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Cake day: August 29th, 2024

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  • Futurism articles really make me feel how these people are not living in the same reality as I.

    Looking from now into 2149 and war is a nonfactor in Babyā€™s life. ā€œGenocideā€ isnā€™t mentioned once, or ā€œfascismā€, or ā€œbordersā€. No food or water scarcity. No mention of what happens to insects or wildlife or people in island countries or near the Equator. The only mention of ā€œecosystemā€ is in the expression ā€œCenter for Advanced Computer-Human Ecosystemsā€. The only mention of ā€œclimate changeā€ is to say that it will lead us to a ā€œreconfigurable architectural robotic spaceā€. Somehow people have all the energy in the world to power AI girlfriends and moveable robotic walls and menstruation-sensing tech panties. The human body, the animal that is the human being, doesnā€™t really matter in this world where Microsoft VR smells your anxiety in your deathbed and comforts you with self-warming textiles. Where does the food that sustains the flesh comes from, what is our relationship to the plants and animals and insects and bacteria who we depend on for food and air and shelter, who builds all this stuff and under which conditionsā€”considerations that do not even cross the mind of this person when they think of the question: ā€œWhat does the future hold for those born today?ā€




  • I tend to like ā€œCool People Who Did Cool Stuffā€ more than ā€œBehind the Bastardsā€. Need some nugget of hope in these dark days. A lot of the cool people have been downright inspiring.

    My daily podcast is ā€œIt Could Happen Hereā€, but some other mainstays in the educational side include:

    • Live Like the World is Dying
    • Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness
    • Itā€™s Going Down
    • Final Straw Radio
    • Reaction (especially liked her dives on the Pinkertons and ā€œThe Business Plotā€)
    • Srsly Wrong [unrelated to the similarly named thing]
    • The Iron Dice
    • Bad Hasbara
    • Frontline Herbalism if you like plants





  • I find the polygraph to be a fascinating artifact. most on account of how it doesnā€™t work. itā€™s not that it kinda works, that it more or less works, or that if we just iron out a few kinks the next model will do what polygraphs claims to do. the assumptions behind the technology are wrong. lying is not physiological; a polygraph cannot and will never work. you might as well hire me to read the tarot of the suspects, my rate of success would be as high or higher.

    yet the establishment pretends that it works, that it means something. because the State desperately wants to believe that there is a path to absolute surveillance, a way to make even oneā€™s deepest subjectivity legible to the State, amenable to central planning (cp. the inefficacy of torture). they want to believe it so much, they want this technology to exist so much, that they throw reality out of the window, ignore not just every researcher ever but the evidence of their own eyes and minds, and pretend very hard, pretend deliberately, willfully, desperately, that the technology does what it cannot do and will never do. just the other day some guy way condemned to use a polygraph in every statement for the rest of his life. again, this is no better than flipping a coin to decide if heā€™s saying the truth, but hereā€™s the entire System, the courts the judge the State itself, solemnly condemning the man to the whims of imaginary oracles.

    I think this is how ā€œAIā€ works, but on a larger scale.