I identify as an anarchist. I see it both as an aspirational goal--a stateless, classless, non-hierarchical society, which I think we all agree on as the ultimate objective--and as tactical guide in the face of overwhelming capitalism. Self-organized mutual aid and voluntary affinity groups can and do get shit done, even in the absence of any kind of widespread socialist (or even leftist) movement or power structure. Most of the anarchists I know in real life are more focused on actually trying to make the world better than on sectarian struggle, but I think the ones who care more about purity and less about praxis are more numerous and vociferous online. The good ones are out doing shit, not making Instagram series. The same is true for most MLs I've met: maybe the difference in philosophy will matter at some point way down the road when revolution is in progress, but that's so far in the future that it almost doesn't bear thinking about, much less starting a fight over. For now, we all have exactly the same goals.
Neoliberalism has also significantly ramped up the amount of political power and influence that business has, making its alliance with the far right more potentially destructive than it otherwise would be. If all politicians are chasing approval by and tying themselves in knots trying to please business interests, then when business interests fall in with fascists, the government follows immediately.
It's definitely a special challenge and you need the right gear, but wow can it be rewarding. Waking up in the middle of the night and going out of the tent to see a full blizzard was one of the most beautiful experiences I've ever had. The absolute silence was incredible.
I do a lot of 4 season camping, and invested in a nice canvas tent. It was expensive for a tent, but still like 1/8 the price of this thing. Plus, my wife and I can get it up in 10 minutes and it's survived for years in 60 mph winds, days of straight rain, snow, and 100° heat without a problem and it's got 8' of headroom. What a fucking scam this is. Perfect for the Tesla crowd.
He's also oddly ahead of his time in his fixation on "wokeness" as what he mostly means by "the left."
Sea water can't corrode steel beams!
Hey it happens to all grill-havers from time to time. It can be especially tough on camera or in public.
The fact that it's treated that way is just evidence that none of the AI bros have actually read "Computing Machinery and Intelligence." It's like the first fucking line of the paper.
"... I would literally just eat a whole block of cheese with my hands... often while sitting on the floor... in the dark...
Sounds fucking rad to be honest.
Yeah, this is just as insane as the people who think GPT is conscious. I've been trying to give a nuanced take down thread (also an academic, with a background in philosophy of science rather than the science itself). I think this resonates with people here because they're so sick of the California Ideology narrative that we are nothing but digital computers, and that if we throw enough money and processing power at something like GPT, we'll have built a person.
Great example! Failure modes are really important. Brains and dwarf fortresses might both be computers, but their different physical instations give them different ways to break down. Sometimes that's not important, but sometimes it's very important indeed. Those are the sorts of things that get obscures by these dogmatic all-or-nothing arguments.
I'm just cautioning against taking things too far in the other direction: I genuinely don't think it's right to say "your brain isn't a computer," and I definitely think it's wrong to say that it doesn't process information. It's easy to slide from a critique of the computational theory of mind (either as it's presented academically by people like Pinker or popularly by Silicon Valley) into the opposite--but equally wrong--kind of position that brains are doing something wholly different. They're different in some respects, but there are also very significant similarities. We shouldn't lose sight of either, and it's important to be very careful when talking about this stuff.
Just as an example:
That is all well and good if we functioned as computers do, but McBeath and his colleagues gave a simpler account: to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.
It strikes me as totally wrong to say that this process is free of computation. The computation that's going on here has interesting differences from what goes on in a ball-catching robot powered by a digital computer, but it is computation.
After all, when a calculator computes the answer to a math problem the physical structure of the calculator doesn't change
What counts as "physical structure?" I can make an adding machine out of wood and steel balls that computes the answer to math problems by shuffling levers and balls around. A digital computer calculates the answer by changing voltages in a complicated set of circuits (and maybe flipping some little magnetic bits of stuff if it has a hard drive). Brains do it by (among other things) changing connections between neurons and the allocation of chemicals. Those are all physical changes. Are they relevantly similar physical changes? Again, that depends deeply on what you think is important enough to be worth tracking and what can be abstracted away, which is a value judgement. One of the Big Lies of tech bro narrative is that science is somehow value free. It isn't. The choice of model, the choice of what to model, and the choice of what predictive projects we think are worth pursuing are all deeply evaluative choices.
