Notices by Cassandra Granade 🏳️‍⚧️ (xgranade@wandering.shop)

@whitequark @fasterthanlime This. I'm perfectly fine with labor being disrupted, insofar as that doesn't disrupt labor *rights*. It's a question of whose financial interests are being served by automation, whether the proceeds go to the employer/owners or to individual workers.

(That all also assumes that said overgrown markov chains *work*, which is a whole other kettle of tea.)

The #Seattle Police Officer's Guild helpfully clarifies that they are anti-antifa; or, more compactly, fa.

There's another more commonly used word they could have chosen, though. Something "fa" is short for, you know?

https://kolektiva.social/@sidereal/114577434150264298

I've said it before, but in light of discourse around Signal blocking Microsoft Recall, I think it's worth saying again: "just use Linux" is bad advice, but there's no way through the omnifuckles* that is tech extraction, AI, fascism, and surveillance without at least some people who currently choose to run Windows deciding to use Linux instead.

(*If Doctorow can do it, so can I.)

There's plenty of people who can't make that choice: folks in locked-down environments, people who depend on accessibility tooling in Windows, people who have been scarred by the pervasive narrative that tech is inherently difficult (as noted before, a narrative that serves oppression), and more.

But this doesn't change if we all continue to keep accepting corporate-controlled computing as the only option.

Not trying to be blithe about this either: Linux isn't immune from corporate capture, far from it. But there's a world of difference between Ubuntu sometimes doing some dodgy shit and Recall slurping up screenshots of every single thing you do. This shit needs to be better, Linux needs to be *more* resistant to corporate control, to have better accessibility, to have a better install experience (Windows coming preinstalled will *always* tilt the field against Linux there), and so forth.

Be very, very careful applying for this job if you are marginalized or oppressed in any way. The University of Waterloo will not have your back should anything go wrong.

If you take a job that requires interacting with the University of Waterloo, make *absolutely* sure you have a robust support network to help you out when UWaterloo decides that violence against you is an acceptable and reasonable part of academic work.

https://beige.party/@mayintoronto/114547738475918997

I really like the bit of worldbuilding in which shouting the name of a spell as you cast it is in no way required for the magic to work, but is a cultural practice similar to tactical callouts — similar to calling "grenade!" as you throw to cut down on friendly fire.

@whitequark It looks amazing! I also don't trust the company at all at this point.

How long until it has a mandatory Copilot button?

https://hachyderm.io/@thejpster/114535696772287407

Thesis: ChatGPT is destroying education, students keep using it to cheat on homework and exams.
Antithesis: ChatGPT has no understanding of facts or semantics.

Synthesis: Homework and exams don't measure understanding of facts or semantics, and can be fooled by plausible-sounding bullshit.

@whitequark My partner has and uses an e-bike... it's great if that's what works for you, but if not? Yeah..........

I can't push pedals even the little bit needed to get pedal assist going, so an e-bike only works for me when it's in full moped mode, at which point... why am I not using an actual moped?

Having a scooter and/or motorcycle is so nice for getting around Seattle. That you can park in any RPZ makes it really easy to find parking, and you don't need to bring a giant-ass car with you all the time that way.

As I've mentioned before, I enjoy riding, but it started as and still is a Long COVID adaptation for me. Walking, even the relatively short bits from parking or between public transit stops, can be exhausting. Having a scooter has really opened things up for me.

…

• Ensure that their use is highly regulated for privacy, labor, and environmental impacts.
• Find some kind of way (and here it gets really magical!) to prevent them from being used to create and push disinformation and propaganda.
• Separate financial interests, such that their development and use doesn't fund fascists.
• Listen to the folks who have been warning about this shit forever, esp. Timnit Gebru and Emily Bender, not fail-upward man children who get a bunch of LinkedIn shares.

Entirely separately, you could ask questions along the lines of what Anil Dash asked recently. For example, what would it take for AI (in the LLM + genAI sense of the word) to *not* be a fascist project?

My 2¢:

• Why? What compelling need would LLMs hypothetically fulfill if we could separate them from fascism?
• Find a way to ethically train, respecting labor rights and avoiding environmental costs.
• Deploy them only in fields with strong unions and in regimes with very strong labor laws.

…

I'm gonna keep harping on the AI / fascism connection until my voice is hoarse and my hands are too broken to type.

You just cannot understand the proliferation of AI products, features, and services without connecting that back to the fascist project of concentrating power by undermining labor, enclosing the commons, and DDoSing the entire concept of truth.

https://jorts.horse/@AnarchoNinaWrites/114530520114731792

That's even *before* you get to the eugenicist motivations of Bostrom and his followers, and how that gets papered over in vaguely philosophical language by MacAskill and his followers. That's the intellectual ocean that Thiel, Musk, Altman, SBF, and all the rest of that particular Silicon Valley crowd swims in.

The whole project is to measure intelligence in terms of how well capital can exploit it, then to conclude that AI is more intelligent because it doesn't have labor rights.

Notably, none of that project requires AI to *work*, let alone work *well*. All it needs to do is produce something that displaces labor and that capitalism can exploit. It's the whole "I'm going to fire you and replace you with a very short bash script" mentality, except you do so to make a future angry machine god happy, you do a eugenics based on how that bash script looks, and the bash script returns random nonsense and sometimes runs destructive shit as root for no discernible reason.

This boss fight could have been an e-mail.

@whitequark Maybe I've just re-read Ozymandias too many times. Who knows.

@whitequark It's a sobering thought. For me, a few papers no one cares about any more (why, when you can make more money lying about VQE than actually building anything?)... I dunno, it's all really odd to think about.