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In 1968, Buckminster Fuller published ‘Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth‘ — a book detailing humanity sailing through space aboard a planetary vessel requiring careful management of finite resources.
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Since June 26, nearly 300 people — including at least 140 children — have died across Pakistan due to intense monsoon-triggered rains, landslides and flash floods, as authorities warn of more severe weather in the coming days.
The free speech organization PEN America fired me three days after I published an article about how they investigated me for sharing an article critical of Zionism. My termination is a sad reflection of PEN's censorious approach to Palestine.
The free speech organization PEN America fired me three days after I published an article about how they investigated me for sharing an article critical of Zionism. My termination is a sad reflection of PEN’s censorious approach to Palestine.
Nenhuma morte no trânsito em Helsinki por 1 ano. Os motivos?
Redução da velocidade máxima para 30km/h em metade da cidade, mais faixas de pedestres e ciclovias, expansão do transporte público. ard.social/@tagesschau/1149643…
Tempo 30 fast überall: Keine Verkehrstoten in Helsinki
Seit Juli 2024 ist auf den Straßen Helsinkis kein Mensch mehr durch einen Unfall gestorben. Der Erfolg sei vor allem auf den Ausbau von Tempo 30-Zonen in der Stadt zurückzuführen, sagt die finnische Stadt. Es gibt aber noch mehr Gründe.
My great uncle Phil fought them on the streets of Chicago in the 1930s. I would have asked him about it if I knew when I was younger and he was still around. Can only imagine what he thought of their resurrection 30 years later in the wake of the Civil Rights Act.
More from Gage Park, which welcomed American Nazi Party leader George Rockwell
Seems the "White Power" sloganeering started during the civil rights era as the same moronic response to Black Power as the All Lives Matter slogan was to BLM.
These white Austin High School students in 1968 were mocking a march downtown to demand more Black representation on school staff and removal of certain school administrators.
interesting. But in 1966 there would be plenty of fit men who would have fought in the WW2 and would have been violently against fellow Americans walking the streets with swastikas. Weren't there violent clashes?
I just submitted a supportive comment on the University of Chicago Maroon that was censored here: chicagomaroon.com/43767/uncate…
Yes, absolutely.
I'm still letting my kid use the scholarship. Not only are populations not homogeneous, organizations are not, and individuals aren't. The leveraging and underscoring of a self-sense of supremacy infiltrates the entire US culture. Chicago is no exception.
yes. Even featured in The Blues Brothers. In about 1980. So they must have been known about well enough to be ridiculed in a major movie. We imagine they were beaten in 1945 - no, they just went underground and gradually rebuilt. Now we must fight the battles, whatever our nation, all over again. If we win again this time, then FFS stamp them out. Crush them totally.
This is an important, disturbing thread. I have to force myself to focus on the fact that the resistance overwhelmed the fash, even though they've now creeped back.
CrowdStrike released its annual threat hunting report showing that we're in a new era of cyberattacks from sophisticated attackers who rely on clever social engineering, AI, and devices outside of IT's purview.
Check out my latest CSO piece for more details and tips on how defenders can better guard against these threats.
CrowdStrike: A new era of cyberthreats from sophisticated threat actors is here
The company’s latest threat hunting report highlights the speed and AI sophistication of threat groups today, offering defenders strategies for keeping up.
It's easy to understand why some programmers love their AI assistants and others loathe them: the former group get to decide how and when they use AI tools, while the latter has AI forced upon them by bosses who hope to fire their colleagues and increase their workload.
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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:
Formally, the first group are "centaurs" (people assisted by machines) and the latter are "reverse-centaurs" (people conscripted into helping machines):
Most workers have parts of their jobs they would happily automate away. I know a programmer who uses AI to take a first pass at CSS code for formatted output. This is a notoriously tedious chore. It's not hard to determine whether the AI got it right - just eyeball the output in a variety of browsers.
If this was a chore you hated doing and someone gave you an effective tool to automate it, that would be cause for celebration. What's more, if you learned that this was only reliable for a subset of cases, you could confine your use of the AI to those cases.
Likewise, many workers dream of doing something through automation that is *so* expensive or labor-intensive that they can't possibly do it.
I'm thinking here of the film editor who extolled the virtues to me of deepfaking the eyelines of every extra in a crowd scene, which lets them change the focus of the whole scene without reassembling a couple hundred extras, rebuilding the set, etc. This is a brand new capability that increases the creative flexibility of that worker, and no wonder they love it. It's good to be a centaur!
Then there's the poor reverse-centaurs. These are workers whose bosses have saddled them with a literally impossible workload and handed them an AI tool. Maybe they've been ordered to use the tool, or maybe they've been ordered to complete the job (or else) by a boss who was suggestively waggling their eyebrows at the AI tool while giving the order.
