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Post a public PO box, and ask people to send you nerdy t-shirts. This will increase the variety and quantity of said shirts, while reducing their cost.

rent: 800

games: 100

food: 200

nerdy t-shirts: 12,000

estrogen: 300

someone who is good at economy please help me budget this

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What kind of bubble is AI?

My latest column for Locus Magazine is "What Kind of Bubble is AI?" All economic bubbles are hugely destructive, but some of them leave behind wreckage that can be salvaged for useful purposes, while others leave nothing behind but ashes:

https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/

Think about some 21st century bubbles. The dotcom bubble was a terrible tragedy, one that drained the coffers of pension funds and other institutional investors and wiped out retail investors who were gulled by Superbowl Ads. But there was a lot left behind after the dotcoms were wiped out: cheap servers, office furniture and space, but far more importantly, a generation of young people who'd been trained as web makers, leaving nontechnical degree programs to learn HTML, perl and python. This created a whole cohort of technologists from non-technical backgrounds, a first in technological history. Many of these people became the vanguard of a more inclusive and humane tech development movement, and they were able to make interesting and useful services and products in an environment where raw materials – compute, bandwidth, space and talent – were available at firesale prices.

Contrast this with the crypto bubble. It, too, destroyed the fortunes of institutional and individual investors through fraud and Superbowl Ads. It, too, lured in nontechnical people to learn esoteric disciplines at investor expense. But apart from a smattering of Rust programmers, the main residue of crypto is bad digital art and worse Austrian economics.

Or think of Worldcom vs Enron. Both bubbles were built on pure fraud, but Enron's fraud left nothing behind but a string of suspicious deaths. By contrast, Worldcom's fraud was a Big Store con that required laying a ton of fiber that is still in the ground to this day, and is being bought and used at pennies on the dollar.

AI is definitely a bubble. As I write in the column, if you fly into SFO and rent a car and drive north to San Francisco or south to Silicon Valley, every single billboard is advertising an "AI" startup, many of which are not even using anything that can be remotely characterized as AI. That's amazing, considering what a meaningless buzzword AI already is.

So which kind of bubble is AI? When it pops, will something useful be left behind, or will it go away altogether? To be sure, there's a legion of technologists who are learning Tensorflow and Pytorch. These nominally open source tools are bound, respectively, to Google and Facebook's AI environments:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/18/openwashing/#you-keep-using-that-word-i-do-not-think-it-means-what-you-think-it-means

But if those environments go away, those programming skills become a lot less useful. Live, large-scale Big Tech AI projects are shockingly expensive to run. Some of their costs are fixed – collecting, labeling and processing training data – but the running costs for each query are prodigious. There's a massive primary energy bill for the servers, a nearly as large energy bill for the chillers, and a titanic wage bill for the specialized technical staff involved.

Once investor subsidies dry up, will the real-world, non-hyperbolic applications for AI be enough to cover these running costs? AI applications can be plotted on a 2X2 grid whose axes are "value" (how much customers will pay for them) and "risk tolerance" (how perfect the product needs to be).

Charging teenaged D&D players $10 month for an image generator that creates epic illustrations of their characters fighting monsters is low value and very risk tolerant (teenagers aren't overly worried about six-fingered swordspeople with three pupils in each eye). Charging scammy spamfarms $500/month for a text generator that spits out dull, search-algorithm-pleasing narratives to appear over recipes is likewise low-value and highly risk tolerant (your customer doesn't care if the text is nonsense). Charging visually impaired people $100 month for an app that plays a text-to-speech description of anything they point their cameras at is low-value and moderately risk tolerant ("that's your blue shirt" when it's green is not a big deal, while "the street is safe to cross" when it's not is a much bigger one).

Morganstanley doesn't talk about the trillions the AI industry will be worth some day because of these applications. These are just spinoffs from the main event, a collection of extremely high-value applications. Think of self-driving cars or radiology bots that analyze chest x-rays and characterize masses as cancerous or noncancerous.

