and when you look up what spending while having a manic episode looks like, does it resemble a layoff? or is it substantively different?
2,024 karma · joined July 31, 2026
“Because why? Got any salt?”
“Because all the available surface metals and coal have already been mined,” said Crake.
“Without which, no iron age, no bronze age, no age of steel, and all the rest of it. There's more farther down, but the advanced technology we need for extracting those would have been obliterated.”
— Margaret Atwood, "Oryx and Crake"
you can reach me at hn.record316@passmail.net :)
which isn't to say that layoffs don't suck (I was impacted by one very recently) but it's not psychosis that causes that to happen, it's greed and short-term shareholder-fixated thinking. that should be named instead of a mental illness that people suffer from
> Delusional disorder is characterized by irrational or intense belief(s) or suspicion(s) that a person believes to be true
it's still a bad fit because there's not currently popular social convention that trusting AI without validation is a bad idea but it's better than psychosis. also it's still stigmatizing and we live in a world where a thesaurus is seconds away at any time. plus psychosis as a diagnosis is typically a cluster of symptoms that go beyond just delusion: https://emedicine.medscape.com/article/294416-overview
Two - there's also an implication that there's 'harm' that this AI psychotic person inflicts on others embedded in this article. in reality, the vast majority of those suffering mental illnesses are far more likely to be harmed by others - https://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/health/conditionsandtrea...
part of the work of being a good mental health advocate is not stigmatizing specific diagnoses as negative social ills. now if you don't give a single shit about mental health I'm not going to argue to get you to care. but if you do care then you should do better
Sometimes they're right. Sometimes they're not. But cautioning skepticism towards multi-billion dollar institutions with a lot of power and how good their intentions really are is never a wrong move, imo
plus, what do we have to lose from increasing pressure on Anthropic to not participate in a surveillance state? there's no political advantage to being their defender here unless you're super bought into the branding
problem is that it requires municipalities and counties to take ownership and they don't give a shit and thus we get the shit we deserve
the only neighborhoods where I don't see this are the ones where there's some nice retired older person who diligently cleans the shit up. but it's not like they bleach the spot, they just pick up most of the poop. so yeah, there's feces everywhere
it also doesn't help that we have bottom tier public restrooms available on a per-capita basis, at least here in the US: https://thronelabs.co/blog/where-have-all-the-public-restroo...
it's like someone who has a personal chauffeur designing the driving experience of a car - you get educated guesses at best and just total crud at worst. actual epiphanies that happen over repeated use and idle thoughts just don't happen
>Generating 1,000 images with a powerful AI model, such as Stable Diffusion XL, is responsible for roughly as much carbon dioxide as driving the equivalent of 4.1 miles in an average gasoline-powered car. In contrast, the least carbon-intensive text generation model they examined was responsible for as much CO2 as driving 0.0006 miles in a similar vehicle
I think its worthwhile for those of us who are involved in this kind of work to be aware of further descent into fascistic tendencies (ie no policing accountability for repressive violence). the stakes are high and always rising and, accordingly, our risk assessments and threat modeling should stay updated to match
and for people who may disagree with the current regime's politics, it's also healthy to stay apprised of the erosion of your own civil liberties, and the potential downstream effects it might have on your life
> “This is being directed by the Main Justice and the US Attorney,” Evans wrote in a remarkably candid account of internal deliberations. “I objected in the strongest possible terms and fought it as hard as I could. It wasn’t enough.”
>[...] DHS originally said Castro and the other agent were ambushed by the men and beaten with a shovel or broomstick, making Castro fear for his life and fire in self-defense. The next month, however, they dropped the charges against [the agents], and the DHS backed off its narrative in a rare admission of possible wrongdoing of its officers. “Video evidence has revealed the sworn testimony of the two agents appeared to be false,” then-acting ICE director Todd Lyons said in a statement.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite...
