A good companion piece to "On Bullshit."

It also calls out issues in tech that have been on my mind:

deadsimpletech.com/blog/essay_o...

A bit of an echo of Upton Sinclair: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Are you frustrated with your elected officials? The good news is we’re heading into a primary season where we get to determine the leaders of the Democratic Party.

leavesubstack.com

Global outcry grows over Israel’s killing of starving civilians in Gaza UN secretary general warns ‘last lifelines’ may soon collapse after Israeli forces attack WHO facilities in Deir al-Balah

Not from the Trump administration or the bipartisan Congressional leadership, however. www.theguardian.com/world/2025/j...

By which I mean LLMs, by which I mean highly tuned personal feedback machines (sweet, sweet dopamine). We are wizards, creating illusions so real we are trapped in them until we die.
So, that's fun.

I also think we can survive it, and maybe the mature version (of the internet? Our media literacy?) is something better. But we seem to be getting hit with a lot of Great Filter events all at once. See also: AI

And, I fully cop to the fact that olds like myself love to panic over new forms of media, photography, radio, television, comic books. But a machine that hooks every monkey brain on the planet instantaneously and then rewards outrage with dopamine...that seems...objectively bad.

Amusing Ourselves to Death - Wikipedia

Remembering today the first Cyberpunk book (nonfiction) I read.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing...

In 1985, it presages the social media dopamine feedback loop, and likely leads to one of my favorite Cyberpunk novels, "Gun, with Occasional Music," the daily news is only music, relating the vibe.

Californians boycott In-N-Out over plans to move HQ out of state Billionaire In-N-Out owner Lynsi Snyder announced the company will open a co-headquarters in Tennessee with plans for the California HQ to be gone by 2030.

At least we can just call it Out Burger.

www.the-independent.com/life-style/i...

Imagine Human Boot II: The Reckoning, stomping on a human face, forever.

True. I think it's a bigger issue in less artistic spheres. AI for programming, for instance. Becomes impossible to introduce a new programming language, because there's no corpus to train on, and all future workflows are built around AI.

Anyway. If anyone wants to help solve the power issue, please invest in my venture to cover the moon with solar panels (light side) and data centers (dark side).

That's right: AI Moon

😁

Discoverability is also on my mind. Like Netflix (sorry not sorry), a huge amount of minimally curated slop can be generated and released with no effort (except all that electricity). So then, it makes it harder to find the actual good, human art work (which includes stuff made with AI tools)

Worse if it consumes it's own output, even if it can avoid model collapse.

The last point about fossilization is one I don't hear much about. The idea being: Train an LLM on all the internet art. Going forward, artist protect their output by opting out of training sets (lets say). The tool then becomes locked into a particular time-slice of human culture.

For example:

- Is there such a thing as an ethically sourced training dataset?
- What are the moral implications of using an unethical training set?
- What are the moral implication of LLM power usage
- Do LLMs fossilize the culture they sample?

Take digital photography. Today, absolutely seen as a valid artform, and the same tool is also the basis for the panopticon surveillance state. So, this is the angle I like to poke AI from.

Agree 100%. Every new artistic technology has an integration curve. Photography was very much not seen as art for a long time, as you allude to.

For me, the more interesting questions are around the morality of the systems.

here you go, @chromecow.bsky.social

You can't add humanity to AI any more than you can add humanity to a stick of charcoal, paint, or Gimp. These are tools, not tool-users. No art lies in a tool. Photoshop can't make art; it's not awake and has no opinons.

YouTube video by Ani DiFranco - Topic Bridges

Embarking on another vanity-project war, seems like a great day to revisit the Utah Philips/Ani DeFranco album The Past Didn't Go Anywhere.

open.spotify.com/album/2IqT02...

www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHcQ...

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government when it deserves it.

-Mark Twain

Archduke Ferdinand joins the chat...

Due for a rewatch.

I'm starting to experiment with simple rules systems. Hoping to run Index Card RPG one of these days.

Lead, follow or get out of the way. There are progressive voices that are actually ready to fight for this country.

Literally, what the fuck are you doing for America?

'Hammer Into Anvil' seems especially relevant

YouTube video by BBC Does the 'average size' person really exist? - QI Series N Episode 7: Preview - BBC

www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch9U...

Dying for Sex, on Hulu. Brutal, and good. Full disclosure, I joined in a couple of episodes in.

Bonus points for using "appease" in the text of the article.

Billionaires Score Best-Ever Day as Stocks Soar on Tariff Pause The world’s wealthiest people added $304 billion to their combined net worth on Wednesday — the largest one-day gain in the history of the Bloomberg Billionaires Index — as stock markets soared after ...

See how this works? www.bloomberg.com/news/article...