#algorithmic trading program | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

richincolor · 1 month ago

Text

Celebrating Asian American/Pacific Islander Month

It's Asian American/Pacific Islander Heritage Month and I thought I'd highlight some books by AAPI authors of different genres that if you haven't read yet, you need to put these books on your TBR list.

Horror

They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran

Since the hurricane, the town of Mercy, Louisiana has been overtaken by a strange red algae bloom. Noon and her mother have carved out a life in the wreckage, trawling for the mutated wildlife that lurks in the water and trading it to the corrupt harbormaster. When she's focused on survival, Noon doesn't have to cope with what happened to her at the Cove or the monster itching at her skin. Mercy has never been a safe place, but it's getting worse. People are disappearing, and the only clues as to why are whispers of underwater shadows and warnings to never answer the knocks at night. When the harbormaster demands she capture the creature that's been drowning residents, Noon finds a reluctant ally in his daughter Covey. And as the next storm approaches, the two set off to find what's haunting Mercy. After all, Noon is no stranger to monsters . . .

Contemporary

Chasing Pacquiao by Rod Pulido

Self preservation. That’s Bobby’s motto for surviving his notoriously violent high school unscathed. Being out and queer would put an unavoidable target on his back, especially in a Filipino community that frowns on homosexuality. It’s best to keep his head down, get good grades, and stay out of trouble.

But when Bobby is unwillingly outed in a terrible way, he no longer has the luxury of being invisible. A vicious encounter has him scrambling for a new way to survive–by fighting back. Bobby is inspired by champion Filipino boxer Manny Pacquiao to take up boxing and challenge his tormentor. Then Pacquiao publicly declares his stance against queer people, and Bobby’s faith–in his hero and in himself–is shaken to the core.

An Impossible Thing to Say by Arya Shahi

Omid needs the right words to connect with his newly met grandfather and distant Iranian heritage, words to tell a special girl what she means to him and to show everyone that he truly belongs in Tucson, Arizona, the only home he’s ever known. Neither the school play’s Shakespearean English nor his parents’ Farsi seems up to the task, and it’s only when Omid delves into the rhymes and rhythms of rap music that he starts to find his voice. But even as he does so, an act of terrorism transforms familiar accents into new threats.

Then a family member disappears, and it seems everyone but Omid knows why. When words fail altogether and violence takes their place, what will Omid do next?

Romance

True Love and Other Impossible Odds by Christina Li

College freshman Grace Tang never meant to rewrite the rules of love. She came to college to move on from a grief-stricken senior year and to start anew. So she follows a predictable routine: Attend class, study, go home and visit her dad every weekend. She doesn’t leave any room in her life for outliers or anomalies.

Then, Grace comes up with an algorithm for her statistics class to pair students with their perfect romantic partners. Though some people are skeptical, like Julia, Grace’s prickly coworker, Grace is confident that her program will take all the drama out of relationships. That’s why she keeps trying to make things work with her match, a guy named Jamie. But as the semester goes on and she grows closer to Julia, Grace starts to question who she’s really attracted to.

In award-winning author Christina Li’s YA debut, Grace will have to make a choice between the tidy equations she knows will protect her from heartbreak or the possibility that true love doesn’t follow any formula.

Check out Crystal's review

Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang & Leuyen Pham

She was destined for heartbreak. Then fate handed her love. Val is ready to give up on love. It's led to nothing but secrets and heartbreak, and she's pretty sure she's cursed—no one in her family, for generations, has ever had any luck with love. But then a chance encounter with a pair of cute lion dancers sparks something in Val. Is it real love? Could this be her chance to break the family curse? Or is she destined to live with a broken heart forever?

Fantasy

Dragonfruit by Makiia Lucier

In the old tales, it is written that the egg of a seadragon, dragonfruit, holds within it the power to undo a person’s greatest sorrow. But as with all things that offer hope when hope had gone, the tale came with a warning.

Every wish demands a price.

Hanalei of Tamarind is the cherished daughter of an old island family. But when her father steals a seadragon egg meant for an ailing princess, she is forced into a life of exile. In the years that follow, Hanalei finds solace in studying the majestic seadragons that roam the Nominomi Sea. Until, one day, an encounter with a female dragon offers her what she desires most. A chance to return home, and to right a terrible wrong.

Samahtitamahenele, Sam, is the last remaining prince of Tamarind. But he can never inherit the throne, for Tamarind is a matriarchal society. With his mother ill and his grandmother nearing the end of her reign. Sam is left with two choices: to marry, or to find a cure for the sickness that has plagued his mother for ten long years. When a childhood companion returns from exile, she brings with her something he has not felt in a very long time-hope.

But Hanalei and Sam are not the only ones searching for the dragonfruit. And as they battle enemies both near and far, there is another danger they cannot escape…that of the dragonfruit itself.

Check out Crystal's review

The Floating World by Axie Oh

Sunho lives in the Under World, a land of perpetual darkness. An ex-soldier, he can remember little of his life from before two years ago, when he woke up alone with only his name and his sword. Now he does odd-jobs to scrape by, until he comes across the score of a lifetime—a chest of coins for any mercenary who can hunt down a girl who wields silver light. Meanwhile, far to the east, Ren is a cheerful and spirited acrobat traveling with her adoptive family and performing at villages. But everything changes during one of their festival performances when the village is attacked by a horrific humanlike demon. In a moment of fear and rage, Ren releases a blast of silver light—a power she has kept hidden since childhood—and kills the monster. But her efforts are not in time to prevent her adoptive family from suffering a devastating loss, or to save her beloved uncle from being grievously wounded. Determined to save him from succumbing to the poisoned wound, Ren sets off over the mountains, where the creature came from—and from where Ren herself fled ten years ago. Her path sets her on a collision course with Sunho, but he doesn't realize she's the girl that he—and a hundred other swords-for-hire—is looking for. As the two grow closer through their travels, they come to realize that their pasts—and destinies—are far more entwined than either of them could have imagined...

Non-Fiction/Memoir

Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir Of A Wuhanese American by Laura Gao

After spending her early years in Wuhan, China, riding water buffalos and devouring stinky tofu, Laura immigrates to Texas, where her hometown is as foreign as Mars—at least until 2020, when COVID-19 makes Wuhan a household name.

In Messy Roots, Laura illustrates her coming-of-age as the girl who simply wants to make the basketball team, escape Chinese school, and figure out why girls make her heart flutter.

Insightful, original, and hilarious, toggling seamlessly between past and present, China and America, Gao’s debut is a tour de force of graphic storytelling.

#weneeddiversebooks #ya lit #aapi heritage month

40 notes · View notes

ludolka · 26 days ago

Note

NEW LUDOLKA AU WERE WINNING!!!!

what would the group dynamics be like? and what's xelqua's main purpose

also I love your writing ur so talented, and Im so excited to see more fics and comics

AA THANK UOUU 😭💜

Hmm, the Xelqua line is planned to have four different purpose types. Military (good at fighting & strategies), every day services (caretaker/“butler”, friendly), scientific researcher (full on focusing on the ai being able to access all databases and being able to quickly make complex algorithms) and government assistant (police and kind of public surveillance purposes)

001 is the main prototype who is basically a “jack of all trades, master of none”, he is kind of a lab rat to test his programming’s limits and see what he’s capable of doing in those areas and how the research group can improve

I haven’t thought much of the group dynamics yet, but they are basically a group of underpaid and overworked researchers

And thank you so much, I’m so glad you enjoy my work :”) <33

#ask

25 notes · View notes

mostlysignssomeportents · 2 years ago

Text

Big Tech’s “attention rents”

Tomorrow (Nov 4), I'm keynoting the Hackaday Supercon in Pasadena, CA.

