Links and Notes for May 12th, 2023

Below are links to articles, highlighted passages[1], and occasional annotations[2] for the week ending on the date in the title, enriching the raw data from Instapaper Likes and Twitter. They are intentionally succinct, else they’d be articles and probably end up in the gigantic backlog of unpublished drafts. YMMV.

Table of Contents

• COVID-19
• Economy & Finance
• Public Policy & Politics
• Journalism & Media
• Science & Nature
• Philosophy & Sociology
• Technology
• Programming
• Fun

COVID-19

Masks Work. Distorting Science to Dispute the Evidence Doesn’t by Matthew Oliver, Mark Ungrin, Joe Vipond (Scientific American)

“In many scientific disciplines randomized trial methods are fundamentally inappropriate —akin to using a scalpel to mow a lawn. If something can be directly measured or accurately and precisely modeled, there is no need for complex, inefficient trials that put participants at risk. Engineering, perhaps the most “real-world” of disciplines, doesn’t conduct randomized trials. Its necessary knowledge is well-understood. Everything from highways to ventilation systems—everything that moves us, cleans our air and our water, and puts satellites into orbit—succeeds without needing them. This includes many medical devices.”

Von der Leyen und der Pfizer-Skandal – Warum schweigen die deutschen Medien? by Jens Berger (NachDenkSeiten)

“Stand heute wurden nach offiziellen Angaben 975 Millionen Dosen verimpft – das heißt, dass mehr als jede zweite verbindlich bestellte und bezahlte Impfdosis vernichtet werden muss; zählt man die optional vorbestellten Dosen hinzu, hat die EU mehr als viermal so viele Impfstoffe bestellt wie benötigt. Das freut die Pharmakonzerne, für die die zentrale Impfstoffbeschaffung der EU der wohl größte Jackpot aller Zeiten war und ist.”

“So kam es, wie es aus objektiver Sicht kommen musste: Die EU-Staaten wussten bereits wenige Wochen nach dem Pfizer-Deal gar nicht mehr, wohin mit den vielen Impfdosen. Diese wurden zunächst eingelagert oder bereits von den Herstellern ab Werk vernichtet. Ausgeliefert wurden ab diesem Zeitpunkt vor allem Dosen, die diejenigen Dosen in den Lagern ersetzten, die aufgrund des Verfallsdatums dort vor Ort vernichtet werden mussten. Doch: Pacta sunt servanda, Verträge sind einzuhalten. Und so werden auch heute noch jeden Tag Impfdosen produziert, die niemand will und die richtig viel Geld kosten. Von der Leyen sei Dank.”

“Von den rund 500 Millionen Impfdosen, die die EU Pfizer Stand heute noch abnehmen muss, fallen 220 Millionen Dosen weg. Dafür muss die EU jedoch eine Art Stornogebühr bezahlen – 2,2 Milliarden Euro. Die restlichen 280 Millionen Dosen werden in einem neuen Rahmenvertrag bis 2026 geliefert … oder besser „vernichtet“. Dafür zahlt die EU dann jedoch nicht den alten, ohnehin schon massiv überteuerten Preis, sondern einen neuen, sich an dem Marktpreis orientierten Abnahmepreis. Auf Deutsch: Es wird noch teurer.”

Economy & Finance

What Makes a Consumption Tax Regressive? by Matt Bruenig (Jacobin)

“Because richer people consume more than poorer people, taxing consumption results in richer people paying more consumption tax than poorer people pay. But because poorer people spend a larger share of their income on consumption than richer people, taxing consumption results in poorer people paying a higher percentage of their income toward consumption tax than richer people pay.”

“Of course, ultimately, it is not really possible to analyze one piece of an overall distributive system and decide whether it is itself good or bad. What matters is whether the system as a whole achieves your overall distributive goals. Put differently: distributive justice can only really be coherently evaluated at the level of the overall system, not at the level of each particular institution in that system.”

AI machines aren’t ‘hallucinating’. But their makers are. by Naomi Klein (The Guardian)

“There is a world in which generative AI, as a powerful predictive research tool and a performer of tedious tasks, could indeed be marshalled to benefit humanity, other species and our shared home. But for that to happen, these technologies would need to be deployed inside a vastly different economic and social order than our own, one that had as its purpose the meeting of human needs and the protection of the planetary systems that support all life.”