You are not just a record of memories. You are also your home, your friends and family, what you ate for breakfast, how much sleep you got, how much exercise you're getting on a regular basis, your general pain and comfort levels, all sorts of things that exist outside of your brain. Your brain is not you.
Embodied cognition. I don't see this as implying that what we're doing isn't computation (or information processing) in some sense. It's just that the way we're doing it is deeply, deeply different from how even neural networks instantiated on digital computers do it (among other things, our information processing is smeared out across the environment). That doesn't make it not computation in the same way that not having a cover and a mass in grams makes a PDF copy of Moby Dick not a book. There are functional, abstract similarities between PDFs and physical books that make them the same "kinds of things" in certain senses, but very different kinds of things in other senses.
Whether they're going to count as relevantly similar depends on which bundles of features you think are important or worth tracking, which in turn depends on what kinds of predictions you want to make or what you want to do. The fight about whether brains are "really" computers or not obscures the deeply value-laden and perspectival nature of a judgement like that. The danger doesn't lie in adopting the metaphor, but rather in failing to recognize it as a metaphor--or, to put it another way, in uncritically accepting the tech-bro framing of only those features that our brains have in common with digital computers as being things worth tracking, with the rest being "incidental."
Nails are like candy to robots. And we'll eat tires instead of licorice.
Above all else, we must trust the process and be civil to the people we deeply believe will immediately create roving murder squads to kill us all.
I was there about 20 years ago, and it was straight up incredible. Probably the best fried chicken I've had to this day. Bummer that it's fallen off, but hopefully the government takes it over and MCGA.
I was talking about Hoppe in my radical politics class on Friday and my students literally thought I was making his views up until I pulled up some primary sources. He's pure mustache-twirling evil self parody.
The kids are alright.
>There's one overwhelmingly common mistake that people make about enshittification: assuming that the contagion is the result of the Great Forces of History, or that it is the inevitable end-point of any kind of for-profit online world. > >In other words, they class enshittification as an ideological phenomenon, rather than as a material phenomenon. Corporate leaders have always felt the impulse to enshittify their offerings, shifting value from end users, business customers and their own workers to their shareholders. The decades of largely enshittification-free online services were not the product of corporate leaders with better ideas or purer hearts. Those years were the result of constraints on the mediocre sociopaths who would trade our wellbeing and happiness for their own, constraints that forced them to act better than they do today, even if the were not any better. > >Corporate leaders' moments of good leadership didn't come from morals, they came from fear.
Maybe you can literally have like the sovereign city of San Francisco and secede effectively ... if you have total control of the city ... maybe it's possible. – B.S. The Point: Like some mustache-twirling cartoon villain, the main tech figure behind the Network State cult lays out a "roadmap" for ...
Some choice bits:
>[A] huge win would be a Gray Pride Parade with 50,000 Grays, that would be massive. That would start, to say: "Whose streets? Our streets!" You have the AI Flying Spaghetti Monster. You have the Bitcoin parade. You have the drones flying overhead in formation ... You have bubbling genetic experiments on beakers. You have the laser eyes, you know, Bitcoin maximalist ... You have the police at the Gray Pride Parade. They're flying the...drones, they are there and, ideally, you know, you even design the police uniforms.
>Every week ... ideally every week, have a policeman's banquet. Okay, all Gray sympathetic policemen are allowed to come to this banquet. Those that are not very sympathetic, you do need to filter you don't just because there's some sort of some policemen who are full Soviets, right?
>Take total control of your neighborhood. Push out all Blues. Tell them they're as unwelcome as ... just as Blues ethnically cleanse me out of San Francisco, push out all blues. And then you'll easily win.
>Reds should be welcomed there and people should wear their tribal colors. No Blues should be welcomed there. And in addition to celebrating celebrating Gray and celebrating Red, you should have movies shown about Blue abuses. For example, there's this guy who's addicted to drugs, who was addicted to drugs he posts on Twitter about how the Blue government helped him get addicted to drugs. You should have an interview with him. There should be lots of stories about what Blues are doing that is bad.
