µblog 🏳️‍🌈

Today I learned that the public disaster awareness app in Japan is called NERV. Très à propos.

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🔗 NYRB: The Throwaway Planet

Clapp’s scathing descriptions shock us out of complacency, raising political and moral questions about the value we place on different classes of human beings: consumers versus those who clean up after that consumption, many of whom are treated as if they were rubbish.

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🔗 Blood in the Machine: Why the AI backlash has turned violent

Yet this is not merely a matter of bad messaging on the tech industry’s part, either. That second key plank of the AI narrative, again, broadcast directly by the CEOs themselves—that it will take everyone’s jobs—is not simply dismissible. It’s the selling point. Investors don’t ultimately much care whether OpenAI renders software sentient; they want to see mass job automation and the attendant historic labor savings. That prospect—of deskilling, controlling, or eliminating labor outright—is what made AI so uniquely valuable in the first place. There’s no putting that promise back in the bottle, no finding better combinations of words to describe how AI is a tool for bosses to automate labor. That’s the project. And people understand that.

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🔗 Pivot to AI: AI doomsday cultist throws Molotov at Sam Altman’s house

Altman is slightly realising there’s a lot of people who’ve literally been driven mad by the ideas he’s been using as marketing. Throwing Molotovs at Sam Altman’s house is probably bad — but it’s like Altman’s done a stochastic terrorism to … himself. Hope he calms down a bit.

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🔗 The Great Majority Body Snatching and Burial Reform in 19th-Century Britain

Enon Chapel was located in the same street. A Baptist dissenting chapel, opened in 1823 as a speculative venture, it had begun to offer cheap burial in its basement. Soon the congregation was contending with an “abominable” stench and saprophagous corpse flies crawling sluggishly from the cracks in the wooden floor. Some fainted from the smell; many left services with insidious, miasmatic headaches. When another reformist venture — the building of drains — required entry to the basement, it was discovered that 12,000 corpses had been stuffed into a space measuring 50 × 30 feet (15.2 × 9.1 m).

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🇸🇪 tycker vi ska jobba för att få hit JD Vance för att kampanja för Tidölaget. IKEA kan sponsra med en soffa

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🔗 James Bennett: Let’s talk about LLMs

The unstoppable force of ChatGPT runs up against the immovable object of Fred Brooks.

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And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

– William Gibson, Count Zero

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The promise of AI: PhDs on tap.

The reality of AI: Facebook posters on tap.

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Happy International Beaver Day to all who celebrate

(also World Health Day but a beaver a day keeps the doctor away as the saying goes)

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🔗 Hussein Banai: The Last Temptation of Trump at the End of a Failed War

A leader who entered a war he did not understand, in pursuit of objectives he had not reconciled, and who now confronts a situation in which every available exit diminishes the political narrative he has staked his identity on, is a genuinely dangerous figure to place at the apex of nuclear decision-making. He has made a catastrophic mess of this confrontation and appears to care only about his own self-image. That is, in the end, what makes this moment different from other moments of great-power recklessness: not the structural pressures, which are real enough, but the character of the man they are bearing down upon.

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🔗 Ashley Pomeroy: Yongsan Electronics Market, Seoul

One place I was keen to visit was Yongsan Electronics Market. In the 1990s it was a legendarily seedy dive where you could pick up computer components and cameras that were unavailable elsewhere. “Anam”-branded Nikons, rare toys and the like. Yongsan was also legendarily overpriced and user-hostile, but in the words of Oscar Wilde, “the one thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about”.

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oh hey it’s April Fool’s Day, which means the internet is somehow worse than usual

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🔗 Mike Chisholm: Dad Club

One ambition I certainly didn’t have as a young man was to be a father. I sort of assumed I would probably become a father at some point – although TBH I was mainly haunted by the worry that I might become one by mistake – but it had never really figured high on my “bucket list”, as people say. And yet, as it turned out, becoming a father at the relatively late age of 37 has probably been the single most fulfilling experience of my entire life.

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🔗 The Flatness of U.S. States [pdf]

In an article published as a spoof but based on actual data and legitimate algorithms, three geographers (Fonstad et al. 2003) cleverly proved that “Kansas is flatter than a pancake.” Their conclusion was widely reported by news media and accepted as proof by many people. The argument played well in a public already inclined to believe that Kansas is flat, but Lee Atchison, then Director of the Kansas Geological Survey, retorted that, by that measure, any state, even mountainous Colorado, would be flatter than a pancake. His point is readily conceived if one imagines stretching a pancake to the size of a state. The pancake measured in the article was 130 mm, and its surface relief was 2 mm. Apply that ratio to the east-west dimension of Kansas, approximately 644 km., and the state would need a mountain 9,908 m. tall in order not to be flatter than a pancake. Since the highest mountain in the world is 8,848 m. tall, every state in the U. S. is flatter than a pancake.

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🎬 The Sting (1973)

First time seeing this movie that premiered 3 years after I was born. It’s a great film but there’s a long scene where they simply miss focus on Redford’s eyes (when he first meets Gondorff) which is a bit jarring.

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