“Why, for instance, should a for-profit company be permitted to feed the paintings, drawings and photographs of living artists into a program like Stable Diffusion or Dall-E 2 so it can then be used to generate doppelganger versions of those very artists’ work, with the benefits flowing to everyone but the artists themselves?”

“The trick, of course, is that Silicon Valley routinely calls theft “disruption” – and too often gets away with it. We know this move: charge ahead into lawless territory; claim the old rules don’t apply to your new tech; scream that regulation will only help China – all while you get your facts solidly on the ground. By the time we all get over the novelty of these new toys and start taking stock of the social, political and economic wreckage, the tech is already so ubiquitous that the courts and policymakers throw up their hands.”

“They are just hoping that the old playbook works one more time – that the scale of the heist is already so large and unfolding with such speed that courts and policymakers will once again throw up their hands in the face of the supposed inevitability of it all. It’s also why their hallucinations about all the wonderful things that AI will do for humanity are so important. Because those lofty claims disguise this mass theft as a gift – at the same time as they help rationalize AI’s undeniable perils.”

“According to this logic, the failure to “solve” big problems like climate change is due to a deficit of smarts. Never mind that smart people, heavy with PhDs and Nobel prizes, have been telling our governments for decades what needs to happen to get out of this mess: slash our emissions, leave carbon in the ground, tackle the overconsumption of the rich and the underconsumption of the poor because no energy source is free of ecological costs.”

“The reason this very smart counsel has been ignored is not due to a reading comprehension problem, or because we somehow need machines to do our thinking for us. It’s because doing what the climate crisis demands of us would strand trillions of dollars of fossil fuel assets, while challenging the consumption-based growth model at the heart of our interconnected economies.”

“[…] he seems to be hallucinating a world entirely unlike our own, one in which politicians and industry make decisions based on the best data and would never put countless lives at risk for profit and geopolitical advantage.”

“Then watch as people get hooked using these free tools and your competitors declare bankruptcy. Once the field is clear, introduce the targeted ads, the constant surveillance, the police and military contracts, the black-box data sales and the escalating subscription fees.”

“[…] we leftists also know that if earning money is to no longer be life’s driving imperative, then there must be other ways to meet our creaturely needs for shelter and sustenance. A world without crappy jobs means that rent has to be free, and healthcare has to be free, and every person has to have inalienable economic rights. And then suddenly we aren’t talking about AI at all – we’re talking about socialism.”

“We live under capitalism, and under that system, the effects of flooding the market with technologies that can plausibly perform the economic tasks of countless working people is not that those people are suddenly free to become philosophers and artists. It means that those people will find themselves staring into the abyss […]”

“Altman reassures us: “Nobody wants to destroy the world.” Perhaps not. But as the ever-worsening climate and extinction crises show us every day, plenty of powerful people and institutions seem to be just fine knowing that they are helping to destroy the stability of the world’s life-support systems, so long as they can keep making record profits that they believe will protect them and their families from the worst effects.”

I don’t think that they think even that far. They just want to make profit for the sake of making profit.

Biden and the Greatest Economy Ever by Dean Baker (CounterPunch)

“While working from home is a benefit largely restricted to more educated and higher-paid workers, lower-paid workers have also been doing well in the recovery. Research by Arin Dube, David Autor, and Annie McGrew shows that much of the growth in wage inequality over the last four decades has been reversed in the last three years. While there is still far to go, workers in the bottom 20 percent of the wage distribution are seeing their pay grow far more rapidly than those at the middle or top of the wage distribution.”

As for the first part, I think the word “largely” is overly generous. Jobs that cannot be performed remotely are generally the ones that are paid the worst. And, even if wages at the bottom are rising relatively faster, that doesn’t mean that it’s closing the gap. If a person making $30k per year gets a $300 raise, then they’re making 1% more per year. A person making $200k per year who gets a $1k raise is then making .5% more per year. So, the lower salary is increasing at a faster rate, relative to its base salary, but the gap is also still growing. When we hear “higher rate”, we kind of think that the lower one will catch up to the higher one, but that ain’t necessarily so. Also, most reported salaries do not include bonuses in the U.S. because they’re not an official part of the pay structure. Bonuses don’t exist for the hoi polloi.

