Elliskatz

Charlotte NC: citizens are saying no to the deployment of ICE in their cities.
#ResistFascim
#ProudBlue

look at our taxpayer dollars at work. trespassing on private property to harass and intimidate innocent people while wearing a fucking tactical keffiyeh in the suburbs of Charlotte.

The entirety of CBP needs to be repurposed to dig ditches or cut fire breaks. Maybe clean public parks in DC

YouTube video by Planet Wild We grew a forest WITHOUT planting a single tree

Fascinating. Tanzania is among those leading in an effort to re-green desertified areas, and rather than 'planting' trees, they have brought back old techniques to prompt dormant tree root systems to begin to regenerate into full trees again.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5g6...

they gleefully announce the llm solves a difficult problem and then you find out...they use it to respond to an email, format some python, arrange two meetings in an 8 hour period.

we are going to let these people burn the planet because we are too nice to tell them they sound stupid.

Why Are We In A Bubble? You’re tired, I’m tired, we’re all god damn tired of the AI bubble. It’s been three years and very little has actually happened other than hundreds of billions of dollars being incinerated to build data centers or sustain the reckless and directionless ambitions of Sam Altman and OpenAI, or any number of near-identical AI startups that all claim to be worth somewhere between $5 billion and $500 billion. Yet what truly upsets me about AI is the lies. Despite the fact that Large Language Models cannot really be trusted to do any particular job without endless prompt engineering and tinkering, so many people talk about them as if they’re the second coming of Christ, capable of doing just about anything if you put your mind to it. In reality, LLMs are capable of some stuff but not a lot of stuff and most people you talk to use it as either a coding assistant (that they have to either give very simple tasks or constantly check up on) or as a replacement for Google search that may or may not be better. Yet for years people have said things about LLMs that they don’t actually do, and when pressed to explain further, they’ve said that “these models are getting exponentially better.” We have seen a dereliction of duty by those who are meant to know the truth — the media and analysts — who are either ignorant of reality or refuse to live within it, saying instead that every bit of proof that we’re in a bubble is just “doomerism” or “skepticism” or proof of some sort of corruption or animosity toward the future, rather than an attempt to speak of what’s actually happening and inform the public. LLMs are limited! What they do today is similar to what they did a year ago, and what they’ll do a year in the future! The time of LLM innovation is over, this era is over, and every day we extend it only beckons further retail investors to throw themselves into an active volcano after being convinced that it’ll transform them into a golden god. It’s insu…

It is insane to me that we still, to this day, have people claiming that “agents are coming,” or still peddling out the dog-brained “Uber and Amazon Web Services burned a lot of money” talking points, or somehow justifying the hundreds of billions of dollars burned by saying that “ChatGPT is really popular,” as if that makes up for the theft of millions of people’s art or the destruction of our planet. We’ve known that OpenAI was burning billions of dollars since the middle of 2024, as we’ve known the same of Anthropic, as we’ve known that every AI company is unprofitable, as we’ve known that models will hallucinate forever, as we’ve known that the “scaling laws” paradigm was a bucket of bullshit. These facts have sat baking in the sun for anywhere from a year and a half to two years, yet the media narrative has only fairly recently shifted to consider whether there’s any problem with an entire industry of unprofitable companies building wrappers on top of models made by unprofitable frontier AI labs. AI has proven that we live in an era of high information and low processing, and that the majority of people — the media, investors, analysts, and even government officials — simply take the top-line analysis from whatever the most “trustworthy” source they can find. As a result, TV networks like CNBC publish outright nonsense to back up things like OpenAI promising to pay $1.4 trillion in compute costs in five years with “trustworthy” analysts like Futurum’s Dan Newman, who had this to say about how OpenAI might afford it: This is a company that its biggest backers and investors believe will become the largest hyperscaler in the future. So it isn’t just going to compete for these software and for these ChatGPT and video making, uh, models, they're going to be focusing on taking over this AI layer, going down the path of Anthropic, playing the enterprise, developing these biggest models, and then ultimately developing a model to make money. This is a fucking analy…

This is why people are going to lose so much money! This is why people are being failed! The mainstream media is deliberately, aggressively pushing nonsense narratives with enough buzzwords to keep the bubble inflated. In reality, our society is built on a lot of beliefs that are extremely thinly-held, and LLMs took root because society has been primed by science fiction to believe that it’s inevitable that we’ll have an autonomous computer in our lifetimes. We are trained to follow smart-sounding people from birth, and what constitutes “smart’ is judged by a combination of right-sounding words and braggadocious confidence, and while that’s sort of worked before, Large Language Models feel as if they’re purpose-built to exploit these semiotic tropes. ChatGPT can convince an imbecile he knows quantum physics because it gives him the topline definition in simple enough terms that he can repeat. ChatGPT can give a convincing-enough impression of a person that it can convince somebody that it wants him to leave his wife. ChatGPT can give a convincing-enough impression of writing code that it can convince basically every investor and member of the media that it will replace software engineers in mere months. And because ChatGPT did a convincing-enough impression of a person writing something, Satya Nadella decided to buy as many GPUs as possible, and because Satya Nadella was doing a convincing-enough impression of a CEO who knew what the fuck he was doing, Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg and Andy Jassy immediately copied him, so that they too could do convincing-enough impressions of executives that knew what they were doing. And because we live with markets that are poisoned by growth-at-all-cost thinkers, they fell in line behind the hyperscalers, claiming that the “era of AI” was here without any proof that was the case, all because the already-existing businesses underpinning the magnificent 7 kept growing. That, and the media has entirely failed to hold the…

