Smallproblem

Unions, pitchforks, communities of care, mass organizing, direct action on all fronts, and detangling dependencies such that there are fewer centralized levers with which to control people.

For a start.

I think focusing on new options blinds us to the patterns we know to work. This is not the first time rampant class disparity and ecocide have been handled as a species, we can use old ideas. Energy-intensive technology currently being developed by the ultrawealthy is the opposite of helpful.

The shift is only real if it has a positive effect on human wellbeing.

Waiting on new tech to save us from rampant capitalism and planetary destruction blinds us to the difficult and necessary work of fixing stuff with the levers we already have.

The deus ex of it all preventing real shifts forward.

"AI communist utopia" has a similar ring to "fully automated luxury communism", and has similar pitfalls.

I think there is a distinction between internalized and externalized transphobia.

Like, I may have thoughts in my head, but I make a concerted and mostly successful effort to avoid applying that lens outward. And I've met trans folks whose "internalized" transphobia bleeds into insults and harm.

This holds attention better for longer.

You'd also be weating on the other side of the production branch with cookies.

Those are individualized, personal ones. The big group stuff is about controlling noise levels and smells generally, which bless my boss, the center already did before I got there.

Random little adjustments I make for my (work) kids' sensory needs:

-yes you can wash hands and come back to the activity
-sure, you can wear your hat inside
-socks are wonky? fix those 70 million times
-child is loud? Ok, we can shift so you are further.
-blanket can be a pillow

angle grinder box locked behind welded frame

almost done wrapping gifts

Movie you've watche more than six times with a gif.

For bonus points, make the gif react to the movie you're responding to.

What colors are these Pokemon officially categorized as in the Pokedex? Do you have eyeballs and color vision and think you know what colors Pokemon are listed as in the main series games? Let's see if your perception matches Gamefreak's official answers.

uquiz.com/quiz/mRw2lk/...

Would anyone like to question their eyes?

The olive oil ON ITS OWN

Text scroll at the bottom: "do not emulate this behaviour"

Maybe we could have freeze frames, and then an arrow pointing to a character saying "good" or "bad" or "clever" or "irrational".

Quick lookup says it is the heat. Oil can be hotter than the boiling boint of water, water obviously can't. So oil is sublimating the ice, while water's just melting it.

I never had one to kill, but I did carefully grow a "people are worried, maybe check why" voice

If I buy an exotic bird - it was ethically sourced, and I plan to take care of it well - in what way does that affect poaching?

Because the understanding I had, and live by, is that purchasing even ethically bred animals drives up the market for poaching.

But it also requires individuals to join up with the union, and that means speaking to each other and getting friends on board.

Bit of both? When I say deciding to do things, I don't mean privately. But there is a critical mass necessary of people willing to do A Thing. And for stuff like boycott actions, it mostly doesn't require single central organizing.

If we build something that acts like us, for inscrutable reasons, is it thinking like us, or is it mimicking only surface patterns?

At the moment, there are still cracks. It is _visibly_ only surface when it errs. When those tells go away, has it gained deeper knowledge, or better patches?

We cannot affect what the masses do, but we can make choices ourselves, and advocate for them among our friends. The way to make group action happen is by large numbers of people deciding to do things individually. We know a mass action has already produced negative results, so ask people to cease.

I don't know that they do.

Certainly the early versions had errors that were... telling in their direction. Humans make errors too, but not _those_ errors. Extrapolating, LLMs are "learning" about totally different factors than what humans prioritize, to mimic a similar effect.

If it had been done en masse at the outset, the companies in control of them could not have built their capacity up to where it is now, and interactions are very much both giving them data and/or money, AND fuelling the investment money being poured in.

I did say calling it understanding was bold, not indefensible.

You can say rocks understand gravity, and under some framings of understand, it's believable. But it's a contentious claim. You and I agreed - last we spoke - that LLMs have not reached _human_ understanding of concepts as yet, no?

One of the only ones we (as in, citizens) have access to, then?

You can do "bake at _ for _" with only voice to text, no?

Refusing to engage with the tech that is being used to do evil is one of the ONLY social structures we have in place to combat bad tech.

When you figure out you LLM powered chatbot is killing people, you pull the plug. When you figure out stable diffusion is producing convincing misinformation and slop, you stop investing.

One of the social structures we have to enforce this is shaming and avoiding those who use the evil tech.