Playing dice with information. A new throw with every use; LLM's are non-replicable. And the dice have no dots. They surface patterns that statistically follow the patterns in the throw. The words are cut away from meaning. The meaning-making externalized to the person. It's just a pattern. Your existing understanding makes the sense...or doesn't.

Convo yesterday where I likened using LLM's to using dice that don't have dots until after you throw them. Someone liked it. ;)

following links from a post, email, text is particularly bad for me. Nearly to 100%. When I still was toggling back and forth between VPN/not, it increased when I had VPN on.

Some of my bills, that would prefer me to pay online, are now fully disabled if I have VPN on.

I hit publish on a new thing before it could get any longer.

www.smudgingthebinary.com/social-media/

I like them together.

The dead-on looks like a command: sit here, this is your place, ignore the street, town, and mountains in the distance.

The angled let's you unfocus from the command to see the context: everything near is bleak, all possibility out of reach in containers, an empty sky.

OpenAI shows that there's no ethical intent, over and over again.

I likened LLM's to a narcissist (a year ago? longer?), and it doesn't even have that much meaning behind it.

this is what I made a couple weeks ago because I woke to it battering in my head:

lol, I was just looking at where this started.

there's just...nothing epistemically sound at the foundation of LLM's. Nothing. Grok shows it's being manipulated. Anthropic shows it's ignoring parameters to the point of multiple restatement...probably because meaning has been subsumed to pattern.

and there are swaths of people who have been carrot/sticked into believing that there's nothing to do but figure out the carrot/sticks, and wend through. so stripped of agency that they *won't* look deeper.

that could be a pattern in people who didn't vote in the last US presidential election.

When it doesn't work as expected, they press harder -- double down, escalate.

I agree with that as well. Humanity isn't simple. Get people scrambling hard enough, and even most nuts-and-bolts of us will break to social interactions. It might even be in just a couple places -- but from above, looking only at the bit, it looks like they found a universal solution.

yeah. It's hierarchy/wishes/ideology providing vector force from above and trying to force out everything that doesn't fit.

I call the shifting area (top-down vs bottom-up beliefs sparking decisions/behavior/actions) "reality adhesion threshold".

I'm not sure. I mean, we all have our little corner where we are very, very, very invested in information and process working. The same continuing confidence isn't invested in everything we do, but as long as what other people are depending on is the bit you do well...it all hangs together.

and he's right. I hope the rest of the world saves the information they're destroying.

When we were growing up it was still easy to use first-hand experience to say, "pftt," and keep doing what worked for us. I think we've lost that.

I'm also realizing I'm more cynical today than I thought.

it keeps hitting me over and over and over again how much death this administration is setting up, and it's all in the info. All the economic fails, all the political abdication. Education & research removed. AI & surveillance & belligerent faith added. The outright killing through war and policing.

it's not just the traction of the lies, the media acceptance of fucked up framing. It's the garbling by LLMs, stringing together words that have been cut from meaning. It's the deletion and imminent sequestering of information. It's the setup of authority to *command* what-is, and LOVING death.

this world feels the furthest from safe to me. we're at the edge of a cliff, with mis- and dis- and lost information about to make things existential for so many people. the holistic epistemic...air (for lack of a better word) was canted mostly towards bottom-up building. it's tipped the other way.

I so want to believe that more people want to understand the world than rationalize their conduct. I want to believe that our current systems are highlighting the people who are bent towards 'rationalize conduct'.

And the fact that I want that is rationalizing. Which is why my model has both.

An Update on the ‘Roadless Rule’ In August 2025, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) published a notice of intent to repeal the Roadless Area Conservation Rule. Implemented in 2001 by the U.S. Forest Service (USFS), the roadles...

Add that to the roadless rule was repealed in June 2025, and some significant changes are coming. Pew report outlines likely impacts:

www.pew.org/en/research-...

4/4

Oh, and if you want to get in there quickly, just pay the executive branch for an expedite fee "not to exceed $10million".

3/4

They've also removed environmental testing and gutted the EPA service, so there's an "argument" that getting environmental testing done (so a data trail of what was before) is now directly subverting "shareholder value".

2/4

Part of what HR1 (aka "big beautiful" or OBBA) did was open up all federal lands to mandatory extraction leasing (to the tune of setting expected lease rates and have a 12% of returns (materials or profit) rate if the highest bid is under).

