpness.  Pre-historic people would use volcanic glass as sharp knives for food preparation.  Also beads.  Pretty much any new substance humans get their hands on for most of our history we immediately try to make into beads.

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.

Tempo, conducting important autism buisness, what exactly we may never know.

Mobile background

Headcanon: Emma nearly had her life completely owned by the infamous and ruthless Darcy Parker, a mob woman with an entire fleet of highly trained killers, manipulators, and con artists, all of them women. What differed Darcy from other mobsters is that she refused to have any men work for her. Instead, men were her victims.

Her M.O. for power is having her con-women marry important politicians, have the men trust them, and then when they least expect it, tie him up and threaten his life, then she’d have her call girls come in, where the “wife” would take pictures of the politician in compromising positions that could easily have them ruined. Once Darcy has these photos, she uses them to get the politicians do whatever she wants. Many have died from her hand too, if she didn’t get her way. And she always gets away with it.

Emma, or as Darcy knew her, Katina, was the mob woman’s favorite ‘pet’. She’d dazzle her with jewels and cars, vacation homes, anything her heart desired. But because of this, it distinctly made Katina hers, in any way she wished. Darcy was vicious with her, especially in bed. But Darcy would make sure she wasn’t afraid by offering her whatever drug she wished, being a “good person”, and all. Emma also was branded by Darcy, with her signature lily tattoo. All of Darcy’s women have this tattoo, but only her lovers would get it on their breast.

Emma betrayed Darcy by stealing one of her target’s money and fleeing. She had the help of Marie, in which they faked their own death, and changed their names. 

my unruly ass:

She's so different from pretty much any other villain in the series, right? Absolutely everybody underestimates her and she uses that to her advantage so skillfully, and frankly it would have worked if not for those meddling Straw Hats and CP0. She's also just a fun and unique character, period, she has such a different vibe from anyone else in the series that I can think of. She truly doesn't care what other people think about her, she's extremely childish but also extremely intelligent. And she was literally created by Vegapunk

She represents one of the darker sides of science and of Vegapunk's hubris. She also fits the theme of rebellion and the danger of using people as tools. She's like the evil mirror of Bonney who was in some sense born to be a science experiment as well, turning against her "creator"

For the most part she also wins, she gets what she wanted, even though she didn't quite manage to kill all the other Vegapunks. It doesn't go perfectly for her, but at the end of the day, the Elders do accept her deal and presumably Imu does as well. And the fact that she succeeds means that she's possibly the most dangerous person alive right now. She has the power plant and is able to create the Mother Flame which can then be used to power Imu's weapon.

Saturn was completely and utterly defeated, humiliated, and then killed by Imu, but York is still doing great. She didn't succeed in all of her goals but the most important ones she did. She's a lot like Ener in that sense, the other villain who wasn't really defeated, only stopped from causing quite as much destruction as they were trying to cause. (I guess Blackbeard is the third example, the one who never fully loses. And maybe Akainu.)

And unlike Ener who we haven't heard from in nearly two decades now and who may or may not come back, York is absolutely going to keep being a problem by helping the CDs with none of Stella's scruples.

I just enjoy her too, she's delightfully evil in such a simple way without being narratively shallow. She's also cute as hell lbr.

Even when she's being evil

here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you

They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,

I hate that they are trying to modernize older books with things that are going to be outdated in a couple of years. I hate that authors can go and take out the age of their characters after a decade (looking at you six of crows). I hate that authors do this and don’t tell their fans they are doing this.