Talk about ripped from the headlines!

Wasn’t that just the plot of The Caves of Steel? Or Robots of Dawn, which combined it with some weird sex thing?

I did a quick scan of the titles just for old time’s sake and ran into a very aggressive “oh my God shut up” directed at my younger self as much as at Scooter himself.

So many of the responses pointing out how bad this is for the local communities in Licking County (lol), but I feel like this has to be a case where the bezzle is collapsing more than a decision causing new harm, right? The bubble wasn’t sustainable and those jobs were unlikely to manifest past the initial construction, especially since data centers aren’t exactly labor-intensive to run.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt for those communities, especially in the midst of the economic ruin left in the wake of Hurricane Tarrif, but I feel like there’s an important lesson being lost here.

If you don’t have to directly interact with the underclass it’s almost like you don’t have an underclass!

I mean, with the instantly recognizable AI lighting design it would actually take a fair degree of skill to make something look that garbage as an actual tattoo.

The hero we need, but not the one we deserve.

No wait I remember this one from Asimov. Humanoid Robots ack-chewally make the most logical sense because we can reuse all the tools and control designs we already have for human slaves wage slaves workers. Why make a new tractor when you can make a robot to work on the one you’ve been using since the 70s? That’s how this works, right?

I’m reminded of an old essay from Siskind that tried to break down the different approaches to disagreement as either “conflict theory” - different people want different, mutually incompatible things - and “mistake theory” where we all want the same basic thing but disagree about how to get it. Given the general silicon valley milieu’s (and YudRat’s specifically) affinity for “mistake theory” I think the susceptibility to authoritarianism and fascism fits remarkably well. After all, if we all want the same basic thing the only way the autocrat could do something we don’t like is if they were wrong, so we just have to get a reasonable enough autocrat and give them absolute power, at which point they can magically solve all problems. See also the singularity God AI nonsense.

If I had my wish, it would be that this doesn’t just remind people of how authoritarians can be/are evil or incompetent, but also that the general structure isn’t actually more “efficient” because whatever delays the democratic process introduces are dwarfed by the inevitable difficulties of just trying to do anything at the scale of any modern state, much less the sheer scale of the USA.

In what world is crypto free and open? Never mind the fact that the public ledger is undercut by the difficulty of tying a wallet (or wallets) to specific people, which is possible enough to make transactions traceable for the average person while letting sufficiently motivated bad actors hide their behavior from observation in a way physical cash doesn’t, the entire infrastructure is controlled by either whoever happens to have the biggest share of the crypto token or whoever has the most real money to buy server hardware and electricity.

Unless you want to talk about actual private block chains like they seem to be suggesting here, in which case you’re literally dealing with a wildly inefficient but otherwise unremarkable database. If you think that replicating the ledger across multiple servers at different HUD locations is somehow more secure or open then I’ve got bad news for you about how modern IT infrastructure is already set up.

As a prominent intellectual voice criticizing the current administration, our boy Curtis should really be grateful that they don’t hew more closely to his preferred fascist project, as if they did they would have the incentive to be just as if not more brutal in stomping out “credible” independent opposition from the right as from existing liberal institutions. After all the fascist project relies on subverting existing institutions that are too tied up in their own bureaucracy and politicking to effectively oppose them, while the whole point Yarvin has made across his whole career is that the fascists have no such impediment or incentive for restraint. The Night of the Long Knives predated Kristallnacht by more than 4 years, after all.

As anyone who has tracked SovCit discourse can confirm, the English language was definitively codified for all eternity by the 1996 edition of Black’s Law Dictionary and all other projects including future editions of that venerable title are the result of communist plots to undermine the sanctity of American freedom and our precious bodily fluids.

AI Overturns Centuries of Forensic Fingerprinting Practice?

Published in Science… Advances

Probably a fair bit to sneer at in the actual study that I’m missing, and the article I first found it in is peak AI Hype. (Big Forensics is trying to keep you from knowing the Truth as found by an undergrad with a GPU) But the part that I found most concerning is that even the whole paper doesn’t appear to break down their 77% accuracy index and provide the specific result ratios that go into it. In a field where each false positive represents a step on the road to innocent people being convicted of major crimes I would really like to know that number specifically.

Looks like that is indeed the post. I have a number of complaints, but the most significant one is actually in the early part of the narrative where they just assume “companies start to integrate AI” with little detail on how this is done, what kind of value it creates over their competitors, whether it’s profitable for anyone, etc. I’m admittedly trusting David Gerard’s and Ed Zitron’s overall financial analysis here, but at present it seems like the trajectory is moving in the opposite direction, with the AI industry as a whole looking likely to flame out as they burn through their ability to raise capital without ever actually finding a net return on that investment. At which point all the rest of it is sci-fi nonsense. Like, if you want to tell me a story about how we get from here to The Culture (or I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream), those are the details that need to be filled in. How do the intermediate steps actually work. Otherwise it’s the same story we’ve been reading since the 70s.

I thought you had to wait at least a few generations to start inventing bullshit evo-psych-adjacent explanations for stuff.

Also this joke was funny when XKCD did it in the alt text 16 years ago. Jesus how has it been 16 years what the hell

Neither, actually. They were testing it by asking how many "T"s appeared in “Llama Four” and it kept saying “2” so they decided to roll with it.

I also legitimately can’t tell the degree to which they don’t understand they’re LARPing a dystopia versus how much they completely understand that and that’s why it’s gonna be so awesome for them once they make fetch happen.

A massive domestic infrastructure project with little actual demand? In China of all places? I don’t believe it

It’s almost like the tech industry relies on a great deal of general stability, education, and other aspects of society that are broadly considered the responsibility of the state. I think there’s a stock line here about libertarians and cats?

If he got into specifics people might think “Damn, I’ve never had that kind of experience with working-class New Yorkers. What gives?” and he might have to consider let alone admit that he was an asshole to someone.