Notices by Chris Ammerman (cammerman@mstdn.social)

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.

Yo dawg, I put gaslighting in your gas boiler lighting, so you can gaslight while you light your gas boiler.

https://universeodon.com/@georgetakei/113001195540203527

I am in the privileged position of knowing that, despite what some may tell you, there is in fact such a thing as "too much garlic".

One of the first dishes I made for a family potluck as an adult was a broccoli salad thing. I followed a recipe. But I thought "clove" meant "head". 6 servings of salad with an entire, *large* head of garlic, minced. It was literally painful to eat due to the astringency.

I feel this so much. https://cloudisland.nz/@baroquebobcat/112771264660480851

You see it a lot in software. When your aim is to get done and move on to the next thing, like you're playing speed chess, it's very difficult to build knowledge and expertise. Moving fast narrows your experience of the work. You gain less from having done it.

Organizations encourage this almost by default, but to their own detriment, and that of the employees. It's very efficient in the short term, but the long term costs are huge.

The world is full of companies that are getting tons of work done, but learning almost nothing. And they try to chain their employees to the same fate, all in service of the next quarterly goal.

My advice to you is to, whenever you can manage it, not let them rush you. Take time to gain the full individual benefit of having done the work. Dig deeper, push further, find out why, experiment, learn things that are not immediately useful. These things make your labor powerful.

@inthehands I keep seeing people say the Atlantic is going down the toilet, but I'm not sure what kind of thing is being referred to. I still find them to be generally far better than NYT or WaPo. But maybe that's a low bar now?

Yup. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2024/07/supreme-court-donald-trump-immunity-decision/678859/

We have to make sure Trump does not get a second term. But that does not end the clear & present threat to Democracy.

A large swath of the Republican apparatus has proven that they are not only willing to let a strongman push them around, but they are actually proactively complicit. "Project 2025" is, explicitly, a roadmap to autocracy and it is being pursued actively right now. A willing president is just the capstone.