Dark Discourse At SXSW recently, IDEO presented a robot pet: a furry blob designed to trigger mammalian caregiving instincts. Soft fur, leopard spots, c...

I had a little rant - with bonus Latin coinage! - about designers making objects friendly that have no business being made friendly exitmusic.world/dark-discourse

In before the hurried rebrand of “tactical nukes“ to “clean nukes“

You Don't Have To YouTube video by Ross Kirsling

My work colleague's AI protest children's song so deserves to go viral OMG www.youtube.com/watch?v=QdD-...

Learning to Need Each Other The family argument There is something that, once you see it, is hard to unsee: every major political argument of the last two centuries has been a disagreement about who should run the machine. Almo...

I wrote a thing about, I dunno, the subservience of all modern ideologies to industrialism, liberalism's blindness to the baked-in nature of the oppression that enabled our story of progress, and the need for us to need each other as a way out of the torment nexus departurein.place/learning-to-...

People working in tech deserve both awakening to their part in the state of the world, and also compassion for not already knowing it or knowing how to extricate themselves yet

Before the LLM craze, the “we should maybe reconsider Luddism” thing was kind of a niche topic. Now its urgency level has switched to “everything’s on fire”

Tyson Yunkaporta likes to say that the oral tradition is the ultimate data resilience strategy, which should give a decent hint as to whether physical durability or social relations are the real underpinning of resilience

Well, feelings are untrustworthy and anyway hard to measure, so we should have computers instead of feelings

AI researchers' wrong theory of cognition is making us worry about the wrong kind of AI apocalypse I originally wrote this (in 18 minutes!) as a stream-of-consciousness Mastodon thread. Thought it might be worth putting it all togethe...

Btw I wrote a post/thread expanding on this a couple of weeks ago exitmusic.world/ai-researche...

AI researchers' wrong theory of cognition is making us worry about the wrong kind of AI apocalypse I originally wrote this (in 18 minutes!) as a stream-of-consciousness Mastodon thread. Thought it might be worth putting it all together ...

All right so I spammed this out after listening to one too many A*G*I apocalypse interviews

exitmusic.world/ai-researche...

I find my LLM writing radar getting stronger over time. There’s a certain brassy, self-confident style, coupled with the sense of incoherence that comes from a slightly ill-placed metaphor, or even the casual elision of meaning from a plausible but wrong choice of noun.

Texts gives this off […]

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Capital is busy completing the construction of a no-escape two-tier economy society. And LinkedIn thought leaders think they can get in on that upper tier if they are loud enough in their support of “disruptive change”

Reading Kingsnorth’s “Against the Machine” and Kemp’s “Goliath’s Curse” back to back is quite a trip

Recommended, so far :)

Design can help tilt what we do towards who we want to be We should design for moral coherence. If we design for anything, our designs should aim to bring our habits and actions into line with the values we truly hold, or perhaps more accurately, the values we wish we were able to hold. “The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.” – Taylor Guthrie, https://overcast.fm/+AA2tlVFUsQs/45:28

“The type of self I am capable of being is incredibly constrained by my context.”
exitmusic.world/design-can-help-tilt-wha...

Wait, how do they know what % of their daily code is LLM-generated?

In the meantime (or to see me wrestle with some of the foundational ideas in public)…

bsky.app/profile/jfai...

Life is supposed to be pleasurable Adrian Bejan’s Constructal Law is something I keep thinking about. It states: For a finite-size flow system to persist in time (to liv...

I’ve started using this place to sketch out my random thoughts - to think in public, but with as small an audience as possible to minimize my self-consciousness. Don’t subscribe unless my public messy thinking is what you want! exitmusic.world/life-is-supp...

Paused, frankly! Mid selling house/relocating, with a 3 week trip back to the UK in the process :)

Will get back to it though. Can’t keep a good idea down, etc

(So in this example that’s 2% extra on $100k)

It’s a progressive tax, so it’s 2 percentage points extra on every dollar of income above the $1m mark.

What does your salary depend on your not understanding?

Executives: if I'm working for you I want you to delegate management & retain leadership. Definitely not the other way around.

Today's NY Times comparison of Elon Musk and Cecil Rhodes really clarifies what Musk's whole deal has always been about: rehabilitating the colonialist tradition around new frontiers on the internet and in outer space, and rebranding this deracinated neo-neo-colonialism as "adventure" and "purpose."

(If you patiently compost computers, you don’t get new computers)

Life is (living systems are) vertically coherent. Things built on top of computers, not so much.

“If this is the game, I wouldn’t try to win it”

Love this! You’re reminding me that devices that don’t seek to disappear (like phones do) support deliberate practice rather than passive, reactive, subconscious practice. “Convivial tools” framing strikes again!

the reasons gadgets are neato is because they are self-contained and limited

gadgetry is a frame, it requires a border

physical camera: gadget, neato

eink weather display: gadget, neato

ipod: gadget, neato

modern iphone: not gadget, not neato

slop generator device: not gadget, not neato

(Obviously I’m not a farmer or a grocer and the problems are real and hard to solve, but curious what it would take for a given locality to make progress here)