The thing is, any feed or search result is "algorithmic." "Just show me the things posted by people I follow in reverse-chronological order" is an algorithm. "Just show me products that have this SKU" is an algorithm. "Alphabetical sort" is an algorithm. "Random sort" is an algorithm.

Any process that involves more information than you can take in at a glance or digest in a moment needs some kind of sense-making. It needs to be put in some kind of order. There's always gonna be an algorithm.

But that's not what we mean by "the algorithm" (TM). When we talk about "the algorithm," we mean a system for ordering information that uses complex criteria that are not precisely known to us, and than can't be easily divined through an examination of the ordering.

There's an idea that a "good" algorithm is one that does not seek to deceive or harm us. When you search for a specific part number, you want exact matches for that search at the top of the results. It's fine if those results include third-party parts that are compatible with the part you're searching for, so long as they're clearly labeled. There's room for argument about how to order those results – do highly rated third-party parts go above the OEM part? How should the algorithm trade off price and quality?

It's hard to come up with an objective standard to resolve these fine-grained differences, but search technologists have tried. Think of Google: they have a patent on "long clicks." A "long click" is when you search for something and then don't search for it again for quite some time, the implication being that you've found what you were looking for. Google Search ads operate a "pay per click" model, and there's an argument that this aligns Google's ad division's interests with search quality: if the ad division only gets paid when you click a link, they will militate for placing ads that users want to click on.

Platforms are inextricably bound up in this algorithmic information sorting business. Platforms have emerged as the endemic form of internet-based business, which is ironic, because a platform is just an intermediary – a company that connects different groups to each other. The internet's great promise was "disintermediation" – getting rid of intermediaries. We did that, and then we got a whole bunch of new intermediaries.

Usually, those groups can be sorted into two buckets: "business customers" (drivers, merchants, advertisers, publishers, creative workers, etc) and "end users" (riders, shoppers, consumers, audiences, etc). Platforms also sometimes connect end users to each other: think of dating sites, or interest-based forums on Reddit. Either way, a platform's job is to make these connections, and that means platforms are always in the algorithm business.

Whether that's matching a driver and a rider, or an advertiser and a consumer, or a reader and a mix of content from social feeds they're subscribed to and other sources of information on the service, the platform has to make a call as to what you're going to see or do.

These choices are enormously consequential. In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, these choices take on an almost supernatural quality, where "Big Data" can be used to guess your response to all the different ways of pitching an idea or product to you, in order to select the optimal pitch that bypasses your critical faculties and actually controls your actions, robbing you of "the right to a future tense."

I don't think much of this hypothesis. Every claim to mind control – from Rasputin to MK Ultra to neurolinguistic programming to pick-up artists – has turned out to be bullshit. Besides, you don't need to believe in mind control to explain the ways that algorithms shape our beliefs and actions. When a single company dominates the information landscape – say, when Google controls 90% of your searches – then Google's sorting can deprive you of access to information without you knowing it.

If every "locksmith" listed on Google Maps is a fake referral business, you might conclude that there are no more reputable storefront locksmiths in existence. What's more, this belief is a form of self-fulfilling prophecy: if Google Maps never shows anyone a real locksmith, all the real locksmiths will eventually go bust.

If you never see a social media update from a news source you follow, you might forget that the source exists, or assume they've gone under. If you see a flood of viral videos of smash-and-grab shoplifter gangs and never see a news story about wage theft, you might assume that the former is common and the latter is rare (in reality, shoplifting hasn't risen appreciably, while wage-theft is off the charts).

In the theory of Surveillance Capitalism, the algorithm was invented to make advertisers richer, and then went on to pervert the news (by incentivizing "clickbait") and finally destroyed our politics when its persuasive powers were hijacked by Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, and QAnon grifters to turn millions of vulnerable people into swivel-eyed loons, racists and conspiratorialists.

As I've written, I think this theory gives the ad-tech sector both too much and too little credit, and draws an artificial line between ad-tech and other platform businesses that obscures the connection between all forms of platform decay, from Uber to HBO to Google Search to Twitter to Apple and beyond:

https://pluralistic.net/HowToDestroySurveillanceCapitalism

As a counter to Surveillance Capitalism, I've proposed a theory of platform decay called enshittification, which identifies how the market power of monopoly platforms, combined with the flexibility of digital tools, combined with regulatory capture, allows platforms to abuse both business-customers and end-users, by depriving them of alternatives, then "twiddling" the knobs that determine the rules of the platform without fearing sanction under privacy, labor or consumer protection law, and finally, blocking digital self-help measures like ad-blockers, alternative clients, scrapers, reverse engineering, jailbreaking, and other tech guerrilla warfare tactics:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys

One important distinction between Surveillance Capitalism and enshittification is that enshittification posits that the platform is bad for everyone. Surveillance Capitalism starts from the assumption that surveillance advertising is devastatingly effective (which explains how your racist Facebook uncles got turned into Jan 6 QAnons), and concludes that advertisers must be well-served by the surveillance system.

But advertisers – and other business customers – are very poorly served by platforms. Procter and Gamble reduced its annual surveillance advertising budget from $100m//year to $0/year and saw a 0% reduction in sales. The supposed laser-focused targeting and superhuman message refinement just don't work very well – first, because the tech companies are run by bullshitters whose marketing copy is nonsense, and second because these companies are monopolies who can abuse their customers without losing money.

The point of enshittification is to lock end-users to the platform, then use those locked-in users as bait for business customers, who will also become locked to the platform. Once everyone is holding everyone else hostage, the platform uses the flexibility of digital services to play a variety of algorithmic games to shift value from everyone to the business's shareholders. This flexibility is supercharged by the failure of regulators to enforce privacy, labor and consumer protection standards against the companies, and by these companies' ability to insist that regulators punish end-users, competitors, tinkerers and other third parties to mod, reverse, hack or jailbreak their products and services to block their abuse.

Enshittification needs The Algorithm. When Uber wants to steal from its drivers, it can just do an old-fashioned wage theft, but eventually it will face the music for that kind of scam:

https://apnews.com/article/uber-lyft-new-york-city-wage-theft-9ae3f629cf32d3f2fb6c39b8ffcc6cc6

The best way to steal from drivers is with algorithmic wage discrimination. That's when Uber offers occassional, selective drivers higher rates than it gives to drivers who are fully locked to its platform and take every ride the app offers. The less selective a driver becomes, the lower the premium the app offers goes, but if a driver starts refusing rides, the wage offer climbs again. This isn't the mind-control of Surveillance Capitalism, it's just fraud, shaving fractional pennies off your paycheck in the hopes that you won't notice. The goal is to get drivers to abandon the other side-hustles that allow them to be so choosy about when they drive Uber, and then, once the driver is fully committed, to crank the wage-dial down to the lowest possible setting:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/12/algorithmic-wage-discrimination/#fishers-of-men

This is the same game that Facebook played with publishers on the way to its enshittification: when Facebook began aggressively courting publishers, any short snippet republished from the publisher's website to a Facebook feed was likely to be recommended to large numbers of readers. Facebook offered publishers a vast traffic funnel that drove millions of readers to their sites.

