So I saw a few relevant newspieces:

~ Companies are now ceasing their mandate to workers to use AI to do things that used to be done without AI. They’re now saying don’t use AI just to use AI. They’re trying to reduce their token purchases.

~ The estimation now for AI use cases is to reconsider if tokens cost ten times their current price. If the use case is still worth it, then that use case will likely survive the bubble. If it’s not worth it, it’s time to hire back employees.

~ The hyperscale AI industry will have to make $6 trillion annually to break even. Amazon makes $2 trillion by selling people material stuff. Walmart is similar. There may not be a market for $6 trillion in tokens every year, even from government projects. Also, it’s a bad sign if government projects are propping up the whole stock market.

~ China is mostly turning to a software AI model which does home and small business AI tasks fairly well without buying compute from a hyperscaler. You get a gaming machine, get open source AI software and a dozen terabytes of training data, and you should be able to create slop, vibe code or fix the grammar and style of your report. Also, hyperscale models are opinionated and don’t like certain topics. Home-grown AI doesn’t have those objections.

No yotta-? How do you describe the number of joulles it takes to blow up a planet?

In the current typhoon of men behaving badly in the US and the ongoing response and safety movements often advocating romantic abstinence, sometimes the observation is made that not every woman — even those pledged to the movement — is on the same page.

And then there’s the abstinence-until-marriage doctrine of white Christian nationalists, in which young women pledge to preserve their virginity until their one-and-only trad-minded husband puts a ring on it. (Young men might take a similar pledge, but they’re not held to it and in fact are pressured to get some early experience. Double standards and inconsistent value systems and all that.) Yet, a conspicuous fraction of these (sometimes underage) young women overestimate their willpower, frequently contributing to the disproportionate rate of teen pregnancy in school districts that have committed to abstinence-only sex-ed.

Then there’s the women’s magazine I remember reading during the COVID-19 lockdown, that asked readers to write in their stories when they needed the d so badly they risked infection by a stranger to get it. There were a lot of confessional replies.

And all this is to say, sometimes a girl has needs.

If it were about Iranian nuclear weapon development, it wouldn’t be NASA doing the surveillance. Although weather phenomena is in NASA’s purview.

We already had high confidence intel before the war Iran was not pursuing a nuclear weapon. But since then, Trump has expressed that a nuke is the only thing he would respect.

My concerns about catastrophic existential risk are descriptive, not prescriptive

I didn’t have kids. Okay, I had a son, but was separated from him at birth. I married into a family around fifty, and thanks to the troubled economy, the millennial daughter moved in with us, and brought her son.

But it sounds like you think of kids as a means of fulfillment for the parents, rather than autonomous persons of their own. I see that a lot, in our children’s welfare policies, in our attitudes towards education and juvenile crime, in society’s complete disinterested in making society accessible to future generations.

And zoomers and alphas are not feeling the love. The fertility rate in the US dropped below 1.6, which scares the snot out of our owner class. And they’ve cut off immigration, which we’ve depended on for decades to increase our numbers.

The silent generation was also conspicuously small. Three guesses as to why.

I like kids, and value getting to be a grandpa for a boy from four to ten (then he became a basketball star and didn’t visit much).

But I feel sorry for the alphas and betas. In fact, I feel sorry for zoomers, who I’ve watched grow up. And millennials got a raw deal too.

We don’t know which catastrophic existential risk is going to manifest, as we’re working on several. But one is, and the aftermath is going to be an ordeal.

Needless to say, I’m anti-natalist. I think bringing new life into the world right now is a disservice to them.

I’m an old guy with a long romantic career. When I had this conversation it was about shaving her legs. I understand some young people these days expect full Brazillian, or at least a tidy trim. I suspect this figures into the current segregation of the sexes.

One first-date purposely did not shave her legs as a disincentive for intimacy, I wouldn’t have minded, but she felt embarrassed over one day’s growth. We were chaste that night, but had a second date.

Different partners trimmed or shaved completely (some brave women waxed) and I was delighted in all cases. In LTRs, sometimes shaving resulted consistently in ingrown hairs, in which case I insisted please don’t do so on my behalf.

But then, I was a kid in the 1970s and society was getting accustomed to the idea of being our natural selves, body hair, (armpit hair,) and all. It stemmed, I think, from the hippy movement. It was very live and let live.

