yes, but it can only sing Peter

I got some very intense, frequent bullying in 90s Latin America for being perceived as queer, before even understanding myself that I was actually queer.

I don’t think there was ever anything like the jocks from US movies. Bullies tended to be troubled kids from difficult backgrounds, the kind of kid who would be themself exposed to violence and abuse at home or in their neighbourhood. A handful were from religious fundamentalist families.

There was some hostility towards children who took school too seriously or were perceived as teacher’s pets, but I don’t think that in itself would have inspired “slapped every day” levels of bullying. I don’t remember bullying due to what today are called fandoms or geeky interests; they were just much less known.

What I never get about this stuff is how unfun all of it is. The characters in character.ai don’t sound anything like their model characters, at all. ChatGPT necromancy is terrible, the séance table in my hometown sucked but the medium on a lazy day was still significantly better at producing some sort of impersonation that felt at least a little bit like the dead person, a skill I’ve come to appreciate a bit when compared to ChatGPT’s attempt at it. Everything that ChatGPT writes, no matter who it’s trying to imitate, has the exact same flavour, and the flavour is slop.

Futurism articles really make me feel how these people are not living in the same reality as I.

Looking from now into 2149 and war is a nonfactor in Baby’s life. “Genocide” isn’t mentioned once, or “fascism”, or “borders”. No food or water scarcity. No mention of what happens to insects or wildlife or people in island countries or near the Equator. The only mention of “ecosystem” is in the expression “Center for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystems”. The only mention of “climate change” is to say that it will lead us to a “reconfigurable architectural robotic space”. Somehow people have all the energy in the world to power AI girlfriends and moveable robotic walls and menstruation-sensing tech panties. The human body, the animal that is the human being, doesn’t really matter in this world where Microsoft VR smells your anxiety in your deathbed and comforts you with self-warming textiles. Where does the food that sustains the flesh comes from, what is our relationship to the plants and animals and insects and bacteria who we depend on for food and air and shelter, who builds all this stuff and under which conditions—considerations that do not even cross the mind of this person when they think of the question: “What does the future hold for those born today?”

translate technically fiddly instructions of the type where people have trouble spotting mistakes, with patterned noise generators. what could go wrong

The representative of the fascist party in Germany says she’s “lesbian but not queer”. I think it’s the same case.

I tend to like “Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff” more than “Behind the Bastards”. Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.

My daily podcast is “It Could Happen Here”, but some other mainstays in the educational side include:

• Live Like the World is Dying
• Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
• It’s Going Down
• Final Straw Radio
• Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and “The Business Plot”)
• Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
• The Iron Dice
• Bad Hasbara
• Frontline Herbalism if you like plants

No need for xcancel, Gebru is on actually social media: https://dair-community.social/@timnitGebru/113160285088058319

Dunno but why not, after Nanowrimo claimed that opposing “AI” means you’re classist and ableist. Why not also make objecting be sexist, racist etc. I’m going to be ahead of the curve by predicting that being against ChatGPT will also be a red flag that you’re a narcissistic sociopath manipulator because uhh because abused women need ChatGPT to communicate with their toxic exes /s

I also fear that said collapse could be ruinous to big tech, deeply damaging to the startup ecosystem, and will further sour public support for the tech industry.

Yes… ha ha ha… YES!

Also John McCarthy and Ray fucking Blanchard

I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesn’t work. it’s not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.

yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even one’s deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if he’s saying the truth, but here’s the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.

I think this is how “AI” works, but on a larger scale.

I don’t have many good memories but I recall having a 486 or Pentium 1 in 2001 when it was already old, in my college dorm room, running NetBSD to serve my and my roommate’s personal blog.

One problem we had is that periodically the ADSL modem would stop responding and nothing could fix it but a hard reset. If nobody was using the Internet (which used to be a thing back then!! not looking at the Internet 24/7!!) it could go hours without us noticing that the blog was down. I couldn’t program or access the modem in anyway, it was a black box, so my workaround was as follows. NetBSD had a /dev/speaker device which could play notes on the buzzer like “echo ‘ABC#’ > /dev/speaker”. I made a little script that output small, random 7-note melodies to /dev/speaker (in pentatonic so that they sound “musical”, and in the lower octaves so it wasn’t grating). A watchdog service periodically pinged the modem; if the modem was blanking out, the PC would bleep-bloop cute little computer songs until somebody turned the modem on and off.

in retrospect I found computing in this era significantly healthier and more rewarding than the current Internet.

how’s the nix drama going these days? I need more spilled tea to sip, anywhere I can read a recap? did everyone just gave up on not being sponsored by border surveillance drones?

Meanwhile in Brazil, the first ChatGPT-powered city council candidate, advertising the Lawmaker of the Future AI as his governing assistant, and the power of blockchain against corruption.

https://www.lex.tec.br/

The most black mirror part for me is where he’s selling tickets to watch Lex (the aforementioned Lawmaker of the Future “AI”, represented as a sci-fi girlbot) in the theatre. No really this isn’t a parody, they’re literally serving political spectacle, as in, on stage.

A note for the unawares that Nanowrimo also tried to cover up a scandal when one of their mods was found to be referring minors to an ABDL fetish site. To my knowledge Nanowrimo never tried to own up to it, never even admitted anything was wrong until the FBI got involved, and still blocks any discussion of the situation.
https://xcancel.com/Arumi_kai/status/1760770617073082629
https://speak-out.carrd.co/

Reportedly they’re now shilling AI hard on their Facebook (I don’t have Facebook to check). I consider it 100% likely that, from this year on, everyone who uploads their 50k words to the organisation to prove completion will have their work promptly fed to the hungry algorithms.

At least one writer in the board has already resigned over the AI blog post https://xcancel.com/djolder/status/1830464713110540326

I really hate it that I already see in my mind the linkedin types going like “80% of AI projects fail—how you need to sleep in the office 7 days of a week to reach the 20%”. I mean Y Combinator used to take pride on the fact that over 90% of startups fail, do you have what it takes to be a ten percenter??

I was going to say they were cowards about this because it’s powered by wind-up mechanics rather than burning droplets of black ship oil you feed into the tiny oil barrel. But then I realised that would probably waste most of the energy on heat, right on the delicate mechanisms and your wrist, and who wants to use an energy source that damages everything around it with excessive warming

I wanted to torture myself so I looked into that person’s posting history. They have made the exact same point that “Monty Python in fact used to mock the gays, how ironic huh?!?” three times in a row in different threads, really showing it to them wokes