for the purists, we offer a bread sandwich.
just don’t call me a psammophobe you beach.
what you inevitably find is that, if the only way to get anywhere is to drive, there isn’t anywhere worth bothering to go.
look on the bright side: this year’s anomaly is just next year’s baseline.
velvet
all is calm on the Romanian Black Sea coast. it’s the first time i’ve been since it’s not been so calm in the country just north of here, the first time i’ve been since COVID.
“we need a legal ban on ads, not mere platitudes on billboards advertising companies' ‘respect’ for our privacy. The US is way overdue for a federal privacy law with a private right of action, which would let you and me sue the companies who violated it” @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/31/context-ads/
from @baldur https://www.baldurbjarnason.com/2023/tech-broke-the-webs-social-contract/ ht @emilybache @matthewskelton
![Text:
The problem is that quite a few people in tech don't believe in any social contract. Their conceptualisation of society is that it's an equilibrium of dominant wills motivated by mimetic desire. That the rich are on top; that the rest of us aspire to be like them; and that any and all criticism towards them is born from jealousy. The world can only be improved by those with power over others. Any form of pro-social reasoning, consensus-building, or genuine negotiations seems to be alien to them.
These people are reactionary libertarian assholes, and they are tech's ruling class. They might see themselves as benevolent shepherds of humanity's future, esp. the creepy longtermist types, but by and large, they are power-hungry libertarian assholes.
This is why they leave scorched earth behind.](media_attachments/files/110/462/016/119/404/254/original/674233efa812553d.jpeg)
it isn’t full employment until profit margins are moderate.
from @akkartik on “situated software”. (i may have hit this before, but i love the aesthetic.) http://akkartik.name/freewheeling
it’s not just intuit’s lobbying. if filing were automatic and refunds just appeared for most workers, it’d be hard to persuade them to hate the IRS despite their interest in escaping predatory plutocracy.
kind of disconcerting when your departure gate is F8.
maybe we should call instagram the fadiverse.
Clinical trials have become an excuse to create barriers to entry and protect massive pharma rents.
Perhaps we should consider nationalizing the clinical trials process. If an otherwise unencumbered treatment looks promising, the government should just pay to check it out. If it works, every competent firm can compete to offer it.
cf proprietary poop @ $20K a pop per @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/29/monopolizing-turds/
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the real win for Joe Biden in the debt ceiling negotiations is a House Speaker whose political fortunes become tied to making progress on “centrist” Republican priorities in a bipartisan manner rather than one dependent upon Mitch McConnell, Newt Gingrich, freedom-caucus scorched-earth, blow-up-the-Democrats-whatever-the-collateral-damage, tactics.
Especially when it comes to political ramifications, I generally stand in opposition to the people who claim our AI systems are or are on the verge of becoming "conscious" independent agents (and therefore dangerous powerful aliens). I am much more worried about malign (or just venal) human agency with these tools than about the agency of the machine. 1/
But I'm reading a lot of I'll say too smug, too hermetic tellings from my side of the argument that it's just incoherent, a "category error" to imagine genuine minds arising from machines made of cable and silicon. Our brains are mere material too. They too have no direct experience of the world, only of opaque signals to which they somehow give meaning. 2/
It is perfectly possible, in my view, that a materialistic view of the world is incomplete, and that we are conscious because in some sense we have souls that a machine cannot. But I would not pretend to know whether that is true, or whether my consciousness and agency result in some way from how physical signals interact. And if the latter is true, I would not pretend to know the same thing couldn't emerge on top of a machine substrate doing complicated signal processing. 3/
I don't even pretend to know whether other humans have "consciousness" or "agency". I can only perceive my own. My resolution to the "problem of other minds" is a moral choice, and an act of faith. I take it as axiomatic that other humans have these things. Whether in the unknowable truth I am right or wrong, I'm sure this is a good choice. I don't want to be lonely, or a sociopath, even if in fact I could only be those things or not in some solipsistic simulation. 4/
So I am sure — at least I will act and even think in the consciousness I experience that I am sure — that you dear reader are a consciousness with agency. 5/
It will ultimately be a social question, not a scientifically resolvable matter of physics or philosophically certain matter of clarity, whether I someday offer that presumption to entities that seem like minds on other substrates. A merely compelling simulation of humanness would not on its own provoke me to that decision. I would have to believe that, according to my own values, the world makes more sense, is more virtuous, is less lonesome, if that presumption would be offered. /fin
cc @poetryforsupper, as this is in part a response to an essay he suggested: https://psyche.co/ideas/the-myth-of-machine-consciousness-makes-narcissus-of-us-all
@wholesomedonut i think we'll want publicly trained models with transparently agreed training sets and feedback mechanisms that we can run and tweak locally.
from preliminary reads of the #DebtCeiling deal it's bad on principle bc it's not a clean raise, and it's bad in fact on cuts, but it's much better than what you'd expect from the hostage situation Ds had publicly, almost performatively, walked themselves into. i have a hard time believing their negotiation position in private wasn't stronger than the public position, that some unilateral workaround wasn't quietly on the table. it's the Congressional Republican reaction that will be interesting.
this is a bad thing. it also may affect the Supreme Court's decision on student loan forgiveness. now they don't have to worry that no forgiveness means no resumption. but as @ddayen points out, the biggest deal in the Biden admin's student debt proposal was the very generous IDR (income-driven repayment plan), which would provide immediate relief but ultimately necessitate a restructuring of how colleges set tuition. i hope that is still on.
![from @ddayen on Twitter:
Any macro impact is going to come from the return of student loan payments, which are codified in this agreement and now guaranteed later this summer.
$400/mo payments for millions are back, with no clarity yet on whether cancellation will happen.
One caveat to that:
The administration has promised a far more generous income-driven repayment plan that would slash payments for lower earners. We haven't heard much about the progress of the updates to this program.](media_attachments/files/110/444/518/052/438/462/original/126ee92f70f31cd6.png)
if AI tools become essential to contemporary communication and media production, it’ll be a big problem if centralized providers continue to control what kinds of expression they will and won’t produce, or worse yet to subtly shape their outputs. these tools must be local-first and user-controlled.