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touch-starvation needs to be written with emphasis on the starving part. you are hungry to be touched. so hungry that even the very taste of it makes you nauseous. it has been long since anything has ever touched you, ever fed you - that your body has grown more used to that gnawing emptiness more than anything else. it's better for you to be held, to eat but it makes you sick to try. you know
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Sensitive pissbabies who clutch their pearls at a book for having slurs ABSOLUTELY need to hear about the book actually. People are saying grape, corn, unalive and are terrified to be historically accurate with slurs.
So, yes, I agree that slurs in a fictional-villain context have their place, or in historical literature need to be faced head-on and discussed. but that's not exclusively where Bradbury was coming from in his "anti-censorship" views
In Fahrenheit 451, he does take to task the idea of white people finding Uncle tom's Cabin uncomfortable and banning it, and tobacco companies banning books about cigarettes causing lung cancer. but later, in a 1994 interview, he also said this:
[F451] works even better because we have political correctness now. Political correctness is the real enemy these days. The black groups want to control our thinking and you can't say certain things. The homosexual groups don't want you to criticize them. It's thought control and freedom of speech control.
and
So whereas back then I wrote about the tyranny of the majority, today I’d combine that with the tyranny of the minorities. These days, you have to be careful of both. They both want to control you. The first group, by making you do the same thing over and over again. The second group is indicated by the letters I get from the Vassar girls who want me to put more women’s lib in The Martian Chronicles, or from blacks who want more black people in Dandelion Wine.
so like. that theme in Fahrenheit 451 was only partially "you have to be able to read uncomfortable literature of the past and deal with it, and portray villains using slurs or similar in modern literature" and the other part was apparently a white straight guy being mad that he couldn't use racist or homophobic slurs anymore
and we DO need to acknowledge that rather than holding it up as a perfect work of progressive fiction
also like. I agree with you about algorithm-based self-censorship and how disturbing it is, but 'sensitive pissbabies' feels unnecessarily Edgelord-ish here. these people don't just Need to toughen Up; it's a more nuanced discussion than that. or it should be
Major pet peeve in my own life is that the brick and mortar on the porch columns of my apartment don't match the rest of the building. It's not something most people would notice at first or maybe at all, but it drives me crazy.
The brick on the building is an old sandmold standard-size flashed burgundy brick and a plain buff mortar in a flush joint. If I were to match these, I would use Belden Brick's Belcrest 740 bricks. Those aren't available in standard size, but the modular size they're made in will work because it's the same height. (Matching size exactly doesn't really matter for columns or other projects where the brick isn't going to be laid directly into the existing brick wythes (in fact, the bricks on the columns are a bit longer and a bit less tall than the bricks on the house)). I'd match the mortar with Heidelberg's Old Colonial, the go-to for matching older structures, from their Flamingo colored mortar series. Heidelberg's premixed Old Colonial could also work.
The brick on the columns is just over 8 inches long and just under 2 1/4 inches tall, so it's a weird size. They may have been "seconds", meaning the factory screwed up and had to sell them at a discount. That would explain the mismatch -- mighta been a 1970s Landlord Special. Nonetheless, they're beautiful bricks. A rusty brown color with ironspot texture ("ironspot" is somewhat literal: the clay and/or shale is mixed with actual flecks of metal, usually manganese these days I think, that melts in the kiln and makes a sort of glaze of freckles on the surface of the brick!), laid with an almost-matching red mortar.
These bricks have to have been discounted, because it shouldn't have been at all difficult to match the brick on the existing building. The reason for the red mortar evades me; colored mortars are usually more expensive than plain mortar. More traditional colors like Old Colonial are popular enough to be not much pricier than the plain grey. Idk why tf they woulda done red, except maybe to hurt me personally.
I've probably watched too much Leverage, because a man in campus cop uniform came in to ask questions about our box office safe today and my boss let him in and gave him all the info he wanted, no questions asked, and all I could think is that we are horrifically easy to con
Yes, guy with a toolbelt who says he's the plumber here to fix our known leak, please have unrestricted access to our basement directly below the box office.
If this were Leverage he would be drilling through the floor right now
No, although I did check the organizational ID of the British woman who came in to do a last minute film shoot on the second floor, bringing with her an equipment cart large enough to hide a person in.
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The whole "Elvis sighting" thing is hilarious because, like, the first documented career Elvis impersonators began working over twenty years before the guy even died. I wonder why a public figure who has a whole industry of people who look and sound like him would generate an unusual number of posthumous sightings? It Is A Mystery.
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:
"Gish Gallop" is the debating term for an opponent who makes so many claims that "it's impossible to address them in the time available" (it's named for Creationist Duane Gish, who was notorious for this tactic):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop
I think about the Gish Gallop whenever I'm asked to comment on AI.
Here's a recent example: last week, I had a pre-interview call with a radio producer who wanted me to come on a 13-minute segment to discusses "whether there's a problem with AI governance?"
I asked what the show meant by that: was it whether regulation of AI in commercial or public sector decision-making needed more oversight? Was it that the siting and provisioning of data-centers needed more democratic accountability? Was it that workers deserved more of a say in AI's impact on labor markets? Was it that customers and/or audiences should be able to opt out of AI customer service and AI slop? Was it about whether we needed some kind of system to prevent "runaway AI," in the event that we teach so many words to the word-guessing program that it wakes up, becomes God, and turns us all into paperclips?
