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As Israel obliterates Gaza with Berlin's backing, German public support is plummeting. Yet the government is crushing dissent and refusing to change course.
“History is best told as a story of organised crime,” Kemp says. “It is one group creating a monopoly on resources through the use of violence over a certain territory and population.”
History shows that increasing wealth inequality consistently precedes collapse, says Kemp, from the Classical Lowland Maya to the Han dynasty in China and the Western Roman empire. He also points out that for the citizens of early rapacious regimes, collapse often improved their lives because they were freed from domination and taxation and returned to farming. “After the fall of Rome, people actually got taller and healthier,” he says.
“Last but not least is that, unfortunately, all the threats we face today are far worse than in the past,” he says. Past climatic changes that precipitated collapses, for example, usually involved a temperature change of 1C at a regional level. Today, we face 3C globally. There are also about 10,000 nuclear weapons, technologies such as artificial intelligence and killer robots and engineered pandemics, all sources of catastrophic global risk.
Shawn P. Wilbur: An exercise in theoretical synthesis-distillation of anarchist thought and practice autonomies.org/2025/08/shawn-p…
"This is the first opportunity that we have had, as a collective, to celebrate and acknowledge the very impressive work by Shawn P. Wilbur of translating, publishing (into English) and reflecting upon – with others – “classical” anarchist theory and … Continue
Gustave Courbet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, 1865 This is the first opportunity that we have had, as a collective, to celebrate and acknowledge the very impressive work by Shawn P. Wilbur of translatin…
Not only is agentic AI bullshit, but it's a specific kind of bullshit that AI hucksters have busted out in the past, and will bust out in the future, so it's worth spending a minute to unpack this bullshit and catalog its traits so that we don't fall for it. --
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
As GW Bush says, "Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, we don't get fooled again."
Automation can be transformative, relieving us of danger and drudgery by getting a machine to pick up some of the heavy work. Ideally automation seamlessly swaps a human for a machine at some stage in a process (ideally, the boring, dangerous and/or difficult phase). Like, whipping egg-whites for a meringue is hard on your wrist.
But swap your whisk for a hand blender, and suddenly that tiresom process becomes fast and easy. If the blender is cordless, you can use it anywhere in your kitchen, including wherever you would have stood over a bowl with a whisk.
A mixer, by contrast, requires more labor on your part: you have to decant the contents of your mixing bowl into the mixer, run its motor, and then scrape the whipped whites back into your bowl for the next phase. It's worse automation.
But the worst automation would be a mixer that requires a special electrical outlet, a different fridge, and a special egg-carton. You would have to redesign your whole kitchen to use that thing. Sure, it might produce *perfect* meringues, and sure, if you had a meringue *factory* it might be a great solution. But for everyday use, it's a solution that creates more problems than it solves.
AI pitchmen promise that seamless swapping of a human tethered to some choresome drudgery for software. That's the whole point of self-driving cars: each of us can swap a standard car for one with an autopilot and use the same roads, with the same road-users, to get to all the same places. We don't have to tear up all the roads and lay tracks, or fill the roadside environment with sensors and beacons to help the "self-driving" cars navigate the system.
A self-driving car shares the road with human-piloted vehicles, even when they are driven by humans who don't see why they should allow a robot to merge into their lane or have the right of way, even if the human is turning left into oncoming robo-traffic.
Self-driving cars are not very good at this stuff, as it turns out. When that became apparent, self-driving car hucksters announced that it was only reasonable for their products to require something of the rest of us.
> “I think many AV teams could handle a pogo stick user in pedestrian crosswalk,” Ng told me. “Having said that, bouncing on a pogo stick in the middle of a highway would be really dangerous.”
> “Rather than building AI to solve the pogo stick problem, we should partner with the government to ask people to be lawful and considerate,” he said. “Safety isn’t just about the quality of the AI technology.”
New limitations in deep learning — called “AI Winter” by skeptics — could pose a serious problem for autonomous car projects by Tesla, Waymo, and Uber.
This is an incredible act of shameless bait-and-swtichery. In just a few short sentences, Ng's cars go from being the kind of automation that is purely the concern of the person who uses it - the owner of a self-driving car - to the kind of automation that *everyone in the world* has to adjust to, lest we become part of the "pogo stick problem."
Making a car that can navigate a well-behaved, non-adversarial world is relatively straightforward. But demanding that the entire world behave itself? Well, that's the hard problem of 100,000 years of civilization and ethics. A product that only works in an ideal world isn't a viable product.
