Lucia Lorenzi

BC Government MUST Reinstate Funding For A Disabled Child's Medication. And perhaps it is time to discuss a declaration on the rights of the dying.

NEW post by me. The BC Govt has cut funding to an essential treatment for a disabled child with a very rare disease. Her name is Charleigh Pollock and time is running out. There is link to petition in post. Please sign, share.
open.substack.com/pub/mssineno...

Important response to the lawsuit. Chief Clarence Louie: “The recognition of unceded Syilx Okanagan land is not a political maneuver; it is an acknowledgment of historical truths & legal realities. Attempts to silence these acknowledgments are attempts to erase Syilx Okanagan presence & rights.” 14/

when the president is claiming the powers of the legislature while skirting at best and arguably outright defying the orders of the judiciary this impulse to say "the president calling himself a king is trolling, a distraction" goes beyond normalcy bias and into something malignant, metastatic

Tomorrow is the fake holiday known as "Flag Day"

It was started in 1996 by the Liberals to try and boost nationalism in the wake of the Quebec referendum.

I use this story about Flag Day to introduce my next book, Corporate Control, which is probably the most that any Canadian knows about Flag Day

people really just exited stage left on their “decolonization journey” and are back to simping for their fuck ass settlerstate huh

The fact is, Canada is deeply implicated in the same kind of fascist forces we see at play in the U.S. In fact, many of the alt-right thought leaders there are Canadians! So if you want to fight this you MUST root it out at home first, and nationalism isn't know for that kind of nuance. Do better.

i think this break is badly needed. i'm not saying CS has no place in refusing, resisting, or destroying AI, but they must have due respect for the people who actually have to deal with the violence and harm that AIs create & project. meaning recognizing undue power they wield and challenging that

recognizing AI as an oligarchic project, or as an authoritarian one (or, fundamentally, as a political project, navigating our way through which particular qualities that project entails), means breaking away from letting computer scientists insist on being the chaperones of our movements against AI

i would lay out the claim that the connective tissue within AI, that spans those last 60ish years, is not shared methods or shared approaches. the thing that connects AI from the 50s/60s to today is the shared ideological project.

i've said this a few times now so i'm sorry if i'm a broken record, but

if you go back in time 30 years, you find AI in a very different form than it exists today. go back another 30 years, and again something very different. the academic tradition that falls under that one umbrella is disjointed;

what does it mean to have systems that render decisions at scales that are de facto or de jure impossible to scrutinize or challenge? again, are we not talking about authoritarian totalitarian states?

we can and should be candid about what it means if someone says that they want to accumulate and centralize (and therefore validate or invalidate) the entire world in the form of data. what does that kind of central authority describe? on its face we're describing systems of authoritarian nature.

one key point that i'll try to make without succumbing to engaging on technical domain shit is that AI projects as we know them today are existentially, definitionally characterized by a massive amount of data, and opaque decisions and other outputs going out.

but i promise i'll try not to constantly turn every conversation into an epistemological crisis about what kind of expertise, and what kind of knowledge, we respect and acknowledge.

BUT WE SHOULD- no, i'm digressing.

should put "technical" experts in so many quotes because i would argue that people who have had to fill out a thousand job application forms online arguably have more *expertise* about AI in job screenings & applications than eg CS faculty and grad students who haven't applied for a job in 10+ years

it's really good to be re-evaluating whether we accept the premises laid out by (technical) experts when they define "AI". the techno-essentialist approach to tracing a boundary around AI according to the tech stack has led us into weird cul-de-sacs that make building power against it more difficult

YES

sorry. yes.

I show up on these bluest of skies just to be So Helpful in your Time of Need.

they have special MBA classes where they train you to be the guy who has to act like “AI” is an exciting longterm strategy to grow and not just a short term gimmick to strip media verticals for parts until the brand loses all credibility and handful of consultants walk off with cartoon bags of cash

Too young to know how to blow into it like a video game cartridge.

BREAKING: Starbucks Workers United is going on strike.

Tomorrow unionized Starbucks workers are walking out in multiple key cities. And @sbworkersunited.org's rolling strike will grow in the coming days.

537 stores and 10,000+ workers are in the union and could potentially strike.

"to be hospitable is to repudiate conquest"

"pleasures held in common"

- Laleh Khalili

V Mitch Mcewen’s question about marronage as a rigorous exploration of outer space reminds me of the Black quantum scientists in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archive

the opposite! will queeramplify!!!!

The flu shot is different this year, thanks to COVID A strain of influenza appears to have disappeared from the planet since COVID. As a result, U.S. flu vaccines have been redesigned.

Masking and COVID precautions early in the pandemic killed off a strain of influenza. Eliminated it COMPLETELY.

Imagine what we could achieve if we improved indoor air quality and masked during surges?

www.npr.org/sections/sho...

*slides entire DVD collection of Reba back out of sight*