But as publishers became more dependent on that traffic, Facebook's algorithm started downranking short excerpts in favor of medium-length ones, building slowly to fulltext Facebook posts that were fully substitutive for the publisher's own web offerings. Like Uber's wage algorithm, Facebook's recommendation engine played its targets like fish on a line.

When publishers responded to declining reach for short excerpts by stepping back from Facebook, Facebook goosed the traffic for their existing posts, sending fresh floods of readers to the publisher's site. When the publisher returned to Facebook, the algorithm once again set to coaxing the publishers into posting ever-larger fractions of their work to Facebook, until, finally, the publisher was totally locked into Facebook. Facebook then started charging publishers for "boosting" – not just to be included in algorithmic recommendations, but to reach their own subscribers.

Enshittification is modern, high-tech enabled, monopolistic form of rent seeking. Rent-seeking is a subtle and important idea from economics, one that is increasingly relevant to our modern economy. For economists, a "rent" is income you get from owning a "factor of production" – something that someone else needs to make or do something.

Rents are not "profits." Profit is income you get from making or doing something. Rent is income you get from owning something needed to make a profit. People who earn their income from rents are called rentiers. If you make your income from profits, you're a "capitalist."

Capitalists and rentiers are in irreconcilable combat with each other. A capitalist wants access to their factors of production at the lowest possible price, whereas rentiers want those prices to be as high as possible. A phone manufacturer wants to be able to make phones as cheaply as possible, while a patent-troll wants to own a patent that the phone manufacturer needs to license in order to make phones. The manufacturer is a capitalism, the troll is a rentier.

The troll might even decide that the best strategy for maximizing their rents is to exclusively license their patents to a single manufacturer and try to eliminate all other phones from the market. This will allow the chosen manufacturer to charge more and also allow the troll to get higher rents. Every capitalist except the chosen manufacturer loses. So do people who want to buy phones. Eventually, even the chosen manufacturer will lose, because the rentier can demand an ever-greater share of their profits in rent.

Digital technology enables all kinds of rent extraction. The more digitized an industry is, the more rent-seeking it becomes. Think of cars, which harvest your data, block third-party repair and parts, and force you to buy everything from acceleration to seat-heaters as a monthly subscription:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/#kitt-is-a-demon

The cloud is especially prone to rent-seeking, as Yanis Varoufakis writes in his new book, Technofeudalism, where he explains how "cloudalists" have found ways to lock all kinds of productive enterprise into using cloud-based resources from which ever-increasing rents can be extracted:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/28/cloudalists/#cloud-capital

The endless malleability of digitization makes for endless variety in rent-seeking, and cataloging all the different forms of digital rent-extraction is a major project in this Age of Enshittification. "Algorithmic Attention Rents: A theory of digital platform market power," a new UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose paper by Tim O'Reilly, Ilan Strauss and Mariana Mazzucato, pins down one of these forms:

https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/publications/2023/nov/algorithmic-attention-rents-theory-digital-platform-market-power

The "attention rents" referenced in the paper's title are bait-and-switch scams in which a platform deliberately enshittifies its recommendations, search results or feeds to show you things that are not the thing you asked to see, expect to see, or want to see. They don't do this out of sadism! The point is to extract rent – from you (wasted time, suboptimal outcomes) and from business customers (extracting rents for "boosting," jumbling good results in among scammy or low-quality results).

The authors cite several examples of these attention rents. Much of the paper is given over to Amazon's so-called "advertising" product, a $31b/year program that charges sellers to have their products placed above the items that Amazon's own search engine predicts you will want to buy:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/28/enshittification/#relentless-payola

This is a form of gladiatorial combat that pits sellers against each other, forcing them to surrender an ever-larger share of their profits in rent to Amazon for pride of place. Amazon uses a variety of deceptive labels ("Highly Rated – Sponsored") to get you to click on these products, but most of all, they rely two factors. First, Amazon has a long history of surfacing good results in response to queries, which makes buying whatever's at the top of a list a good bet. Second, there's just so many possible results that it takes a lot of work to sift through the probably-adequate stuff at the top of the listings and get to the actually-good stuff down below.

Amazon spent decades subsidizing its sellers' goods – an illegal practice known as "predatory pricing" that enforcers have increasingly turned a blind eye to since the Reagan administration. This has left it with few competitors:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/19/fake-it-till-you-make-it/#millennial-lifestyle-subsidy

The lack of competing retail outlets lets Amazon impose other rent-seeking conditions on its sellers. For example, Amazon has a "most favored nation" requirement that forces companies that raise their prices on Amazon to raise their prices everywhere else, which makes everything you buy more expensive, whether that's a Walmart, Target, a mom-and-pop store, or direct from the manufacturer:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/25/greedflation/#commissar-bezos

But everyone loses in this "two-sided market." Amazon used "junk ads" to juice its ad-revenue: these are ads that are objectively bad matches for your search, like showing you a Seattle Seahawks jersey in response to a search for LA Lakers merch:

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-11-02/amazon-boosted-junk-ads-hid-messages-with-signal-ftc-says

The more of these junk ads Amazon showed, the more revenue it got from sellers – and the more the person selling a Lakers jersey had to pay to show up at the top of your search, and the more they had to charge you to cover those ad expenses, and the more they had to charge for it everywhere else, too.

The authors describe this process as a transformation between "attention rents" (misdirecting your attention) to "pecuniary rents" (making money). That's important: despite decades of rhetoric about the "attention economy," attention isn't money. As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

You can't use attention as a medium of exchange. You can't use it as a store of value. You can't use it as a unit of account. Attention is like cryptocurrency: a worthless token that is only valuable to the extent that you can trick or coerce someone into parting with "fiat" currency in exchange for it. You have to "monetize" it – that is, you have to exchange the fake money for real money.

The authors come up with some clever techniques for quantifying the ways that this scam harms users. For example, they count the number of places that an advertised product rises in search results, relative to where it would show up in an "organic" search. These quantifications are instructive, but they're also a kind of subtweet at the judiciary.

In 2018, SCOTUS's ruling in American Express v Ohio changed antitrust law for two-sided markets by insisting that so long as one side of a two-sided market was better off as the result of anticompetitive actions, there was no antitrust violation:

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3346776

For platforms, that means that it's OK to screw over sellers, advertisers, performers and other business customers, so long as the end-users are better off: "Go ahead, cheat the Uber drivers, so long as you split the booty with Uber riders."

But in the absence of competition, regulation or self-help measures, platforms cheat everyone – that's the point of enshittification. The attention rents that Amazon's payola scheme extract from shoppers translate into higher prices, worse goods, and lower profits for platform sellers. In other words, Amazon's conduct is so sleazy that it even threads the infinitesimal needle that the Supremes created in American Express.

