😥 😭 😭 😭

We’re in the throes of a few crisis in the US:

1. a professional backlash against the over-prescription of opiates that were advertised as “non-addictive” which was actually a lie,
2. the monster the above crisis created: a domestic population of drug addicts who are either seeking drugs themselves or looking to non-addicts to acquire them,
3. constriction within the health insurance marketplace, demanding more and more justification for care and drug access,
4. an entire political system that’s in the pocket of said industry who are incentivized to manufacture a world that maximizes health care spending while minimizing actual health care delivered.

Monoculture is an antiquated form of agriculture.

Slavery is a barbarously cruel crime against humanity.

Perhaps people will say similar things about industrial meat production and billionaires in a few hundred years.

Chehalis. Checks out.

I once texted the phone number on an elote stand to ask when they were open, got a polite response, then accidentally sent them fetish furry porn by accident a week later. I immediately apologized. I’ve still never visited that elote stand. Too ashamed.

TROUBLE AHEAD FOR THE CEO OF SEX

The only acceptable response is “I heard he was good at making bitches wet.”

60 minutes of self-congratulatory blathering from olympic-level athletes in the sport of failing upwards.

They’re speaking with the underlying presumption that agi is a real thing that will happen. It’s not, and it won’t. https://www.404media.co/google-deepmind-paper-argues-llms-will-never-be-conscious/

On the topic of Google’s influence over Mozilla being the primary source of their funding: “It’s complicated, it’s entangled, but it seems to be working alright.” JOURNALISM!

Any-LLM platform: Mozilla’s new middleware for developers allowing them to hop between models and LLM companies.

Mozilla data collective: Mozilla’s marketplace platform (platform?) for making “training data” (any content of value to LLM companies) monetizable for the owners of that content.

In resposne to the loaded question ‘hey, isn’t it bonkers that your “rabid” users forced you to build a “dont do AI shit” setting in Firefox?’:

“It’s being reactionary to our community and reactionary to our users. They’re asking us for that. And so I think in some ways, both we need to respond to that and we need to lead them through it, but we need to provide these other alternatives.”

Because, clearly, the user’s aversion to these tools is a childish phase that they need to get over.

44:10: The ex-head of self-driving at Uber talks about letting his Tesla self-drive, with his kids inside, trying to take over driving and having the car crash into a wall at 30 mph. Lesson learned: “I’m not blaming the software” and (human) “passivity is bad.” Remember when that guy got shot in the face by Dick Cheney, then he held a press conference and apoligized about getting shot?

Some grade-A Texas sharpshooting around “could AI invent punk rock?” They argue no, but they’re misunderstanding the premise. Punk didn’t get a cultural foothold because of the music alone. The philosophy, the artists, the choices, the industry and the scene behind and around the music made that happen. LLMs are a million monkeys on a million typewriters, just like artists. Given enough time and resources one will evenutally fart out something unique that resonates with the culture and captures peoples’ interests, and we all conveniently forget about all the failures. The brilliance of human artists is that our failure rate is significantly lower. The reply to this should not be “let’s keep working to make failure cheaper so that it’ll evenutally be economical to retire human creativity.”

They attest that the nightmare scenario is that we all become the fat useless humans in Wall-E (which, on its own, is a ridiculously optimistic vision, ignoring the potential hellscape of a ravaged environment, digital feudal lords and impoverished serfdom), but they refuse to stop building all the infrastructure to make those precise futures actually happen.

But it’s ok; we’re going to get lead through it.

Toby Hooper, always pinching those pennies!

Somebody at my last job showed me how to do this to speed up searching within internal tools at work. It’s only saving a few seconds and a few clicks, but it blows people away every time.

I’ve got a ton of them now.

Or, as Cory Doctorow put it, “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four.”

( ( stares at the Fibonacci sequence… ) )

This has to do something…

Yeah. The bar down the street will have the game on the TVs and they’ll bring me all the beer and tots I ask for. I’m good.

Or perhaps other reasons…

Your lucky numbers are #ff0000

This is one of the sickest synthesizers of the 1990s g-funk era. It produced the high-pitched portamento sound that provided iconic hooks for many of the tracks on Dr Dre’s 1993 album The Chronic.

Erowid is a remnant of the old web where people would post trip reports. What you’re looking for is methaqualone.

This is a giant waste of time.

A) Restricting AIPAC just means capital and influence will flow from other, more obscure sources. It’s squeezing a closed tube of toothpaste.

B) PACs should be illegal, full stop. So long as PACs exist, capital will continue to flow into our politics. And as the cost burden of jumping through regulatory hoops and sidestepping ridiculous half-measures like this one is trivial for large donors, PACs disproportionally benefit highly-funded causes as opposed to those powered by small donations.

No half measures. Make PACs illegal.

Beginning to feel a peculiar compulsion to confound tourists with ice cream.

Geeking out over the origins of HTTP 418 kinda got me a job once. But that was back when that kind of stuff, connecting interpersonally with the humans that you work with, mattered during hiring.