With God As My Witness, I AM THAT FOOL

No nuance. If you don’t have a mother/are no contact etc this is not a poll for you.

1800–1802 John James Barralet

There is a trend amongst depictions of the founding fathers to show them as literal christ figures, a trend that started very early in the nation’s life.

I’d also like to point out Washington & Lincoln Apotheosis, artist unknown, about 1865, the same year as lincoln’s assasination

The personification of America in the form of Columbia, a goddess of both the land and the concepts that America tends to inhabit. A pre-anime Hetalia. She was often used in depictions of Manifest Destiny, a religions ideal that stated that America, by God’s will, must go from coast to coast.

American Progress by, John Gast, 1872. Note the indigenous people cast in literal darkness, away from the light. The religions deification of America relies upon colonialism and white supremacy

“Don Colossus” by Alan Cottrill, 2026

Pastor Burns defended the installation via a lengthy public statement after critics compared it to the biblical golden calf, a symbol associated with idolatry.

“What amazes me is how quickly some people have compared this beautiful statue, created, and made possible by more than 6,000 patriots, to a golden calf or idol worship,” he said. “Let me be very clear. We worship the Lord Jesus Christ and him alone.”

… “This was not idol worship, this was patriotism.”

instead ask:

is it SINCERE

was it CATHARTIC

was it FUN TO MAKE

is it MADE BY ME

They have a Global Device Identifier (GDID) Tracker that functions as a fingerprint for your PC that can surpass VPNs, proxy servers and countries. Although it can't survive a clean reinstall of Windows (it can survive updates), because Microsoft forces you to go to the internet and log in into a Microsoft account, they will be able to get to you.

Microsoft kept it secret and it was only found out when the FBI tracked a hacker thanks to the information Microsoft gave them.

You should be paying attention to this, and possibly consider moving away from Windows. If a government, especially the US government, doesn't like you for some reason, this could be seriously concerning.

This article specifically notes:

For journalism, activism, or domestic abuse situations, skip Windows and use Linux routed through Tor instead of a commercial VPN. A GDID doesn’t care which VPN you use, only that it’s still the same Windows installation.

Other important quotes:

What has researchers uneasy is everything else the case reveals. Costin Raiu, a well-known malware researcher, asked on the Three Buddy Problem podcast how much of this exists on other platforms, and whether it is linked more permanently to hardware. Matthew Hickey, another security researcher, called Windows “surveillance software”.

Two things back that up:

There’s no consent screen. A GDID gets assigned when you sign into a Microsoft Account. Apple’s advertising identifier needs an App Tracking Transparency prompt and a visible reset; Android’s works the same way. GDID has neither, and a Windows reinstall only gets you a new number Microsoft can still get back to the same account.

Then there’s activation. Massgrave, the group behind Microsoft Activation Scripts, notes that Windows setup sends hardware info to Microsoft and gets identifiers back, the same tokens later used for Store access and licensing: “It’s impossible to prevent Windows from getting a GDID without breaking activation and UWP app[s].” Anyone who lost a license after swapping a motherboard has already met a smaller version of this.

Here's the complaint filed to the court, the primary source for the case mentioned in the article. You can find mentions of GDID on page 30 of the document or 34 of the PDF.

I also made a PDF version!!

For comprehensive deets, tomshardware explains

“I’m not mad,” Sam repeats, because he thinks it bears repeating. “I’m just- I’m just trying to understand… what happened.”

“He told you what happened,” Dean snaps.

“I would like… for him to tell me again.”

Sheepishly, Cas pushes the thick rectangular glasses that he started needing once he turned human up his nose.

“Well,” he says. “One of your friends. Uh. Stewart, I believe, was talking about how his cousin had seen a bear in his driveway.”

“Right.”

“And I was… under the impression… that humans thought bears were mythological creatures. So I said… that bears weren’t real.”

Sam looks at Eileen. She’s still shaking with silent laughter, so she’s not going to be of any help. He turns back to Cas and Dean.

“How the fuck’s the man meant to know that bears are real, Sam?” Dean demands.

“I am being,” Sam stresses. “Understanding.”

“Listen, this is totally doable,” Dean argues. “There’s a whole shitload of weirdos out there, alright- sorry, babe-”

“No, that’s alright. I’m quite content to be a weirdo.”

“He’s basically just gonna be a Bigfoot guy now, or a flat earther. That’s fine.”

“Cas,” Sam says, trying for an air of patience and communication. “You don’t understand. You’re gonna be the Guy Who Doesn’t Believe In Bears now. That’s gonna be your whole thing. They’ll text you pictures of bears. They’ll buy you teddy bears for Christmas. This is gonna be your whole deal. But if you go back out there and play it off as a joke-”

“Won’t work,” Eileen says, managing to contain herself.

Sam rounds on her. “What do you mean, won’t work?”

“Cas is way too earnest to be the just joshing you guy. Just gonna make him more of the Bears Guy.”

“Well, he can try!” Sam turns back to Cas. “Cas, I am trying to do you a favor, hand to God. This will be like this the entire time you know these guys.”

Cas tilts his head, thinking it over.

Then he squares his shoulders.