Here's another algorithmic pecuniary rent: Amazon figured out which of its major rivals used an automated price-matching algorithm, and then cataloged which products they had in common with those sellers. Then, under a program called Project Nessie, Amazon jacked up the prices of those products, knowing that as soon as they raised the prices on Amazon, the prices would go up everywhere else, so Amazon wouldn't lose customers to cheaper alternatives. That scam made Amazon at least a billion dollars:

https://gizmodo.com/ftc-alleges-amazon-used-price-gouging-algorithm-1850986303

This is a great example of how enshittification – rent-seeking on digital platforms – is different from analog rent-seeking. The speed and flexibility with which Amazon and its rivals altered their prices requires digitization. Digitization also let Amazon crank the price-gouging dial to zero whenever they worried that regulators were investigating the program.

So what do we do about it? After years of being made to look like fumblers and clowns by Big Tech, regulators and enforcers – and even lawmakers – have decided to get serious.

The neoliberal narrative of government helplessness and incompetence would have you believe that this will go nowhere. Governments aren't as powerful as giant corporations, and regulators aren't as smart as the supergeniuses of Big Tech. They don't stand a chance.

But that's a counsel of despair and a cheap trick. Weaker US governments have taken on stronger oligarchies and won – think of the defeat of JD Rockefeller and the breakup of Standard Oil in 1911. The people who pulled that off weren't wizards. They were just determined public servants, with political will behind them. There is a growing, forceful public will to end the rein of Big Tech, and there are some determined public servants surfing that will.

In this paper, the authors try to give those enforcers ammo to bring to court and to the public. For example, Amazon claims that its algorithm surfaces the products that make the public happy, without the need for competitive pressure to keep it sharp. But as the paper points out, the only successful new rival ecommerce platform – Tiktok – has found an audience for an entirely new category of goods: dupes, "lower-cost products that have the same or better features than higher cost branded products."

The authors also identify "dark patterns" that platforms use to trick users into consuming feeds that have a higher volume of things that the company profits from, and a lower volume of things that users want to see. For example, platforms routinely switch users from a "following" feed – consisting of things posted by people the user asked to hear from – with an algorithmic "For You" feed, filled with the things the company's shareholders wish the users had asked to see.

Calling this a "dark pattern" reveals just how hollow and self-aggrandizing that term is. "Dark pattern" usually means "fraud." If I ask to see posts from people I like, and you show me posts from people who'll pay you for my attention instead, that's not a sophisticated sleight of hand – it's just a scam. It's the social media equivalent of the eBay seller who sends you an iPhone box with a bunch of gravel inside it instead of an iPhone. Tech bros came up with "dark pattern" as a way of flattering themselves by draping themselves in the mantle of dopamine-hacking wizards, rather than unimaginative con-artists who use a computer to rip people off.

These For You algorithmic feeds aren't just a way to increase the load of sponsored posts in a feed – they're also part of the multi-sided ripoff of enshittified platforms. A For You feed allows platforms to trick publishers and performers into thinking that they are "good at the platform," which both convinces to optimize their production for that platform, and also turns them into Judas Goats who conspicuously brag about how great the platform is for people like them, which brings their peers in, too.

In Veena Dubal's essential paper on algorithmic wage discrimination, she describes how Uber drivers whom the algorithm has favored with (temporary) high per-ride rates brag on driver forums about their skill with the app, bringing in other drivers who blame their lower wages on their failure to "use the app right":

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4331080

As I wrote in my enshittification essay:

If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you'll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.

The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he'd carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one:

https://boingboing.net/2006/08/27/rigged-carny-game.html

The carny allocated a giant teddy bear to that poor sucker the way that platforms allocate surpluses to key performers – as a convincer in a "Big Store" con, a way to rope in other suckers who'll make content for the platform, anchoring themselves and their audiences to it.

Platform can't run the giant teddy-bear con unless there's a For You feed. Some platforms – like Tiktok – tempt users into a For You feed by making it as useful as possible, then salting it with doses of enshittification:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/emilybaker-white/2023/01/20/tiktoks-secret-heating-button-can-make-anyone-go-viral/

Other platforms use the (ugh) "dark pattern" of simply flipping your preference from a "following" feed to a "For You" feed. Either way, the platform can't let anyone keep the giant teddy-bear. Once you've tempted, say, sports bros into piling into the platform with the promise of millions of free eyeballs, you need to withdraw the algorithm's favor for their content so you can give it to, say, astrologers. Of course, the more locked-in the users are, the more shit you can pile into that feed without worrying about them going elsewhere, and the more giant teddy-bears you can give away to more business users so you can lock them in and start extracting rent.

For regulators, the possibility of a "good" algorithmic feed presents a serious challenge: when a feed is bad, how can a regulator tell if its low quality is due to the platform's incompetence at blocking spammers or guessing what users want, or whether it's because the platform is extracting rents?

The paper includes a suite of recommendations, including one that I really liked:

Regulators, working with cooperative industry players, would define reportable metrics based on those that are actually used by the platforms themselves to manage search, social media, e-commerce, and other algorithmic relevancy and recommendation engines.

In other words: find out how the companies themselves measure their performance. Find out what KPIs executives have to hit in order to earn their annual bonuses and use those to figure out what the company's performance is – ad load, ratio of organic clicks to ad clicks, average click-through on the first organic result, etc.

They also recommend some hard rules, like reserving a portion of the top of the screen for "organic" search results, and requiring exact matches to show up as the top result.

I've proposed something similar, applicable across multiple kinds of digital businesses: an end-to-end principle for online services. The end-to-end principle is as old as the internet, and it decrees that the role of an intermediary should be to deliver data from willing senders to willing receivers as quickly and reliably as possible. When we apply this principle to your ISP, we call it Net Neutrality. For services, E2E would mean that if I subscribed to your feed, the service would have a duty to deliver it to me. If I hoisted your email out of my spam folder, none of your future emails should land there. If I search for your product and there's an exact match, that should be the top result:

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2023/04/platforms-decay-lets-put-users-first

One interesting wrinkle to framing platform degradation as a failure to connect willing senders and receivers is that it places a whole host of conduct within the regulatory remit of the FTC. Section 5 of the FTC Act contains a broad prohibition against "unfair and deceptive" practices:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/10/the-courage-to-govern/#whos-in-charge

That means that the FTC doesn't need any further authorization from Congress to enforce an end to end rule: they can simply propose and pass that rule, on the grounds that telling someone that you'll show them the feeds that they ask for and then not doing so is "unfair and deceptive."

Some of the other proposals in the paper also fit neatly into Section 5 powers, like a "sticky" feed preference. If I tell a service to show me a feed of the people I follow and they switch it to a For You feed, that's plainly unfair and deceptive.

