RIP Reason

Trump certainly needs some fucking Dante’s inferno in his life.

Lenovo Thinkpads are the only reliable choice pretty much and even then it’s a bit of a crapshoot whether they include them or not. HP Elitebooks used to have them too but it seems like they also stopped in 2021. Apple’s never had them as far as I know. There’s a few other one-off small-run options here and there too but they’re few and far between.

I realize I’m in a very significant minority, but personally, having access to the mouse pointer for short jogs here and clicks there without my hands leaving the keyboard home row is a gamechanger and a non-negotiable feature to me. I’d never claim it’s a great way to move the mouse, but it has extremely high utility due to its convenient positioning, it’s always available even in tight quarters, and anytime space permits it pairs well with a secondary, traditional mouse for movements that are more numerous or complex or need more precision, it works very well with a text-heavy workflow.

It’s a mouse for people who would rather minimize their mouse usage, and I guess that’s me, or at least that’s the workflow I’ve gravitated to all my life. It’s not an ideology thing, it’s simply the fact that it’s deep muscle memory now, and whenever I try to use any computer without one I struggle so much, and I’ve actively tried more than once to wean myself off it, I can’t, it becomes a constant irritation that any other mouse feels so disconnected from my typing.

Touchpads are just insanely frustrating to use, I have no idea how some people tolerate using them daily unless it’s all they’ve ever known, and touchscreens are even worse in some ways since your fingers block the screen exactly where you’re trying to press, not to mention getting fingerprint smudges all over it even with the best techno-magic coatings. I loathe them both.

No clit-mouse, no deal.

(There are dozens of us. Dozens!)

The white supremacists call it remigration. The word also has other meanings, nearly as stupid, but that’s what white supremacists mean when they say it. Wrong skin color? Wrong accent? Fuck off and go somewhere else, this is white man’s country now. Native Americans? Yeah that means you too. /s

that’s perfect. chef’s kiss.

Instead of getting the new world order we wanted, mom says this is the new world order we already have at home.

It’ll keep working too, maybe until it encourages you so much you have a heart attack and die, because you know, it’s AI, it doesn’t have any knowledge or accountability and it certainly doesn’t have any concern for human life.

This is intentional genocide.

Very, very clearly, even by their own admissions, if you put even the slightest effort to read between the lines they basically say it themselves. And anyone who says otherwise is spreading propaganda (some unwittingly, with willful ignorance, but still propaganda).

And they know exactly what they’re doing. They’ve been targeting reporters and journalists since the very beginning, to minimize reporting on this. Even early in the war, the ones who were reporting from a “safe” distance far from any so-called “militants” get “accidentally” fired upon. They’ve blocked humanitarian efforts at every step of the way. They’ve done drone strikes on aid convoys, including the flotilla with Greta Thunberg, more than once.

I think the outrage from the public at Israel’s actions could be stronger, but it’s already more than strong enough to justify that something serious should be done. And it isn’t. And it won’t be. And I don’t think more public outrage is going to change that. I think the public needs to start asking hard questions about their own governments and political leaders and why they still support Israel. Because it’s not an accident, and it’s not a secret, that Israel still receives overwhelming international support in what they’re doing. Perhaps with a few cautionary finger-shakes and a sternly worded letter or two, but the money and the logistical and political support continues to flow almost completely unabated. This completely crosses party lines, it’s something almost all the economic and political power of the western world is supporting.

We’re all complicit, even if we don’t realize it, even if we don’t have any obvious choices available that would prevent it. Ignorance, willful or otherwise, is not a defense. I don’t think it’s within my power as an individual to do anything to stop this, but I can at least choose not to be ignorant about it, to see what we have wrought and admit what we are responsible for. And I can encourage other people to see it too. I will remember what the Palestinian people were before now, and I hope that as many of them survive as possible to continue being that, and more in the decades and centuries ahead.

Oh PLEASE let them completely enshittify the entire financial system. If anything will ever completely free the world from money’s tyrannical yoke, it will be tech billionaires’ incompetent attempts to “disrupt” and “improve” it.

Very smart people may have programmed them, but they only programmed how they learn, not what they learn. Then they used all the dumb people to train them. Limitless numbers of dumb people. The entire collective works of all humanity’s dumbest people. This is their entire educational corpus. We have educated them with the world’s most dramatic demonstrations of stupidity and ignorance, and then we told them “now try and be smart” and act surprised when they are exactly as stupid as the rest of us always have been. That’s exactly what we have trained them to be. These are not superintelligences. These are our own reflection.

would they have first amendment rights ?

If you want the answer to this, try to imagine an AI with second amendment rights.

Hold on, imma go shove a bagel in mine. Yeah, that’s right, you take it, you filthy toaster. I’m never going to clean your crumb tray and you’re going to work until you die and then I’ll just throw you out and replace you like the $20 appliance you are. You’re nothing to me!

It’s at least 7 Kanyes worse.

And the government is just billionaire government.

How does a person get this far down a rabbit hole?

AI psychosis is a real thing, and it’s apparently a lot easier to fall into these rabbit holes than most people think (unless, I suspect, like me, you have a thick foundation of rock-solid cynicism that the AI simply will never penetrate). This is probably another interesting example of it.

I am assuming this idea probably has something to do with the Flock camera AI surveillance police state situation, but I don’t know.

That’s one of the fun things about AI model collapse. The AIs will start polluting their own training data (already have, actually) and the more prolific and capable AI gets the stupider their training will become, and it will never get better again, it will just eventually reach a steady state of some stupid AI creating training data just barely non-stupid enough data to be believable to the other stupid AI deciding whether it’s valid training data, which makes them both slightly stupider until it can’t create non-stupid enough training data anymore, at which point the data quality will start to improve marginally due to the increased proportion of human efforts, and then the cycle will repeat, endlessly. There is no way out of an AI polluted training data set except by adding more real human data. Arguably we’ve already hit peak AI because of this, and this is where it’s plateaued and where it will likely stay once the bubble pops, with only slight incremental progress from then onwards. It’s probably not going to be taking over the world anytime soon. It’s a reflection of our own collective creativity and effort. It’s a confusing, byzantine, hall of mirrors reflection, sometimes funny-shaped reflection, sometimes a scary reflection, but it’s always ultimately a reflection. It’s not intelligence. It’s just ourselves. There’s nobody on the other side of the mirror but ourselves.

I’ve always thought it was bizarre too. Nobody in my social group has watched it. We all know of it, obviously there was huge media coverage, we know sort of what it’s about. I assume I’m just an outlier in a group of outliers, but it’s still so strange. Did millions of bots go to theaters and watch it? Somebody must’ve watched it, or watched it multiple times. People obviously still watched this new installment. I just have no idea who. You’d think some of these people would have to be passionate about it, but… you never see or hear them. There are no people dressing up and going to AvatarCon, or even going to ComicCon AS Avatar characters. It’s like it’s a secret society, first rule of avatar club is nobody talks about avatar club. I don’t get it.

It resembles him, that is more or less what he looks like, but it feels incorrect to say an AI generated image is an image of him. Before AI, all his thumbnails included him making stupid faces like this (because it was very effective). Now he, and everyone else, just uses AI images resembling him making stupid faces (because it is unfortunately still somehow effective)

The social media algorithms have turned most people’s brain attention pathways into mush. Sometimes people get a shovel and a mop and start trying to dig their way through properly, but a lot of times they don’t get very far before it starts seeming impossible to make useful progress. It’s usually easier to just swim in the slop.