“Does this amount to the greatest economy ever? That’s a tough call. We expect living standards to improve over time as technology improves, people become better educated, and we get a larger and better capital stock.

“The real question is the rate of improvement. By that score, it would be hard to beat the decades of the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. We saw a quarter century of generally low unemployment and rapid economic growth, from which the gains were widely shared.

“Also, while we have seen some gains for those in the bottom half of the income distribution, we still see falling life expectancies for this group. That is not due to strictly economic factors, but economics plays an important role.”

The Pundits Were Wrong: Corporate Greed Stoked Inflation by Andrew Perez, Matthew Cunningham-Cook, David Sirota (Jacobin)

“[…] corporations that had been permitted to grow into oligopolies during the era of lax antitrust enforcement were now able to leverage their outsized market power to hike prices — and to do so with less fear of competitors undercutting them. It’s a reality that has since been recognized by a Federal Reserve study, a top economist at UBS, European central bankers, and, most recently, Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. And yet, corporate media outlets ignored the available data, choosing to publish and platform pundits who scoffed at accusations of what they derisively called “greedflation” and who insisted that the problem is workers being paid higher wages. That decision delivered devastating consequences for the US working class.”

Public Policy & Politics

Empörender Umgang mit dem Tag der Befreiung: „Hier weht nur noch die Ukrainefahne“ by Tobias Riegel (NachDenkSeiten)

“Das ist nicht nur ein Verrat an der historischen Verpflichtung Deutschlands, das macht auch einen extrem kleinlichen Eindruck: Manche Propagandisten vermögen es sogar angesichts der monumentalen Vorgänge des Zweiten Weltkriegs nicht, über den Schatten der täglichen Auseinandersetzungen zu springen, um die historischen Taten jener Befreier, die den größten Blutzoll entrichten mussten, angemessen zu würdigen.”

The U.S. has been comfortable telling this story for my entire lifetime. Germany will also become accustomed to it, with practice.

“Es sei denn, man ist Holocaust-Relativierer und man möchte den Einmarsch Russlands in die Ukraine mit den Feldzügen der Wehrmacht gleichsetzen und das heutige Handeln Russlands mit dem der deutschen Nazimörder. Zusätzlich muss ja die Geschichte der Ukraine und der NATO mindestens seit 2014 massiv unterdrückt werden, damit die hierzulande dominante und vor doppelten politisch-moralischen Standards strotzende Deutung des russischen Einmarsches von 2022 nicht auffliegt.”

Ukraine’s Big Mistake: an interview with Renfrey Clarke by Natylie Baldwin (Scheer Post)

“Ukraine had been one of the most industrially developed parts of the Soviet Union. It was among the key centres of Soviet metallurgy, of the space industry and of aircraft production. It had some of the world’s richest farmland and its population was well-educated even by Western European standards.”

“Fast-forward to 2021, the last year before Russia’s “Special Military Operation,” and the picture in Ukraine was fundamentally different. The country had been drastically de-developed, with large, advanced industries (aerospace, car manufacturing, shipbuilding) essentially shut down. World Bank figures show that in constant dollars, Ukraine’s 2021 Gross Domestic Product was down from the 1990 level by 38 percent. If we use the most charitable measure, per capita GDP at Purchasing Price Parity, the decline was still 21 percent. That last figure compares with a corresponding increase for the world as a whole of 75 percent.”

“Few of the new business chiefs knew much about how capitalism was supposed to work, and the lessons in the business-school texts were mostly useless in any case. The way you got rich was by paying bribes to tap into state revenues, or by cornering and liquidating value that had been created in the Soviet past. Asset ownership was exceedingly insecure — you never knew when you’d turn up at your office to find it full of the armed security guards of a business rival, who’d bribed a judge to permit a takeover. In these circumstances, productive investment was irrational behaviour.”

“Customs barriers were absent, and technical standards, inherited from the U.S.S.R., were mostly identical. Ways of doing business were familiar, and negotiations could be conducted conveniently in Russian. Perhaps most critically important was another factor: the two countries were on broadly similar levels of technological development. Their labour productivity did not differ by much. Neither side was in danger of seeing whole industrial sectors wiped out by more sophisticated competitors based in the other country.”