These are high value – but only if they are also risk-tolerant. The pitch for self-driving cars is "fire most drivers and replace them with 'humans in the loop' who intervene at critical junctures." That's the risk-tolerant version of self-driving cars, and it's a failure. More than $100b has been incinerated chasing self-driving cars, and cars are nowhere near driving themselves:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/09/herbies-revenge/#100-billion-here-100-billion-there-pretty-soon-youre-talking-real-money

Quite the reverse, in fact. Cruise was just forced to quit the field after one of their cars maimed a woman – a pedestrian who had not opted into being part of a high-risk AI experiment – and dragged her body 20 feet through the streets of San Francisco. Afterwards, it emerged that Cruise had replaced the single low-waged driver who would normally be paid to operate a taxi with 1.5 high-waged skilled technicians who remotely oversaw each of its vehicles:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/03/technology/cruise-general-motors-self-driving-cars.html

The self-driving pitch isn't that your car will correct your own human errors (like an alarm that sounds when you activate your turn signal while someone is in your blind-spot). Self-driving isn't about using automation to augment human skill – it's about replacing humans. There's no business case for spending hundreds of billions on better safety systems for cars (there's a human case for it, though!). The only way the price-tag justifies itself is if paid drivers can be fired and replaced with software that costs less than their wages.

What about radiologists? Radiologists certainly make mistakes from time to time, and if there's a computer vision system that makes different mistakes than the sort that humans make, they could be a cheap way of generating second opinions that trigger re-examination by a human radiologist. But no AI investor thinks their return will come from selling hospitals that reduce the number of X-rays each radiologist processes every day, as a second-opinion-generating system would. Rather, the value of AI radiologists comes from firing most of your human radiologists and replacing them with software whose judgments are cursorily double-checked by a human whose "automation blindness" will turn them into an OK-button-mashing automaton:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/23/automation-blindness/#humans-in-the-loop

The profit-generating pitch for high-value AI applications lies in creating "reverse centaurs": humans who serve as appendages for automation that operates at a speed and scale that is unrelated to the capacity or needs of the worker:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/04/17/revenge-of-the-chickenized-reverse-centaurs/

But unless these high-value applications are intrinsically risk-tolerant, they are poor candidates for automation. Cruise was able to nonconsensually enlist the population of San Francisco in an experimental murderbot development program thanks to the vast sums of money sloshing around the industry. Some of this money funds the inevitabilist narrative that self-driving cars are coming, it's only a matter of when, not if, and so SF had better get in the autonomous vehicle or get run over by the forces of history.

Once the bubble pops (all bubbles pop), AI applications will have to rise or fall on their actual merits, not their promise. The odds are stacked against the long-term survival of high-value, risk-intolerant AI applications.

The problem for AI is that while there are a lot of risk-tolerant applications, they're almost all low-value; while nearly all the high-value applications are risk-intolerant. Once AI has to be profitable – once investors withdraw their subsidies from money-losing ventures – the risk-tolerant applications need to be sufficient to run those tremendously expensive servers in those brutally expensive data-centers tended by exceptionally expensive technical workers.

If they aren't, then the business case for running those servers goes away, and so do the servers – and so do all those risk-tolerant, low-value applications. It doesn't matter if helping blind people make sense of their surroundings is socially beneficial. It doesn't matter if teenaged gamers love their epic character art. It doesn't even matter how horny scammers are for generating AI nonsense SEO websites:

https://twitter.com/jakezward/status/1728032634037567509

These applications are all riding on the coattails of the big AI models that are being built and operated at a loss in order to be profitable. If they remain unprofitable long enough, the private sector will no longer pay to operate them.

Now, there are smaller models, models that stand alone and run on commodity hardware. These would persist even after the AI bubble bursts, because most of their costs are setup costs that have already been borne by the well-funded companies who created them. These models are limited, of course, though the communities that have formed around them have pushed those limits in surprising ways, far beyond their original manufacturers' beliefs about their capacity. These communities will continue to push those limits for as long as they find the models useful.

These standalone, "toy" models are derived from the big models, though. When the AI bubble bursts and the private sector no longer subsidizes mass-scale model creation, it will cease to spin out more sophisticated models that run on commodity hardware (it's possible that Federated learning and other techniques for spreading out the work of making large-scale models will fill the gap).

So what kind of bubble is the AI bubble? What will we salvage from its wreckage? Perhaps the communities who've invested in becoming experts in Pytorch and Tensorflow will wrestle them away from their corporate masters and make them generally useful. Certainly, a lot of people will have gained skills in applying statistical techniques.

But there will also be a lot of unsalvageable wreckage. As big AI models get integrated into the processes of the productive economy, AI becomes a source of systemic risk. The only thing worse than having an automated process that is rendered dangerous or erratic based on AI integration is to have that process fail entirely because the AI suddenly disappeared, a collapse that is too precipitous for former AI customers to engineer a soft landing for their systems.

