back in ~my~ day cartel oligarchs would meet in secret to fix prices for products you cannot live without, then get a ton of profit and swim in money, while backstabbing one another at any opening with blackmail and assassins and whatnot. sometimes they’d fund a library or something to pretend they were philanthropists.

cartels these days make pretend products that nobody wants, then promise they’re going to “invest” one quadrillion dollars on the other oligarch’s company to create more virtual husbandos, and the other company in turn promises they’re going to buy one quadrilllion dollars of “compute” from the first company, so that both can report one quadrillion dollars of “growth” for doing absolutely nothing. like who are they even trying to impress here. then the oligarch hires people to pretend he can play Diablo. what happened to honest, salt-of-the-earth exploitation of the masses, huh. the boot stomping on my face is all cheap plastic nowadays. they gotta replace it every 3 years and the new model doesn’t even fit my face anymore. they don’t make cartels like they used to

Maybe more importantly, for his readers and listeners, Zitron holds out the seductive promise of some great comeuppance for the industry. Justice, of some kind, for an audience that isn’t seeing much of it in evidence anywhere. “I do not think this is a real industry,” he has written, “and I believe that if we pulled the plug on the venture capital aspect tomorrow it would evaporate.” When On the Media asked how he could be so certain that a collapse was coming, he replied, “I feel it in my soul.”

Yeah this cannot be bad journalism, it has to be intellectual dishonesty. Someone paid for a hit piece for sure.

The first couple Eko Eko Azarak movies. Grade-A B-horror Japanese schlock, main character is a Satanist witch teenage detective, more or less. Her goddamn name is Kuroi Misa (“Black Mass”), I love her so much. Perfect if you like brainless gore and non-irony-poisoned creepy movies for spooky week.

The movies are currently on Youtube in full. I’m also watching the 1997 TV series but after episode #3 you’ll need to speak Japanese. The movies are better than the series anyway (the first two at least, haven’t watched the others.)

Yeah I mean I am in favour that food should not be paywalled from the hungry and everyone who wants food should be able to just go to the food and eat it (i.e. I am in favour of a system that allocates resources according to need). I am not in favour that wealthy capital owners who already hold all the power in the world should be allowed to vacuum all the food into a hell blender that produces processed food product to try and impress investors into another round of funding for their food sucking machine. These are not the same thing.

I will deliberately avoid declaring the take to be in the public domain, just so that you can enjoy the street cred of your life of crime 🏴‍☠️

I’m a leftist who doesn’t support intellectual property. My solutions to intellectual property are 1) communism, or at least 2) basic income, in that order of preference.

Until one of the solutions to the problem of intellectual property is implemented, individuals should be allowed full sovereignity over their intellectual creations as they see fit. Personally all my intellectual creation is either public domain, or published under open, explicitly anti-capitalist licenses. But that’s because I have a day job and a safe economic situation. If an artist decides people should pay to use their stuff, people should pay to use their stuff. The consent of the creator is non-negotiable.

Capitalists are the enemy and I don’t give a flying fuck about capitalist intellectual property. My rule, grosso modo, is: if I pay to access this piece of art, does the money go to the creators, or does it go to some corporation’s shareholders? If the first, I pay, gladly. If the second, I sail the high seas. Sometimes when it’s hybrid (usually of the form “the artist gets peanuts and the capital owners get the lion’s share”) I will dig up the artist’s patreon or ko-fi or whatever, donate the price of the thing there, and pirate it, under the assumption that the patreon/ko-fi/bandcamp/etc. cut is smaller than the typical entertainment industry’s.

Peter Coffin is a fuck and his contrarian-ass pro-AI stuff deserves sneering to the full extent of sneerdom

Biggest examples I know of is Shaun’s 4-hour review of the “War on Science” book, and the backlash to the Riyadh Comedy Festival (the whole drama here was hilarious, and not because of the comedy).

Yeah comeon OP spill the tea, I want my daily dose of drama, which pokémons are those and why are men angry about them 🍵

That’s like “there’s no ethical consumption under capitalism so I’ll get an Amazon Prime subscription” thinking.

You can’t boycott away a government, you can’t even boycott away a corporation for that matter. That doesn’t mean we should just give up and be complicit.

The enshittification of all social media and online services in general has been driving me continuously more towards downgrading devices, low tech solutions, and non-computer-based hobbies and interests, and I am at this point increasingly optimistic about it. I spend more time gardening now, and doing sports, and not looking at my cellphone in the middle of a date but just enjoying the quite moments. I get entertainment recommendations from human beings more than algorithms. I’m like yes please, keep making it worse, add more ads, more slop. Go on nerds, ruin search bars harder. Help me quit my addiction.