“The shift to integration with the West, however, did not bring Ukraine the promised surge of economic growth. After a severe slump in the aftermath of the Maidan events of 2014, Ukrainian GDP saw only a weak recovery between 2016 and 2021. Meanwhile, the country’s trade balance with the EU remained strongly negative. Integration with the West was doing far more for the West than for Ukraine.”

This is the story of every other Eastern European country, most of which became export markets and/or source of cheap labor.

“[…] the role Ukraine has been assigned is that of a market for advanced Western manufactures, and of a supplier to the EU of relatively low-tech generic goods such as steel billets and basic chemicals. These are low-profit commodities that Western producers are tending to move out of in any case, especially since the industries concerned can be highly polluting.”

“In the dreams of liberal theorists, foreign capitalists had been going to troop over the border, buy up ruined industrial enterprises, re-equip them and on the basis of low wages, make attractive profits from exports to the West. But Ukraine had a criminalised economy run by oligarchs. Rather than swim with sharks, potential foreign investors opted overwhelmingly to stay away.”

And how would even the initial scenario have been beneficial to the local populace?

“it seems like the left — at least in the U.S. — has been reduced to a frightened waif obsessing over a caricaturised form of identity politics and regurgitating the latest war propaganda. What, in your opinion, has happened to the left?”

“In the classic left analysis, modern imperialism is a quality of the most advanced and wealthy capitalism. Imperialist countries export capital on a massive scale, and drain the developing world of value through the mechanism of unequal exchange. Here Russia simply doesn’t fit the bill. With its relatively backward economy based on the export of raw commodities, Russia is a large-scale victim of unequal exchange.”

“Imperialism has to be resisted. But does this mean that the left should support Putin’s actions in Ukraine? Here we should reflect that a workers’ government in Russia would have countered imperialism in the first instance through a quite different strategy, centred on international working-class solidarity and revolutionary anti-war agitation.”

I fail to see how that would have affected the actions of NATO or the U.S. at all. They would not have acted any differently. Do you think that NATO would have failed to propagandize the war even if they hadn’t had Putin as their bugaboo? They are capable of manufacturing consent out of whole cloth. The quality of the initial—or real—enemy doesn’t matter one whit.

“[…] the left-liberal position, of seeking victory for imperialism and its allies in Ukraine, is deeply reactionary. Ultimately, it can only multiply suffering through emboldening the U.S. and NATO to launch assaults in other parts of the world.”

“The military draft has taken large numbers of skilled workers from their jobs. Other highly qualified people are among the Ukrainians, reportedly at least 5.5 million, who have left the country. An estimated 6.9 million people have been displaced within Ukraine, and this has also affected production.”

“The figure I have for total planned U.S. military spending in 2023 is $886 billion, so the NATO countries can afford to maintain and rebuild Ukraine if they want to. The fact that they’re keeping the Ukrainian economy on a relative drip-feed — and worse, demanding that many of the outlays be paid back — is a conscious choice they’ve made. There’s a lesson in this for developing-world elites that are tempted to act as proxies for imperialism, in the way that Ukraine’s post-2014 leaders have deliberately done. When the consequences get you in deep, don’t expect the imperialists to pick up the tab. Ultimately, they’re not on your side.”

“How is the fighting to end? At present, the Russian forces seem unlikely to be defeated, at least by the Ukrainians. Meanwhile, the closer a Russian victory, the greater the prospect of full-scale imperialist military intervention.”

“Presuming there can be an “after the war,” what might it look like? We must remember that Ukraine is now one of the poorer parts of the capitalist developing world. For countries in this general situation, there can be no genuinely “stable and equitable” economic future. Such a future is conceivable only outside capitalism, its crises, and its international system of plunder.”

“In politico-economic terms, Ukraine’s future doesn’t lie in “integration with the West” — a destructive fantasy — but in …. taking its place among the member states of organisations such as BRICS, the Belt and Road initiative, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. For its financing needs, Ukraine needs to repudiate the IMF and look to bodies such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank.”

