Notices by dstu (trurl@mastodon.sdf.org)

@scribe I'm pretty sure there have been enough fictitious and real-life villain monologues about people being sheep/longing to be oppressed/etc. that an answer to, "If they're going to put someone at the top, it might as well be me," is merited.

Call it a social prosthetic. In a truly cybernetic culture (in the sense of a self-regulating system), we recognize a tendency to despotism and build artificial mouths at the top of the pyramid that consume more effectively than you ever could.

@scribe I honestly have been kicking around some thoughts that might someday turn into an essay about Hedonismbot from Futurama. It's a bit of a one-off joke that I didn't really appreciate when the show was airing.

But maybe it does make sense to replace humans at the top of the wealth distribution with robots. If humans' monkey-brains are doomed to reinvent hierarchies of disparity everywhere, we might as well put Hedonismbot at the top. You can program a robot to have bounded appetites.

@cstross @Remittancegirl @logomancer @jzillw the way I was putting it to friends recently was that one of the USA's major exports was a stable economic playground for the wealthy of other nations to play in (and the threat of force to keep that system running). The mask is off now, and trust in that system isn't coming back.

That system was doing a lot of people a massive disservice, but I don't see "massive power vacuum" + "cut social programs and unleash the Gestapo" as an actual improvement.

@scribe I usually curse like a sailor or pound keys, but I'll try gibberish or a language other than English next time!

@cstross oh, right. Just clicked in a new way for me. You can imagine an AI future where artificial agents supplant humans because they're more efficient, better at tasks, etc. Fine, I was a SF nerd, I can imagine.

But there's a shortcut. AI-assisted marketing just has to get good enough to convince decision-makers that "AI" is better, screw the actual performance on novel inputs.

And, uh, oops our economy is structured to enable that?

I love my local library network. I can place a request for anything at 40+ libraries, and it will be delivered nearby. Direct cost to me? Zero.

I am not a fan of Overdive/Libby ebooks. It is beyond absurd that there are 20 physical copies of a book available, but 20 people are "in line" for an ebook.

Physical libraries are great. I wish people visited them more.

Also, since being acquired by private equity, Overdrive now poses to a threat libraries across the country: https://americanlibrariesmagazine.org/blogs/the-scoop/overdrives-new-owners-what-means/

Somewhere, a weary field engineer records the 5403rd successful field test of the Antikythera mechanism. Each time the sun was covered in shadow, they successfully nudged the moon to continue along its course by spinning the appropriate dial.

When dispatching their report, they include a postscript requesting relief. The life-extending ambrosia is wearing off.