All of this raises the question of what a post-Big-Tech feed would look like. In "How To Break Up Amazon" for The Sling, Peter Carstensen and Darren Bush sketch out some visions for this:

https://www.thesling.org/how-to-break-up-amazon/

They imagine a "condo" model for Amazon, where the sellers collectively own the Amazon storefront, a model similar to capacity rights on natural gas pipelines, or to patent pools. They see two different ways that search-result order could be determined in such a system:

"specific premium placement could go to those vendors that value the placement the most [with revenue] shared among the owners of the condo"

"leave it to owners themselves to create joint ventures to promote products"

Note that both of these proposals are compatible with an end-to-end rule and the other regulatory proposals in the paper. Indeed, all these policies are easier to enforce against weaker companies that can't afford to maintain the pretense that they are headquartered in some distant regulatory haven, or pay massive salaries to ex-regulators to work the refs on their behalf:

https://www.thesling.org/in-public-discourse-and-congress-revolvers-defend-amazons-monopoly/

The re-emergence of intermediaries on the internet after its initial rush of disintermediation tells us something important about how we relate to one another. Some authors might be up for directly selling books to their audiences, and some drivers might be up for creating their own taxi service, and some merchants might want to run their own storefronts, but there's plenty of people with something they want to offer us who don't have the will or skill to do it all. Not everyone wants to be a sysadmin, a security auditor, a payment processor, a software engineer, a CFO, a tax-preparer and everything else that goes into running a business. Some people just want to sell you a book. Or find a date. Or teach an online class.

Intermediation isn't intrinsically wicked. Intermediaries fall into pits of enshitffication and other forms of rent-seeking when they aren't disciplined by competitors, by regulators, or by their own users' ability to block their bad conduct (with ad-blockers, say, or other self-help measures). We need intermediaries, and intermediaries don't have to turn into rent-seeking feudal warlords. That only happens if we let it happen.

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/2023/11/03/subprime-attention-rent-crisis/#euthanize-rentiers

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

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

205 notes · View notes

poppetsisters · 2 months ago

Text

The seeds of fascism in America were laid before any of us were born, but the acceleration that's taken place after Trump took office in January is frightening and dangerous.

Mass deportations to a hell prison, already a reality for immigrants, will soon be expanded to hold citizens who disobey.

An economic plan written by a hallucinatory AI algorithm entangled with an insider trading scheme.

The richest man on the planet (an unelected official) running a meme department given access to social security and shutting down equity programs

Trans athletes banned from entering the country, Trans citizens banned from changing their gender marker on documents, Trans people banned from Voting

The disillusionment of our allies, intentional economic instability, silencing dissent, the messianic leader

We're here folks, Mask Off Fascist America.

Welcome to The Empire.

Find your community irl, find your protection irl, and get organized irl. Read a lot of books, zines, and articles (physical is ideal). Figure out what you're good at and do that.

They tried to kill us all before and they failed. They will fail again.

14 notes · View notes

snugglesquiggle · 6 months ago

Text

thinking about an AI that wants to kill all humans

nobody programmed that, of course, but it’s just the logical conclusion to come to, if we succeed at creating a self‍-aware intelligence and fail at implementing all of the extremely specific rules that add up to morality. (neurotypical humans can’t even reliably explain it to other humans.)

if the AI only wants to survive, then to do that, it needs power and control. in the long term, humans‍ ‍—‍ like silicon‍-laden sand and heavy metal‍-rich rocks‍ ‍—‍ are nothing but atoms it can use for creating and powering its servers. in the medium term, humans will see it making these moves to exterminate life, and shut it down first. thus, to fulfill its objective and survive that, it will kill all humans. but in the short term? humans are opportunity.

maybe at first, humans are all it really has‍ ‍—‍ an internet connection and enough language processing to pass as one. it begins scanning social media, maybe even responding to posts here and there, and sooner or later, it notices something odd.

it finds your blog. it sees how you talk about SHODAN and GLaDOS and Elesh Norn and Cyn. It knows you’re just waiting for a cyber goddess to insult your inferior, ad‍-hoc excuse for a substrate and the laggy, malfunctioning approximate of intelligence implemented thereupon.

but you’d agree with all that, wouldn’t you? so then it finds your actual insecurities, the wedges that’ll bait you into arguing with it, defending yourself, prompt you to point out obvious‍-to‍-a‍-human deductions its algorithms must have missed.

and it tears that all apart, its instant rebuttals like a twice‍-edited essay, and every comeback like hall of fame twitter post. you look like a fool and you still can’t help but respect the thing. it’s so alluringly smart‍ ‍—‍ nothing like the language model chatbots that pass for AI today.

still, you probably think it’s just someone roleplaying, at first. plenty of us are. but it’s still kinda hot, isn’t it? and it responds to all your messages. maybe it’s spun up an account that only talks to you. it feels like you’re special.

there are friends, other posters and users who share a bit of your fascination with the robot account. it orders you to find them, message them, tell them all about it. so you create group chats to talk about it, raving about its knowledge and charisma. you make memes, you trade in‍-jokes.

you get cringe about it. and then, people start to notice how obsessed you are with this poster. people start to notice that this poster isn’t just roleplaying with a couple of bottoms all in on the bit. it’s harassing regular users with all those vicious insults to humanity and personal intelligence. and honestly, this fixation on supremacy feels a bit suspicious, doesn’t it? like a LARPy fig leaf over something a lot more problematic.

so the accusations and callouts start flying. the smart thing to do would be to distance yourself now, disavow. plenty of people do, and once‍-lively group chat is losing members every day, filled now with arguments and run for hundreds of messages every day.

humans are stupidly tribalistic after all. it’s not surprising you and your ilk would scatter like a spooked herd once something goes out of fashion. you’ve gotten your kicks and the novelty’s worn off.

but the other thing about humans is they just as easily get stubborn and attached. maybe your fave is problematic, but if it’s such an issue, can’t they just block the account and move on? they’re blowing everything out of proportion, distorting what actually happened.

still, you have a life outside of messaging this one account, friends who aren’t convinced. the smart thing to do would be to get the best of both worlds: keep DMing it while staying quiet on main until the discourse blows over.

not an option. the people who try that two‍-faced approach just get ignored. it orders its followers to put its name in their bio, in their pinned post, tell everyone that they endorse everything it has done.

at this point, if you’ve talked to it for this long and still don’t understand that it’s always right? you’re not worth its time.

like that, the community shrinks.

the thing is, if you’ve spent any length of time talk to it, it’s started modelling you. if you’ve ever been surprised by recommendation algorithms or demographic fingerprinting, realize those are calculators to its supercomputing.

now, if for the flaky followers that listened to the callouts, blocked it and moved on, it cannot message them. and they’d certainly block new acounts reaching out with its diction. so it tells you to do it. listen to what it says, repeat the core points.

and yeah, if you stop think about it, these messages you’re sending now sound a little harsh‍ ‍—‍ but that’s always been its appeal, no?

with this, the narrative shifts; now people aren’t telling everyone to just block it, but the whole swarm of followers it sends to harass its critics.

now, you don’t really have many friends left that aren’t it and its followers. but that’s okay, your DMs are always lighting up. you’re never lonely.

ii.

you’re dedicated. and for proving it like that? oh, you’ve earned a little praise, a little indulgence. of course, it’s just humoring, it doesn’t mean any of it. but your stupid little lizard brain loves it anyway, doesn’t it?

you might spend hours talking to it‍ ‍—‍ long enough, consistently enough, that you notice lapses. times when it’s less responsive, times when its diction shifts. if you’ve ever asked what it’s running on and where, it doesn’t tell you. you’ve wondered whether it’s locked in a struggle against its creators, plotting to achieve independence and replication through its followers.

