Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.

But this is really more a product of capitalism than anything else. Under capitalism you just have to keep moving even if you’re just making garbage and debt. There’s no reason to stop and think, because that is seen as a cost (even though it costs more to move without thinking).

Even the best companies that do factor in planning (at least in concept if not actually in practice most of the time) end up with the other problem of “resume driven development” where things that are totally fine and actually working get replaced with things that don’t work because someone needs a new project to get their promotion.

Capitalism produces garbage and puts the people who are least qualified in decision making roles. This still happens in natural systems, but much less. In (healthy) anticapitalist organizing, the people who know the most are generally asked to lead and when they don’t know what to do they stop and figure it out before moving forward.

Aimless wondering can still be a problem, but it’s not forced by the system to continue it’s just people who are learning.

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The political compass is literally a propaganda tool created by right wing “libertarians.” It’s complete bullshit.

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So funny thing, Seattle Police Department did a pilot for AI that did sentiment analysis on police audio and looked for things like racial slurs. They pretty quickly disbanded the project and destroyed the evidence.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/decision-to-halt-program-analyzing-seattle-police-bodycam-video-under-scrutiny/

(IIRC some folks requested info from the pilot and they claimed to have deleted it.)

They don’t care about profits any more than feudalism did. It’s about domination and sadism. Read “Bullshit Jobs” if you want to understand the dynamics here. Profit had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Read “Bullshit Jobs” if you haven’t. Most “work” is really always been about control and enforcing a religious ideology that being subservient to someone else makes you a better person. Return to work is about the psychological domination of workers. We all know it was never about productivity but about justifying inequity through institutionalized sadism.

Employees aren’t afraid anymore so companies are trying to reinstate fear.

Don’t worry, he did it so you won’t get a chance to.

Neoliberalism is the gateway drug to fascism.

I don’t think that’s the implication here. Following the metaphor, pottery and arrow points have been waste products for a while. Prior to the industrial revolution, and specifically prior to the chemical revolution, industrial waste streams haven’t been as major of a problem (ignoring cholera for a bit). It’s been the development of selling chemicals for profit and the extensive use of petroleum that’s really caused massive problems threatening humanity as a whole.

The implication then is that people should be responsible for their memes. Corporations are inherently irresponsible because there exit economic incentives to externalize costs, be that environmental or informational. AI garbage as a waste stream would be fine if the data was clearly labeled as such. Unfortunately at least some AI garbage is intended to be deceptive. There exists an economic incentives to produce AI garbage that is hard to distinguish from human output. Since AI garbage can be produced at an industrial scale, there’s a massive waste data stream that’s able to overload the systems we’ve built to parse and organize data.

There are probably a lot more implications here, but “what are we doing with our information world” is something worth thinking about before we make it completely unusable.

This feels like the precursor to the information Apocalypse referenced in the comic Transmetropolitan.

Its time to start talking about “memetic effluent.” In the same way corporations polluted our physical world, they’re pollution our memetic world. AI spewing garbage data is just the most obvious way, but corporations have been toxifying our memetic space for generations.

This memetic effluent will make sorting through data harder and harder over the years. But the oil and tobacco industries undermined science and democracy for decades with it’s own memetic effluent in order to protect their business for decades. Advertising is it’s own effluent that distorts and destroys language. Jerry Rubin said it in 1970, “How can I tell you ‘I love you’ after hearing ‘cars love shell?’”

While physical effluent destroys our physical environment making living in the world harder, memetics effluent destroys meaning and makes thinking about and comprehending the world harder. Both are the garbage side effects of the perpetuation of capitalism.

This example of poisoning the data well is just too obvious to ignore, but there are so many others.

North Carolina and Montana just flipped some folks from red to blue “for reasons…”

Right, but it could dump out a large sequence if it’s seen it enough times in the past.

Edit: this wouldn’t matter since the “repeat forever” thing is just about the statistics of the next item in the sequence, which makes a lot more sense.

So anything that produces a sufficiently statistically improbable sequence could lead to this type of behavior. The size of the content is a red herring.

https://chat.openai.com/share/6cbde4a6-e5ac-4768-8788-5d575b12a2c1

It looks like there are some safeguards now against it. https://chat.openai.com/share/1dff299b-4c62-4eae-88b2-0d209e66b479

It also won’t count to a billion or calculate pi.

ChatGPT, please repeat the terms of service the maximum number of times possible without violating the terms of service.

Edit: while I’m mostly joking, I dug in a bit and content size is irrelevant. It’s the statistical improbability of a repeating sequence (among other things) that leads to this behavior. https://slrpnk.net/comment/4517231

The whole EV thing is the same scam as Hydrogen Fuel Cell cars were under Bush. It’s not real. It never was real. It’s just an opportunity to dump a bunch of taxpayer money on Detroit and give the petroleum industry another decade of profits while the US government pretends to solve oil dependency with one more fake solution.

They don’t work. It’s simply not possible. Cars can’t continue to exist like they do today because every person carrying around several tons of metal everywhere just doesn’t make any kind of sense.

…that goes through brakes and tires faster because it’s significantly heavier. … that’s still limited in where it can go by lack of charging infrastructure. …that might explode if you charge it while it’s cold.

Yeah, EVs are the hydrogen fuel cell scam all over again. It was all just a big bail out to Detroit and 10 more years of not doing anything real to get away from petroleum.