Self-driving car boosters didn't invent this wheeze, either. The entire concept of "pedestrian" (and later, "jaywalker") was invented by the auto industry to shift blame for the death and destruction the wealthy owners of their products inflicted on everyday people to the victims:
This is the story of how, in the 1920s, the auto industry chased people off the streets of America — by waging a brilliant psychological campaign. It’s one of the most remarkable (and successful)…
The latest peddlers of pogo-stick demands are the agentic AI people. They have raised (hundreds of) billions of dollars by promising that they will make AIs that can autopilot your browser to accomplish tedious, time-consuming tasks, visiting the same websites you would visit, locating and processing the information needed to perform the task you've set for it.
This will supposedly make all kinds of human workers obsolete (which is where the hundreds of billions of dollars come in - the whole AI investor pitch is "We are developing technology that will let bosses fire their workers").
But agentic AI sucks. Asking a chatbot to take a screenshot of a website, then make guesses about which parts of it are links and what those links do, choose one link to fire a click at, and then start again is a recipe for incredible dysfunction.
That's even before we get into "hallucinations" (this is AI jargon for "errors").
A more mature agentic AI apologetics admits that while no one knows how to make an AI that can navigate the whole internet, we can make specialist agents that can perform one kind of task, then hand off the output from that task to the next agent, and the next.
This also sucks: you're created a whole menagerie of AIs, each of which is prone to its own failure modes, and then combining them, multiplying all those error potentials together, sending erroneous findings careening through a cascade of downstream AIs. This is broken-telephone-as-a-service.
Give it your credit card, ask it to order a bag of jucing oranges, and six months later someone's gonna back a 16 wheeler up to your front door with $40,000 worth of frozen OJ and a receipt for a futures contract you're on the hook for.
The latest agentic AI pitch "solves" this problem by asserting that the whole internet will simply have to accommodate itself to AI agents.
Every website will have to adopt robust, accurate semantics that describe its navigation and offerings, standardized across every domain of human activity. This would be great. The semantic web people have been trying to make it happen since 1999, with no success to speak of, for reasons I identified more than 20 years ago:
The reason websites don't make their results easy to scrape and compare is that they want to cheat you. They want you to buy something more expensive and/or inferior than the best match for your desire. There is no way for an AI agent to know when a website is lying to it.
Websites that lie the most are incentivized to have the *best*, highest-grade automation hooks for an AI agent to connect to (just as spammers have the best, most pristine anti-spam incidia, from DKIM to SPF to DMARC records).
And these cheaters aren't fringe players - they're the biggest companies out there. Amazon knows that Prime members don't shop around, so it presents them with higher prices than non-Prime users.
The hard part of comparison-shopping for an airline isn't sorting a database of all the prices offered to all customers under all circumstances: *it's compiling such a database*.
We don't need complex AI-based techniques to perform a simple sort - we need AI to solve the problem of knowing what prices every airline is charging at this instant to every flier for every itinerary.
When agentic AI grifters insist that the entire internet has to adopt and faithfully use standard APIs so their bots can accurately analyze the internet's contents, they are re-inventing the pogo-stick problem.
Yes, if you could get the entire world to arrange its affairs to your benefit, you could surely do some *incredible* things, and if my grandmother had wheels, she'd be a rollerskate.
Even if you *could* get everyone to adopt a standard set of APIs and use them well, this is a *titanic* engineering challenge, at least as big as anything the agentic AI people are promising to do.
There's an unassailable response to the assertion that you could do amazing things as soon as everyone else upends their life to make things more convenient for you, the sacred principle of "wish in one hand and shit in the other and see which will be full first":
Hey, German-speakers! Through a very weird set of circumstances, I ended up owning the rights to the German audiobook of my bestselling 2022 cryptocurrency heist technothriller *Red Team Blues* and now I'm selling DRM-free audio and ebooks, along with the paperback (all in German and English) on a Kickstarter that runs until August 11:
So I guess this'll be their next form of the two-tier internet of the enshittifiers' dreams.
Those who want to use the whizz-bang AI agents will be limited to the handful of big corporate sites who've built out specific infrastructure tailored to (lying to) AI agents.
I'm truly fascinated how we are still able to keep going in the worst possible direction, full speed. Things didn't change - at all. This blog post reminded me (apart from having a blog - which looks terrible) of a post I wrote in 2019.
This Week in F-DroidTWIF curated on Thursday, 31 Jul 2025, Week 31F-Droid coreF-Droid and F-Droid Basic were updated to 1.23.1 fixing the index diff bug we’v...
Had a dream where I was playing a vidya and defeated a boss by charging up and yelling NIGGER with immense force at him repeatedly and then the game said NOW YOU'RE FIGHTING HOLY and some metal song started playing
Russia is willing to negotiate but the West displays a lack of “genuine interest” in reaching a peaceful settlement in the Ukrainian conflict, former CIA officer Larry Johnson tells Sputnik while commenting on the latest remarks by Russian President …
SUPPORT THE SHOW BUY CAST BREW COFFEE NOW - https://castbrew.com/Join - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLwNTXWEjVd2qIHLcXxQWxA/joinHosts: Tim @Timcast (eve...