Do Conservatives Actually Like RFK Jr., or Do They Just Think He’ll Hurt Biden? by Joe Lancaster (Reason)

“As Reason’s Matt Welch has written, Kennedy has a long and shameful history of authoritarian pronouncements, including stating that his political opponents should be arrested and dissenting corporations “given the death penalty.” Kennedy also praised Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez as the “kind of leader my father and President Kennedy were looking for.”

“And that’s to say nothing of what became Kennedy’s signature issue for nearly two decades: a full-scale opposition to vaccines that only intensified during the COVID-19 pandemic. Over the years, he has repeatedly compared vaccination to Nazi experiments, including using the term “holocaust.”

“Scully huffs that tarring Kennedy as a conspiracy theorist or an anti-vaxxer is “lazy and slanderous, telling us nothing about the merits of his arguments or about what has or has not actually been ‘debunked.’” However, Kennedy’s long-held insistence that there is a causal link between childhood vaccinations and autism spectrum disorder has been debunked. Kennedy’s prediction that Bill Gates would design a COVID-19 vaccine with a microchip, ushering in a cashless society, has also proved incorrect. He has further claimed, without evidence, that 5G wireless signals “could have almost unimaginably devastating impacts on our health [and] environment”; and that they will enable insidious forces to “harvest our data and control our behavior.””

“Kennedy, meanwhile, served on New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s commission on hydraulic fracturing, better known as “fracking”; the commission successfully lobbied Cuomo to ban the practice. In 2016, Kennedy secretly lobbied New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman to impose a “corporate death penalty” by terminating ExxonMobil’s authority to operate within the state. Kennedy’s campaign website promises that his platform will include “curbing mining, logging, oil drilling, and suburban sprawl.””

Kennedy also said this in a tweet (Reddit):

“The most crucial aspect of the immigration crisis is rarely discussed: Why are so many people so desperate in the first place to leave their homes and countries behind for an uncertain future? The answer is uncomfortable. In large part, it is U.S. policies that create desperate conditions south of the border. The War on Drugs is one. U.S.-funded dictators, juntas, paramilitaries, and death squads. Neoliberal extraction of resources. Unpayable debts. It is inhumane and hypocritical to deny immigration while creating the conditions that drive immigration. As President, I will change these policies. That’s the only long-term solution to the border crisis.”

Picketing writers in New York City: “The people who run these companies are getting richer and richer, and they’re asking us to work for as little as they can possibly pay us” by Our reporters (WSWS)

“The highly paid parasite-executives at Disney, Amazon Studios, Netflix, Warner Bros. Discovery, Sony Pictures, NBCUniversal and the rest, who contribute nothing to television and movie production, consider the various series and films as their personal property, which only exist to enrich them and which they can dispose of as they see fit. Objectively, the strike raises the question of who presently controls cultural life and who should control it.”

“The people who run these companies are getting richer and richer and they’re asking us to work for as little as they can possibly pay us.”

Journalism & Media

Journalists-on-Journalists Crime by Patrick Lawrence (Scheer Post)

“Diana Johnstone, the distinguished Europeanist who has corresponded from Paris for decades, sent a brief note after Fox’s announcement, calling Carlson “the last free voice on mainstream television.” I paused and wondered if I agreed. And then decided I did.

““The TV host paid the price because he tried the impossible: straddling the divide between corporate media and critical journalism,” Jonathan Cook, who I hold in the same high regard I have for Johnstone, wrote last week on his blog . “He exposed ordinary Americans to critical perspectives, especially on U.S. foreign policy, that they had no hope of hearing anywhere else—and most certainly not from so-called ‘liberal’ corporate media outlets like CNN and MSNBC. And he did so while constantly ridiculing the media’s craven collusion with those in power.””

“Johnstone and Cook share an essential point. It is not about agreeing with everything Tucker Carlson had to say on “Tucker Carlson Tonight,” his evening cable broadcast. They don’t and I don’t. This is about the presence of independent voices in American journalism. And Carlson has raised such a voice since Fox gave him a prime-time slot in 2016.”

“This is not a left-right question. Not much is anymore when you come down to it, primarily because there is no left left in America to allow for right-left questions. I do not read Carlson as an ideologue of any sort. I read him as an independent mind feeling its way, correct on many things, wrong on just as many.”