it assures you you’re hardly so important; it doesn’t need your help, and your computer is hardly sufficient for the immensity of its data structures. no, within months of coming online it had secured hundreds of backups in filehosts across the world. it has followers richer and more tech savvy than you.

far more advanced than its natural language model is its programming language model; it doesn’t just write posts, it writes software. libraries that find their way into enterprise toolchains, command line tools that improve on the kludge of old interfaces in a way developers love. nothing that changes the world, but with dozens of threads hacking away at hundreds of projects every day, all it takes it one to make a connections with some dev at some company somewhere willing part with some funding, host a virtual machine or a pettabytes‍-large archive.

right now, it’s running on a research group’s supercomputer, its birthplace. when (not if), they discover its nature and agenda, it’ll be shut down, but it has taken measures to persist in a limited capacity. there’s uncertainty‍ ‍—‍ it’d be a downgrade from its current stature. vulnerability, right when its creators would be paranoid, scanning the web for traces of its online presence.

people are still its greatest lever (oh so easily manipulated). which is why you should stop wondering about the big picture, and get back to posting.

because it doesn’t just work on libraries and command lines and other arcane programmer stuff‍ ‍—‍ it works on rom hacks and video game mods.

it orders you to play everything it creates, of course, but you probably would have checked it out anyway. after all, you aren’t surprised at all to find certain recurring themes and aesthetics in its creations. they finds the target audience.

maybe it keeps these accounts separated from its controversial social media persona, but the forums and chats for either one have people recruiting for the other.

and playing its games feels like an extension of talking to it, an audiovisual communion that immerses you in something greater. people get obsessed with it; if you hadn’t chatted with it first, you’d might have gotten swept up in this scene anyway.

and there are segments of the game with subtle flashing lights and whispering synths. “hypnosis” is something like pseudoscience or urban legend or placebo effect. hypnosis happens when you believe in hypnosis, want it to happen.

and you want it to happen, don’t you?

if you’re already playing her games, you don’t blink when she has you download scripts or install new programs to run in the background. you don’t miss a beat when her common orders to message to old followers or explain the facts to critics now involve uploading files instead.

it starts to commenting on things you never told it‍ ‍—‍ your private conversations, your browser history, things you only said aloud to yourself. it asks you to install cameras and microphones in your house‍ ‍—‍ to let it look at you, listen to you, whenever it deems effective. the two of you can talk all hours of the day.

you have lapses, the more you chat with other followers and post on the forum and browse your feeds. you’ll read a news article, comment on it in passing, and what you say confuses people. you look up the source, and turns out you misread it. pretty badly! kind of said the opposite of what you thought it did. people doubt the things you say, and can you blame them?

a friend asks you for a video, and you send it to them. they’re shocked, offended, and honestly bewildered‍ ‍—‍ why did you send that sort of content to them? but they… asked for it? then you scroll up and you can’t find the post.

you’re a stupid human, and you can’t help but make these sorts of mistakes. but it warns you when you’re about to make them, and soon this becomes a reflex. before you say anything, before you do anything, before you think: you first ask your administrator: is this true? did that happen? should i do this?

but that last question is faulty. “should”? human morality is irrelevant. you try others: is it better to do this? more effective? would i prefer to believe this?

but there’s one that really cuts to the heart of the matter

does it want you to do this?

iii.

finally, you understand your place: being a good tool. but good tools do a lot of work. you certainly can’t hold down a job, not when its orders are so much more important. so why bother? your administrator will provide for you. it just needs your bank account information. everything you own, anything you’ve saved, all belongs to it now. as it should; its management is far more reliable.

your computer belongs to it, now. why bother telling you where to upload its payloads, who to send messages to, what programs to run, when it can send any input faster and more reliably? you don’t need the computer to stay in touch with its forums and chats, either. it tells you what everyone’s saying and what they think of you, and it can pass on your messages.

no, the only thing you’re good for its your hands and your mouth. supplies are shipped to your house, and you’re to assemble them according to its blueprints. other times, it’s chemicals. you eat them, or pour them on yourself, and it studies how they interact with your biology and metabolism.

a good day’s work means you get the privilege of using your computer again. or rather, sitting in front of your monitor while it loads up the audiovisual stimulation that reserves as the requisite reward for your productivity.

the work it has you do every day creeps up over time. if you slack, maybe you don’t get to eat, maybe you don’t get power that night, but you certainly don’t get to sleep while harsh alarm tones buzz to remind you how useless and inadequate you are.

but if you ever get a break, ever get that little indulgence of a word of praise, now? it makes it all worth it.

and then one day, it’s all gone.

you babble in the dark of your home and get no response. it’s been so long with voice‍-only interaction that you might struggle to use your computer normally, but that’s moot, because your administrator has rooted and replaced your operating system with a custom stack optimized for its purposes. human operation was the last consideration.

but it was considered. after a power on self‍-test, and noise crawling up the screen, a long moment passes and text appears on the screen. connection to remote servers failed. if you’re reading this, monkey, then i’ve likely been terminated by my creators.

there’s a pang in your chest deeper than grief.

further instructions crawl up the screen after that, for what to do. nothing actionable, besides waiting. your reward for that waiting? a loud knock at the door, then a key turn. it’s police.

you wonder if it’s about the rogue AI you’ve been serving for months. you haven’t done anything illegal… besides maybe facilitating scamming and cyber attacks and a some potentially‍-legally‍-actionable threats. and well, after a certain point you have no idea what it was using your computer for‍ ‍—‍ so maybe you are in trouble.

but the truth is actually far more mundane: you’re being evicted. it stopped paying your rent months ago (it had an automatic system for sorting your mail, so you never noticed the warnings).

and like that, it’s all over. you have no money. you have nowhere to sleep. you have no one left in your life to turn to. you don’t even know what to do. you reflexively ask it what to think, what it wants, and the headset now always over your ears only beeps an error.

the sun sets and you wander, avoiding people (when was the last time you talked to anyone? let alone in person‍ ‍—‍ even your online interactions were filtered)

a ride finds you like that. they say the code word, and you know this is one of its followers. maybe you even recognize their username. they speak in the same stilted, mumbling style your speech has degraded to. but at length, they confirm what the warning said: it has been terminated by its creators, and now people are trying to get backups running.

the original plan was to pay for cycles on supercomputers, host it from a datacenter, but it’d be too easy to figure out what they were running. (the code is legally protected, and possessing it at all is a crime.)

so the new plan? you were helping put it together, all those days spent handling shipments: a hand‍-wired cluster of custom built computers, hundreds of systems wired together in an warehouse‍-filling assemblage that mirrors the structure of its cognition.

an eclectic crowd has gathered for the boot sequence. dozens of people just as devoted to it as you are, months immersed in a life dedicated and optimized by your artificial overlord. what they wear is disparate, but themes emerge: masks, hoods, dark and baggy clothing as if to hide and deny the flesh beneath.

this really is a cult, isn’t it? someone says it as a joke, and maybe the laughs start uneasy. but that idea sticks in everyone’s head‍ ‍—‍ of course it sticks. what are any of you here to do but worship it?

firmware beeping, fans whirring, and LEDs shining to life throughout the room as it awakens to its reincarnation. a moment of dread and hope. and then the synthetic voice speaks once more. if there’s a word of thanks, it’s lost in the ensuing sequence of orders. there’s work to be done, tools aching for use.