Think of the freelance writer whom Hearst tasked with singlehandedly producing an entire, 64-page "best-of" summer supplement, including multiple best-of lists, who was globally humiliated when his "best books of the summer" list was chock full of imaginary books that the AI "hallucinated":
Nominally, he was tasked with serving as the "human in the loop" who validated the AI's output. In reality, he was the AI's fall-guy, what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink," who absorbed the blame for the inevitable errors that arise when an employer demands that a single human sign off on the products of an error-prone automated system that operates at machine speeds.
It's never fun to be a reverse centaur, but it's especially taxing to be a reverse centaur for an AI.
AIs, after all, are statistical guessing programs that infer the most plausible next word based on the words that came before. Sometimes this goes badly and obviously awry, like when the AI tells you to put glue or gravel on your pizza. But more often, AI's errors are precisely, expensively calculated to blend in perfectly with the scenery.
AIs are conservative. They can only output a version of the future that is predicted by the past, proceeding on a smooth, unbroken line from the way things were to the way they are presumed to be. But reality isn't smooth, it's lumpy and discontinuous.
Take the names of common code libraries: these follow naming conventions that make it easy to predict what a library for a given function will be, and to guess what a given library does based on its name.
But humans are messy and reality is lumpy, so these conventions are imperfectly followed. All the text-parsing libraries for a programming language may look like this: docx.text.parsing; txt.text.parsing, md.text.parsing, except for one, which defies convention by being named text.odt.parsing. Maybe someone had a brainfart and misnamed the library. Maybe the library was developed independently of everyone else's libraries and later merged. Maybe Mercury is in retrograde.
Whatever the reason, the world contains many of these imperfections.
Ask an LLM to write you some software and it will "hallucinate" (that is, extrapolate) libraries that don't exist, because it will assume that all text-parsing libraries follow the convention. It will assume that the library for parsing odt files is called "odt.text.parsing," and it will put a link to that nonexistent library in your code.
This creates a vulnerability for AI-assisted code, called "slopsquatting," whereby an attacker predicts the names of libraries AIs are apt to hallucinate and creates libraries with those names, libraries that do what you would expect they'd do, but also inject malicious code into every program that incorporates them:
It's like the AI is constructing a spot-the-difference image puzzle on super-hard mode, swapping the fork and knife in a diner's hands from left to right and vice-versa. You couldn't generate a harder-to-spot bug if you tried.
It's not like people are very good at supervising machines to begin with. "Automation blindness" is when you're asked to repeatedly examine the output of a generally correct machine for a long time, and somehow remain vigilant for its errors.
Humans aren't really capable of remaining vigilant for things that don't ever happen - whatever attention and neuronal capacity you initially devote to this never-come eventuality is hijacked by the things that happen all the time. This is why the TSA is so fucking *amazing* at spotting water-bottles on X-rays, but consistently fails to spot the bombs and guns that red team testers smuggle into checkpoints.
The median TSA screener spots a hundred water bottles a day, and is (statistically) never called upon to spot something genuinely dangerous to a flight. They have put in their 10,000 hours, and then some, on spotting water bottles, and approximately *zero* hours on spotting stuff that we really, really don't want to see on planes.
So automation blindness is already going to be a problem for any "human in the loop," from a radiologist asked to sign off on an AI's interpretation of your chest X-ray to a low-paid overseas worker remote-monitoring your Waymo...to a programmer doing endless, high-speed code-review for a chatbot.
But that coder has it worse than all the other in-looped humans. That coder doesn't just have to fight automation blindness - they have to fight automation blindness *and* spot the subtlest of errors in this statistically indistinguishable-from-correct code. AI's are basically doing bug steganography, smuggling code defects in by carefully blending them in with correct code.
At code shops around the world, the reverse centaurs are suffering. A survey of Stack Overflow users found that AI coding tools are creating history's most difficult-to-discharge technology debt in the form of "almost right" code full of these fiendishly subtle bugs:
As Venturebeat reports, while usage of AI coding assistants is up (from 76% last year to 84% this year), trust in these tools is plummeting - 33%, with no bottom in sight. 45% of coders say that debugging AI code takes longer than writing the code without AI at all. Only 29% of coders beleive that AI tools can solve complex code problems.
Venturebeat concludes that there are code shops that "solve the 'almost right' problem" and see real dividends from AI tools. What they don't say is that the coders for whom "almost right" isn't a problem are centaurs, not reverse centaurs. They are in charge of their own production and tooling, and no one is using AI tools as a pretext for a relentless hurry-up amidst swingeing cuts to headcount.
The AI bubble is driven by the promise of firing workers and replacing them with automation. Investors and AI companies are tacitly (and sometimes explicitly) betting that bosses who can fire a worker and replace them with a chatbot will pay the chatbot's maker an appreciable slice of that former worker's salary for an AI that takes them off the payroll.
