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Both Canada and the USA cancelled events in their national capitals on their national holidays due to extreme weather.

But pipelines!
But Secure, stable, fossil fuel deliveries!
But divisiveness!
But Jobs!

But The Economeeehhhhh!!

#endfossilfuels #climateChange #climateEmergency #canpoli #cdnpoli #canadaDay #fourthOfJuly

Unless you were largely cognisant during the late 90s, it's very hard to get across to you just _how_ bristling with positive energy computing was back then, just **look** at this opening screen, it screams "ARE YOU READY TO LEARN MOTHERF*CKER?!".

It has dolphins, in the clouds. How many smartphone apps welcome you with dolphins in clouds?

#encarta #90s #retrocomputing

A post about project managers

I do not condone criminal activity, but it's more profitable for the thieves than targeting residential homes.

Thieves Are Now Targeting AI Data Center Construction Sites for Copper and Expensive Equipment
https://www.vice.com/en/article/thieves-are-now-targeting-ai-data-center-construction-sites-for-copper-and-expensive-equipment/

Things I wish journalists knew

* If you report the right-wing dogwhistle, without explaining that it's a dogwhistle, all you're doing is right-wing propaganda

* CEO's/powerful people lie, and it's legal to remind your readers of this when you report on another lie

* Running at a loss due to private investment, then regulatory capture, followed by the inevitable rug-pull is the entire "tech" playbook, stop being naive

* Feel-good "success in adversity" articles are actually just victim-blamey

I hate headlines like this. You read the article and discover she works in finance, he runs a life coaching business whatever that is, and they retired once their savings hit £1 million which didn't come from making their own sandwiches.

Meanwhile out in the real world most of us have been bringing packed lunches to work since the 2010s at least and are still one unexpected vet bill away from a couple of months of home haircuts.

"Professor fired over #CharlieKirk post could receive $1.9M in settlement."
https://thehill.com/homenews/education/5948386-professor-fired-over-charlie-kirk-post-could-receive-1-9m-in-settlement

This is just the latest in a series. Universities that disciplined professors for criticizing Charlie Kirk knew or should have known that they were violating those professors' free-speech rights. But they did it to align themselves with the Trump admin, even on the wrong side of the law. Consider these settlements and damage awards to be a cowardice tax.

#Academia #AcademicFreedom #Censorship #FirstAmendment #Trump #Universities #USLaw #USPol #USPolitics

What if intelligence is real the same way that charisma is real?

Sure, some people have more or less of it than others, but at the end of the day, it's a poorly defined aggregate of personal characteristics that doesn't define one's worth or moral status and trying to put a number how much one has is a fundamentally wrongheaded way to think about it and will only lead you into paradoxes

(But in the case of intelligence, people keep trying to do it for reasons historically related to eugenics)

"Have we found the gene for human charisma?"

"Will human-level charisma ever be possible from a computer?"

"Are girls more charismatic than boys?"

"How to boost your child's charisma metric"

"How charismatic would an animal have to be, for it to be wrong to eat it?"

What if intelligence is real the same way that charisma is real?

Sure, some people have more or less of it than others, but at the end of the day, it's a poorly defined aggregate of personal characteristics that doesn't define one's worth or moral status and trying to put a number how much one has is a fundamentally wrongheaded way to think about it and will only lead you into paradoxes

(But in the case of intelligence, people keep trying to do it for reasons historically related to eugenics)

I opened up a textbook on LLM use in NLP

And in the first chapter, the example they use for a probability distribution

Is IQ scores

"Tell me this is meant to be used for eugenics without telling me this is meant to be used for eugenics"

The problem with crime prediction algorithms is that they're racist false-positive machines that just make life worse for black people; not "Is it unjust to arrest someone for a crime they didn't commit, but would?"

The problem with AI is stuff like: colonial exploitation, theft, environmental damage; not that robots become so good that they gain personhood or overthrow us

The problem with eugenics is devaluing of humans now; not a hypothetical perfect superhuman

All of 20th century sci-fi has premises like: What happens when we can predict crime with perfect accuracy, or if robots follow the Three Laws perfectly, or if eugenics produces a true perfect superhuman race, WHAT THEN

Now people who skimmed those books are giving us half-baked versions of them held together with duct tape and Python code with failure modes that are all just fascism

But everyone still talks about them like the interesting moral questions are the ones from the perfect sci-fi

And that's without even getting within a fucking lightyear of the discussion about how wrong-headed and eugenics-adjacent it is to suggest that if you turn the intelligence of a system up high enough, then it just becomes a person with moral status

If you're writing sci-fi, and part of the plot depends on the concept of "super intelligence" or something similar

Be careful

You're probably closer to promoting eugenics than you think you are

Whenever I see the word "intelligence" in a headline

I replace it in my mind with the word "charisma"

They're both poorly defined aggregates of properties of a person that are often referred to collectively

And it helps me to see through the way that we've been trained to see intelligence as equivalent to moral status or worth

It's more that you can't, as the AI boosters have done (and that very much so includes Evan as a soft booster), put out extraordinary claim after extraordinary claim, do *none* of the work to back that up with equally extraordinary evidence, then complain to the ref that opponents of AI haven't done their work.

(2/3)

Them: Oh an Ancient Screw

Me: I have a name

Them: Oh a Fire Fruit

Me: I have a name