Notices by Chris Ammerman (cammerman@mstdn.social)

If the U.S. learns nothing else from this dark era that we are in, we should at least learn that propriety and tradition absolutely cannot be treated as load-bearing.

I don't know how we ended up in a universe where "Trump Derangement Syndrome" refers to people who don't like Trump, rather than to all the batshit fucking unhinged behavior of all the people that have twisted their souls into pretzels supporting or following him.

There is no way around the fact that LLMs are being used as a weapon of class war, and that they are moving us the wrong direction on water and energy.

If you have the choice, I think you should not use them, for those two big reasons.

I understand that because the capital class is currently winning the class war, many people don't have the freedom to choose not to use them. But broadly we should be looking for ways to avoid using them wherever possible.

Kimmel de-platformed because MAGA doesn't like something he said. Remember when Trump took office and MAGAs were saying "comedy is legal again"?

Sorry, no. Free speech is dead in America.

TFW YouTube injects its own ad in the middle of the in-video ad read.

"Don't 'yuck' someone else's 'yum'" doesn't mean you're wrong to be personally grossed out by something that someone else is into.

It does ask you not to project your reaction onto that person ("you're gross"), or onto the fact that they are into that thing ("liking that is gross"), or to moralize based on your reaction ("it's wrong to like that.") And especially, it exhorts you not to do any of those things vocally, let alone from a platform.

Having a 'yum' is joyous. Celebrate joy.

Fuck Microsoft and the VS Code team for force installing no less than THREE different AI extensions without even asking.

Welcome to the profoundly stupid Age of AI.

https://www.404media.co/chicago-sun-times-prints-ai-generated-summer-reading-list-with-books-that-dont-exist/

Shockingly (not shocking at all), all the strict textualist interpretations of the constitution no longer matter now that their guy is the white house. Who could have predicted? Must be convenient to be able to enforce rules only on others and leave your own hands free to wreak whatever havoc you want.

Deeply disappointed, though unsurprised, and ultimately worried, about how so many people in positions of power and visibility have decided they just need to muddle through the coming Trump term and not make waves, or even try to capitalize on it.

Does not bode well for our collective ability to resist sliding fully into autocracy, oligarchy, single-party rule, fascism, etc.

I would really like to have a single place I can go for all of my "read something later" needs. Link/bookmark collection, newsletters, and RSS. Is it really true that Omnivore was the only thing doing this? I can't seem to find an alternative that does all three.

@inthehands This thread started out as incredibly deflating and ended up flatly horrifying.

Casey Newton writes authoritatively about AI and he is dramatically mislead on what it does, how it works, and what its actual threats and harms are.

Why would we trust that he is better informed or educated on any other fucking thing he writes authoritatively about?

Journalists have a hard job. They also have a huge potential impact and a huge amount of responsibility that comes with that. That's why it's a hard job.

They have an obligation to be humble and not credulous when they receive information in a domain that they are not personally educated on, from powerful people who have an interest in the public not being too well informed.

I keep reading these scare headlines with implied exclamation marks, about what Trump could do, what the Senate could let him do, etc.

And it's like... What are we even doing here?

Yeah. Obviously. But not "could". He's going to do these things. They are going to do these things. In most cases, they've literally said this is what they want to do.

At this point all of the safety rails are removed. It's literally what they campaigned on, and what America voted for. Why are we *still* hedging?

@ironchamber I think that is optimistic, personally. And I think it would be unwise to underestimate the amount of collateral damage that could be caused while people jockey for the favor of the Dear Leader.

January 6 will be a singularity moment for the U.S. It's just impossible to know how fucked up shit is going to get and how long it will take. We have to assume some combination of Project 2025 and the X-ification of the government (cut until it creates an existential threat) will be the attempted route. But the reality could end up limp, or could be so much worse.

One of the reasons for the enthusiasm for AI is because it seems to promise to all the "idea guys" that their ultimate dream is within reach: Freedom from the dreaded reliance on a "technical co-founder" and all that comes with it. One must only speak their unique and beautiful Idea into the machine, and out the other end comes an implementation. Just a little spit and polish, and then ready to sell.

I have to believe the AI hype bubble will pop like those before it did. But a small part of me fears that, with the world's largest companies all-in on AI, and human sentiment on it so uniformly negative, that we have somehow moved fully into an economic regime where it doesn't matter what anyone wants anymore, the machine is just following it's own tail in some kind of cascade/avalanche mode until everything crashes.

This is almost certainly not an original thought, but: Gameshows and reality TV are just the modern world's coliseum.