Jared Dunn

Again, this is just the fucking Sims. Y'all are claiming to be doing social science based on The Sims. JFC.

Well, and that's the reason this has been pitched so hard directly to the C-suite. If you're an underwriter you're worried about all this systemic risk and liability that you can't price or cover. If you're an exec, you don't care, you're extracting short-term value from the company and moving on.

Tech oligarchs are rich & loud, but they are not the whole economy. Where is the whole healthcare and pharma industry? The whole travel and hospitality industry? Entertainment? Insurance? Powerful oxen are getting gored, but they're doing very little to push back as yet. Maybe they never will 🤷‍♂️

What I am waiting for is conflicts *between* well-resourced and privileged people and entities about this. Or really for anyone with power to doggedly defend their own goddamn interests and ambitions against the big tech and fash pol axis.

But this is another of the Trump confluence issues, the widespread abandonment of rules. The assumption going forward is clearly "no rules will ever be enforced against well-resourced and privileged people and entities again". And it was the assumption that allowed these tools to be created at all.

Not only is my job going to disappear, apparently, but my hobbies as well. So instead of working, I'll be spending my time with AI sewing patterns that don't work, terrible AI novels, uncanny valley AI films, because if I don't have a job, I won't be able to afford anything other than AI slop.

But there's also a big dollop of "if it didn't exist, it would have to be invented" . Or maybe a sense that this tech had a much broader range of potential affordances, but because these lunatics happened to be the ones to midwife it, this hellscape is what we are getting.

It's a cruel trick of history that specialists in mass unreality got presented with an an infinite-unreality-creation machine exactly at the historical moment where they were prepared to go for broke and burn it all down and rule over the ashes.

1. Trump 2.0 and LLM/GenAI technology becoming huge at the same time in history feels deeply cursed.

2. I think a lot about if Trump and GenAI hitting at about the same time was accidental or correlated, and I'm strongly leaning towards 'correlated, albeit in complex ways we're still puzzling out.'

I do see posts from LLM enthusiasts that boil down to “critics are just mad the computer is better than them at trivia now” and idk, I think *most* critics are just genuinely terrified they’ll never find work they don’t hate that pays a living wage again in the current batshit climate

"Shooting an Elephant" was about how it is cool, fun, and effective to shoot an elephant in front of your assembled colonial subjects.

A war that isn't a war, documented with videos that may or may not be real, funded by elected leaders who are neither for nor against it, is the most dystopian thing that's happened in my lifetime

What about like the 4th or 5th time tho?

"There's an old saying in Schelling—I know it's in Hegel, probably in Schelling—that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as... as... tragedy... the second time as... as... it's funny if it happens again."

And probably the jockeying for position part is that Musk or Altman got freaked out about Claude Code's recent hype surge and planted a seed with Hegseth or someone in the admin to try to take them down a peg, and then Anthropic had to hit back and try to defend themselves, and it got out of hand.

I feel like this whole brouhaha is just the hyperscalers jockeying for position. Anthropic does have nominally different values and culture, but that is not stopping them from building tools that authoritarians and bosses are clearly gonna use to surveil and oppress us in this environment.

Pivot Point
Durant, IA

Corruption in terms of what citizens of a functioning democracy should or will tolerate, vs. the letter of the law that is written and interpreted by the class that wants to do corruption to further enrich themselves and entrench their power are very different things. Which class does media serve?

I did my first SoCal trip right after New Years and had to do a lot of freeway driving at night in the rain. They... do not know how to drive in the rain. Neither 85MPH nor 45MPH is the right answer guys! But that's generally what was happening, on top of the tendencies you mention.

Flags fly forever

To vote against it, right?

😒

To vote against it, right?

Is this structurally inherent to current platforms and information flows? Because Obama-era Dems did have an organizing/influencing operation that wasn't, but that required them to listen to and empower their left-of-center constituencies, and they didn't want to do that so they shut it down.

And professional / institutional standards meant pro archivists will never just go yolo/disruptor mode and do it. Internet Archive might push the boundaries, but then nearly get sued into oblivion for it. So you only get this needed service from a dodgy offshore grey market source.

An additional bit is that you can’t trust the regulators to get it right in terms of public interest or practical needs either. Like, archive.today exists at any scale in large part because there was no political will to negotiate a fair use solution for citing and archiving paywalled materials.

If all the billionaires betting this country's economic future on AI weren't the guy from the "I don't wanna cure cancer, I wanna turn people into dinosaurs" meme, then yeah, it'd be a lot easier to be interested in what is, in the abstract, kind of a cool technology

If "AI" was being built, used, and planned for in responsible ways--the way a civilization designed to enhance human thriving would do--then a lot more people would be enthusiastic about its potential. But the people in charge of defining what AI will be are the fucking worst short-term scumbags.

The Democrats' failure to articulate and alternative vision for America is as much a part of how we got here as the Republicans' assertion of theirs.

Except they didn't just fail, they worked actively to thwart anyone who tried.

The reason why billionaires are attracted to Russia isn't difficult. That is a society run by and for oligarchs, without any pretence of being anything else. Putin's regime is the model they want to impose on us.

This is important to recognize. There are very few brakes on the actions of the Trump regime and things are very likely to get worse before they can get better. The example of the bravery of the people of Minneapolis is going to need to be repeated in other places.