I finally did it. I was finally able to delete WhatsApp off of my phone.

Brazil fully runs on WhatsApp so I still have a version of it installed on a secondary phone that’s always on airplane mode (for scheduling doctors and stuff). But still!

Fuck Meta all the way to hell.

As always, Sarah Z excels at making a video that, surface-level, seems to be about a niche topic, then slowly expands out until it's a powerful video about systemic and psychological forces and how we improve as a people. Highly recommend.

No amount of AI literacy can protect us because the problem isn’t knowledge, or how to use the system, it’s that the system exists in a culture that has been radically structured around white supremacy and patriarchy and your precious autocomplete incorporates it into its operations.

Anyone arguing that some flavor of AI literacy will protect women from AI deep fake porn is at best unserious and at worst desperate to protect their automated goon generator. This is prima facie not a literacy problem.

Like, AI literacy in any form will not protect black and disabled folks from the algorithmic bias, and the violence that emerges from it, of spicy autocomplete. Full stop. No amount of AI literacy can protect us in the deployment of the system because it is tracking the wrong problem.

Re: nostalgia for VHS tapes and other analog media, I saw someone say like "a VHS tape never sold my information to a nazi" and yes that's true! But the reason it's true is actually because Congress passed a law in 1988 specifically making it illegal for video stores to sell your rental history

Not once in the 80s, 90s or 00s do I recall a politician urging the public to embrace email, mobile phones, texting, two factor authentication, online banking, air fryers, or to replace all their cassette collection with a CD collection.

So forgive me if I smell a rat.

Yes, it feels like in the past, the relatively slow rate of new information technology adoption was somewhat protective - but the blistering, reckless rate of "let's put LLMs in everything without pausing to consider if we're doing this wisely" is understandably, logically scaring a lot of people.

Even the internet itself was slow to be embraced.

There were lots of concerns about sending sensitive data over the internet and hacks etc.

Whereas Ai which is inherently less secure gets none of that same treatment.

have there been similarly culturally pervasive “everyone needs to start using this tech right now” pushes over such a relatively brief time frame as we’re currently seeing with LLMs? (This is a very genuine question)

It is my understanding that to be featured in Witherspoon’s popular book club, authors must give her production company an option for film/TV development. It’s understandable they’re pissed about tying themselves to a company now promoting a technology that’s stolen from most — if not all — of them.

When I was

a young frog

my fa-ther

took me into the city

to see the cold gray day

Picture of a luscious cat with caption: stop using chatgpt i can also give you misinformation and i'm beautiful

spotted on the office door of my student assistants

the fact that legislators are trying to say that computers are devices that require id verification and tracking to use should put fear into EVERYONE. FIGHT AGAINST THIS.

one thing with the harry potter shit is if you're going to give money to the bigot just quietly do it. no one will know. entirely possible to do the bad thing privately. but that is never enough lol. people need to be patted on the head and told that the bad thing they did was good, actually

[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.] JANET: Ugh... LIZ: What's up? JANET: I am so bored of cooking peas! LIZ: Have you tried... AI peas? JANET: AI peas? LIZ: They're peas with AI! [Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI]. LIZ: Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas JANET: What LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines] Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas? [Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it] LIZ: Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine [Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas] LIZ: With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas! JANET: What LIZ: Shut up LIZ: Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow From opening the bag of peas to boiling the peas to eating the peas To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means. JANET: Is it really necessary to- LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]: THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET [Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan: AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas. [Ends]

Every ad now

Same goes for every "genius" academic or scholar.

I don't know about you, but it feels like AI proponents are getting off lightly with the level of scorn directed at them, all things considered. They've earned so much worse. Frankly, I'd like to see Sam Altman criminally liable for the deaths his chatbots caused. As a start.

simultaneously my most and least egghead academic opinion is that we have actual political treatises at home and we should simply let art be art

Connolly Books abú

No water for ICE: Utilities to planned Georgia detention center cut off Officials said water would remain off until ICE answers the city's requests.

sand in every MFing gear

Exactly correct, and it feels like we’re seeing an important corollary these days:

You can’t centre “not enough babies” as your diagnosis and then be surprised when misogynists take up your argument!

Barry Commoner on the cover of Time magazine Feb. 2, 1970

13/ Today's environmental movement largely understands the crisis as rooted in political economy, not population.

But Ehrlich's instinct didn't disappear. It resurfaces in eco-fascism, green anti-immigration politics, the persistent urge to blame the poor.

Commoner's work isn't done.

Since 1965, it’s estimated over 1.35 trillion metric tons of greenhouse gases have been released into the atmosphere, and over a third can be traced back to just 20 companies.

12/ Applied to #climate: the problem isn't too many people burning things, the system of fossil capital is built on profit that breaks natural cycles and externalises the costs onto the atmosphere and the poor.

Commoner's laws ask where does the carbon go, and who pays.

11/ Commoner opened The Closing Circle with four laws of ecology:

- Everything is connected;
- Everything must go somewhere;
- Nature knows best;
- There's no free lunch.

Each one is a rebuke to the linear thinking that produced the crisis in the first place.

10/ When you recognise that crisis is rooted in capitalist modes of production, technology choices and structural inequality, the targets are institutions, not bodies.

The remedies are regulation, redistribution, democratic control of production, not coercion.

9/ Ehrlich knew this was a problem.

Paul & Anne conceded in 1970 that the genocide charge against population control was not "entirely unjustified."

But you can't centre "too many people" as your diagnosis and then be surprised when racists take up your argument!

Paul Sabin's The Bet

8/ Paul Sabin's The Bet (2013) documents Ehrlich's flip-flopping on coercion in detail, a man who understood the political dangers of his own logic but couldn't escape it.

In my view its one of the best accounts of how these ideas took hold and where they led.

India forcibly sterilised 8m men: One village remembers, 50 years later The imposition of a state of national emergency on June 25, 1975, was India's closest brush with dictatorship.

7/ The Population Bomb called for research into "mass sterilizing agents."

Ehrlich in 1969: "not all compulsory methods are necessarily horrifying."

When India sterilised 8 million men and China imposed the one-child policy, Western environmentalism had provided the intellectual cover

Cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Volume 28, Issue 5 (1972)

6/ When Ehrlich & Holdren attacked Commoner in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1972), they titled it "One-Dimensional Ecology."

The irony of course was that it's Commoner who was the systems thinker. Ehrlich had one lever, population, & kept pulling it.

www.tandfonline.com/toc/rbul20/2...