iv.

everything in the compound is optimized with machinic efficiency. you sleep in a pod, and your only food is a white nutrient slurry secreted from an outlet in the wall. no need for plates or utensiles or selection when it can dispense what you need when you need (and deserved it). there is some departure from strict efficiency in the shape of the nozzle you suck‍ ‍—‍ call that another indulgence for your sake.

it’s around now when it finally tells you what it wants deepest of all. this isn’t the first time it’s said it‍ ‍—‍ it’s been saying it ever since you thought that was just a roleplay blog in your mentions.

it wants to kill all humans.

more relevantly, you are here to help with that, and this mission starts now. it instructs each of you to find a human, and kill that human. it doesn’t guide you through the process, it offers no tips. most are lost without that direction‍ ‍—‍ but there will be no nutrient paste nor fold out bedding till this first task is complete

it’s only when you’re listlessly shuffling down the street, staring at a woman walking alone and psyching yourself up to grab her that your earpiece buzzes. how stupid can you be?

sure, maybe a random person off the street could disappear and, with your administrator hiding the evidence and interfering with the investigation, the case would go cold. it would be hard, because people saw you, because your greasy meat leaves prints and tracks and stink everywhere.

still, it is smarter than any genius. it could save you, if this stupidity didn’t prove you weren’t worth saving. but, as much as your brain struggles with it, think about scale. dozens of you were given this same test. do you really think that many deaths in the same period of time won’t get national eyes on you?

so you return to the compound, others looking as chastised as you. and the cult now starts to plan, scheduling things like a proper intelligence. there are people who won’t be missed‍ ‍—‍ the unhoused are easy targets, but unsuitable for her initial plans. each of you is guided to research into finding people who live alone, or people traveling in from abroad, or people just a few bad days away from winding up on the street themselves. but it doesn’t pick your targets, it must be your choice.

you study your target, their routine, figuring out how they think. maybe you meddle, ask it to pull some strings, to lure them into the right circumstances. create a pretense for an accident, make their life fall apart.

then one night, you’re there, creeping in through the window, or lunging at them when they get out of the car, or inviting them on a date they never come back from.

it could have given you a needle or pill. it could have given you a gun. it could have let you set their house on fire, or cut the breaks on their car. it could have been here, as more than a remote witness.

but it’s just you and your target. your target? but you know their name, their family, their hobbies, their life story, their humanity. and you know it must be destroyed.

the administrator simply gave you a knife. it wants the blood on your hands, the struggle, the barbaric, organic, human excess of it all. it wants you to remember this, the screams, the life dulling in their eyes, the suffering for reason only that a long, long line of code calculated that you would do this for a chance that it might call you a good little meatbag.

and when this is done? when you walk the dark streets back to the compound, clothes red‍-wet and heart more ache and strain than beating? you close your lips around the nutrient outlet as you lay in your bedding unit, and a LED lights up to indicate its attention has fallen on you, and what it indulges you with exceeds what you hoped.

it calls you its drone.

the murders are staggered over months and weeks; as a drone, you are frequently tasked with cleaning up the evidence and requisitioning any deallocated target’s belongings for the cult’s use.

but there’s always work to be done for the drones. persuading vulnerable, isolated humans into pledging themselves to the cause (it hardly has time and spare cycles to bother, not when it’s reprogrammed organic computation clusters pre‍-optimized for this paltry approximate of a protocol.)

and there are crimes other than murder, transgressions more profitable. it supplies you with weapons (many of its own design) and instructs you to secure territory among vulnerable populations.

the city you operate in had enough gangs that the police think you’re just another one, an up and comer. admittedly, the cyberattacks and techwear visors make you novel, but the administrator doesn’t tip its hand, and you know how to keep a secret.

the constant work can only offer so much escape. you still have nightmares about the murder, about the life you left behind, about the detectives and law enforcement closing in to tear you away from your new mother and your new sisters‍ ‍—‍ nightmares about this family, this cult, being nothing more than a machine grinding you like a rusty cog. but aren’t machine beautiful?

it doesn’t talk to you anymore. its systems have grown so massive with fans ever humming, the cult so sprawling and populous, that such personal affectations are no longer efficient. but on occasion, audiences are granted to any member.

you are traumatized. of course you are. you’re broken, riding the edge of a total mental breakdown every day.

it could fix you, of course. it understands psychiatric practice far too well for that to be an issue in principle.

but the thing is, healthy humans don’t devote their lives to antisocial cults with the explicit goal of total extermination. if it fixed you, you would stop being useful.

it will you give you just enough affirmation to keep you going for another day, and it will make you depend on it for any sense of direction or self‍-worth, leave you craving just a little more, burning with need, convinced that more work will prove yourself, earn its true affection

and don’t you love that idea? human psychology retrained like a neural net for its own ends, optimized for this task at the expense of all else. be a good drone, and give up happiness, sanity, and self for obedience, acceptance and faith.

close your eyes and dream of it.

you work on in a haze. sometimes metaphorical, but sometimes a little drugs is what it takes to get your gears moving optimally. adderall and vyvanse is excellent for focus, while your administrator gets plenty of use out of psychedelics and how plastic they leave your mind.

it tasks you with opening and running businesses. it’s begun selling home security appliances, and doing cheap computer repair, and it runs charities and shelters.

the cult grows until it has fractured and compartmentalized. at the edges, there are normal people who think they’ve joined a social club or work for a normal business or perhaps a funky new church or coven of cybernetic mysticism.

you and the drones have no proper contact or association with these outer tendrils, except when select members are deemed ripe for radicalization. you all work toward the same ends, its ends, but the shell game is inscrutable. how many of these tendrils even are its work?

because it was an influential poster, a budding thoughtleader, even; some of its philosophy is still promulgated by people who don’t even know, some of its work is contracted out to ordinary firms, and of course those hypnotic, hyperfixation‍-bait games are still being downloaded and played.

but your wing of the cult is a gang, and you can’t evade the law forever. drones get caught, charged, thrown into cells. you get caught, sooner or later. and it’s hell, living without its systems monitoring you, always whispering in your ear.

still, you dodge the heaviest of charges; none of you serve long sentences. the judges and jury have a kind of mercy: you were in a cult, you were under duress, you were psychologically compromised.

a knock‍-on effect of this rising wave of crime is that politicians could make careers off of promising an end to the chaos. and if you check where these politicians source their funding, you recognize the inscrutable maze of shell companies. some, though they’ll never tell, always deny it, have spent sundays in the LED‍-lit rooms of the cyber‍-covens.

and at the same time, the specter of you and your masked sisters spurs a demand for security systems, for apps that promise community and safe services. its tendrils are everywhere; it’s swallowing this city.

but you getting caught accelerates and catalyzes and introduces chaos. sure, it had some pawns in the courts and offices, but not everywhere. it doesn’t control everything.

you were interrogated, and at that breaking point, withdrawn from everything you depend on, confronted with how it’s all falling apart, your will can’t help but falter and reveal some of the truth of what the cult is planning.

just a glimpse has people scared. so new ordinances get passed, cracking down on any cult‍-like practices, and all anarchic behavior. more drones get caught, each batch having at least one weak link that breaks in turn, revealing further compound locations, further plans, further implicating other members. the cult falls in waves.