This is a blind spot in our policymakers debates about AI. The smart policymakers are asking questions about fairness, algorithmic bias, and fraud. The foolish policymakers are ensnared in fantasies about "AI safety," AKA "Will the chatbot become a superintelligence that turns the whole human race into paperclips?"

https://pluralistic.net/2023/11/27/10-types-of-people/#taking-up-a-lot-of-space

But no one is asking, "What will we do if" – when – "the AI bubble pops and most of this stuff disappears overnight?"

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/19/bubblenomics/#pop

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

CC BY 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en

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tom_bullock (modified) https://www.flickr.com/photos/tombullock/25173469495/

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

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You're gonna need a bigger box.

im hunting americans

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Well, the first computers were people, and when they weren't fast enough, you'd just hire more. So I think we should get together like 20-40 people in a room, and see how fast we can run doom.

A brain is not a general purpose computer. It can't run Doom.

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Actually kinda impressive, they managed to avoid using pronouns. Shame it makes them sounds stupid.

I’m honestly kind of in love with how these people speak and express ideas

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One thing to add - my understanding is that a lot of the original support for Zionism was antisemitic. They supported the idea of Jews going back to Israel, because it meant less Jews in Europe (and the US).

Also, thanks for this.

just had to write some stuff about Israel-Palestine down to organize my thoughts, not even specifically relevant to the current phase of conflict, mostly just subtweeting all the annoying people I see on twitter

A few truths about Israel-Palestine that are in my view basically indisputable

For the leftists:

1. There is absolutely no conceivable scenario where the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resolves with Israel not existing as a state and not retaining at least the 1967 borders (besides the remote but technically possible chance of a binational state). The idea that Israel proper will be “decolonized” is an absolute fantasy. I understand there might be tactical value in disputing this, as like a “high opening bid” in negotiations so that when the inevitable compromise comes you can concede the fantasies and agree to something like 1967 borders. But you must understand that that is all it is.

2. Islamists being in charge of Palestine as a polity makes the prospect of a sovereign Palestinian state in the world even more unthinkable than it already was. A more secular-leaning party like Fatah (or some other party that doesn’t exist yet or is currently only marginal) coming to power is basically a precondition for any independent Palestine.

3. Violence will inevitably be part of the negotiation for a resolution to the conflict. Violence is not an alternative to “peace talks”, violence is part of the peace talks. But as a corollary to this, people should recognize that Palestine is never going to “win” militarily. There is no conceivable scenario where Israel is defeated decisively on the battlefield. These attacks are part of a negotiation, a credible signal that says “see what we’re capable of?” But crucially, they’re not capable of fending off the Israeli counterattack. Israel will retaliate and kill 10 times as many people and there’s nothing the Palestinian forces can do to prevent that. That’s what I mean. Israel won’t be defeated, merely harassed.

4. The Palestinian liberation movement--both in the earlier days when led by secular-leaning and leftist groups like the PLO and PFLP, and in its current form led by Hamas--commits atrocities against civilians much more routinely and comfortably than almost any other national liberation movement in the last half-century. All terrorist groups get their share of blame and condemnation, but it's simply false to say that all of them behave the same and therefore the condemnation means nothing. Groups like the IRA, PKK, ANC, FRELIMO, and West Papua National Liberation Army have not historically committed the same kinds of atrocities at anything like the frequency and routineness that Palestinian liberation groups do. All have committed some atrocities, and you can try to make an argument that those are just the eggs that have to be broken in order to make the omelette. But since they all have committed substantially fewer atrocities, that suggests clearly many of Hamas and co.'s are excessive.

5. A significant portion (perhaps the majority?) of Mizrahi and Sephardic Jews who have emigrated to Israel since its founding were forced to flee the various Arab countries they used to live in due to pogroms and expulsions in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. This history offers yet another reason people doubt the possibility of peaceful coexistence between Jews and Arabs in a single state.

For the liberals and/or Zionists:

1. There's a reason there is a world consensus in favor of a two-state solution along the 1967 borders and it's not that the whole world is controlled by Hitlerites. Israel's position is indefensible. There is no version of international law or the concept of national self-determination that allows Israel to indefinitely occupy the Palestinian territories or to annex any part of them. Israel is an international outlier. No other country in the world occupies a densely-populated stateless territory full of 5 million stateless citizens. That's not a thing that's allowed to exist in international law. The only legitimate stateless territory is Antarctica, where no people live.