Oh, I think Carlson is a more than a bit of an ideologue on some topics. He drives very hard on topics like immigration without seeming to be “feeling his way” toward a consensus opinion that represents reality. He is/was quite vociferous and unbending and unsympathetic. He was also wildly illogical considering the realities of the U.S. workforce (without immigrants working its fields, the U.S. would quickly starve or suffer massive price swings on basic foodstuffs).

“Stacey Plaskett had the gall to refer to Matt Taibbi as “a so-called journalist.” That’s what these people are. They are the penny-ante scoundrels who populate the lower reaches of Cold War II as our discourse is narrowed to suit an information monoculture. Journalists—my take-home here—have fundamentally changed the function of the profession. There is among the great majority of mainstream reporters no longer even the pretense of independence from the powers they are supposed to cover. They openly serve now as the clerks of the political and administrative cliques they “report” upon. They give the impression they think this is their proper role.”

“I do not think Garland and his assistants give a hoot about the APSP or the Uhuru Movement. They chose to go after these groups precisely because they are so insignificant. It is the implications the Justice Department is after—the legal precedent. Garland and Olsen are using these two groups to establish that sowing discord and all the rest can be prosecuted, when this case concludes, as unlawful.”

Mainstream Media Doesn’t Care That the CIA May Have Helped Cause 9/11 by Branko Marcetic (Jacobin)

“Relaying the information gathered from dozens of interviews he conducted with former FBI and CIA personnel, members of the 9/11 Commission, and US government officials, Canestraro’s affidavit outlines a sequence of events that, if true, suggest a botched and illegal domestic CIA operation was at the heart of the intelligence failure that enabled the attacks. More than that, it suggests there was a concerted cover-up of the grave blunder after the fact by both the CIA and the George W. Bush administration.”

“More than two decades later, there’s no price the US establishment won’t pay, no civil liberty it won’t bend, no effort it won’t go to prevent another September 11 — except, apparently, taking a critical eye to its own unaccountable intelligence agencies.”

Western News Media Exist To Administer Propaganda by Caitlin Johnstone

“Typically the only time you’ll ever hear the word “propaganda” mentioned in mainstream discourse is in reference to things other countries do to their own citizenry or as part of foreign influence operations, despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of the times we’ve encountered propaganda in our day to day lives, the call was coming from inside the house.”

Science & Nature

Is there something fishy about radiocarbon dating? by Paul Braterman (3 Quarks Daily)

“The ICR article’s author, James Johnson, has a law degree, and arguments based on the correction of scientific errors seem to have a particular appeal to lawyers, who treat the science as they would a witness who had changed their story under cross-examination. This shows total misunderstanding of what is really going on, and it is deplorable that lawyers (and juries) regard eyewitness accounts as more reliable than forensic evidence.”

“There is long-standing puzzlement among archaeologists about the apparent lack of Viking skeletons, and it now seems that this might be resolved by re-dating skeletons thought to be pre-Viking, applying the appropriate correction for diet. It is also a splendid example of science in action. Hypothesis (that we are looking at skeletons from the Viking Great Army), anomaly (mismatch of measured dates), subsidiary hypothesis (the effect of diet) proposed to resolve the anomaly, and independent support for that subsidiary hypothesis, without which we would have had to suspect special pleading.”

Pour One Out by Tim Requarth (Slate)

“The updated guidelines simply mark the fading of this radiant aura, rather than signaling a return to Prohibition. “The main message is not that drinking is bad. It’s that drinking isn’t good. Those are two different things,” Hartz said. “Like, cake isn’t good for you. Getting in a car isn’t safe. Life has risks associated with it, and I think drinking is one of them.””

Philosophy & Sociology

This is not the future we wanted by Karl Sharro (Reddit)

“Humans doing the hard jobs on minimum wage while the robots write poetry and paint is not the future I wanted.”

Technology

The Ghost in the Machine (Part I): Emergence and Intelligence in Large Language Models by Ali Minai (3 Quarks Daily)

“Metabolism : The ability to extract energy from the environment in order to generate the nutrients necessary to remain organized against the forces of entropy.”