If you tried to put this in a satire, people would think it was too much.
Futurists and the future-curious, including Seth Meyers and Darren Aronofsky, attended a screening in New York City for a new PBS documentary.
>Mr. Musk, in a black T-shirt and moto jacket, weighed in on the subject of the future, too. > >“I think we’re currently teaching kids in school to hate America or to question whether America is good,” Mr. Musk said, reflecting on something he feels society is doing right now that will negatively affect the years to come. > >“There’s a lot of focus on all things America does wrong, but not enough on what America has done, both currently and historically,” he continued. “Which then causes people to lose faith in America. And then, I don’t know, we might fracture as a society and no longer be the United States of America.”
Also, the US showed nothing but kindness to their enemies. !amerikkka-clap
Jimmy Donaldson warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back
>If viewers don’t really see him having fun, that’s by design. Donaldson has outright said he sees “personality” as a limitation for growth, once noting in a podcast that hinging your content on who you are as a person means risking not being liked. And if someone doesn’t like a creator as a person, they may not give the videos a chance. > >McLoughlin’s comments hit at another bleak possibility: Viewers may hardly see MrBeast having fun in his videos because he’s not actually having a good time. In podcasts, Donaldson tells hosts that he goes so hard, he won’t stop working until he burns out and isn’t able to do anything at all. With a laugh, he admits that he has a mental breakdown “every other week.” If he ever stops for a breather, he says, he gets depressed. MrBeast is so laser-focused on generating content on YouTube that he describes his personality as “YouTube.” He acknowledges that this brutal approach to videos, which has cratered many creators over the years, is not healthy. “People shouldn’t be like me. I don’t have a life, I don’t have a personality”
>While his free time seems minuscule, the rare times he does pull away from work are for dates with his girlfriend that center around activities that could enrich his videos, because he considers a single hour of a date to be worth $100K had it been dedicated to work instead.
Absolutely brutal indictment of algorithmic capitalism.
>“I don’t have a problem with the Palestinian flag – people can share whatever flag they like, but the people who post ‘no Zionists’ are basically saying ‘no Jews’. It’s what they think is an acceptable way of saying it,” he adds. > >“It’s like the signs that used to read: ‘No Blacks. No Jews. No Dogs. No Irish.’” Stephen says there are masses of Palestinian flags on Hinge, and he’s come across profiles of women who say: “No terfs, no Tories, free Palestine.” “It’s put me off opening the app.”
I teach at a public high school for "profoundly gifted" kids, and work pretty much exclusively with 16+ students. They're all very smart, and range from libs to somewhat better than normal libs (we had one open ML, but he graduated a few years ago). They all think Trump is a fucking dumbass. As with every election, a big crop of our seniors is going to be eligible to vote for the first time this year.
For the first time in the decade or so that I've worked here, pretty much every single one of them has said they don't intend to vote. They hate Biden almost as much as Trump, either because they condemn the genocide in Israel or just because they (correctly) believe that he has done nothing to actually benefit them. This is a population of kids who are much more politically engaged than your average teenager, and vote turnout in previous years has been high. I was actually very surprised at how many of them expressed contempt for the whole process this year, and indicated that they were totally uninterested in supporting Biden (and of course would not support Trump). I'm guessing this is part of a big trend that we're going to see this year, and I'm preparing myself for libs blaming young people--for whom Biden has done little but make their future demonstrably worse--for Democrats' loss.
I'm trying to convince all of them to vote anyway, just for some third party that speaks to them. Yesterday, we talked about PSL, Cornel West, the Greens, and Afroman for a bit. It would be incredibly funny to see young people reject Biden/Trump, and yet turn out in record numbers anyway. The narrative that kids are just too addicted to their phones to vote would fall apart. I'll keep working on it.
No real point here, just !im-doing-my-part
She ended up throwing a shoebox with $50,000 in cash into the window of a moving SUV in order to help the CIA get her a new social security number. Incredible levels of professional financial competence.
How can one man be simultaneously so stupid and also so dangerously irresponsible?
