keybored

Yup, caught me falling for the propaganda.

1. When the capitalists wage class war: bussiness as usual, some murmuring about widening wealth gap by progressive, diffuse threats to democracy

2. When workers complain about the system: all hands on deck, class war immiment, please think of the children and the stability of society

> and leading to class wars.

Aren’t we overdue for one anyway.

Yet another IT that will help the average person/democratize something, like the Internet and so on.

Over three thousand comment boxes agree that the cat is out of the bag. No moats.

> [we don’t know]

I haven’t forgot capitalist euphoria from 2023 about cutting worker power off at the root. That’s all these AI Cretins want. Well, that and an unnerving enthusiasm for personifying their AI Golems (Anthr. in particular here).

Sorry to poo poo a post about AI company prompting their underlings to prompt out visualizations.

I think you can safely skip to the last three paragraphs here.

Holy heck, ain’t this the truth.

Really it’s the logical conclusion of living your whole life by studies-show. Studies show that friends are good for you. That’s why I have friends. Studies show that laughing is good for you. That’s why I indulge in merry company. Studies show that dirt is good for you. That’s why I go off the beaten asphalt.

Clanker fodder. Unless the We are heads of states/heads of spooks or the AI powers that be (praise be) that there is no power and will to do that in one year or even ten years.

Corporatism works best when people as citizens and civic agents are preoccupied and sort of diffuse, not organized for anything substantial, just busy with their work, hobbies, and local councils. Then the workers go to work every day, some of the lobbying the government, to undermine democracy.

Just a group of people. And some of them are paid to influence the government. But the citizens? They are just diffuse. Sometimes they vote...

> I prefer to live in reality, where American suburbs are nowhere near dense enough for public transport to pencil out, plus there is no political will from the voters for it. No one is tearing up existing roads and replatting all the detached single family homes to more dense housing.

Car Country was designed by the US car lobby. Political will of the voters? Oh yeah sure, now a century into it that’s also not palatable for home owners and the like.

People think reducing some argument to “use tech” or “use computers” is a slam dunk nowadays. But see what a beautiful mess of adtech, antisocial and predatory social media, massive privacy breaches over trivialities (both in professional conduct and what the service was about) with no accountability, surveillance tech, revenge porn, scams, robber tech barons... and with that in mind do we really have anything to gloat to the naysayers from “a few decades ago”? ;)

Tsk. Maybe that’s what you were going for.

> No good reason, really. I got four hours of sleep and my brain wasn't good for much of anything and I saw someone posted a screenshot of a reddit post dunking on Ed Zitron's prediction record. When I wrote this review of futurist prediction accuracy, I tried to make sure that I didn't bias what I was reviewing in any way. It's not obvious from the post if the redditor who reviewed Zitron's predictions was pulling predictions in an unbiased fashion or if they were biased in some way (since AI has become a culture war issue, it wouldn't be surprising if someone pulled biased predictions), so I decided to read some Zitron in my spare time while poking at agents to get them to do an unrelated task I wanted them to do. For the futurist post, I read multiple entire books to pull predictions and generally only stopped when someone was being repetitive and kept saying the same thing over and over again. In this case, all Zitron does is be repetitive, so the methodology in the futurist review would mean that I review a few predictions and then stop immediately. To overcome this, I had ChatGPT give me a list of predictions (with no attempted tilt towards correct or incorrect predictions) and then I skimmed/read the posts that ChatGPT linked to. There were some cases where I thought ChatGPT's reading of the post was incorrect (these were generally cases where it flagged a prediction that would be incorrect if its reading was correct, but I disagreed with its reading) and (discussed further below) I also removed predictions which weren't falsifiable or seemed pointless because they were tautological (I noted something similar to this in the futurist post).

No reason really. Just very sleep deprived and want to multitask in between agentic feedback.

Some people obviously want AI to fail. Some people obviously want The Magic Machines to win.

Read the snark. Individual eco merit is a waste of time and a distraction. Climate change was caused by an industrial and globe-spanning effort. People BIKING to work and NOT flying aeroplanes will not even make a dent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425790

You don’t use a tax on consumption for things that are destroying the planet. You ban it or ration it. How can “lifestyle” even factor into this? It doesn’t because it’s not about lifestyle at all.[1] We will keep criss-crossing container ships across the world and maybe pass on the extinction event tax to discipline the lower classes. Then we can use that money to transfer the wealth to the single home owning class in the form of solar panel rebates and EV discounts.

[1] That people drive to work is the tip of the iceberg. Just when it comes to cars alone, you also have all the transportation of goods that need to be dumped off more locally than the closest harbor or train freight station. But only the tip of the iceberg is discussed as far as “blame” is concerned. (How curious.) The “ban” here is quite loaded as it would implicate the whole supply chain.

All individual solutions (“lifestyle”) are inherently anemic and impotent. You don’t avert an extinction event with public service announcements and solar panel rebates.

The only thing it is useful for is scapegoating (cf. this thread).

You agree. Yet you keep repeating this cul de sac attitude of recycling and other single home nice to haves?

Simply miss me with these already-wise replies. That just means that your comments are something worse than naive.