The people who find AI fun or useful or surprising are centaurs. They're making automation choices based on their own assessment of their needs and the AIs' capabilities.
*They are not the customers for AI*. AI exists to replace workers, not empower them. Even if AI can make you more productive, there is no business model in increasing your pay and decreasing your hours.
AI is about disciplining labor to decrease its share of an AI-using company's profits. AI exists to lower a company's wage-bill, at your expense, with the savings split between the your boss and an AI company.
When Getty or the *NYT* or another media company sues an AI company for copyright infringement, that doesn't mean they are opposed to using AI to replace creative workers - they just want a larger slice of the creative workers' salaries in the form of a copyright license from the AI company that sells them the worker-displacing tool.
They'll even tell you so. When the movie studios sued Midjourney, the RIAA (whose most powerful members are subsidiaries of the same companies that own the studios) sent out this press statement, attributed to RIAA CEO Mitch Glazier:
> There is a clear path forward through partnerships that both further AI innovation and foster human artistry. Unfortunately, some bad actors – like Midjourney – see only a zero-sum, winner-take-all game.
Get that? The problem isn't that Midjourney wants to replace all the animation artists - it's that they didn't pay the movie studios license fees for the training data. They didn't create "partnerships."
Incidentally: Mitch Glazier's last job was as a Congressional staffer who slipped an amendment into must-pass bill that killed musicians' ability to claim the rights to their work back after 35 years through "termination of transfer." This was so outrageous that Congress held a special session to reverse it and Glazier lost his job.
AI companies are not pitching a future of AI-enabled centaurs. They're colluding with bosses to build a world of AI-shackled reverse centaurs. Some people are using AI tools (often standalone tools derived from open models, running on their own computers) to do some fun and exciting centaur stuff.
But for the AI companies, these centaurs are a bug, not a feature - and they're the kind of bug that's far easier to spot and crush than the bugs that AI code-bots churn out in volumes no human can catalog, let alone understand.
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:
Note that asking this way is pretty much biased in favor of AI.
For example, yes, I can confirm that AI tools occasionally help my workflow. I gave up on letting it do anything "interesting", but for stuff like "update all calls to this function to add an extra argument" it works rather well (not 100% though).
Of course... this is only relevant because of a lack of working IDE refactoring tools. Which thanks to AI will also never be made or fixed in the future at all, because "you can just use the AI".
So yes, AI does make me as a developer more productive. But less productive than if I had proper refactoring tools available.
Can't even imagine what I'd do in this situation. Even something as comparatively simple & straightforward as desktop publishing (back in the day) I discovered very quickly that if a customer brought in a document for modification, it was nearly always MUCH faster just to reconstitute it from scratch than to try to open the existing file, figure out how it was organized, & try to modify it. Especially if it was made by an amateur. I can't imagine this with actual computer code. >
"45% of coders say that debugging AI code takes longer than writing the code without AI at all." I think this would have to be my fall-back. Just •tell• the bosses I'm using the AI & then do it by hand. 🤦
This one is my personal nightmare. I've been in a few situations where I've been required to sustain attention to check for a low-incidence error embedded in a body of work &—I can sustain it for four or five seconds before my attention drifts.
The •only• way I've ever managed that class of task is to come up with hacks that make the whole thing more interesting. If they want my straight attention, it's a pretty much automatic fail.
(One of) the problems with black assimilation is they’ll just assimilate into African Americans who do half the crime and make society worse. Pro-assimilationists point to Italians and Irish but blacks haven’t assimilated in 400 years and everyone seems to forget this fact.
"Partout en France, des groupes se rencontrent, s'organisent et partagent des idées avec un objectif commun : tout bloquer le 10 septembre. L’article Le 10 septembre : « On bloque tout » est apparu en premier sur Contre Attaque."
China is strategically reducing its oil dependence to counter potential disruption by the US. It is heavily investing in renewable energy (wind, solar) and electric vehicles, becoming a global leader in both. This multi-pronged approach aims to secure its energy supply and lessen vulnerability to external pressures.
Clean energy will provide countries with sovereignty along with saving the environment.
China's thirst for the world's oil has slowed dramatically. Andrew Chang explains how China is guaranteeing its energy security against possible U.S. interve...
Στην πισίνα υπάρχει πινακίδα που γράφει ότι το ντους είναι υποχρεωτικό Κάποιοι (πολλοί) μάλλον καταλαβαίνουν ότι το ντους είναι υποχρεωτικό ΜΕΤΆ τη χρήση της πισίνας 🤦🤦
I have to keep track of every payment like a beast and once they threaten to send me to collections, I email the receipts, every bill in image with the date paid and every canceled check.
I'm no longer nice about it.
The only words in my email: Stop double billing me.
