The 3 stooges-style robber confrontation and the death of caesar feel like a very young child’s recreation of a story they overheard from adults; very little basis in reality and full of nonsensical assumptions. Or like when a kid is trying to write a story and they come up with “Space Wars: The Fellowship of the Lightsaber, part 2: the Klingon Horcruxes”.
It’s cute when a kid does it, it’s hilarious when an adult does it intentionally. This is just sad.
I suspect there is wisdom to be learned from forest management, specifically how regular, small controlled burns are how you avoid huge, unmanageable forest fires.
I think the fruit in question is hairy, has brown skin, and green flesh.
My naive, optimistic guess is that they really don’t want the Ukrainian forces to summarily execute him from a distance, and so many Russian soldiers have faked surrenders over the past 2 years that they figure anything less than taping this man’s arms around a tree will just get this guy killed.
That means that the harm done by these systems compound the more widely they are used as errors pile up at every stage of work, in every sector of the economy. It builds up an ambient radiation of system variability and errors that magnifies every other systemic issue with the modern state and economy.
Wanted to shout these two sentences out in particular. Best summary of my biggest current fears regarding use of “ai”/llm/transformer(?)-based systems.
I swear these dudes really need to supplement their Ayn Rand with some Terry Pratchett…
“All right," said Susan. “I’m not stupid. You’re saying humans need… fantasies to make life bearable.”
REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.
“Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—”
YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.
“So we can believe the big ones?”
YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.
“They’re not the same at all!”
YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME…SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.
“Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what’s the point—”
MY POINT EXACTLY.”
– Hogfather
The most naked attempt yet at allowing billionaires to live on without the rest of us.
What infuriates me the most, for some reason, is how nobody seems to care that the robots leave the fridge door open for so long. I guess it’s some form of solace that, even with the resources and tech to live on without us the billionaires still don’t understand ecosystems or ecology. Waste energy training a machine to do the same thing a human can do but slower and more wastefully, just so you can order the machine around without worrying about it’s feelings… I call this some form of solace as it means, even if they do away with us plebs, climate change will get’em as well - and whatever remaining life on Earth will be able to take a breather for the first time in centuries.
Bernhardt tweeted in January 2025: “The dead internet theory is coming to fruition.” And he’s doing his part.
… we live in a farce
I think you are referring to https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/
Funnily enough, Angela Collier also made some pretty good videos for “actually” studying physics. Spoiler: no need to go to Hawaii, or anywhere further than your own couch/desk!
How feasible is it to configure my server to essentially perform a reverse-slow-lorris attack on these LLM bots?
If they won’t play nice, then we need to reflect their behavior back onto themselves.
Or perhaps serve a 404, 304 or some other legitimate-looking static response that minimizes load on my server whilst giving then least amount of data to train on.
Good stuff near the end:
I will never forgive these people for what they’ve done to the computer, and the more I learn about both their intentions and actions the more certain I am that they are unrepentant and that their greed will never be sated.
These men lace our digital lives with asbestos and get told they’re geniuses for doing so because money comes out.
I care about you. The user. The person reading this. The person that may have felt stupid, or deficient, or ignorant, all because the services you pay for or that monetize you have been intentionally rigged against you.
You aren’t the failure. The services, the devices, and the executives are.
I don’t feel like Zitron completely addressed my remark in the parent comment, but the end result/destination is the same.
Where The Rot Economy separates is that growth is, in and of itself, the force that drives companies to enshittify.
Not finished reading the article yet, but my reaction to reading this line is that Zitron is missing the mark in the same way he qualifies Doctorow’s Enshittification does.
I don’t think growth directly drives companies to enshittify. Rather, infinite (and especially constant-or-better) growth in a finite space is only possible when things degrade. Physical widgets do this pretty decently on their own, though we (humans) had to come up with planned obsolescence to keep degradation above a certain threshhold. Software, on the other hand, doesn’t naturally degrade over time. It only seems to do so because the different actors in its ecosystem, from the software “bricks” to the underlying hardware, are similarly incentivized to churn out new things that deprecate the old, indirectly degrading them.
We’ll see where Zitron goes from here to the end of the article.
The classic Scott Adams manœuvre.
I see the tumblr culture is already present, congrats! Although I never personally used tumblr, my understanding is that more than features or functionality it was very much the culture that its users cultivated that made that site special.