This is my fault for not highlighting the crux of the issue.[1] That was only sarcastically pointed at in my “Step one.” paragraph.

Okay, so I guess “blame” is too contentious. It is of course technically true that we can all bike more, or we can stop the petroleum industry, and both have a positive effect, but the Petroleum Industry is not here in this thread so biking is the real thing to discuss. But let’s not say that I blame the Petroleum Industry or whatever else. Let’s call it: Properly seeing cause and effect, if you prefer.

Properly seeing cause and effect is actually the proper way to solve any problem. You should root out weeds rather than trimming them.

We can see the symptoms of mystification (cf. considering real cause and effect) with terms like “basic human psychology”. I don’t think, ever, that the basic human psychology and “needs and desires to lead a comfortable life” for the average person has ever mattered in a real crisis. In a real crisis like a war you use rationing and other harsh measures to deal with the problem. The powers that be don’t fret that Johnny is on keto and needs his daily butter. But we are not in a crisis according to this irrational system which would rather burn the world down than to upend... the system itself.

Of course you dismiss my remedy as wishful thinking and make-believe because that is the real, challenging task ahead of us. Merely to stop companies and other entities that have the whole economic system, militaries for that matter, etc. behind them. Not just wishing and praying that the consumers will drive less and for China to give up their jerbs to produce less commodities.

> > I don't want to criticize you, but a question: what are you doing in practice to change something? Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

Oh if we just prodded each other. A little, day by day. Have you heeded the call of British Petroleum?

[1] Which is https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49425790

Most people are reasonable. Most people will not screw you over if you just give them an inch. Living in society would be hell if this was not the case.[1] Living day-to-day is just fine in my experience. Because most people are not assholes.

But a lot of society is run by asshole sociopaths which (who) unfortunately lack some pretty fundamental wiring. And that creates some far-away problems, global even, that don’t really have anything to do with normal people that you meet daily. But you can notice how when these concrete problems are pointed out that someone will want to retreat back to generalities. Human nature. That’s IMO from a concerted effort to spread this talking point that asshole-caused problems are really human-caused problems. Because the asshole sociopaths (AHS) in charge are not AHS. They are not just human. And any human would do what they are doing. And in fact by going to war with X we are just stopping them from doing Y to us—

It is a coordination problem for normal, reasonable people. There’s too many key AHS personell disrupting the information flow. So those reasonable human beings have to make more of an effort.

[1] Some poorer societies (as have been told to me) have problems with vile opportunism of the sort where you help some apparently in need person get home and you get gutted and robbed by a gang of thugs. So I asked, okay so you can’t trust anyone then? No, they said. There’s a small and real chance that that could happen. But not to the point that you have to shun strangers. You can still choose to help.

There is this obvious disconnect. Productivity will go up, they promise, but you might be out of a way to support yourself. So that revolutionary productivity is going somewhere. Just not to knowledge workers. And not to farmers or carpenters. They are going to the owners of the means of production. So this is a very straightforward anger-direction.

Right-wing minded people are often fine with you being angry at people. As long as you don’t look up.

> We have access to magic machines, and we can poke at them and see what happens. The second way is to feel genuine excitement. Once you move beyond curiosity, you can come away with a newfound feeling of power and freedom.

Brother, these self-improvement speeches where you shift your frame of mind from half-empty to half-full to thinking of the aswesome potential of the negative space of the cup are supposed to be held on a weekend on some retreat in front of people who have their basal needs met and have the psychological constitution of someone who knows that they have decades left in them for their job or career unless they get hit and disfigured by a car. They are not fit for people who have been told, oh maybe you will never have a job again ever after six months, two years,—who knows?

> A lot of the gains from AI aren’t turning into productivity gains that are reflected in company profits but they’re showing up instead in the number of side projects shipped by everybody not on their company’s time.

You might be out of that thing that put food on the table in the long run. But right now you can use the mAgiC mAchIne to make side projects, ya know? What?

What kind of a GitHub-star poisoned response is that? Log off the green checkmarks for a few days, please.

This I solemnly swear. To take my paycheck with gratitude, even if my employer makes three times as much based on my output. To take whatever technological disruption that graces my path as an immaterial and impersonal force. To politely and discreetely bow out when the statistics soup trained on my fellow colleagues makes me unemployable and worthless. Amen.

The boss says we should do it this way. The boss hasn’t got a clue about how to do it. But he knows what he wants, more or less. And we can fill in the details. And we don’t make a stink about him not knowing exactly how things work. That doesn’t serve anyone. And he still thinks that he knows how to do it. Because he tells us how to do it and it gets done.

Now everyone can be the boss.

> Is your carbon footprint below what is sustainable?

What a waste of time this is. Carbon footprint? Zero-emission homes? The climate is global and the balance sheet is spread across all of us. Someone with a disability might have much more use for cars and transporation than someone who is able-bodied. And homes out in the boonies without much sun (for solar power) might need a diesel generator for their three-times-a-year power outages in order to keep up productivity and a comfortable existence. And twenty miles from that house is a village full of grid-connected homes running on hydropower. As long as the “balance sheet” is okay we should not fret about this individual stuff.

