johan

Book cover of Impasse: Climate Change and the Limits of Progress by Roy Scranton

We need a new realism in the face of global climate catastrophe

It's past time, @royscranton.bsky.social argues in Impasse, to free ourselves from our dangerous faith in progress. If we want to have any hope for the future, it must be grounded in recognizing human limits

www.sup.org/books/li...

Just posted a recap: Decentralized Tech to Resist Authoritarianism

Geopolitics of routing. Mutual aid infra. P2P networking. Not theory, these tools are live and in use.

👉 brkhzn.com/recap-dweb-m...

@getdweb.net @iroh.computer @mai.bsky.social @johanm.bsky.social

Image promoting an event. Features DWeb logo against a stylized image of the night sky with constellations. Text reads: Decentralized Tech to Resist Authoritarianism, lightning talks, July 30, 10 am PT, virtual.

There's still time to join today's DWeb Virtual Meetup on tools to build peer-to-peer power.

📆 TODAY, July 30
🕙 at 10am PT / 🕐 1pm ET / 🕖 19 CET

🎟️ Free & online ⤵️
www.eventbrite.com/e/1510991800...

@GetDWeb.net #DecentralizedWeb #DWeb

A project that would make energy more affordable and reliable for more than 40% of Americans is cancelled, just days before a new EO is released calling for accelerated funding and permitting for data center energy projects (including reducing and removing environmental review wherever possible).

America drunk on its own power today.

ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development There may be no undoing the vast amounts of pollution wreaked by ChatGPT. And that's just tough luck for any AI models that come after it.

ChatGPT Has Already Polluted the Internet So Badly That It's Hobbling Future AI Development

emphasis on the "user" the way a tobacco company see's a "user"...

thelastwave.substack.com/p/llm-exposure

Perhaps the country shouldn't be run by people living in an absolute fever dream that has no relationship with reality

This is another reason you should be extremely skeptical of widespread delivery drones

a generation of students addicted to AI

thinking is hard... just let the AI's do it

My husband’s cell was getting calls from people thinking they were phoning a certain city’s police number. He was puzzled—his number doesn’t appear on any web page. Then he learned that if you Google “[city name] non-emergency police”, the AI overview hallucinates his number. Thanks, Google!

how unlike a dream, this waking nightmare

Probably the most sober account of LLM I have read.

They are not intelligent, but they are also not useless parrots. They are a fundamentally different cultural technology and thinking of them as cultural technologies increases rather than decreases their potential impact.

In a dying civilization, political prestige is the decoration conferred on mediocrity by ignorance.

i read through this whole thing, and all the lying is a bit absurd.

but... the model can't simply go to URLs, it doesn't say so. instead it hallucinates.

if the author had pasted in their essays instead, it would have been a very different conversation...

even as an academic, there's still value in publishing some ideas in a blog (or in my case, substack) - it's a way to reach ppl who might not otherwise encounter your work in academic publications

a little folk tale about the danger of symbols

A new generation about to get cooked by dopaminergic loops we don't fully understand.

A live, uncontrolled experiment already underway and we hardly have the language for why its concerning.

More here: thelastwave.substack.com/p/llm-exposure

Your chatbot friend might be messing with your mind OpenAI, Meta and others want people to spend more time with AI chatbots, but there is growing evidence that they can hook users or reinforce harmful ideas.

ChatGPT is all of the horrific things about Facebook on steroids www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

LLM Exposure The dosing and dependence of synthetic semiosis

What are the cognitive effects of embedding LLMs in our problem-solving loops? Already there is a growing body of literature showing that it might be addictive. Might we think of LLMs as a kind of stimulant?

I explore these questions in my latest substack:
thelastwave.substack.com/p/llm-exposure

NSF, NASA and NIH budgets per year, inflation adjusted from 2000-2025 along with the proposed cuts. NSF includes research component only. Massive cuts across all sectors, well below support spanning 25 years.

How bad will it be? Catastrophic.

Proposed cuts to #NSF, #NIH, and #NASA will set the US R&D landscape back 25 yrs+, cause economic and job loss now, and undermine innovations to come.

But, this is the WH's *proposed* budget.

Speak up now before it is too late.

(inflation adjusted $-s below)

What if we started to think of LLMs as a kind of stimulant? One that created targeted interventions in the minds of its users?

If we saw it as a kind of cognitive drug, or even hazard, how might we treat exposure to it differently?

sublime?

I do know one ceo who says they've stopped hiring and are just letting attrition slowly reduce their work force because they're able to move so much faster with fewer people with AI now. I'm skeptical, but he's not.

Expressing stigma and inappropriate responses prevents LLMs from safely replacing mental health providers Should a large language model (LLM) be used as a therapist? In this paper, we investigate the use of LLMs to *replace* mental health providers, a use case promoted in the tech startup and research spa...

This paper exposes some of the dangerous flaws in using LLMs for mental health treatment. Well worth a read.

arxiv.org/abs/2504.184...

for sure! that's one of the reasons why 'resonance' has been so interesting to me. it seems to be an area where models' representation and how it anticipates+acts back on the world entail both questions of semiotics and cybernetics. here i've been reading luhmann

Excited to learn more from your substack! Reading it now ...

Associative data structures On steps towards an epistemic technology

Totally! I'm not as familiar with Eco though I've been drawing on some Derrida in later work, especially around différance in mapping out networks of signifiers from the models, such as in this piece. thelastwave.substack.com/p/associativ...

no not really. glad we connected. looking forward to reading your work!