"We have a shared responsibility[..] to promote education about the Holocaust and combat antisemitism, both online and offline[..]we will continue to fight hate speech online through our policies, tools and programmes... Hate speech targeting the Jewish community is a particularly pernicious example of hateful content that we are committed to tackling on YouTube"
Some of the really good things about this tree: blooms at just-above-eye-level, surrounded by other green plants with good pink/white contrast, and the contours of the blooms complement the shape of the feeding hummingbird.
I had to wait a couple hours to get the shot in my previous post. It was a bloom at the outer edge of the tree. Most of the feeding action happened in a much messier interior environment with better cover.
Shots like the one in the previous post are good practice though. I found at times I needed to bump my manual focus ring in a bit so it would “find” the bird, which was important to learn for when it came out into the open. Sometimes you only get one good chance and it’s a heartbreak if you miss it!
It was also good to understand something about hummingbird behavior. Apparently they are able to make mental maps within their territory to maximize the flower’s replenishment of nectar. They won’t usually return to the same bloom in consecutive feeds if there are other options. So—theoretically—if I waited long enough, it would eventually get to the grouping of flowers that I wanted to shoot.
And the offshoot photography tip: make sure your hands know which direction your knobs and the rings on your lens go. You can probably see it in the viewfinder but sometimes that split second can make a huge difference. I couldn’t actually TELL you which way the knobs go (aperture is on my thumb and shutter is on my index) but when my hands are on the camera, it’s automatic.
Haha the muscle memory thing is so weird. I was trying to think of how I do exposure compensation but I’m not 100% sure! I think I hold down a button with my index finger and there’s a dial for my thumb on the back? If I think about it I don’t remember but with the camera in my hands, I know.
That’s the fun challenge of the whole thing. Some things you can control and other things are completely not up to you. So I do my part and show up and see what the birds will do.
#FotoVorschlag 'Dinge, die mit "Z" beginnen' Zugschwellen, -geleise und Zaun In einem unserer Nachbarorte fahren nur sehr selten Züge, deshalb war dies ungefährlich, bringe trotzdem ein CW an. Nun könnte ich so ein Foto aus gesundheitlichen Gründen nicht mehr machen. Handyshot Herbst 19
They slashed your healthcare, hiked your bills, and left you screaming into the void. This isn’t policy; it’s punishment. And millions of Americans are done staying quiet.
A Department of Homeland Security memo obtained by TNR signals top-level discussions about a potential escalation of the Pentagon’s domestic anti-immigration role, and lays out new details.
I say, if death is the penalty for proclaiming truth, then I will proudly and defiantly pay the costly price! Truth crucified in Socrates, in Christ, in Giordano Bruno, in Huss, Galileo still lives -- they and others whose number is legion have preceded us on this path. We are ready to follow! -- August Spies
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Several major Israeli sports websites were hacked overnight in a coordinated cyberattack that broadcast messages of support for Gaza and condemned Israel’s ongoing genocide.
I don't know, it can fell "deus-pi-machina" but given the title and some allegories in previous episodes I could predict what the ending was and it was that but I like it nonetheless.
@hfaust i was commenting how the "original sin" actually refers to the knowledge between good and evil
without the knowledge takopii one-sidedly tries to ~bring happiness~ to good people by removing evil people, and ends up failing and screwing everything up because the gap in its knowledge of what people are going through was too great
in the end only after finally knowing good and evil is takopii capable of making the decision to sacrifice itself
hence "takopii's original sin" isn't referring to its original screwup, it's it finally understanding good and evil
They slashed your healthcare, hiked your bills, and left you screaming into the void. This isn’t policy; it’s punishment. And millions of Americans are done staying quiet.
Nora Barrows-Friedman, associate editor, delivers the news report. This is a segment from The Electronic Intifada's livestream on day 664 of the Gaza genocid...
US Representative Tim Burchett has ordered billionaire George Soros and his associate Leonard Benardo, senior vice president at the Open Society Foundations (OSF), to appear before Congress to testify on their alleged role in orchestrating the 2016 R…
A senior Israeli official said earlier this week that Israel and the U.S. increasingly agree on shifting from a partial hostage deal approach to one requiring a full hostage release, Hamas' disarmament and Gaza's demilitarization
At the NY Times, even the food staff work on reinforcing its reputation for being the "people's paper." Here's a recipe that thoughtfully takes into account the kitchen gear that readers are likely to have at their summer homes.
![[ASW] Takopii no Genzai - 04 [1080p HEVC][3F73ED60]_00-13-25.221.jpg](https://friendica.eskimo.com/photo/preview/640/8294961 "[ASW] Takopii no Genzai - 04 [1080p HEVC][3F73ED60]_00-13-25.221.jpg")
IRGC Commander Xenophon
in reply to Ash • • •