“I believe I will exercise,” he says, bringing out the air quotes. “Commitment to the bit.”

Dean laughs, bringing him in so he can kiss Cas’ cheek. “Atta boy. Come on, let’s go rejoin Sam’s dumb party for wieners.”

Cas and Dean slip off the back porch to rejoin the party inside, to drunken choruses of hey, it’s Bears Guy!

Sam looks at Eileen.

“We have to make a teddy that looks like him at Build a Bear,” she tells him.

However, I do think this case is great example of what happens when smart people decide they can use these systems “responsibly.”

Let’s put aside the plagiarism and the energy use for a second (not that these don’t matter, but they’re not relevant to my point at the moment) and pretend these systems were made with entirely properly obtained info and ran on only solar, but otherwise were entirely the same. If you’re a person, you might think “okay, I’m going to only use this to come up with ideas for my next paper: I’m going to do all the research myself and the writing, I’m just gonna brainstorm topics.”

The thing is, even if you’re trying to limit use to just “brainstorming” the chatbot isn’t going to limit itself to just brainstorming. You might ask it “what should I write about involving Greek history” and it may suggest “the plague of Athens” but it’s also going to suggest some “basic info” on the plague of Athens that you might end up picking up and deciding your topic is. It’s going to provide you with “research.” And even if you decide to check that research yourself, that’s still setting you down a specific path you might not have picked organically.

And speaking of double checking its “research”, fact checking is a time heavy process. Not only now do you have to read the original text the bot provided, but you also have to compare it line by line with the summary the bot provided. That’s more time than it would have taken to just read the article by itself. And with any time heavy task, people are going to get lazy. And in original research being lazy might mean skimming a paper or an abstract, chatbots allow you to be lazy without looking at the article at all.

And soon enough, despite telling yourself you were only going to use it for brainstorming, you have offloaded topic generation, research and eventually even drafting because that’s what these bots are intended to do. They are not meant to serve as research tools or help brainstorm or serve as a bouncing off board: they are built to encourage maximum engagement. And that means if you go at them with the best of ethical intentions, they are built to tempt you to use them as much as possible, regardless of whatever line you drew in the sand for yourself.

Obvs, Hank’s situation is not the same as the scenario I laid out but I think the snippet above gets back to my main point which is these tools are built to encourage interaction and that’s a hard thing to avoid, regardless of intentions.

Some other notes:

1. As stated, I don’t bring this up to add to a pile on, just to use this as an example of something I’ve seen happen with folks trying to engage in this tech with an ethical framework. This is because-

2. Frankly, I think shame is a shit motivator. I bring all this up to try to draw attention to something I find under discussed which is what these LLMS are meant to do, and what they are advertised for which are often very separate lists. (I didn’t even get into how they’re meant to train off user data but that’s another can of worms). If you want to discourage AI use, it’s a far better strategy to listen to why the person is engaging with AI and then address that reason.

3. I don’t want to come off as someone trying to scare folks that they’ll get addicted just by touching the stuff: my point is merely that is it critical to know what something is made for before engaging with it. This actually goes for a lot of tech besides AI like Google or social media (which are also designed to 1. Capture your attention and 2. Show you advertisements). AI isn’t a special kind of evil in this way, merely a continuation of a tech trend where a product is sold to a consumer with the goal of the time of the consumer becoming the source of revenue.

obsessed with how all you need to do is throw money at public education and eliminate most standardized testing and you will start getting smarter, more engaged, kinder adults. obsessed with how giving people safe housing, reliable access to good food, and decent wages dramatically reduces drug overdoses and gun violence. obsessed with how much people actually want to get together and fix infrastructure, invent new ways of helping each other, and create global ways of living sustainably once you give them livable pay to do so. obsessed with how tracking diseases, developing medicines, and improving public health becomes so much easier when you just make healthcare free at point of use.

there are a lot of fun ones listed here and here but for the most part, they were made years ago and are now a dying breed. i get why. there's no money in it. factoring in the cost of web hosting and servers, it probably costs money. it's just sad that it's a dying art form.

anyway, here's some of my favorite browser-based interactive projects and games, if you're into that kind of thing. 90% of them are on the lists that i linked above.

A Better World - create an alternate history timeline

Alter Ego - abandonware birth-to-death life simulator game

Seedship - text-based game about colonizing a new planet

Sandboxels or ThisIsSand - free-falling sand physics games

Little Alchemy 2 - combine various elements to make new ones

Infinite Craft - kind of the same as Little Alchemy

ZenGM - simulate sports

Tamajoji - browser-based tamagotchi

IFDB - interactive fiction database (text adventure games)

Written Realms - more text adventure games with a user interface

The Cafe & Diner - mystery game

The New Campaign Trail - US presidential campaign game

Money Simulator - simulate financial decisions

Genesis - text-based adventure/fantasy game

Level 13 - text-based science fiction adventure game

Miniconomy - player driven economy game

Checkbox Olympics - games involving clicking checkboxes

BrantSteele.net - game show and Hunger Games simulators

Murder Games - fight to the death simulator by Orteil

Cookie Clicker - different but felt weird not including it. by Orteil.