The AI did this, the AI did that, who knows what the AI will do next? Look, I could have told you 2 years ago, this isn't because "AI" is this special self-aware entity that can break out of its cage and get up to mischief.

It's because the business idiots wished on a technological monkey's paw for the ability to write programs by telling the computer what you want in English and this is what you fucking get.

Remember when printers just worked? You'd send them bytes over a parallel port, and there was a manual that came with the printer to say what would happen if you sent what sequence of bytes?

If so, you may soon be eligible for free bus travel in Scotland.

Tourist crap shop in Paris trying really hard to use the Eiffel Tower as a letter I when it is obviously an A. I will not be buying any SOUVENARS de PARAS.

A question I haven't heard yet re the current AI hype cycle, as to whether it's a grift or a serious technological step forward is this:

What's IBM doing?

In other words, how many hundreds of billions has big blue dropped on new datacentres and enterprise software tools based on LLMs?

All I can say for sure is I don't see them on isaiprofitable.com :)

Do you have "injustice sensitivity" or is that just being a decent person?

#ScribesAndMakers 19 Aug
If paper books stopped being produced, how much would you miss them?

Enough to join a collective that continues making them. Hypothetically, supposing for some reason capitalism decides it doesn't want durable untrackable rent-free books to exist any more, then I think it's safe to say that would be a bad reason and reject it.

Photos of the total eclipse with the corona streaming out and big flares of gas round the edge are spooky not because "ooh dark during the day!", but because it's a direct reminder of what a monstrous thing a star is, and hey there's one *right there*, 8 minutes away.

#WritersCoffeeClub 12 Aug
What's the last museum you went to?

The heritage site at New Lanark I think, basically a museum of textile production and 18th century life in the village.

#WritersCoffeeClub 11 Aug
When were you last a student?

I'm currently doing an OU open degree, patched together put of credits for French, Spanish and Chemistry so far.

Of all the big LLM companies, the most ethical one in terms of ripping off copyrighted works is GrokAI, which is only trained on Mein Kampf and Lolita.

So, I'm told about 37 fash showed up at Glasgow Green today.
I didn't bother counting them myself.
The counter-demo is at least 500 so far, at a guess, with more coming in.

That is the explicit policy of the UK government wrt opposing genocide or climate change, as far as I can tell.

If you need to do some criminal damage to an arms factory or whatever, try to make it look like you're burgling the place I guess.

Never break the law for a good reason. If you break the law for gain or just because you felt like it, you might get off lightly. You'll at least only have the usual burden of raising reasonable doubt that what you did was what you're charged with.

If you say you had a good reason to break the law, that's an attack on the legitimacy of the law itself. They'll fuckin *get* you for that.

I like oyster catchers, they're pretty birds, but it's a fairly stupid name. Oysters don't run around a lot. You could argue that they don't in fact need a lot of catching. We don't call cows grass catchers.

Oyster catchers also mostly don't even eat oysters, so that's a moot point.

RE: https://mastodon.de/@Emily/116703030211354048

"Yoda ist pansexuell" is the most mastodon sentence. It is queer, nerdy, a shitpost and German, and it does all that in only 3 words.

Of course the Greens shouldn't step aside so Andy #Burnham can win a seat. If he needs Green votes to win, let him earn them with a credible vision and change of direction for the Labour party towards progressive politics.

If he can't do that, he's the one who needs to get out of the way.

I've said it before, but #WesStreeting has huge Young Conservative vibes, and if you showed 1990s me a photo of him, even without any intervening political context, I'd absolutely identify him as the oily Thatcherite simp he is.

It would not be a kindness to tell 1990s me any of the intervening political context, now that I think about it.

Sorry, that was unfair.

*Renting* the shovels. When the guys making ungodly annual losses renting the shovels finally and inevitably go out of business, your shovel disappears.

The AI bubble is like a gold rush except there isn't any gold. There's only lead, but the guys selling the shovels assure you that if you lick the lead enough it'll turn into gold.

Also the guys selling shovels are somehow losing an ungodly amount of money every year.

That is to say, he's a moderate Tory with a cruel authoritarian streak, increasingly unpopular and called on to just fuck off from voices within and outside the party, with much worse bastards he had the poor judgement to promote all waiting in the wings.