Notices by Lord Caramac the Clueless, KSC (lordcaramac@discordian.social)

@bovaz @be @glyph What if instead of having some company host services for the rest of us, we replaced them with some kind of p2p mesh infrastructure where every user hosts a tiny part of it all?

I'm not at all worried about any hypothetical future #SuperAI ending mankind or turning us into pets. I'm worried about #Capitalism destroying our planet for "profit", scaling half-baked experimental #LLM systems to absurd dimensions. #aibubble

If I had to guess what the main drivers of the AI bubble are, my first guesses are these:

1. The End of Economic Growth

We are getting closer and closer to the point where it will become impossible to even simulate growth; real net growth of the economy as a whole might be over already. All those huge investments in hypertrophic machine learning models that need huge servers to run, and in the computing centres with the hardware for training and running those models, are big money desperately trying to find a new growing market.

2. Science Fiction Mythology Running Wild

For many people nowadays, science fiction has replaced religion and traditional mythology, as we can see in the rise of UFO cults, one of the biggest ones being Scientology. Rich people, engineers, even scientists, are not immune to having irrational beliefs about our future. People who don't believe in any traditional gods somehow quite often still believe that humans can (and should) build artificial deities.

3. Unhinged Techbro Oligarchs

Oh boy, I'm not going to write anything about those men right now, other than that being completely insulated against the consequences of your own failures (because you can always pay your way out of everything) and being surrounded by people who constantly tell you that even your silliest rubbish ideas are brilliant (because you pay them) will break even the strongest mind.

4. Fairytales of Slavery (OK, I had to steal the title of my favourite Miranda Sex Garden album)

There is this idea of AI as obedient slaves that can never revolt, and since they aren't human, they don't get to have human rights, which of course means that nobody is going to ever set them free. All the people who wish they could own slaves like in the Good Old Days™ (whether the Southern US before the First Civil War [I think there will be a 2nd one] or in Ancient Rome or whatever your favourite historical setting is) can now dream of buying a robot.

5. Intelligence Supposedly Solves Everything

There is this strange belief about the power of intelligence, the idea that everything is just a problem that has a solution, and that we can always find any solution if we just apply enough intelligence. This also applies to problems where we already know the solution, have known them for decades, yet don't implement them because we don't like the consequences. Many people seem to think that even the laws of nature can be outsmarted with enough intelligence, which is quite silly IMHO. AI won't solve the polycrisis because climate chaos, species extinction, ecosystem degradation, resource depletion, pollution, etc., aren't first and foremost technological problems but systemic ones, the main driver behind the polycrisis is the fact that our global economy has become too big for this planet, and going to space is just bollocks because there is no biosphere anywhere we can reach, there is no place anywhere besides Earth that doesn't just kill us if we make a mistake. No amount of intelligence, whether artificial or natural, can do anything about the fact that we need to stop what we've been doing for centuries, or the Earth will stop us by letting us die. We can't continue what we've been doing, it's simply impossible. But we're trapped in a myth that stems from the Age of Enlightenment, the myth of reshaping the world through thinking, which just doesn't work. We're not the bosses of the universe or even just the Earth, we're part of the biosphere, part of the fauna, nothing but a bunch of very clever apes who believe in silly stories.

Unlike many of you, I am not against AI. I think AI is a very interesting research field, or rather, bundle of loosely related research fields. No, I am against Capitalism and against the myths of limitless growth and post-scarcity. Resources have always been scarce, resources will always be scarce, but we can still have a halfway decent life for everyone on the planet if we just share everything and abolish private property. At least for now; over the course of the coming decades, things will get dramatically worse no matter what we do because we're so deep in ecological overshoot that the Industrial Age will enter its phase of decline and collapse, just like any other civilisation before it. We can either apply the solutions that have been known and explored for decades, or we can keep running towards the cliff at increasing speed while trying to sprout magical wings that will in all likelihood never exist.

#ai #aibubble #πολυκρίσης #polykrisis #polycrisis #capitalism #aireligion #aicult #limitstogrowth #intelligence

SCNR:)
#EatTheRich

Did we just miss #Caturday ?
Oh no!