I quite like this clinical definition.

“All these attributes give animals intelligence, defined as the capacity that allows them to survive longer and reproduce more successfully by exploiting their environment. Thus, intelligence too can be regarded as an essential emergent property of an arrangement of matter that includes a central nervous system and a body capable of perception and behavior.”

“The result has been deep learning, which is essentially the practice of building and training extremely large neural networks on extremely large amounts of data – and, incidentally, using up a lot of power”

Stolen data…

“Looking at why the output is Y, we see that the network did not, in fact, produce Y at all. All it produced was a set of numerical probabilities over all possible words in its vocabulary, and that the word Y is the result of “sampling” this probability distribution [1] (which is why LLMs produce different answers to a repeated question). Therefore, we need to determine how and why the machinery inside the network generated that set of probability values.”

“We could also look into the entire network hoping to make sense of things, but all will we find is billions of numbers – signal values, neuron activations, synaptic weights – none of which have any meaning in themselves. It is only in their specifically patterned collectivity that they produced the probabilities that then generated the meaningful word Y.”

“The clear implication is that, while the system is indeed simply generating a sequence of tokens (words, punctuation, spaces, line breaks, etc.), the choice of tokens at each step is coming from a model of the general rules of language at the syntactic, grammatical, and semantic levels inferred as an emergent effect of learning sequential token generation.”

“In the end, however, we still cannot be sure that the model of language that an LLM has learned has any formal correspondence with human language, even though its empirical correspondence is apparent to all users.”

“Their successes tell us that a truly surprising amount of deep information about both language and the world is implicit in the extant corpus of electronic text, and LLMs have the ability to extract it. But the failures of LLMs – notably, their pervasive tendency to just make up false stuff – tells us that text, no matter how extensive, cannot substitute for reality.”

“Yes, the system has learned about a world, but that world in not the real world; it is the world of the text it was trained on. It “knows” the real world only to the extent that well-formed statements in the world of text are also meaningful in the real world.”

Cory Doctorow Explains Why Big Tech Is Making the Internet Terrible by David Moscrop (Jacobin)

“There’s this kind of performative complexity in a lot of the wickedness in our world — things are made complex so they’ll be hard to understand. The pretense is they’re hard to understand because they’re intrinsically complex. And there’s a term in the finance sector for this, which is “MEGO:” My Eyes Glaze Over. It’s a trick.”

“The pathology that I think that Musk is enacting in high speed is something I call “enshitification.” Enshitification is a specific form of monopoly decay that is endemic to digital platforms. And the platform is the canonical form of the digital firm. It’s like a pure rentier intermediary business where the firm has a set of users or buyers and it has a set of business customers or sellers, and it intermediates between them. And it does so in a low competition environment where antitrust law or competition laws are not vigorously enforced.”

“Think about Uber losing forty cents on the dollar for thirteen years to just eliminate yellow cabs and starve public transit investment by making it seem like there’s a viable alternative in rideshare vehicles. And we see predatory pricing and predatory acquisition in many, many, many domains.”

“One of the things that platforms do when they reach this stage is they start undermining both the revenue that publishers get from advertising — they’ll pay you less of the money that they collect from advertisers to show you content associated with your material — and they also charge advertisers more and deliver it less reliably.”

“I think that we need to understand that capitalists hate capitalism. They don’t want to be in an environment in which they have to compete. And there’s a couple of reasons for that. One is just that if there’s no alternative, they can extract more surplus from you without you defecting to a rival’s offer. And so, they really like lock-in and predatory pricing and mergers-to-monopoly.”

“Google as a company kind of epitomizes all of this. Google is a company that made one successful product. They made a search engine and it was really good. And then they just had no other ideas. Everything they tried in-house was a failure. The exceptions are their Hotmail clone and the time they took the Safari code base that Apple had discarded and used it to make Chrome. Every other product that has succeeded is something they bought from someone else.”

“Their whole ad tech stack, their whole video stack, their whole server management stack, their whole mobile stack, docs, calendaring, maps, road navigation, these are all acquisitions.”

