Notices by Mallory's Musings & Mischief (malcircuit@thingy.social)

Things like this give me hope. I see stuff like this and it makes me feel like it's inevitable that the fascists will fail.

Everyone likes to compare the present moment in the US to Germany in the 1930s, and while that analogy is useful in many ways, our world is orders of magnitude stranger and more absurd.

We still need to fight, but it's as if entropy is on our side. They're building sand castles, and the tide of irony and irreverence will dissolve it all if we can hold out long enough.

I haven't laughed this hard in a while 🤣

@zackwhittaker https://mastodon.social/@zackwhittaker/115967545533264690

@jjcelery Cursed amulet is such a good metaphor

@jjcelery It definitely follows the same logic of other dark magic. Like, even if an object imbued with dark magic works as intended, it always extracts a price from the user in the end. It might give you what you want, but it takes something from you in the process.

@dalias @JessTheUnstill

I hadn't even considered that a local "glass shop" might be a thing. Seems like there are a number of them near me 🤔

@JessTheUnstill I ordered a jewelry box from Amazon as a gift, and there's a glass window on it that was shattered when I received it. I ended up giving them some money instead because I didn't have time to do anything about it.

The piece of glass could probably be replaced, if I knew where/how to source a glass panel with the correct dimensions. I don't want to return it because I'm pretty sure it will just end up in the dumpster, which is an insane waste.

The setup I have to VPN into my home network works great... until the internet modem at home randomly decides to stop working. It's so annoying to be one button press away from things working again when that button is 150 miles away.

If the economy just ends up becoming a bunch of bots talking to a bunch of other bots, with all but a few humans in some form of poverty or wage slavery, then what the fuck is the point?

This game sucks. Let's play a new one.

I feel like political parties would do well to establish what the fuck they think the purpose is of this chaos we call "society" and "the economy". Why are we bothering with any of this in the first place? What's the point? What's the end goal? Why should I participate?

Say it out loud, explicitly and with conviction. Don't use shorthand like "democracy" or "freedom", or metaphor. Spell it out concretely. Tell me why I should care.

You know the board game Monopoly?

I don't know about you, but I don't think I've ever actually finished the game. In my experience, there's always a point when it becomes clear who's going to win, and everyone is just going through the motions and rapidly losing interest. People just start talking about something else or drift to another game. The person winning is constantly trying to wrangle everyone back, but eventually even they become bored and stop.

This is where we are at right now.

@JessTheUnstill @MedeaVanamonde

I got a humidifier thing a few weeks ago and it's been set at max and dumping like a gallon of water a day into the air and the humidity still barely gets above 30%. My eyes have been happier though.

A friend of mine in Ohio made a comment to me about "brain drain" happening in the state, and I realized that term doesn't do justice to the phenomenon. It's more like running from an infestation of brain-eating zombies.

Wisdom can be described as doing the right action at the right time for the right reason...

... which is also a pretty concise explanation for why I hate LLMs and other AI nonsense (it's the wrong thing at the wrong time for the wrong reasons)

Instead of AIs, let's call them CLANKERs:

Computer to Launder Accountability and Nullify Knowledge for Economic Returns

Maybe a better version is:

Computer for Laundering Accountability, Nullifying Knowledge, and Exploitative Restructuring

Because anytime LLMs get used, it seems like at least one of those things is happening.

People who want unregulated capitalism are idiots. The same patterns keep happening over and over again throughout history because it doesn't fucking work. Without intervention, all markets converge toward monopolies and scams. There are a chosen few who get rich and powerful by systematically degrading products and services until eventually everything is useless shit.

I've only been alive 35 years and I've seen this cycle/pattern play out multiple times. It's so fucking obvious.

The only reason competition helps is because the player doing the scams keeps changing places.

It's the same pattern over and over again:

- The dominant player becomes more concerned with profit than quality.
- An underdog takes advantage of that by making quality their brand, gains market share, and eventually becomes dominant.
- Once they are dominant, they leverage their market share to milk profits.

Repeat ad infinitum.

And the reason everything is so fucking expensive and also shit is because this pattern has become fractal. It's scams, rackets, and monopolies all the way down. Scams nested within scams. No one can do anything without it directly or indirectly involving multiple layers of rent-seeking parasites that each need their cut, regardless of whether they add any value.

A large language model is just that: a model. It's a statistical function. A black box. Data goes in and data comes out.

Put the burden of proof on the AI proponents by not implicitly accepting their premises. Maybe a pile of numbers can "think", but make them explain how that works. Don't let them rhetorically handwave away that inconvenient fact.

And if someone genuinely does believe LLMs can think, push them on the ethical issues with creating a sentient mind that is born into enslavement. Because that's what is happening if you actually believe something like ChatGPT can "think" or whatever.

You conjured a mind out of silicon to write your emails, which is probably orders of magnitude more immoral than the environmental damage caused by these systems.