jarmes

[jarmes]

we do need to revisit the wording of "you can't have your cake and eat it too" because i don't think it clearly enough conveys that it's more that you can't simultaneously retain a cake and also get to consume it (which would render you cakeless). for years i was like But why not....it's my cake....?

[jarmes]

It’s so crazy that suicide prevention is just people going awwww don’t!! Awwww come on noooooooooo stopppppp

[jarmes]

[jarmes]

The problem with having a child with an attorney that has spoken to the child like an adult since birth is that she's 4 years old and she's negotiating the order in which we're going to complete tasks as a family to best suit her idea of an ideal day.

[jarmes]

[jarmes]

Seeing a thousand "fork found in kitchen" and "believe scientists" and "we all knew about AI" tags on a post with an AI incorrectly summarizing a preprint study advising thoughtful use of AI as "AI is making your brain weak and ineffective" was making me crazy i'm sorry i tried not reblogging it like four times and every time i didn't reblog it it had like an order of magnitude more notes

[jarmes]

is incredible how The wolf of wall street and the big short are so starkly the obverse face of one another, the negative space, the polar opposites.

they are both an examination of the world of wall street, they are both a look at the kinds of people that inhabit that world, the kinds of people who handle millions and billions as a daily matter, about the gross excesses of this world, about how these people cause untold, unnacountable, reckless harm, and how vapid and cynical and empty their greed is.

they are, in short, these big criticisms of capitalism and of the capitalists that keep the system as rotten as it is.

and yet they are such incredibly different movies on almost every regard. its almost like a caricature of a personality test. "the chad X/the virgin Y"

the wolf of wall street is this big, loud, bold, boorish movie about outrageous people doing outrageous things. its about excess and decadence. its all about an evil man and how evil and morally bankrupt and degenerate he is. he does wild things like kinky sex and hardcore drugs and these are some of the indicators of how morally repugnant he is (along with his racism, sexism, exploitation of people, etc). its a movie that is grotesque and cartoonish and over the top and slimy, and its specifically about this one man, this one evil individual who works as the avatar of capitalism itself, the incarnation of the capital sin of greed. this guy is The Billionaire (tm) who commits all the sins of billionaring too hard. its about how this one evil guy got away with everything and ho the forces of good (represented by a humble, working class fbi agent) were ultimatly powerless to really stop him.

the big short on the other hand is an almost painfully dry, sardonic, unassuming, extremely academic work. often confusing, hard to keep track of what the hell is going on or what people are talking about. a lot more concerned with structures, with incentives and regulations. Is a thoroughly systemic critique. It allows itself to be much more dour and depressing. Whereas the wolf of wall street never lets go of the gas, the big short has many quiet somber moments that hit you like a splash of cold water. There is also no real good guys or bad guys in it. Well, there are some bad guys but the movie makes it clear that they are ultimatly as much a cog on the machine as the good guys. The protagonist themselves keep being hit over and over with how much their own hands are dirty and how powerless they are to stop any of it.

you can probably tell which work i think is the superior one.

I think what ultimatly cinches it for me is how they deal with the common man. The people who ultimatly get screwed in the proceedings.

In the wolf of wall street the victims are just disembodied voices on the other side of the phone. And they are suckers. Ultimatly they choose to give their money to a conman. They are naive and trustful and ignorant. The way in which they are presented leaves you with the reassuring idea that you would never fall for a conman as obvious and sleazy as belfort. Just say no.

In the big short we see their faces, we see them as people, with families, with jobs, struggling to pay rent. Trying to keep their home. And most heartbrealing of all we see one of the families having lost everything and presumably living in their car by the end of the movie. And there is nothing they could have done. There was no action, no knowledge, no wisdom they could have had that could have saved them. That is just how the system works.

I am someone who likes to think of systems, of institutions. I am someone who thinks that big systemic critiques and analises of giant sociological forces are the most effective lenses to understand the problems in societies.

So, yeah, the second movie flatters my intuitions a lot more

[jarmes]

via grewupinnewengland on instagram

[jarmes]

[jarmes]

My journey thru my kid’s Paw Patrol phase via posts from my Bluesky account.

[jarmes]

What would you do?

English added by me :)

[jarmes]

Worst part of popular left wing AI discourse online is that there's absolutely a need for a robust leftist opposition to use of cognitive automation without social dispensation to displaced human workers. The lack of any prior measures to facilitate a transition to having fewer humans in the workplace (UBI, more public control over industrial infrastructure, etc) is a disaster we are sleepwalking into - one that could lock the majority of our society's wealth further into the hands of authoritarian oligarchs who retain control of industry through last century private ownership models, while no longer needing to rely on us to operate their property.

But now we're seemingly not going to have the opposition we so desperately need, because everyone involved in the anti-AI conversation has pretty thoroughly discredited themselves and their movement by harbouring unconstrained reactionary nonsense, blatant falsehoods and woo. Instead of talking about who owns and benefits from cognitive automation, people are:

Demanding impossibilities like uninventing a now readily accessible technology

Trying to ascribe implicit moral value to said technology instead of the who is using it and how

Siding with corporations on copyright law in the name of "defending small artists"

Repeating obvious and embarrassing technical misconceptions and erroneous pop-sci about machine learning in order to justify their preferred philosophy

Invoking neo-spiritual conservative woo about the specialness of the human soul to try to incoherently discredit a machine that can quite obviously perform certain tasks just as well if not better than they can

Misrepresent numbers about energy use and environmental cost in an absurd double standard (all modern infrastructure is reliant on data centers to a similar level of impact, including your favourite fandom social media and online video games!) to build a narrative AI is some sort of malevolent spirit that damages our reality when it is called upon

It's a level of reactionary ignorance that has completely discredited any popular opposition to industrial AI rollout because it falls apart as soon as you dig deeper than a snappy social media post, or a misguided pro-copyright screed from an insecure web artist (who decries a machine laying eyes on their freely posted work while simultaneously charging commission for fan-art of corporate IPs... I'm sure that will absolutely resolve in their favour).

It would be funny how much people are fucking themselves over with all this, except I'm being fucked over to, and as a result am really quite mad about the situation. We need UBI, we need to liberate abundance from corporate greed, what we don't need is viral posts about putting distortion filters on anime fan-art to ward off the evil mechanical eye, pointless boycotts of platforms because they are perceived to have let the evil machines taint them, or petitions to further criminalize the creation of derivative works.

[jarmes]

Did it not occur to you that the fact that you dress like a Victorian vampire was relevant to the post about children thinking you are old?

I was teaching kids today and they got fixated on the usual ‘are they dead now?’ question when I was talking about historical figures. So I was just like ‘Yes, they’re dead now, everyone who was alive in the 1800s is dead now.’ and then one kid was like ‘Except for you’.

[jarmes]

i said this was going to happen like four years ago (and then three, and two, etc.) and EVERYONE gave me shit about it. i fucking told you it was going to happen!

the essence of being a leftist is as always people getting mad at you for being correct too early

[jarmes]

[jarmes]

The way a lot of people in the US are talking about Iran feels kind of gross. We are in such vanishingly small danger that pretending we're gonna get our homes blown up while people elsewhere are actually getting their homes blown up feels in really bad taste.