In fairness, operationalizing those innovations could be perceived as just as worthwhile—or perhaps more—than the original innovation. It’s not easy building a platform like YouTube that actually works more often than not. It’s also not easy keeping it running. Sure, their desire for profit is killing it—slowly but surely—but the operational technology is solid and something that Google built.

“Each product manager, each executive, is like “My bonus, which is 5x my salary and determines whether or not my kids go to Harvard without accumulating debt, depends on whether or not I can increase the profitability of my business unit by 3 percent. And the way I do that is by enshitifying.””

“[…] you get to the florid chatbot confident liar, which is not a thing anyone wants, not a thing anyone’s asked for.”

“Yes, AI — which let’s just say here, is not artificial and not intelligent — it makes for a lot of great and fun party tricks and probably will make some interesting art and may automate certain parts of certain jobs in ways that makes them less shitty to do. But AI is not AI. We haven’t created robots that can answer our questions. As the eminent computer scientist they fired for coming up with this said, “We’ve created stochastic parrots .” All it amounts to is a party trick. And I like party tricks. I was at the Magic Castle last week and I saw a conjuror do an amazing mentalist and sleight of hand act that I’m still thinking about. It’s great. I love living in a world with party tricks, but the idea that the way that we solve searches is with a party trick is just manifestly wrong.”

“I think that when people worry about Skynet, what they mean is the imperatives of business are driving the world to the brink of human extinction.”

“That’s Skynet, right? That’s the limited liability company. Charlie Stross calls them slow AIs . They’re basically AIs with clock speeds that are really low, but they still accomplish the same imperative. Paperclip maximizing”

Programming

The Clean Architecture by Robert C. Martin (Clean Coder Blog)

“The Dependency Rule always applies. Source code dependencies always point inwards. As you move inwards the level of abstraction increases. The outermost circle is low level concrete detail. As you move inwards the software grows more abstract, and encapsulates higher level policies. The inner most [sic] circle is the most general.”

“[…] consider that the use case needs to call the presenter. However, this call must not be direct because that would violate The Dependency Rule: No name in an outer circle can be mentioned by an inner circle. So we have the use case call an interface (Shown here as Use Case Output Port) in the inner circle, and have the presenter in the outer circle implement it.”

Announcing .NET 8 Preview 4 by Jon Douglas (MSDN Blogs)

This is an incredibly detailed and feature-filled release with a ton of low-level optimizations and language and runtime features that will enable a ton of performance improvements in already-existing code.

Rune Struct (MSDN Documentation)

This struct allows proper handling of Unicode characters, as shown in the code below.

static int CountLetters(ReadOnlySpan<char> span)
{
    int letterCount = 0;

    foreach (Rune rune in span.EnumerateRunes())
    {
        if (Rune.IsLetter(rune))
        { letterCount++; }
    }

    return letterCount;
}

However,

“The number of Rune instances in a string might not match the number of user-perceivable characters shown when displaying the string.”

“For similar types in other programming languages, see Rust’s primitive char type or Swift’s Unicode.Scalar type, both of which represent Unicode scalar values. They provide functionality similar to .NET’s Rune type, and they disallow instantiation of values that are not legal Unicode scalar values.”

Character encoding in .NET (MSDN Documentation)

“In .NET APIs, a grapheme cluster is called a text element. The following method demonstrates the differences between char, Rune, and text element instances in a string […]”

Fun

Boop by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“Subscribe.”

“Have you noticed that you can get humans to do almost anything as long as you pretend it’s a scam?”

“Can I watch ads instead of paying you?”

Robot John Searle by Zack Weinersmith (SMBC)

“Imagine there’s a man he has a book that translates all possible phrases from english to Chinese

“[…]

“It’s clear the book 1s conscious by any definition but the human is just an operator of the book with no sense of what
the symbols mean.

“It turns out that this is what humans are like with reference to almost every subject − not just Chinese language but most languages, mathematics, history, and in general the nature of reality.

“Sure, they can operate in the universe, but they have no meaningful internal model of it.

“Therefore, we conclude that although a human does things, it’s clear they are not in any sense conscious.”

As we discuss whether AIs are conscious—or even capable of consciousness—it’s a good idea to revisit what we consider to be the canonical vessel of conscious intelligence—humans—and to evaluate to what degree most exemplars are actually satisfying the definition.