"Oh," the producer said, "all of that."
In 13 minutes.
You see the problem, right? The AI industry has made so many claims about its past, present and future that it's almost impossible to have a reasonable critical conversation about it:
Shortly after I did the radio show, a newspaper editor who'd heard my segment got in touch to ask me if I'd write an 800-word op-ed about the subject, and also, could I address claims that "AI is the next Industrial Revolution?"
I keep finding myself on stages or panels where an AI-struck person says something like, "AI is the next industrial revolution. It will change everything we do. It will let anyone create important works of art. It will cure cancer. It will take us to space. It will solve the climate crisis."
Or sometimes it's an AI critic, but that person's criticism is really more "criti-hype," which is when you accept tech industry hype claims at face value, and then criticize them rather than questioning them:
AI criti-hype might ask what we'll do once AI takes all our jobs, or what we'll do when AI replaces the government or teachers or doctors, or what we'll do when AI can bypass our critical faculties and brainwash us or drive us all mad.
What do you say to that? I usually start by talking about whether there's any economic basis for keeping the AI servers running. AI is – by far – the money-losingest venture in human history, and it's practically impossible to overstate just how bad the AI business is. Not only does AI have terrible unit economics, those unit economics are getting worse over time:
AI's happiest customers cite cost-benefit calculations that depend on truly unimaginable subsidies from the AI companies, who are basically selling $100 bills for $5 apiece. It would be pretty amazing if you couldn't find people who'd extol the virtues of this arrangement. But when AI companies try to raise the price of those $100 bills to, say, $20 apiece, those ecstatic customers fly into a rage and start loudly proclaiming that AI is so inefficient that they will lose money on this arrangement:
Now, it shouldn't fall to me, a card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America, to point out that capitalist enterprises require profits to be sustainable. You can't keep a business afloat by selling $100 bills for $5, nor for $20. You can't even make a profit selling $100 bills for $100 apiece! For a company to succeed, it needs to take in more than it expends.
AI is a money-furnace, and AI hustlers are clearly on the hunt for a way to force all of us to feed every dime we've got to it. Elon Musk's (now scuttled) gambit to make every pension saver in America bail out Grok (and Twitter, but at a mere $44b, the losses from Twitter are dwarfed by the titanic losses from Grok) was the most ambitious and shameless population-scale bag-holder scheme, but it's not the only one:
So before we ask about the capabilities AI will acquire in the future, we should at least give some consideration to the question of whether anyone will be willing to fund the development of those capabilities, and if so, where the money would come from? Likewise, before we ask whether AI can perform adequately in a job, we should at least consider the possibility that the company that sells that AI tool will be bankrupt in a year or two. When we fight about data-center buildout, we mostly talk about the (considerable) environmental downsides to them – but what about the question of what we will do with these data-centers after their owners go bankrupt, possibly even before they can be provisioned with electricity? How many laser-tag arenas do we actually need?
This is just one example of the questions that you could spend days unpacking, which make many of the other questions about AI a little silly. Like, even if you think there are limitless returns to scale for creating new AI capabilities, which means that if we keep the money-furnace burning it's only a matter of time until it powers a cure for cancer and the end of the climate emergency, how much money do we need to shovel into the furnace before that happens, and where will it come from? There are plenty of cancer researchers who have promising approaches they haven't been able to pursue due to funding shortfalls.
Unless there's some way to estimate how much money we have to give to AI companies before they cure cancer, we should at least consider the possibility that the true sum is "more money than exists now and that will ever exist." We should also consider that whatever benefits to cancer research that AI might deliver could come with a higher price-tag than the promising cancer research we're dropping because we can't find far more modest sums.
Likewise, it may be that the amount of CO2 that AI will generate atmosphere before it "solves climate change" will render Earth permanently unfit for humans, consuming the only habitable planet capable of sustaining human life in the known universe. I mean, I suppose that's one way to "solve" climate change, but it's a pretty drastic solution.
My next book (out later this month) is The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI. I wrote it because I was frustrated by other people demanding that I talk to them about AI, and then handing me 800 words or 13 minutes to address fifty nebulous, poorly supported claims about AI:
Now that I'm about to go out on the road with the book, I find myself frustrated anew by the need to try and pull together a compact way to address the broad, incoherent claims the industry uses to keep its bubble inflated and the money furnaces roaring. The series of essays I've developed here on Pluralistic are part of that effort:
But it occurred to me that this whole enterprise of making sense of AI needs to be framed in the context of the messiness of AI itself, and AI boosters' overwhelming, promiscuous and disjointed Gish Gallop.
Every part of Vegas feels like it's pulled out of fiction and is Incredibly off-putting. It's a major city in the middle of one of the world's most inhospitable deserts
Its famous for recreating other world landmarks on a small scale. It uses this as a trap to bait people into making life ruining decisions. It's motto is essentially "never speak of what happened here". Fucked up
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What I think of when I think of tumblr sexyman, is a character that is nearly impossible to see the appeal if you don't have a specific The Infection. The essence of tumblr sexyman is weirdly abstract and more about a peculiar kind of charisma than the character's physicality.
Like, The Onceler from the lorax movie is a quintessential tumblr sexyman.
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