µblog - archive for 2026-09 🏳️‍🌈

🔗 All A.I. Projects Are Digital Asbestos

The people I am most upset with by far are the architects of these big generative A.I. programs. How is something so resource-intensive allowed to run rampant around the world when they have proven to be ineffective in many ways, harmful and unprofitable? It is mindboggling to me. It has affected every aspect of my life, causing loved ones and colleagues to lose their jobs to hyped-up promises, infecting every piece of software I use at work and at home, clogging my own hardware with bloat and even managing to worm its way into my niche little hobby that was always “safe.” I am absolutely sick of the tech currently being marketed as generative A.I. and I want it to go away immediately. My life was better without it.

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🇸🇪 på förekommen anledning: Wikipedia: Extraval i Sverige

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Flooding in Bangkok, drought in Texas. The world of Paolo Bacigalupi is fast approaching.

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Yet another example of politicians not giving a shit about the decisions they make: Manitoba adopts year-round UTC−5, will not fall back in Nov 2026.

From memory this was the same sort of notice that the entire country of Russia gave when they decided to stay on permanent DST in 2014 or so.

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🇸🇪 visst, dom rödgröna vann valet men Haag/Lundgren vann gårdagens På spåret så det är plus minus noll

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🔗 Ian K. Duncan: Sex, AI, and the Apocalypse

decent wrapup of the history and connections between Big Yud, LessWrong, Theil, Anthropic, Vance etc.

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🇸🇪 onsdagsröster lajv: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/folj-onsdagsrosterna-live

uppdatering 16:55: sidan ligger nere pga ”överbelastning” men jag tror någon vajbkodat för plötsligt hade regeringssidan 7000 fler röster och 18 fler mandat…

uppdatering dagen efter: så här i valtider är jag extra petimetig - det heter extraval, inte nyval, och det verkar som om partierna som bildar den nuvarande regeringen saknar mandat i den nya riksdagen att fortsätta.

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🇸🇪 avkommans kommentar om valutgången: ”det kunde varit värre”.

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🇸🇪 lite läsning så här på höstkanten: Wikipedia: Jämkade uddatalsmetoden

(i korthet, tänk Sainte-Laguë, inte d’Hondt)

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🇸🇪 sitter framför TVn, biter naglarna och hinkar rödtjut

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🔗 MJD: George Orwell’s essay on the atomic bomb anticipates Nineteen Eighty-Four

Orwell writes:

Mr H.G. Wells and others have been warning us that man is in danger of destroying himself with his own weapons…. Nevertheless, looking at the world as a whole, the drift for many decades has been not towards anarchy but towards the reimposition of slavery. We may be heading not for general breakdown but for an epoch as horribly stable as the slave empires of antiquity. … The kind of world-view, the kind of beliefs, and the social structure that would probably prevail in a state which was at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of “cold war” with its neighbours.

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🔗🤖💀 Matt Stoller: Stop Panicking About AI

I realized it was more realistic for [the AI doomer] to imagine that bots would take over our civilization and supplant humanity than to imagine that we might apply the rule of law to Sam Altman. And that, to me, proved that we don’t have a crisis with technological advances, we have a crisis of the rule of law.

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in this era of “affordability” what the public really wants is a $2,500 folding phone

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🔗 McSweeney’s: Why We Must Return to the Office to Use AI in Person

I was an Associate Slop Doula for Mondo Mayo, founded as a mayonnaise company, which now sells consumer packaged goods, software as a service, and surveillance technology, and is one of three large corporations remaining on Earth. At the time, I didn’t think a full, six-day-per-week, fourteen-hour-per-day, in-office schedule was necessary to discharge my duties clicking the GENERATE button, followed by the APPROVE button, thousands of times a day on SlurryHose. But experience has shown me that I was wrong. Here’s why RTO is essential.

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somehow Leica has managed to become even more redonkolous since I last dipped my toes in photo-gear-nerdom

🔗 DPReview: Leica’s new Summicron 66mm F2 is a tribute to a military lens M shooters have never been able to buy

There will only be 660 of them made, which still makes it far less rare than the original.

missed a trick not limiting to 666, now Peter Thiel will not buy one

Leica has announced the Summicron-M 66 F2, which it says is a “reinterpretation” of one of the rarest M-mount lenses ever made: the Elcan 66mm F2, which was specially designed for the US Navy’s use in “covert reconnaissance photography.”

just what we the world was missing: tacticool Leica

Leica says the aperture ring turns in the opposite direction from a typical M-lens – you twist it left to stop down, instead of right – and the distance scale is military-spec.

these alone are features that will spawn a thousand forum threads

anyway it’s a steal at $10,900 (I’d have put $10,660 but apparently that would be too “fun”)

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🔗 More Weight: A Salem Story by Ben Wickey

Long thoughtful review of a graphic novel about Salem in 1692 and the aftermath.

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