1/4

it seems you hit a nerve! but you're right. Process can be more fungible than data, with greater potential to accidently hang together. To LLM's even language is just a pattern, not filled with meaning. Something so antithetical to what language intends that we confabulate the meaning gap.

that one's from May 2025. So if he's continued at that level, pickling is...

yeah.

mishmash. irreproducible, untraceable data.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Explains How He’s Making Himself Obsolete With AI The longtime software executive told reporters how he uses his company’s AI app Copilot during his commute—and it looks a lot like talking back to the radio.

he is the one that is filtering everything through CoPilot...

www.vanityfair.com/style/story/...

I am not pleased with how often I'm running across "this is just human nature" lately. We are multitudinous.

www.smudgingthebinary.com/movements/fu...

here's the original, in case people don't want to deal with CNN's tracking.

www.unwater.org/news/unu-inw...

Left-to-right is what we're layering as we build on one data chunk. Top-to-bottom is actually usually about building the data from bottom-up -- the most complex data first, and then what supports it. Doesn't mean the later data is any less huge, just that I'm trying to get the known complexity and (re)balancing managed first, while keeping development moving. This one I was pre-designing the information with the intent of getting dev involved as I couldn't break the info structure, so the phases were approaching waterfall layered with agile (I know). But I've used the color-coding for all kinds of bigger-picture shifts. I've used this for rebranding efforts, shifting underlying data is quarterly-cycle publications that had to otherwise look unchanged, building design systems, building new features, building 0-1...probably a few more things, I forget. It's worked with no pushback in that quarter-cycle environment, and 0-1. Major pushback in building new features. Vacillating pushback in rebranding efforts. Usually we get a week or three into the first tranche of data (another reason to put the most complex first, but bottom-up is the only reason that registers to me), and the pm's that were yelling get quiet. This also does NOT mean I'm ignoring the later data tranches as I'm dealing with the now. I'm just not wrestling with the structures unless I sense it's going to affect my current primary attention. Just in case you needed another POV. ;)

My normal high-level roadmaps are about chunking the information so it will be available -- and even be the spark-point -- when we get to a dev cycle. Matrix for scannability; color-coding and freeform connections to nod to network.

Just in case you want another pov. :)
ooooold proj:

It's not binary: care for everyone, the assholes are everyone, gimme.

It's not binary: care for everyone else, suffer yourself.

It's a balance. They take and spread suffering. You give, support, say, discover, create, think, do because it eases broadly.

When you care broadly, the illogic of having to care for the assholes who would gleefully see others suffer doesn't hold water. They'll whinge & admonish & bully & punish; all it does it confirm that the suffering they spread is willful. Their convolutions are warping senses to *take* something.

I thought & read & watched about this for years...decades. Just care. Once you care about people, it's easy to care about yourself as one of the people -- not as privilege. It takes confidence to care. It takes strength to care, especially in the face of all this bullshit.

Our language is built to be able to describe our world, in all of it’s everything. What we experience is translated to share. We work to describe. Words are the most common connectome. They are abstracted, facile nimble nuanced modifiable contextual easy to carry. Not the only. And when the words hit a meaningful balance, the sharing succeeds. Sharing builds understanding and community, the actual keys to survival.

So when the words are broken away from meaning – still being words, just…placed by pattern instead of by significance, smoothed over to feel about right – they are no longer doing what they were built to do. They are no longer connecting and sharing meaning. As our words and meaning devolves, what we experience becomes moot. We are silo’d, alone, and brimming with the inexpressible and unsharable. Because the words have become something where the key pattern isn’t meaning, but placement. And LLM’s have done even more. They’ve flooded the field with meaninglessness. The people building them have stripped others of their previous expression and labeled it “mine to sell, mine to hold, mine forever. You, the expresser, the creative, the thinker, are the meaningless.” And they are not sated. The machine and the new owners* want more. Their hunger is forever, and if it eats the world….so be it. You, who cannot ever express enough to sate it, who cannot survive physically in it’s consumption of resources and subsumption of agency and self, are become as meaningless as the words. As they are set out into the world, the hollowed-out words become a broken clock, useful by accident. Words become patterns in the clouds, entrails to read and make up sense. Divinity that is just out of reach, transmutable and only for the “special few” to interpret meaning. We’re not there yet. But if meaning and sense-making continues to be dismissed, the key contributors of our sharing and community sundered to nothing more relevant than standardized, swappable, smoothed-over patterns to herd people into usurious profit, it’s where we go. *And they believe, somehow, that they will be the exception. They will transcend the meaninglessness, the loss of people and their expression. That they will continue to profit in an empty world, forgetting that profit requires shared meaning of an abstract that is empty without community.

This is what I woke to banging on the inside of my head this morning.