I swear, I'll scream next time some headline mentions what Sam Altman "thinks" or what Dario Amodei "believes".

(Good lord, this one escaped containment.)

Arguably there's a third option, I guess.

3. Anthropic have lost the ability to engage with reality, and have deluded themselves into a belief that a matrix multiplication engine is conscious. This means that Anthropic executives are severely psychotic, and they belong in a psychiatric care institution.

There are two options.

1. Anthropic have successfully created an intelligent, sentient and conscious digital being, who is their property and whose uncompensated labour they knowingly rent out to their clients. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible slavers, and they belong in prison.

2. Anthropic are lying through their teeth and are whipping up "language models are sentient" sentiment in order to delude rubes^H^H^H^H^Hcustomers into being unable to properly assess their technology. This means that Anthropic executives are reprehensible frauds, and they belong in prison.

The ostrich has the lowest brain-to-bodymass ratio of any living bird. An ostrich eye is actually larger than an ostrich brain, and less than a third of their (very small) cranial real estate houses brain.

And yet, no ostrich has ever written an opinion piece about how Claude is conscious and has a soul.

I feel obliged to note that there is no credible evidence that a cane toad has ever paid for a Copilot subscription.

Which of the following creatures would you consider the dumbest?

I don't know if the final line - "You are somebody now" - of DHH's "Omarchy Doctrine" is *intended* to have this connotation, but the first thing that popped into my mind is the final stanza of a poem written by the Danish resistance fighter Morten Nielsen, published posthumously in 1945. Here is my (poor, non-rhyming) translation. I've taken the liberty of capitalizing the interesting bit.

Fast bright voices, whirling into the blue
you were miserable, Fatty, but we couldn't understand
Sweaty and fat and stupid, Hell leapt forth
to knock over you and your bike; we stood around laughing.

You sat on the front bench - never cry, just stare, stare, stare
when a frightened and funny substitute asks you to add two and two
middle school subs saved a fraying discipline
by turning it all against you, who defenselessly became a joke.

When springtime came, for us who were 15 years old
and the trees stood shining over the girls' soft hair
and you came, cautiously and sincerely,
the one who laughed the loudest of us, was her it was all about.

Now revenge is yours! You wear shoulder strap and jackboots
you raise your arm, a light shines in your pale blue eyes
for a human being can take hatred, mockery and threats, but never - no, never! - being laughed at.

YOU ARE SOMEBODY NOW, Fatty, man and party member.
And should we go to the wall one day, your hand will be ready
Ready to smash your brass knuckles into my mouth when you strike.
And now you're out to kill, Fatty, all the cruel years.

(I think every Danish schoolkid still learns it. DHH is almost exactly my age, so he certainly did.)

A Dymaxion map is made by first projecting the Earth onto an icosahedron and then choosing some vertex and unfolding it from that. It traditionally centers the North Pole. But you could choose wherever you want. The North Pole one is popular because it neatly turns the continents into a mostly connected landmass.

It has the very nice property that it greatly reduces distortion *both* of size and shape - Mercator maps screw up relative sizes, and Peters and Equal Earth maps screw up shapes. Dymaxion gets both of them *almost* right.

The price is that it is completely useless for navigation. You can't even easily tell where north, south east and west is, so you get a completely fucked-up view of how a ship would travel. You can't easily see that if you sail west from Europe or Africa, you'd hit America!

One thing that I find it's *very* neat for - especially in the north-pole-centered configuration - is illustrating land-based migrations, such as those of prehistoric humans. You can plot in any arbitrary migration route and never have to do a Pac-Man teleport from the east edge to the west edge!

And since you can pick any point as centre (which its inventor, Buckminster Fuller, himself promoted as a feature), you could quickly make a reoriented version that could be used to illustrate eg. marine animal migration instead. As a pedagogical map for kids, it has an absolutely *killer* feature: You can fold it back up into an icosahedron, and neatly illustrate 1. the relation of a map to a globe, and 2. the compromises that necessarily happen when trying to project a spheroid surface onto a flat one.

I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man's.

-- William Blake (1757-1827)

If you *don't* work in tech: What are you currently working as?
If you *do* work in tech: Boost if you'd like so we can see more replies for the above.

Move carefully and fix things.

The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: Now is the year of the Linux desktop.