“Carbon footprint” was explicitly designed as a distraction away from British Petroleum and onto the consumer. I think the kids call that a “whataboutism”.

> I consume things produced all around the globe, either as items like phones, or food, and the food I do probably daily (I really like fruit, so bananas, mangos, avocados etc).

Yeah things are made in Vietnam and China now. And that is the consumer’s fault? That eco-friendly wooden utensils used in Europe are made in China?

Step one. Create and design a deeply interconnected, global market with specializations. The signal is just money, the most fungible asset. Step two: externalities. Step three: use money (see step one) to market your scapegoating to everybody, in direct contradiction with the sheer simplicity of step one; no, consumers aren’t supposed to just use money/price as the signal, that’s evil and has a high Carbon Footprint.

> My point is: my carbon footprint is pretty low, and I try to be mindful about not wasting resources. And it's not that hard, I don't feel like I am missing out on something if I don't drive a car. But I still took my kids to Spain on a vacation, and we still flew there to sit on the beach. Giving that up is hard, and making them sacrifice their childhood fun is hard.

I dunno, an extra twelve degrees Celsius and beaches is worth those flights? And sacrificing childhood fun? Children are an endless maw of desires. Of course if you give them the idea of something (or the TV does) and then don’t go through with it is the greatest crime in the history of humanity. And yet, our parents went without all of that, etc., despite their identical child programming.

This consumer/suburbia-level checklist of individual eco merit is more of a scapegoating ritual than something that makes a difference. This is not a job for solar panel rebates. It’s more of a job for things like Extinction Rebellion; political demonstrations and activism that forces the issue. Which in turn (if successful) will lead to real organized work towards and ecological future. One where we are chipping in together rather than hunking down in our single-home bunkers with our plastic recycling and electric bicycles.

Although things like adoption of EVs does probably have a great positive impact on the local pollution levels.

> Reading Claude output is starting to cause actual psychological harm.

As a side note, I think we are about too dismissive of computers and the Internet as “not real life”, that stuff written in text boxes by humans are just sticks and stones, etc. And now that we shouldn’t anthro-po-morphize or whatever the LLMs. But I do think, at least for some of us, that there is no way to avoid certain impacts that even non-personal text can have on us. It can feel alienating to interface with five different people in order to figure out how to solve a problem or navigate some burocracy (think Kafka). Well just interacting with one single LLM can induce that same feeling. The long-winded replies and the uncanny ways to miss the context.

Disclaimer that for my own needs I would be happy if the whole AI thing crashed and burned post-haste.

Future solutions nothwithstanding, the metaphor does not make sense according to the reality of many people as of today. Many live in locales where the Grid has made the grid capacity into the consumers’ problem via time-of-use pricing and adjusting pricing according to some max-use scheme. It is absolutely not just something you set and forget if you have to worry about not using the stove at the same time as you use the AC.

But this seems apropos in a roundabout way since LLMs cost a lot of energy.

> Do people think learning new tech is somehow wasted effort?

No. But funnily enough that is a promise by some of the AI cretins and their boosters. Oh yeah best case scenario you learn how to build LLMs for us. We’ll employ you. And then ultimately that just becomes training data for the LLMs to do it themselves.

But why are people cynical? they ask.

Points one and two are irrelevant to my comment, but that’s fine. I don’t expect any thoughts to be spent on whether not to deploy that stump speech.

What doesn’t make sense in points 3 and 4 are that the AI takeover is lead and powered by vile cretin scum who, in their former more honest days, were gleefully announcing the end of labor power. Being lead by them, how could it lead to “utopia”? Well, there are two possibilities that some AI evangelist might bring up.

1. It’s the volition of the AI that could lead to the “utopia”—they/it simply take charge after some threshold

2. No, it is still human-lead

This point (1) conflicts with your own point (4) though; the all-powerful (or converging on at least) AI is foiled by human sins? How?

The other point (2) conflicts with my point about how it is the vile cretins who are in charge of AI.

Nothing.

Employers suffering from AI metric mania does not mean that AI is here to stay forever and it will just escalate. Necessarily. <insert obligatory AI about possible future capabilities, as demanded by the AI Overton Window>

> Most people are just too passive and go along with whatever is happening.

I guess they are seeing/hallucinating a tidal wave.

That’s why I don’t entertain their fatalism. We’re all rats on a sinking ship powerless to do anything outside of our existing schedules. Indistinguishable outcome for the majority of people compared to the AI euphorics.

Why one would care? Look at your comment from two days ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49363319

> I hope we'll figure out some equitable society before that, but I'm not going to bet on it, so I'll do what I can to be on the side of the winners.

Obviously people care if they think they might lose out.

Is it going to be this hopes-and-prayers about egalitarianism/ah screw it I hope I get to oppress and dominate the majority? Or all of us sipping wine on the beach for eternity?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49366313

You gotta pick a lane with your rah-rah-ism.

Pro AI: It’s inevitable and I love it

Anti AI: It’s inevitable and I hate it

Oh no. They’re converging. But I guess that just proves the point doesn’t it.