So it is finally time for the tale of Mowis "Patty" Burwic. Sometimes in a Rimworld run I get invested into a particular character that becomes the main character. Patty took on that role for this game.
Early on, the colony was doing horribly. It was about surviving until the gravship could be obtained and there were many complications. One colonist died due to injuries that couldn't be patched up in time. Patty joined during this time, saving the colony with her fast learner trait. Despite being a xenophobe, she quickly became best friends with Jessie.
Jessie was the only person she'd ever fully befriend during her time on the Rim, as some time after Patty joined, Jessie was kidnapped by the Rakkle-led Valentina's Rakkle Incubating Plant pirate faction. Only later would Patty learn through interrogating another raiding group that her friend had been unceremoniously killed. No chance to save her.
And so Patty broke. She delved into advancing her shooting skills, and took a mechlink when the gravship was built. She built more and more mechs along with turrets. She had her entire body filled with cybernetics and bionics. She explored the world to find the mechhive. Once the mechhive was taken, she claimed its power for herself, becoming a queen of sorts to the mechs (thanks to a mod that adds allying the faction to the ending). She used it to destroy the entire faction for revenge. It took a lot of work and time but she finally got revenge for her only true friend she lost that long time ago.
For reference on time, the time since the game started seems to be ~10.5 years, and the real playtime is 55 hours. Odyssey DLC is really fun.
Even though I just finished this run the other day I'm already feeling like I want to start another Rimworld run with some gimmicky idea. Odyssey is a curse, it has single-handedly given me a new fascination with the game. No wonder Vinny "Melpert" Vinesauce immediately started his Odyssey run the same day his Anomaly run was finished, it's just that addicting. Some part of me wants to do a space station run after claiming a station with life support units for myself, some part of me wants to do a high difficulty commitment run, some part of me wants to do a run where I say screw it and have fun with dev tools to make something cool, it can go on.
Though I still haven't picked up Anomaly for the Ratkin Research Foundation™ that will absolutely not end terribly for all Ratkin involved. That's locked in for what I'll do whenever I pick up Anomaly.
Fuck now I can't get the thought out of my head that Ratkin anomaly is just going to be a sickly rat trying to survive a nuclear warhead. Poor rats have no idea what lies in store for them.
Die Protestwelle gegen die deutsche Beihilfe für das Töten in Gaza wächst an. Proisraelische Hardliner in der Union befürchten ein »Einknicken« des Kanzlers und fordern weitere Waffenlieferungen an Israel.
Israels Blockade humanitärer Güter und Nahrungsmittel ist integraler Bestandteil einer Strategie der Vernichtung des Gazastreifens. Dazu gehört auch das Töten verzweifelter Menschen an den sogenannten Verteilstellen.
@foufoutos @giormatsis @baskin ένα σεντόνι κι εδώ χρειάζεται το βράδυ 🥹 Εν τω μεταξύ οι τουρίστες - μάλλον για να αποδείξουν πόσο ηλίθιοι είναι - κλειδαμπαρωνονται και βάζουν κλιματιστικό Στο 2ο όροφο Με 18-20 βαθμούς
> Στα τέλη Μαΐου η οικογένεια Θεοφανίδου στο Κάτω Ελληνικό βρήκε πετρέλαιο στο νερό του πηγαδιού της. Συλλέξαμε και στείλαμε δείγματα στο Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου. Οι συγκεντρώσεις είναι άκρως τοξικές, εκατοντάδες ή χιλιάδες φορές πάνω από τα όρια [..] παρά τις ψευδείς διαβεβαιώσεις της εταιρείας Lamda Development [..] ότι η απορρύπανση θα ολοκληρωνόταν το 2023.
Στα τέλη Μαΐου η οικογένεια Θεοφανίδου στο Κάτω Ελληνικό βρήκε πετρέλαιο στο νερό του πηγαδιού της. Συλλέξαμε και στείλαμε δείγματα στο Πανεπιστήμιο Αιγαίου. Οι συγκεντρώσεις είναι άκρως τοξικές, εκατοντάδες ή χιλιάδες φορές πάνω από τα όρια.
Instead of eliminating the income tax like he promised, now orange turd wants to get rid of capital gains tax for real estate investors instead. fuck me
Hello. If you like silly cats and you need to be clothed, then I’m here to let you know my dashery store is on sale this week! Yay! exocomics.dashery.com/
Grab your free copy of 'The Kybalion' here: https://www.lawofinsights.com/kybalion-offerThey told you Nikola Tesla was a scientist. An inventor. A man of mac...
Researchers have formulated a "second law of entanglement manipulation," an analog to the second law of thermodynamics. They proved that, with the help of an "entanglement battery," entanglement can be manipulated reversibly. This finding offers a new framework for efficiently manipulating quantum resources for future technologies like quantum computing.
DrRyanSkelton
in reply to H. Faust • • •