There is only one way to avoid this happening again: holding every single booster’s feet to the fire for months and months after the bubble bursts, and make sure that any other hype cycles they push are met with venom and receipts the likes of which God has never seen. If I sound like I have an axe to grind, it’s because I do. Regular people are already getting hurt — their communities destroyed by data centers, their art stolen, their loved-ones driven mad by AI psychosis, and, most likely, their 401Ks ravaged when this ends. I will have no mercy for those who failed to do their jobs. Will you?

The AI Bubble inflated by a dereliction of duty from those meant to seek out and publish the truth. LLMs have been sold on myth and outright lies about what they do or will do, and when the bubble bursts, retail investors will be left with the consequences.

www.wheresyoured.at/premium-the-...

Fall leaves in the forest

#EastCoastKin #photography #photographersofbluesky#Photographersunited #nature #scapes #landscape

Also I'm thinking with his ongoing cognitive decline he's not going to be as good at handling all this (manipulating) as he was in earlier times. And trying to do so will further tax his already decreased cognitive resources

I hope his blood pressure is running very very high

Democratic performance in off-year elections demonstrates Trump and MAGA's weakness A key challenge for Democrats in the coming year will be to sharpen public defiance into a force powerful enough to foil Trump's authoritarian responses to his growing unpopularity

"Trump will likely respond to his declining popularity by accelerating efforts to immunize himself against accountability, and by attempting to distract via foreign wars and domestic repression. He will also likely escalate his and allies’ looting of America..." plus.flux.community/p/democratic...

WATCH — @milestaylor.bsky.social : “The average 🇺🇸 family saved $1,600 a year from tax cuts, but spent $4,000 a year on Trump’s price increases — now he's realizing what conservative economists have known for centuries: Tariffs are taxes. And he's having to walk it back.”

bsky.app/profile/iwil...

FACT CHECK: TRUE

Let's say Trump's DOJ hands over the big bucks to Flynn et al. Then assuming the Dems get control of Executive Branch in '28, what if any kind of recourse would we have to claw the money back? Or will it just be a done deal :(

With all the fine tuning of the distinction between sex with 14 year olds and 8 year olds I'm starting to think that Ephebophilia might be part of the 2028 GOP platform if Trump let's them have a platform again.

Vance - Blackburn 2028, Ephebophilia, NOT THAT BAD

Trump's Affordable Economy?

On the Eve of Destruction, 1/19/2025, I baselined things I commonly buy at my local Kroger in SE Michigan.
I check prices monthly. Here's November's tally for the worst increases. There are many smaller ones. Watch for shrinkflation! We're paying more for less every day.

Oy vey, after getting over my initial surprise, I'm not surprised

My dog Sam contemplating his next move on an oversized chessboard somewhere on the grounds of the National Cathedral, I think by the St Albans school, in Washington DC. His light brown fur, by happy coincidence, is the same color as the white pieces.

Dog to d4 (and d5 and c5)

👉

So, Trump's Liberation Day in April not working out? Things actually did get more expensive? The consumer actually does pay for tariffs? Nothing like economics to get in the way of a bad plan.
www.reuters.com/business/tru...

Establishing an authoritarian state while simultaneously destroying state capacity was never going to work; it's just going to be massively unpleasant to live through, and for those of us who aren't young it will probably consume the remaining years we have.

every day I feel worse about the next 6-12 months and better about the next 2-5 years.

Far below the top political tiers, when you think about the perverse incentives around who would even be willing to run for office…

We cannot hope for sanity without treating algorithms and those who profit from them as the real enemy.

Reporter needs to ask him if he and Epstein spent Thanksgiving 2017 together

Hold up

Pam Bondi has now assigned a prosecutor to look into Epstein's ties to Democrats.

If this investigation was legitimate, why wasn't this investigation opened months ago?

If this investigation was legitimate, why isn't everyone mentioned in Epstein's emails being investigated?

This stuff is so crazy. Trump is now just letting his allies that helped him nearly overthrow the government take turns stealing taxpayer money.

Playing us all for suckers. The corruption of this regime will leave an indelible mark on our nation. 🇺🇸 www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Epstein files reveal his obsession with Trump The president is mentioned over a thousand times in sex trafficker’s emails

NEW: President Trump mentioned over 1,000 times in Epstein files, more than anyone else. (gift) www.miamiherald.com/article31290...

👇👇👇👇

This is where we are right now. It’s NOT okay.

She Was Deported in Error. Her Child Was Left Behind.

“With immigration agents under intense pressure to deport thousands of people each day, Ms. Lopez was pushed through the system swiftly and was deported within four days of the factory raid.
As a result, Jorge is now cared for by two siblings who are barely adults themselves.”