>With the end of World War II, Project SHAMROCK was established in 1945. The organization was created to accumulate telegraphic data entering and exiting from the United States.[4][22] Major communication companies such as Western Union, RCA Global and ITT World Communications actively aided the project, allowing American intelligence officials to gain access to international message traffic.[23] Under the project, and many subsequent programs, no precedent had been established for judicial authorization, and no warrants were issued for surveillance activities. The project was terminated in 1975.[4]
and yet I hated the new Subaru so much. I hated the fact that the entire console is now one giant touchscreen, requiring you to look away from the road in order to operate. I hated the huge bulky 'Starlink' hardware hidden in the roof. I hated the fact that the MPG was barely better even with ten years worth of supposed engineering advancement and the Forester was now wider and taller which sucks for being a city car
the last 15 years of 'innovation' in cars was a total mistake. call me a luddite but I really don't want my car to be able to be tracked by any satellite at any time. so it's either used cars for me from now or something like the Slate truck with the barest dashboard config (or a kei truck once it's legal in my state)
this, in combination with the rise of Flock, Clearview, Axon, and other mass-surveillance programs is leading us down an incredibly dark and Orwellian state - something that feels almost ludicrous given how anti-Big-Brother your average person is
[0] https://www.aclu.org/news/national-security/how-nspm-7-seeks...
that meme image of Garfield saying 'you are not immune to propaganda' comes to mind. it's always the people who are the most confident that they aren't influenced by marketing that also have some of the most irrationally strong brand loyalties
some other light reading on this topic:
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2026.3085...
> Buying into the food industry also facilitated the tobacco companies in applying the knowledge, skills, and strategies developed from their tobacco businesses to another business domain in ultraprocessed foods and beverages. For example, Philip Morris applied its aggressive marketing tactics developed from its tobacco businesses to market ultraprocessed foods to the US public. Furthermore, US tobacco companies and their food companies were systematically involved with developing hyper-palatable foods, which have elevated addictive properties.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/add.16332
>Tobacco-owned foods were 29% more likely to be classified as fat and sodium hyper-palatable foods (HPF) and 80% more likely to be classified as carbohydrate and sodium HPF than foods that were not tobacco-owned between 1988 and 2001 (P-values = 0.005–0.009).
https://tobacco.ucsf.edu/cigarette-giants-bought-food-compan...
> Tobacco giant R.J. Reynolds led the transition to sweetened beverages in 1963 when it purchased Hawaiian Punch from Pacific Hawaiian Products Company, according to the documents. The beverage previously had been promoted to adults as a cocktail mixer, but R.J. Reynolds sought to beef up the drink’s “Punchy” mascot – a counterpart to the “Joe Camel” cartoon character the company used to promote cigarettes – and featured it on toys, schoolbook covers, comics, tumblers, clothing and TV commercials. Punchy became the “best salesman the beverage ever had,” according to tobacco industry documents.
> In the ’60s and ’70s, the company conducted taste tests with children and mothers to evaluate sweetness, colors and flavors for Hawaiian Punch product line extensions. The children’s preferences were prioritized, the authors noted.
> By 1983, R.J. Reynolds introduced the nation’s first juice box, marketed as a “handy little carton that comes with its very own straw.” This innovation was largely responsible for a 34 percent jump in sales, according to industry documents.
other fun things might include just reading the Wikpedia pages on major food companies like Kraft: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kraft_Foods_Inc.#Financial_exp...
> At the end of 1988, Philip Morris Companies purchased Kraft for $12.9 billion. In 1989, Kraft merged with Philip Morris's General Foods unit—makers of Oscar Mayer meats, Maxwell House coffee, Jell-O gelatin, Budget Gourmet frozen dinners, Entenmann's baked goods, Kool-Aid, Crystal Light and Tang powdered beverage mixes, Post Cereals, Shake 'n Bake flavored coatings and numerous other packaged foods—as Kraft General Foods. Its aggressive product development was reversed after the merger, as it became slow in addressing issues on its product lines due to its size, and also company politics.[4]
> In 2000, Philip Morris (renamed Altria in 2003) acquired Nabisco Holdings for $18.9 billion and merged the company with Kraft Foods the same year.[212][4] Also in 2000, the company acquired Balance Bar.[213] In 2001, Philip Morris sold 280 million Kraft shares via the third-largest IPO of all time, retaining an 88.1% stake in the company.
https://woods.stanford.edu/news/meats-environmental-impact
>Livestock production accounts for 14-18 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, including 32 percent of methane gas emissions worldwide.
