I am at least glad that hunting down trans people and burning down any place where people (especially kids) can get gender affirming care is probably not going to be an active priority up and down the various levels and branches of government the way it seemed to be for a while there. I’m not entirely convinced it’s a step in the right direction yet, but it should at least be a temporary halt in most areas.

So admittedly I’ve kept out of the wider star wars discourse ever since everyone was wrong about The Last Jedi. (Instead I got on the Knives Out hype train early which was an objectively better choice.) But this feels like a particularly poor fit for the pattern because Anakin was redeemable and sympathetic all the way back to Return of the Jedi. Anakin’s story was already about a young man who was denied a healthy coping envuronment for his trauma, was promised unreasonable powers and privileges, then when denied them embraced hatred and fascism and destroyed almost everything he used to care about, but still was ultimately able to pull back from that edge and, at the last crucial moment, do the right thing because of the love of his family. Obviously it’s not a complete nonstarter because of how powerful and aesthetically dominant Vader is as a character, but ironically I think the story already invites you to see Anakin as a protofascist and to feel regret and pity for the path he takes. It’s easier to look at something like Harry Potter and invent “this bad guy was a powerful Nazi and that’s awesome!” almost out of whole cloth than to try and get there from “this bad guy is a sad, whiny, but poweful Nazi and that’s pathetic and horrible.”

And I don’t think that they don’t know this because when the prequels came out this was exactly why the same chuds hated them. Anakin was whiny and wimpy and the fallout kinda killed Hayden Christiansen’s career and broke Jake Lloyd full stop. I know this is part of the usual “fascists don’t take words seriously” thing but I think (I hope?) that in this case it weakens their propaganda because while they may be able to forget what they said five minutes after saying it the broader cultural consensus remembers.

If anything the clearest inversion would be to lionize the emperor as the embodiment of state power, but in fascist ideology the creepy old man who secretly seizes power to undermine the golden age out of allegiance to a poorly-understood insular ancient religion already maps pretty strongly to another stock character. I guess that’s probably why they used to try and cast themselves as the rebel alliance, even while venerating the love of power that the empire and Vader represented.

Hey wait a minute that episode was iconic for being actually good.

But what about the way abnegating our duty to smell piss infringes upon the other guy’s right to piss freely?

Man, Cheesecake no longer sounds like a real word and I’m real hungry now. Clearly the cheesecakes are too powerful and simply thinking about them or talking about them for too long will allow them to tempt even the most stout-hearted to open the fridge.

It’s always vague talk about how they need to rearchitect their workflows to better integrate blah blah blah. There’s never a specific model they want to move to or a specific plan or even a single detail about what this should look like other than “more LLMs!”

I propose the reason for this is that we’ve already seen what this kind of model looks like with Gas Town or whatever he’s calling it now and it’s both blatantly stupid and incredibly expensive so any CTO who honestly tried to move a real company towards that model would laughed out of the room or sued for breach of fiduciary duty.

He was on Weird Little Guys last week too. Seems like a good egg with a good book.

I don’t find myself having nearly as many occasions to make use of them as you do, but I do think that all the misplaced AGI hype makes it hard to evaluate the actually technological advancement that LLMs represent. Like, being able to statistically model language to the degree these things do is neat, and I would be more surprised if it wasn’t possible to use that to do some useful and powerful things. But just like how it’s impossible to separate the underlying math of the cryptocurrency sphere from the ideology of technolibertarian griftocracy, everything that the LLM space has produced is poisoned on some level by millenarian technofascism. Like, the degree to which our economy and culture have been warped by these things is entirely a product of the people who think that they’re going to spit out a God that makes whoever does so first king of the world forever. All the actual useful things people are getting from it are around the edges and happening in spite of the demands to remove guardrails and quality checks and human accountability from these systems. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the underlying mathematics is without value and can’t be part of good and useful systems in the future. Machine Learning as a whole had already demonstrated the value in automated pattern identification and reproduction in a variety of fields from medical diagnostics to pastry sales.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m strongly in favor of throwing out all this bathwater even if there might be a baby in there somewhere. I just think that “hard to evaluate independently” isn’t necessarily the same thing as “without value in other contexts”.

Christ Almighty just @ me next time. The other element of this dynamic is that non-technical managers or users, who would previously have heard about these vulnerabilities from our IT security group who are equipped with our specific context, are now hearing it from OpenAI’s marketing copy.

Nah, my computer can totally do math on its own. Wanna see?

cos(4)

Bam!

7²

Get mathed on!

4E183

See, your human brain can’t even do math like that.

I imagine they’re running into the same issue that github is, just on a lesser scale.

Generative AI is an extractive and oppressive technology with the goal of faking and replacing human creativity, and because it can’t feel pain, it is used as an industrial drone army stapling together bad systems that we rather should have overcome.

Yeah this is a good one.

You know, it seems like ever since the Heartbleed debacle we can get a rough sense of how complex a vulnerability is by examining how much explanatory text or context on normal system operation is required to explain it to a layman.

“I asked it to make me an admin and it just… did it” might be the literal minimum level of complexity by that standard.

They’re backed into a corner where any number high enough to not be embarrassing for everyone involved is wildly unrealistic and any realistic number is going to be embarrassingly low. Trying to leave blanks so that someone else has to provide the actual numbers is basically the only option that doesn’t involve committing lots of fraud.

Also in that context it seems like millenarianism is specifically bad at actually doing anything about the harms it’s worried about. Whether you want to curb fossil fuel usage or just get sinners to repent before it’s too late, doomsday prophecy is actively bad at motivating anyone other than the prophet themselves.

Now I’m imagining a biomechanical turbocharger that captures the energy of exhaust gas being expelled to increase pressure and efficiency of the air intake.

I think we might need to ask Tumblr user cybersmith about that and I don’t think anyone wants to hear from Tumblr user cybersmith.

So wait, if you recategorize all the hardest parts as “preparing the site” then the project speeds up significantly?

I mean they absolutely do, but nature and economics have their say. Like, you can make money selling homeopathy, because people who falsely believe in homeopathy are a market segment, but you can’t otherwise make money doing homeopathy because it doesn’t work. Similarly you can speculate on anything and come out ahead with the right combination of luck, publicity, and timing, but taking advantage of short-term volatility or noise in the market isn’t the same as actually doing something effective, and the farther away from truth you push the market the more damage it’s going to cause snapping back to reality.

We could unironically live in this world if only the powers that be would allow it. I’ve personally radicalized at least 3 basic bitches with this fact.