Like I wanted to know about some martial arts club that only has online information on facebook, because websites are dead (no, websites were murdered); so I made a throwaway account; facebook rejected my chosen username because it “mixes characters from different alphabets” (one small but unsung injustice of the modern Internet is increasing marginalisation of multilingualism); I put in an ethnically pure, non-race-treasonous username all in a single script; facebook then told me that my account would be verified with a selfie video, it’s easy…

So I closed the tab, thankful to Facebook for saving me from Facebook. I learned more about the martial arts club by showing up for a test training and checking the vibes, which tells me more about it than any online presence ever could and also gets me out of the house, breathing some crispy-chill autumn air, amongst fallen leaves.

I don’t know what is everyone’s red line but for me, I’ll never make an account that requires a government ID, a video selfie, or a facial photo. The way this exiles me from more and more online silos is doing wonders to help me stop my decades of being too online, to recover my ability to read paper books. I had missed being a bookworm so much. I had switched from Emacs org-mode and electronic tools to paper-based bullet journaling long ago, to great success. Now I’m banned from every single dating app due to my radical and unreasable posture of not wanting to expose my face (indexable by location (as a trans woman antifa activist latina immigrant (in this economy))). The only dating app that still accepts me is Lex, and ain’t nobody uses Lex. As a result I now find new dates through offline means, which mostly means queer parties, or metamours refereed to me by women I’m dating. Both user interfaces are significantly more satisfying than even pre-enshittification OkCupid.

I’ve downgraded my smartphone to a Fairphone 2 from 10 years ago. It’s sufficient to run the transport and authentication apps that modern life requires, or to DM my family on Matrix, but it’s slow and small and the battery runs out too fast to use for distraction. As a result my weekend trips became much more interesting, contemplative, I notice more things and the time lasts longer. I’m using more retro- or purpose-specific devices, like the ebook reader and a cheap MP3 player. But I’ve also taken to doing embroidery on trains and waiting rooms, or just people-watching and thinking. A year ago I couldn’t do anything without having a podcast or playlist shuffle on the background. Somehow the simple act of being less online also made it more comfortable for me to not have so much stimulation all the time. It might be placebo or self-image or something, I don’t care, my quality of life has increased.

All of this tech was cursed anyway, we should never have quietly accepted and normalised that everything is made by coltan mine slaves and 996 suicidal workers, we should never have accepted everything made of plastic and toxic metals dumped unceremoniously into the soil life by the tons every day due to planned obsolescence or just to inflate prices, we should never have accepted startup culture and obscenely thieving celebrity CEOs hoarding all the wealth while mechanical turk and AI taggers in Third World countries pour their blood onto the machine for pennies, we should never have continued to fund Big Tech, and increasingly open source projects for that matter, after they got in bed with governments doing literal genocides. It is an abomination that my kids in an European public school are required to used Microsoft Teams accounts on government-provided Apple iPads. I hope this whole industry crashes like nothing else crashed before, and in the meantime I hope Big Tech hubris prevents them from seeing they’re driving everyone away from the plugged lifestyle they designed.

I just got a cheap-ass Sandisk MP3 player, as part of my efforts to both stop streaming and stop depending on a phone so much when I’m outside. It has an audiobook function which didn’t work but after a firmware update it does, mostly. It’s not a good device by any stretch but it cost me 20€ and I consume a lot of audiobooks, and it’s extremely calming to not be exposed to a smartphone when I read.

On the music side of things the biggest change wasn’t so much the devices but getting more into bandcamp, with a healthy supplementation of stuff downloaded from soulseek, torrents, and on a pinch, youtube. I make wishlists of small bands I like and buy full albums on bandcamp friday. Listening to these offline made me able to listen to entire albums again, like in the physical media days, which again I find to be incredibly calming compared to hopping between the same favourites on shuffle.

Spotify actually helped me discover music, both through user-created playlists and algorithmic suggestions. I hear it’s all full of “AI”-generated music and lists, though, and I found a much more powerful algorithm to discover music, called “asking people”.

Swedish audio streaming companies who recruit for ethnic cleansing militia squads, and whose profits are reinvested in “AI” murderdrone arms dealer Helsing.

