🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈 Sam Kimbrel

I had a long talk with someone yesterday about how all prior logic and norms about the labor market have been called off because capital is in the final push to finally casualize white collar workers the way they’ve long wanted to do. From AI to non-competes to this. They smell blood in the water.

poetic justice would have this story end with altman getting dumped by means of a chatgpt-generated letter

every other publisher needs to pay attention to this

when i hit a link to a paywalled article, paying $2 to read it is exactly what i want

not a subscription, not your mailing list; just let me pay you a reasonable amount of money to read a single article!

A large granite outcrop reflected in a small lake at Barker Dam in Joshua Tree National Park. There are dark bands on the lower part of the rocks indicating historical water levels.

A small woody plant and a large, leafless tree in front of some large outcrops of rock. The small plant is highly branched and thorny, so it resembles the tree, and the photo is framed so that they’re both centered and aligned with each other.

A gnarled joshua tree in front of a high wall of rock. The sun is high in the sky behind the rocks, illuminating the tree from behind and casting a sharp shadow of the tree in the foreground of the picture.

A bent joshua tree in the foreground, framing a dramatic outcrop of rocks in the distance, under a bright blue sky.

okay, finished processing shots from my Proper Camera and here are some favorites

it keeps happening

This is a deeply unpopular policy. No swing voter ever said "make sure trans people get raped in prison". Few conservative voters said "make sure trans people get raped in prison"

If you're a Dem and you can't win political arguments by bringing this up, I don't know what you're doing in politics.

SAD PILOT NOISES

sadly no

A greater roadrunner walking through a patch of gravel

stopped off in palm springs for lunch on the way home and got INCREDIBLY lucky to see this greater roadrunner strutting around in front of the art museum

airbnbs here are generally quite nice!

do let me know when you plan this! i would love to take on some of the longer hikes

i’ve been in california for 19 years and this might just be one of my favorite spots

A desert sunrise in a cloudless sky with a perfect gradient from pink to blue over mountains in the distance and small scrub plants and a few joshua trees in the foreground

A tall, weathered granite formation dotted with small trees, reflected in a small lake

A many-branched joshua tree and a cholla cactus in front of a rock outcropping, with snow-capped mountains in the distance

Many joshua trees dot the near landscape, with rocky outcroppings in the mid distance, and snow-covered mountains in the background

a long weekend in joshua tree was exactly what i needed

People should be able to move about freely without having to worry about the police monitoring their daily activities.

Blanket mass surveillance does not improve public safety.

In fact, it's dangerous and puts people at risk even when governments put privacy policies into place.

This is what government censorship actually looks like: defunding entire fields, deporting researchers, and quite effectively chilling speech that helps people understand how our information systems are being exploited and calls out powerful people and platforms for their bullshit.

ah thank you for the reminder to watch the thing @chrisjrn.fyi told me to watch last year

On Incomputable Language: An Essay on AI An incidental consequence of having written a book on tech-fascism and the so-called rationalist movement is that I find myself periodically queried for my thoughts on artificial intelligence. On the ...

there's a recent one from @eruditorumpress.com covering similar ground www.eruditorumpress.com/blog/on-inco...

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be The AI boom is based on a fundamental mistake.

Grateful to The Verge for publishing my essay on why large-language models are not going to achieve general intelligence nor push the scientific frontier.

www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

What happens when ChatGPT cites to a real case but misstates what the case stands for? That doesn't fly for Judge Behm in Michigan. The court says that while a litigant could make the same error based on faulty reasoning, LLMs can't, because they can't reason.

And while a litigant might get away with similar overstatements because they could, perhaps, reason their way to showing how a case's stated holding might extend to novel situations, an LLM does not reason in the way a litigant must. To put it in a slightly different way, LLMs do not perform the metacognitive processes that are necessary to comply with Rule 11. When an LLM overstates a holding of a case, it is just piecing together a plausible-looking sentence

h/t @robertfreundlaw.bsky.social

holy shit, an accurate legal critique of LLMs. LLMs don't reason because they're just stitching together plausible-looking sentences indifferent to the content

should’ve gone with “fired” instead of “inspired”

i suppose you could call it that

An entire room full of powerful old white people smiling and laughing as the president dehumanizes black immigrants and the first black president.

Just fucking pathetic.

In July, wireless carrier T-Mobile US said it was ending its DEI programs as it sought regulatory approval for two major deals including buying almost all of regional carrier United States Cellular’s wireless operations including customers, stores and 30% of its spectrum assets in a deal valued at $4.4 billion.

oh. nope

goddammit i just switched *to* at&t after verizon royally screwed up what should’ve been a simple device provisioning.

is tmobile standing up to this?

tired: read-only database
wired: write-only database
inspired: wrong-only database

Much more important than whether this particular mediocre young person succeeds, and considerably more worrying, is how easy it all is, and how smooth and efficient the process is through which all this noise and damage is manufactured—how simple the culture has made it for someone with nothing but themselves on their mind to hurt someone they think they might benefit from hurting, and how eagerly and unquestioningly this daisy chain of apparatchiks and opportunists and independent operators and actual elected officials will apply themselves to that work. It doesn't much matter whether Samantha Fulnecky was volunteering to join the movement to remove trans people from public life because she thought this oafish provocation might someday pay her bills, or is just a spoiled kid seizing an opportunity to walk to the front of the classroom and try her luck, Marine Todd-style. What matters is that it all ends up in the same place, and that this choice is so easily and cheaply made, and that there is a machine—well-funded, well-insulated, and much clearer about the terrible things it wants than anyone charged with describing it can quite bring themselves to acknowledge—that exists to send anyone desperate, cruel, or careless enough to enlist off to war.

Yes.
defector.com/the-conserva...

i mean, i also chose not to have children because i like spending my free time on myself, but it does seem like it keeps getting harder to support children in the socioeconomic situation we’ve had for the last forever

my brain instantly went to taiwan’s sales tax receipt lottery which might be the best example of this ever

Every dollar JK Rowling makes from Harry Potter is going into bankrolling an extortion racket issuing legal threats to organizations across the UK to purge themselves of trans people or face ruinous lawfare.