Notices by Baldur Bjarnason (baldur@toot.cafe), page 2

Whenever I have a go at reading through a bit of the leftist “blogosphere”—newsletterosphere, I guess would be the modern word—I get deeply uncomfortable by how common talking points such as “DEI, gender equality, and LGBTQ rights are liberal imperialism” seem to be

Too often it feels like these people are just looking for ways to agree with fascists and religious extremists

@gekitsu Was it this one? https://medium.com/@socialcreature/ai-and-the-american-smile-76d23a0fbfaf

“AI” models are suffused with US values and, occasionally, those are quite shocking to us non-Americans

An Icelandic police force used a generated image to promote a public notice

People were absolutely horrified

Why?

Because the cop in the image had a gun, in a holster, AROUND CHILDREN 😱

The uniform was also not accurate for an Icelandic cop but what people found obscene was the idea that anybody would carry a gun around children, even holstered

https://www.ruv.is/frettir/innlent/2024-10-20-logreglan-a-sudurnesjum-aetlar-ad-haetta-ad-nota-gervigreindarmyndir-af-logregluthjonum-425104

My sister sent me a couple more photos of her cat Kolka, a former rescue she got from the cat shelter here in Hveragerði. A masterful blepper. #caturday

“You Might Not Recover from Burnout. Ever. - Devon Price”

https://drdevonprice.substack.com/p/you-might-not-recover-from-burnout?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0ZtSlqNT-I_Hl7iVE11vhby4uBh-3cJvG1lkymFsjIqeca7OywMuG6xyA_aem_9gd_MbOoACi42NcCwUY7WQ

> Among the exploited and overworked, the compulsion to sleep and stare off into space can feel similarly uncontrollable. And yet, it is also a blessing, a ravenous hungering for more life.a

“Trees and land absorbed almost no CO2 last year. Is nature’s carbon sink failing? | Oceans | The Guardian”

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/oct/14/nature-carbon-sink-collapse-global-heating-models-emissions-targets-evidence-aoe?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

> The sudden collapse of carbon sinks was not factored into climate models – and could rapidly accelerate global heating

Not the time to be doing anything that increases emissions

TFW you see a quote of a dumb tech opinion mixed with a shallow but popular literary misreading and you have comp. lit. degree so you feel compelled to follow the link and it’s even worse—just the shallowest, “I’m so surprised about these unsurprising things with obvious causes, btw here’s a book I misunderstood” garbage—but the misreading is so compellingly wrong that you’re tempted to explain the literal text of the book but you realise you’ve already spent more time than any of this is worth

For this #caturday some photos of a neighbour of mine, a cat who I’ve nicknamed “Miss Sensible”. She’s the sibling of the other two neighbour cats whose pictures I often post—Mouser Queen and Fluffy Murder Bro—but doesn’t go out as much. Pretty much stays indoors unless the weather is particularly nice and even then only for short walks. Hence Miss Sensible.

“The Return”

http://hackeducation.com/2024/10/05/the-return

> I’ll be damned if I’ll go quietly and let the techno-libertarian fantasies strip the future from the rest of us.

“After software eats the world, what comes out the other end?”

https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/after-software-eats-the-world-what

> This is something that is hardwired into the technology. The more unusual a cultural feature is, the less likely it is to feature prominently in a large model’s representation of the culture.

“htmx ~ Why Gumroad Didn't Choose htmx”

https://htmx.org/essays/why-gumroad-didnt-choose-htmx/

> AI and Tooling Support: It’s worth noting that AI tools are intimately familiar with Next.js and not so much with htmx, due to the lack of open-source training data.

A risk with "AI" for coding I’ve talked about is that it's trained on legacy code so it's going to be a conservative force in software dev, driving people to use outdated but popular approaches. This is the first time I've seen that happen in the wild

“US Court Rules: Marvel and DC Lose Their 'Superhero' Trademark - Play A Sci Fi”

https://playascifi.com/marvel-dc-lose-superhero-trademark/

If you ever wondered why a lot of movies, series, and comics use terms like "meta" or something even more awkward, this trademark was part of the reason

That they lose it now, largely due to their own legal missteps, just as the public seems to be losing interest in the genre, is kinda funny.

> A GitHub [survey published in August](https://github.blog/news-insights/research/survey-ai-wave-grows/) found that 97% of software engineers, developers, and programmers reported using AI coding assistants.

97% using tools that generate 41% more bugs. Fuck all of this. What a fucking clown car of an industry

“Devs gaining little (if anything) from AI coding assistants | CIO”

https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html?amp=1

> Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel, a company providing insights from coding and collaboration data.

Like I've been saying for a while, feeling productive is not the same as being productive

I wonder how many people realise that libertarian Universal Basic Income (dismantle every welfare system, make the poor buy privatised services using their UBI allowance) and socialist UBI (supplement existing welfare systems with UBI) are very very different proposals and that the libertarian one would put us in a much much worse situation than where we are today

Analysts and investors truly believe:

1. That "AI" agents will reach human performance
2. That they'll be able to displace the workforce en masse
3. Huge profits will follow, despite all the mass unemployment and unrest

Each of these is implausible on its own. Together they're a fantasy. But it shows why they're willing to lose billions upon billions in the short run: it'll let them get rid of the rest of us from the economy

“Enterprise Philosophy and The First Wave of AI – Stratechery by Ben Thompson”

https://stratechery.com/2024/enterprise-philosophy-and-the-first-wave-of-ai/

> Benioff isn't talking about making _employees_ more productive, but rather _companies_; the verb that applies to employees is "augmented", which sounds much nicer than "replaced"; the ultimate goal is stated as well: business results.

Reading this article will definitely spike your blood pressure. But it's key to understanding why the AI Bubble is likely to last a long while.

This is not going to end well. The longer they keep the bubble going , the more of our current economy they’ll destroy or disrupt, the more the functional flaws and biases “AI” get ingrained into our systems, and the more off track we will get from mitigating the climate crisis

“AI is revitalizing the fossil fuels industry, and big tech has nothing to say for itself”

https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/ai-is-revitalizing-the-fossil-fuels

> Now analysts and agencies are quietly revising their decarbonization goals downward, gas and coal plants that were slated for retirement are being kept online, and now utilities are building more gas plants in the first half of 2024 than were built in all of 2020 combined.

Again, a sincere fuck you to everybody who has had a hand in inflating the AI Bubble.

“‘The data on extreme human ageing is rotten from the inside out’ – Ig Nobel winner Saul Justin Newman”

https://theconversation.com/the-data-on-extreme-human-ageing-is-rotten-from-the-inside-out-ig-nobel-winner-saul-justin-newman-239023

> Regions where people most often reach 100-110 years old are the ones where there’s the most pressure to commit pension fraud, and they also have the worst records.

I'm surprised. This is my surprised face.