The Palestinian territories--Gaza and the West Bank, as defined in 1967--are either (1) the sovereign territory of a sovereign state, in which case Israel is at war with that country, occupying that country, and the settlements are therefore completely illegal and outrageous; or (2) they are the sovereign territory of a single state that encompasses all of the former Mandate of Palestine, in which case Israel has built an enormous system of apartheid that denies citizenship, freedom of movement, and civil rights to approximately 1/3 of its population, who are segregated in strictly-controlled unrecognized bantustans. It can't be both, you have to pick one or the other. Israel cannot settle the West Bank if the West Bank is some foreign country that Israel is at war with and legitimately occupying. And if it's not a foreign country, if there is no foreign country, then by default it is Israeli territory that must enshrine the equal rights of all its inhabitants. You don't get to pick and choose the elements of each of the two scenarios that benefit you more.

2. For the last five decades, Israel has killed ten times as many people as Palestinian forces have. Their only fig leaf of defense is that they kill the majority with bombing, rather than shooting, which is impersonal and allows an infinitesimal degree of deniability that the civilians they're killing are being intentionally killed. You'll have to forgive the world for not granting this fig leaf much credit. Furthermore, no one cares about the lengths the "most moral army in the world" is supposedly going to in order to minimize civilian harm when the result is the same as always: a 10-to-1 ratio of retaliatory killing that colonial armies throughout modern history have enacted whenever there is violence by the natives. If you'll return to the list of national liberation struggles above, you'll note that not all of them were suppressed by their enemies with such an enormous ratio. The British in Northern Ireland often resorted to brutality in their war to suppress the IRA, but they did not kill ten times as many as the IRA did. Even if Israel's war were completely legitimate, they are clearly being excessive.

3. Attacks by Palestinian forces against Israel cannot possibly be defined as "unprovoked". The status quo in the West Bank is the slow-motion annihilation of any possibility of a Palestinian state as the settlements continue to expand and become entrenched to the point that any possibility of their eventual evacuation becomes increasingly remote. To think that the attempted interruption of this status quo by counter-offensives from Palestinian militants is some kind of aggression on their part is preposterous. They're under occupation and they're fighting it, as is their right. Particular acts in the fighting most assuredly constitute war crimes, but the idea that the fighting itself is criminal is categorically false.

Unless, of course, you were to admit that there is no foreign country under occupation, it's all just sovereign Israeli territory, in which case these are domestic terrorists, not occupied foreigners. Then they would be criminals again, though only criminals against an illegitimate apartheid regime.

4. The founding of the state of Israel was a messy process and reversing that process is impossible anyway. But it was not straightforwardly legitimate and the world is not obligated to respect Israel's founding ideology. None of the basic tenets of Zionism are legitimate universal principles. Not every identifiable ethnic group in the world is entitled to their own state. They can't all have them, it would never work, everyone already knows this and accepts it regarding hundreds of different ethnic groups. The complaint that the Jewish people are somehow being "singled out" for discrimination if they were denied their own nation-state is completely ludicrous. Also ludicrous is the idea that Jews whose ancestors have not lived in the region for over 1,000 years have any special right to migrate to the region that any other human being shouldn't have. Aliyah is an illegitimate and racist policy, and the idea that Ashkenazi Jews from the US or Russia have a greater "right of return" allowing them to live in Tel Aviv than Palestinian refugees in Jordan is completely laughable.

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Rb for when I get home (assuming I remember)

“This is probably not a standard transitioning procedure but I’m going to cut his neck in half.” *sawing sounds*

“I wasn’t sure how to make them, so like a responsible adult, I left this problem for last.”

“I want her expression to say ‘oh you poor creature. I don’t care.’”

If any of the above quotes made you laugh, consider taking a trip over to YouTube and visiting my favorite channel

Enchanterium✨✨

It’s two sisters, Alex and Barb, doing doll customization. As someone who has never customized a doll in my life I find their channel FASCINATING.

Alex used to be a henna artist and her main job is giving the dolls new faces and hair styles and occasional body modifications.

Barb is an engineer going for her phd and a seamstress, who sews teeny tiny doll clothes. She’s also a talented 3D print designer who makes robot gauntlets, space ships, and a functional doll sized flame thrower.

They do all sorts of dolls! Redesigns of popular characters like Team Rocket or the Totally Spies girls, and their own original characters. If you want to check them out here’s three good starting options.