14-18% seems like a fairly significant chunk, no? and what if we just started with not eating beef, all of us, especially the USA? that'd cut down the emissions by quite a large bit
I also feel like the idea that technology will save us can only exist if you're fully ignorant of the sheer amount of money poured into lobbying by various industries into deregulation (like, for eg, the beef industry: https://www.ucs.org/about/news/agribusiness-industry-lobbyin... or Taylor Farms https://www.wired.com/story/diarrhea-outbreak-taylor-farms-m...)
not to mention the abandonment by state energy companies like Georgia Power of their solar/renewable goals and full buy-in to building yet more gas turbines in order to attract hyperscale data centers. I was part of some organizing against this in my city: https://atlpresscollective.com/2025/12/18/public-service-com...
just look at the funding for renewable R&D in the past few years - the reason we have the market we do now is that huge spike (thanks, Obama) in 2009 that drove down the cost of manufacturing and drove up conversion efficiency. that much investment into the renewables sector hasn't been the same since, especially now: https://www.theinvadingsea.com/2025/11/05/fossil-fuels-oil-c...
2) there are definitely problems with journals and publishing but, like many similar absurdly reductive pronouncements, the argument that the current mode of scientific inquiry is bunk is both wrong and lacks nuance
the problem with modern publishing is that private equity is buying up publishers [0]. these publishers are then giving peer-reviewers no time and zero pay to do the necessary work of review [1] while also charging exorbitant rates for access. this is leading to worsening quality of the published research along with highly overburdened researchers who are stuck between shrinking funding [2] and their myriad other professional obligations
to just say that 'journals' are bunk is ignorant in a harmfully anti-empirical way. the process of empirical research and review is the entire reason why we see realworld results. foundations comprised of bullshit crumble fast but for some reason or another our economic system is highly driven to enshittifying everything it touches
to have defenders who claim AA is 'pushing the boundaries of the scientific method' sounds like the screeching refrain of anti-intellectual cargo cults, apeishly mimicking the features of rigor and methodology while avoiding any real accountability
[0] https://issues.org/how-academic-science-gave-its-soul-to-the...
[1] https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty/books-publishing...
like they have words that are dressed in scientific language on their site like
"We estimate a 95% confidence interval for Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index of less than ±1% - based on experiments with >10 repeats on certain models for all evaluation datasets included in Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.2."
but where's the outcome dataset justifying this? how did they get that probability? what was the specific methodology of the tests? what variables did they account for?
there's a major difference between scientific sounding and being truly empirically rigorous. the 'research' in AI intelligence feels somehow even less trustworthy than supplement-funded studies because those are at least subjected to scrutiny by peers without profit motives
and I assume this was just for content from Reality Labs. god knows how much other torrenting was done outside of Reality Labs IP
[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2024/09/17/andrew-kingman-data...
eventually that just leads to an even bigger crashout, burnout, break. Sinclair Lewis parodied this as early as 1922 in Babbitt [0], depicting a man who is economically satisfied and fits perfectly the mold of the white picket life and yet is devoid of meaning and satisfaction. he then spends his years in the wilderness crashing out before stumbling back into conformity because he knows nothing else
you can find meaning outside of work in so many ways. joining a small organizing group, help run mutual aid efforts, even dipping a toe into civic engagement. disentangle achieving goals that signify success from living your values and you'll be on your way to a better regulated life [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babbitt_(novel)
[1] https://psychwire.com/free-resources/expert-insights/resourc...