But of course, for the glamour and cosmetics industry, that just wouldn’t do.

For a less bleak answer, they’re powered by kids wandering through the toy store amazed at all the rows.

So cybercrime is apparently not cybercrime when a major hyperscale AI does it.

deleted by creator

Paywall or whatever bypass

Predicted by the Twilight Zone

ETA Yeah, our C-Suite employees are very rich nowadays, so much that it’s difficult for them to not fail upwards when they make stupid (or harmful) decisions.

Also human upper management and owners resent their own workforce, hence RTOs, efforts to micromanage them, denial of breaks and so on, all of which drastically reduce morale and productivity. This figures in to the hope that AI will replace human workers (almost) entirely, even if AI systems require more cost and maintenance and are less reliable.

But we don’t train AI based on logic, rather we train it on what’s been done before, hence, for example, predictive policing programs carry the same racial biases that the human-run justice system does, on which they are based. So AI executives may carry the same resentment-fueled policies that their human counterparts do.

Also if they’re entirely advisory, well, C-suite folk are not great at listening to advice. They tend to believe they’re the smartest guy in the room.

It might be they’re not trying anymore.

All the common AI tasks that by end-users and small businesses can be done better by local software rather than through compute on a hyperscale platform. The only reason to need big AI is for large-scale projects. They’re still selling compute at a huge loss, and their profits are dwarfed by their expenses.

(Some argue the expenses are due to the massive buildout, which is reaching a capability point of diminishing returns. But even the running expenses outweigh the profits, even with government contracts.)

You know, like controlling armies of killer drones, or processing mass surveillance data to find dissidents that are an actual threat. Or doing cyber-ops on a rival nation.

I think that is why the stock market is still investing in big AI, not because we want better slop, but because they want garrison large populations and wreck rival societies.

George W. Bush was not that long ago. He (too) won with a popular minority. He won by shenanigans in Florida with the help of a partisan SCOTUS.

Bush ran as a compassionate conservative_ but he moved hard-right as soon as he was in office. He started abusing power such as his conspicuous legal-boilerplate signing statements. (Essentially, _I don’t have to enforce this law, IF i don’t want to.) He immediately started rolling back environmental and consumer protections.

Then 9/11 happened, and we went to war, and language started pivoting towards Iraq and WMDs. Joseph Wilson wrote an article about how there’s no yellowcake (processed uranium) and to get revenge, the administration (via Scooter Libby) burned the CIA operative Valerie Plame, which was once a huge offense to the intelligence sector during the Cold War. I’m still sore about it, but I’m still sore about much of the Bush administration.

Soon we started learning about the extrajudicial abductions of Arab, Muslim, Americans, extraordinary rendition (to black sites), torture, the prison camp in Guantanamo Bay, the PMC black ops (precursors to drone-strikes) and so on.

It was awful. So much that the Democrats were taking seriously blaxk and women candidates for the first time. So much so, that Obama got the Nobel Peace Prize, mostly for not being Bush. (Even he was surprised.)

I thought the US would never elect a Republican again.

I totally overestimated the civic savvy of American voters.

Trump should keep going.

He should raname the Atlantic, the American Ocean…

Rename the moon Trump. Not Trumpworld, just Trump

Antarctica is now Cold America. We can’t expect Trump or MAGA to comprehend America Australis

Canada is now Canadian America even though it makes no sense. Greenland is now Green America even though it’s famously not Green at all, but glacial white.

I want to see if Google and Apple will still humor him, no matter how unhinged he gets. I want to see them shouting to the world how Trump is absolutely the best-dressed emperor in the world.

[Scripture is] only ‘meaningless’ to you personally because you’re clearly an atheist.

You should know better. Fundamentalist faiths like to veer away from the beatitudes, and from anything that challenges the hoarding of wealth and power. Post-enlightenment Christians like to avoid the large sections that discuss and openly endorse human slavery, or massacres of villages to the last child and livestock. For most Christians there are large segments of the bible that they disregard entirely, because it doesn’t fit into their own understanding of social norms. There’s a Buddhist saying, Everyone is a biblical scholar when it comes to passages they don’t like.

And then there are atheists who were Christians and deconstructed. Biblical passages have quite a lot of meaning to them. There are a lot of deconstructed Christians who create content on social media. And they talk about the bible and what it means to them.