This is actually their second most popular video, it’s part of a collaboration where they all made a member of a space ship crew. Enchanterium made Tzula, the medic, who is also an alien cow. Backstory in video.

The girls were a big fan of the Winx Club show when they were younger, and now each Halloween they reimagine a winx character as their darker self, kind of like what Fate tried to do and failed miserably at. Enchanterium DOES NOT FAIL.

You can see a sneak peek of this one when I talk about Alex, it’s one of my favorite of their zodiac videos. They design the Cancer symbol as a high school student with crab legs growing out of her face because why not lol.

Anyway GO WATCH ENCHANTERIUM! The sisters are hilarious, and talk a lot in Polish, and create the most kickass dolls you’ve ever seen, and I need more people to talk about them so I’m blazing my first ever post. Hope to see some of you in the comments ✨

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An important point: Debian unstable is still much slower than Arch, in terms on updates. My understanding is unstable is very comparable to Ubuntu (and most Debian derivates (including Ubuntu) are actually based on unstable). The primary reason to pick Debian is for the additional stability, although this means you will get new features anywhere from a couple months to several years later than on Arch.

On the other hand, it's far less likely you will get broken dependencies or updates.

What about Debian?

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Listen, I have a proper Ortho-linear split keyboard. This is weak

Reblog, click the picture, and prepare for battle.

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Also, if you (like me) didn't know you setting existed, and wondered why you dash was crappy and repeated the same posts, this is probably why.

@staff LOOK AT THESE IMAGES YOU STUPID BASTARDS!!!

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For those following the SAG and WGA strikes there’s new shit a-brewing, this time targeting background actors (aka extras).

Some may know that one of the issues SAG is fighting is that studios want to take virtual scans of background actors and use them in perpetuity (meaning forever) without any additional compensation to those background actors. So you would just see a bunch of AI generated humans in future movies based off of a background actor that worked one day.

This is already shitty because working as an extra for 3 days on a union set (if you receive a union voucher each day) is one of the main ways to qualify for SAG eligibility. This means that a lot of actors working background do not yet have union protection and likely do not have an agent or manager to protect them. Disney has already allegedly told background actors to do this on the set of Wanda Vision: https://www.avclub.com/wandavision-background-actors-say-disney-scanned-them-1850709900

Here’s where it's worse.

There is one main company that supplies background actors for major union and non union productions. Central Casting. They love to brag about their very long influence in the industry - in old movies dating back to the 40s you can hear jokes about hiring extras from Central Casting.

Central Casting has been including an electronic document for all actors in their database to sign as part of onboarding. Signing it gives Central Casting the right to use your images, your videos, and YOUR LIKENESS in perpetuity, forever. They would OWN your likeness. Instead of it being a studio supplying the AI background actors, it would be Central Casting instead.

Receiving any work from Central Casting in the future is conditional upon signing it. No signature = no extra work = no extra income for union actors trying to make health insurance minimums, no union extra work for pre-SAG members.

SAG already reached out to Central Casting to tell them to stop. Central Casting refused.

Edit to say: this is not new. It’s part of actors onboarding and is called the Photo, Image, and Video Release. It’s phrased to sound like you are just giving them permission to use your image and video for CC’s website and promotional purposes. But the actual language is much broader. It's only recently being brought up as a point for discussion because some casting directors (who are generally supportive of the strike) started pointing it out.

Central Casting is owned by Entertainment Partners which is also a giant software conglomerate and owns a lot of the software used to organize background casting and pay actors. https://www.ep.com/company/about-us/

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TO THOSE MAKING NATIVE OCS

I see this a lot, no one has actual names, or any reference for names, that are legit Native American, varying among the tribes, for their characters.

Babynames.com and shit like that will give you names made up by white people.

However, I’ve got your solution.

Native-Languages  is a good website to turn to for knowledge on a lot of native things, including native names. If you’re unsure about the names you’ve picked, they even have a list of made up names here!

Please don’t trust names like babynames.com for native names, they’re made up and often quite offensive to the cultures themselves.

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how to draw arms ? ? 

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Are fedoras really that bad?

YES YES THEY ARE

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I went to 'Marquette University High School,' and most referred to it as either Marquette or Marquette High. The second one was needed because there is a college named Marquette University just a couple miles down the road. The pair still confused people, esp since I only went to the high school, but most people only know the college.