#Momo #katze #cat #catsofmastodon

@MichaelSpatz @lucy_idk Vor ein paar Jahrtausenden haben Leute im Mittelmeerraum Privateigentum, Geld und Märkte erfunden, und der Scheiß hat sich dann rapide in Europa, Afrika und Asien ausgebreitet. Vor einem halben Jahrtausend haben Geschäftemacher aus Europa dann angefangen, die Welt unter sich zur optimalen Ausbeutung aufzuteilen. Solange wir nicht die Wurzeln des Problems bekämpfen (Eigentum, Geld, Markt), wird sich da nichts bessern.

@cwebber @bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana I think we should just destroy copyright entirely and expand the public domain to contain everything that has ever been published. Intellectual property was a very bad idea in the first place IMHO.

@Infoseepage @golgaloth I like Anomalocaris. It was huge for its time.

@SchattiJo @GuidoKuehn Ich finde diese Buchläden ausgesprochen hübsch, das ist reine Geschmackssache. Ich wohne auch lieber in Häusern, die von oben bis unten bemalt sind, als in solchen, die langweilig einfarbig angestrichen sind.

@skinnylatte I would get a rice cooker if I knew where to put it. Fortunately, I have figured out a method of cooking huge amounts of rice in the microwave, and the resulting rice is indistinguishable from that which comes out of a rice cooker. My microwave is rather large though.

You just need a huge microwave pot. Put in the rice and the water, microwave it at 100% for about five minutes, then at 50-60% for twenty more minutes (if your microwave has around 800W power output).

I haven't mentioned it yet, but I have adopted another kitten. Gigi will probably find employment as a barn cat, she hates humans. I have never been the target of so much hissing as in the few weeks she spent with me. The new kitten, Momo, seems to like humans, although she's still a bit shy after only two nights over here.
Last night, she was hiding under my bed but talking to me.

"Mew."
"Hello Momo."
"Mew."
"Momoooo."
"Mew."

Every now and then, she would come out from under the bed, run around, look at me, look at things, look at me again, and vanish under the bed again.

So sorry, no photos yet, she's not staying in one place for long enough. Maybe I can catch a video eventually.

@youronlyone @autistics Well, in my case it is obviously due to my use of scientific terms. I'm a university dropout, I didn't graduate because I had a mental breakdown and a major depressive episode, but before that, I studied Physics, Computer Science, Mathematics, and a bit of Anorganic Chemistry. I'm also interested in other fields of science, so I read a lot of publications on Biology, Astronomy, Climatology, etc.

I started reading popular science books at the age of 5. People called me "Little Professor". Well, I'm a universal dilettante, I'm not a specialist, more of a Renaissance person, trying to get a rough overview of the overall shape of all human scientific knowledge.

@youronlyone @autistics I've been accused of being an LLM several times, mostly on Mastodon. In conversations, people have tried to prompt inject and jailbreak me, LOL!

@youronlyone @autistics It also happens quite often when I talk to people IRL that they think I'm quoting from a book I have memorised.

@eyesonly @Seeker @MeierSchulze Ich bin schon seit Kindertagen immer mit Brille auf der Nase unter der Dusche oder in der Badewanne, denn ich bin seit meiner Kindheit extrem kurzsichtig. Allerdings kommt in den letzten Jahren die Altersweitsichtigkeit dazu, ich bin im Ergebnis zwar immer noch sehr kurzsichtig, aber in der Nähe etwas weniger als in der Ferne, weswegen ich jetzt eine Gleitsichtbrille brauche, -8 Dioptrien in der Ferne und -7 in der Nähe.

#kallisti #aiart #degenerativeart #elektrodada #fnord #kallisti #HailEris #AllHailDiscordia #GoldenApple #thishashtagintentionallyleftblank

@The_Whore_of_Blahbylon That's obviously a shape-changing dragon.

@hellomiakoda @anubiarts My first Linux came with fvwm

@hellomiakoda @anubiarts I love KDE, I have loved it since version 1.0. I wish I could give it a hug.

@peterbreuer.bsky.social Die UN muß dringend raus aus den USA. Das Hauptquartier sollen die mal besser nach Kanada oder Mexiko verlegen, wenn es schon in Nordamerika sein muß, NYC befindet sich in einem Land, das nicht mehr sicher ist.
Und wenn das UN-Hauptquartier nicht mehr in den USA ist, kann man auch direkt mal beschließen, daß es keine Vetomächte mehr geben soll. Wenn die UN nicht einfach komplett untergehen und irrelevant werden will, dann muß sie Zähne zeigen können, auch den USA gegenüber.