“In the 21st century, the Antichrist is a Luddite who wants to stop all science. It’s someone like Greta or Eliezer,” [Peter Thiel] said, referring to Thunberg and Eliezer Yudkowsky

I am going outside to smoke something. I don’t care what, just… something

Dunno I just enjoyed the fuck out of “Landlocked in Foreign Skin”, like it’s been a long time since I pause my life to devour a book in one sitting like this, and given that Drew Huff writes from Seattle I’m thinking they’re a USian? And I was really engrossed by Arkady Martine’s A Memory Called Empire which resonated a lot with my experiences as a Third World immigrant, with a certain honesty in portrayal of what it feels like to admire “culture” at a distance from a colony that I seldomly see (I’m on book #2 currently). I’m more of a fantasy reader, but Octavia Butler and Le Guin’s sci-fi were absolutely formative to me, and if you ask me one modern sci-fi series I liked besides those mentioned so far, I’d probably say Wayfarers or Monk & Robot. Plenty of good SF authors from the USA whose politics are more or less the opposite of what you describe.

The trick is I read books by queer folk, women and PoC almost exclusively. Absolutely don’t regret it, all the fun stuff is there in the margins.

re: last line: no, he never will admit or concede to a single damn thing, and that’s why every time I remember this article exists I have to reread dabblers & blowhards one more time purely for defensive catharsis

The problem with calling imaginary entities by “funny wordplay” on the slurs used against Black people and Mexicans isn’t the imaginary entities, is that you imply that Black people and Mexicans are something negative to be compared to. It implies that racial slurs are so trifling and inconsequential that it’s appropriate subject matter for puns; it implies racial slurs are not an act of targeted oppression.

That’s literally the opposite of calling nazis nazis. Personally I deal with nazis through the use of direct violence. The world deals with Black people and immigrants through systemic violence. There’s a process by which people get convinced that it is ok that Black people get targeted by police, and that process begins with hegemonic normalisation of supremacist values—it beings with words, with implications. Just like, for example, the process by which it becomes OK to discard the lives of disabled people begins with language that insults others based on “intelligence”.

It is contemptible to be a fascist; it is not contemptible to be a wetback. Therefore it is a good thing to insult the machines by comparing them to 1984 versificators; it is a bad thing to insult the machines by comparing them to Mexicans. The direction you insult towards matters, just like there’s a difference between violence done by the oppressor and violence done to the oppressor.

So I learned about the rise of pro-Clippy sentiment in the wake of ChatGPT and that led me on a little ramble about the ELIZA effect vs. the exercise of empathy https://awful.systems/post/5495333

I’ve often called slop “signal-shaped noise”. I think the damage already done by slop pissed all over the reservoirs of knowledge, art and culture is irreversible and long-lasting. This is the only thing generative “AI” is good at, making spam that’s hard to detect.

It occurs to me that one way to frame this technology is as a precise inversion of Bayesian spam filters for email; no more and no less. I remember how it was a small revolution, in the arms race against spammers, when statistical methods came up; everywhere we took of the load of straining SpamAssassin with rspamd (in the years before gmail devoured us all). I would argue “A Plan for Spam” launched Paul Graham’s notoriety, much more than the Lisp web stores he was so proud of. Filtering emails by keywords was not being enough, and now you could train your computer to gradually recognise emails that looked off, for whatever definition of “off” worked for your specific inbox.

Now we have the richest people building the most expensive, energy-intensive superclusters to use the same statistical methods the other way around, to generate spam that looks like not-spam, and is therefore immune to all filtering strategies we had developed. That same blob-like malleability of spam filters makes the new spam generators able to fit their output to whatever niche they want to pollute; the noise can be shaped like any signal.

I wonder what PG is saying about gen-“AI” these days? let’s check:

“AI is the exact opposite of a solution in search of a problem,” he wrote on X. “It’s the solution to far more problems than its developers even knew existed … AI is turning out to be the missing piece in a large number of important, almost-completed puzzles.”
He shared no examples, but […]

Who would have thought that A Plan for Spam was, all along, a plan for spam.

choice quote from Elsevier’s response:

Q. Have authors consented to these hyperlinks in their scientific articles?
Yes, it is included on the signed agreement between the author and Elsevier.

Q. If I were to publish my work with Elsevier, do I risk that hyperlinks to AI summaries will be added to my papers without my consent?
Yes, because you will need to sign an agreement with Elsevier.

consent, everyone!

From gormless gray voice to misattributed sources, it can be daunting to read articles that turn out to be slop. However, incorporating the right tools and techniques can help you navigate instructionals in the age of AI. Let’s delve right in and and learn some telltale signs like:

• Every goddamn article reads like this now.
• With this bullet point list at some point.
• I am going to tear the eyes off my head