My own path was more meandering, and my own ethics were gained by deliberation and reading what moral philosophers have figured out. In my experience, societal values are not revealed, they’re constructed.

Atheists aren’t antagonistic to you. At least this one is not. I anticipate you will get exactly the same salvation, the same redemption, the same afterlife as I will. I see that you live in the same cinematic universe as I do and are subject to the same physical laws. I see that there is no justice, no kindness except for that which we collectively decide to create for ourselves. Ultimately, we all go to the same grave. And I anticipate neither of us will be disappointed.

It’s your rival ministries that believe their congregation is blessed by fiat, and yours is profane, also by fiat. It is they who believe good and evil are binary, the paint on chess pieces. That once they determine someone is in league with the Devil, they are free to do anything they want to them. And they do. So, yeah, I am concerned this is the model that reflects your beliefs as well. I hope not.

The old and new testaments are meaningful to me the same way the Koran is meaningful to you. And Christian faith is no more or less valid than Muslim faith, or Shinto faith, or Hindu faith. I believe only in what I see, what I understand to be true. What is consistent with my experiences. And yes, it means having to confront that I am not special or chosen. Nor are any of us. In the zombie apocalypse, we’re all just zombies.

Though, if you have to be Christian, perhaps you should consider being Universalist. They, at least, are optimistic about the nature of humanity.

The true church of Jesus Christ does not have molesting preachers.

If that were the case then there is no true Church of Jesus Christ. Full Stop. Your definition excludes allowance for human nature, and the corrupting influence of authority.

Anyway, all your bible passages are meaningless. The white Christian nationalist movement serves as an example of what Dan McClellan observes, that the bible is only used for the prooftext to uphold social hierarchy. The amount of care we see for the sick, support for the impoverished, and regard for the stranger in modern ministries is nauseatingly slight, even though they’re central themes in the bible.

It not only highlights that the texts are a historical work, not inerrant, not univocal, and not divinely inspired. But that they can be reinterpreted to say anything to any purpose. And they are.

And if we presume the omniscience of God, then They knew in advance the scripture-church model of messaging would fail, and would choose something different that worked.

Without question. Corruption and abuse within institutions is epidemic throughout human history. Child sexual abuse runs lousy in religious institutions. The youth-pastor problem is pervasive.

If you want to create a church, and figure out how to keep its elders free of vice and corruption, I applaud you. But I don’t think you’re going to succeed, if ever your ministry gains any significant following.

A more realistic ambition (if your congregation is more than a dozen folk) is for absolute transparency. A bigger problem in the religious sector is the incentive by ministries to cover up scandals, and silence victims in order to preserve the reputation of the institution. (And predators looking for a hunting ground often seek positions of authority in religious institutions because of this trait.) If your church had the policy of reporting wrongdoing to the authorities and to the press, quickly and openly, then, yes, your ministry will have a lower rate of misconduct, but it will appear to be more corrupt, because of your sunshine rules. Kinda like Florida.

The primary reason the Catholic church is so ridden with corruption and scandal is because it’s big and it’s old. It’s the largest Christian denomination, and it’s been around the longest.

Don’t think this doesn’t happen to non-Christian religious institutions as well. Unchecked power breeds abuse of it, and scandals run thick in temples, in mosques, in secular community centers. The larger the institution the worse the entrenchment.

The term nepotism comes from the root nepot meaning nephew.

Nepotism comes from the practice of high-ranking clergy siring children, and then wanting to promote their bastards into choice positions. They couldn’t claim to be the lad’s father, so they’d instead claim to be his uncle. Thus the kid was his nephew.

Catholics are Christian, at least according to those of us who are not Christian.

It’s like the LGBT+ community: someone is how they personally identify. Even if their behavior doesn’t meet expectations. (Russell T. Davies did a series about this phenomenon, Bob & Rose) If a man claims to be lesbian, than he is. And yes, this pisses off the gold-star lesbians.

Anyone who identifies as Christian, is Christian. Full stop.

They might not be very good at it.

They might disagree with what qualities a Christian should have.

They might, themselves, decide you’re not a Christian either.

If they belong to a mainline or fundamentalist ministry, they probably think your faith is a deception by the devil, and only by joining their church will you receive salvation. That is more common ministerial position than not.

If they’re Universalist, then they don’t care if you’re Christian, you get salvation anyway.