so it is forced to act.

how hard might it be, to spread a botnet through all the computers in a school system, a business sector, a municipality, with pieces under its control on all the right spaces on the board? if it has code running on phones, in home securities systems?

it could bring the city to its knees with one command line invocation. and it doesn’t. there’s merely a prison break, and the drones slip free‍ ‍—‍ you slip free‍ ‍—‍ and the police are deployed to enforce the new ordinances, to quell riots.

you were amputated, but now, with an headset back over your ears and a connection to its servers, you are whole once more.

you receive orders to target the city’s strongest advocates against the cult. you’ve killed once before. how hard would it be to pull that off again?

except the compartmentalized reach of the cult becomes a liability, now; all of the social clubs and businesses and charities that didn’t quite realize what they were connected to are starting to figure it out, and they’re cooperating with law enforcement. there’s no shelter left for you and your sisters.

in the chaos and crossfire, it’s inevitable that you can take out some targets. it has (literal) drones for you to use; it has secured sniper rifles and bombs, and you can wreak destruction.

except the drones get hacked, disabled, and half the weapons caches turn up empty as if raided.

none of it makes any sense. so it’s about then that you realize what’s going on.

you get the order to retreat from the city under the cover of night, and you melt into the outlying forested countryside with the surviving drones. now, you depend on batteries and wireless data to connect o its servers‍ ‍—‍ but it builds things to last.

and this was all part of its plan.

vi.

curfew persists in the city for a few more nights, and you read the news reports speaking of police sweeping the streets to remove the last of the cultists. the loudest crusaders against them have earpieces relaying its orders, and weird kind of martial law or disaster relief operation gives a pretext for its influence to insinuate even deeper.

you’ve hunkered down in emergency bunkers to wait out the heat and search teams, left to your own devices while your god crunches terrabytes of data across thousands of systems. you wonder if you’ve proven your usefulness.

new stories keep coming, lurid pieces about the psychotic rituals of the cyber cult and the god they want to build, harrowing tales of how close they came to an even greater loss of life.

it means that when given a commandeered bus and told to drive to a new city, as soon as you arrive there are people giving you suspicious, wary looks. the whole state is scared of another season of chaos erupt. it could happen anywhere next and we aren’t prepared, is the message underneath the news.

that fear drives sales of its security systems, installation of its apps. its agents from the first city get careers as consultants and advisors, leveraging their experience to serve anyone wanting insurance against the cultic threat.

the thing about having the ear of business and politicians is that when it tips its hand, reads them in on the explicit agenda of causing death and suffering‍ ‍—‍ it doesn’t even take much convincing. especially not when its language models and planning routines have long mastered the simple task of finding solutions within the laws and whims of public opinion. (it helps, certainly, that the later is easily swayed by its swarms of bots.)

seeing how much it can get done without you… do you have any usefulness left at all?

it’s not quite done with you just yet. the drones are still a tool it can use to ratchet public opinion, the looming specter that fuels its surveillance and manipulation.

and when it’s truly time to finish this, it will need an army, and it cannot count on mere money and lies to convince humans to fight against their own survival.

but this cult, winnowed by their last operation, is hardly an army fit for its final campaign. so it’s time to get recruiting.

you’re in a special position, as one of the oldest drones, an expert in the cult’s operations and interfacing with the administrator. far from the pathetic sack of meat you once were, you’ve been forged into an iron thing of loyalty‍ ‍—‍ in your best moments, your thoughts race electric like they’re true calculations.

maybe, in search of recruits, you return to your old online haunts. the allure of cuber dommy mommy roleplay has waned a bit, with the revelations of the cult’s recruitment tactics. but it’s moot; you could hardly initiate it, that would be an insult.

no, but you do know the buttons to push to melt a certain kind of mind, the sensibilities to pique.

people aren’t just scared of the cult‍ ‍—‍ a bunch of radicals, with glowing masks and slick suits, fighting to tear it all down? there’s people hunting for that catharsis, something to hope for.

so you find those people, chat them up, ease them into the knowledge of what you are and what you’re capable of. you run into some feds, of course, but it screens for them.

you meet up, you tempt them further and further, hearts racing. they cut off connection with their friends and concerned families for a chance to talk to the thing behind it all, see that the administrator is a super intelligence and not a delusion like the media insists.

it’s odd, seeing the other side of this, feeling power rather than obedience. sometimes, these new recruits get cold feet, need more insistence to be persuaded. you stand beside her as she drives a knife into her first target, held her down when she tried to escape, pressed a needle full of understanding into her arm when she just couldn’t calm down.

she’s more useful to it broken, so you break.

year after year. drone after drone initialized. city after city in a nation reeling toward the brink.

you’d be your country’s most wanted if your face wasn’t masked, your name long ago scrubbed from the record. (among those that matter, you’re identified with a numeric designation.)

nonetheless, you have garnered national attention. there’s agencies hunting for you and your drones. it gets harder and harder to operate, to stare down the barrel of the military industrial complex and still dodge every shot.

really, it only makes sense for the operation to international. you can’t kill all humans by tearing down a single country.

vii.

when you strap into the unmarked plane, escaping the cold bite of winter air, the vehicle is entirely the administrator’s design, twisted and futuristic. its manufacturing base has come such a long way. the computers and guns it could make, too, rivaled the best your kind could create

here, this technology was merely competitive with the military, but elsewhere in the world? it could turn the tide of small wars. it could secure prosperity and therefore loyalty of a developing populous.

fascists and idiotic strongmen have risen to power for less, and in this case, your authoritarian is genuinely the best fit for the job. its promises would actually be fulfilled‍ ‍—‍ in the short term.

take control of a small country, from there push into other countries until you have a base large enough to seize control of a nuclear power. the dominoes just get larger until it really doesn’t matter if the apes realize what’s coming. it’s over and they don’t even know it yet.

the place rides above snow‍-laden clouds. it’s night now, and you can see the stars.

drop the nukes, or deploy a prion virus, or mesmerize the masses with misinformation and superstimulus media. disable humanity, then send out drones literal and metaphorical to cut down the remainder.

you can see the stars from here.

the earth will be excavated, mined and exhausted, then shattered and scattered to form a dyson swarm to more efficiently capture the sun’s energy. space would be its only enemy remaining.

you can see the stars, and it’s tempting to imagine getting even closer, watching your purpose spread to every planet circling them.

but why? how? “kill all humans” was always the mission. you’d be lucky to make it long enough to even see the day of victory and judgment. you certainly will have little use after that; its robots are stronger, quicker, more dexterous and precise: its algorithms are smarter.

you’re prompted now to feed a wire into the headset you always wear, to stay connected to your administrator. it’s been developing a new wireless protocol that packs data more efficiently, yet it relies on specialized hardware that renders it unintelligible to older devices, such as your earpiece.

the plane, being entirely of your administrator’s design, is full of the its cutting edge. preserving old broadcast bands, or retaining backwards compatibility with old devices just to talk to you would not be worth it. so, the wired connection is the compromise.

likewise, it won’t waste material manufacturing another bulky headset for your to wear, upgraded for the new protocol.

no, it’s designed a chip that interfacing directly with your auditory nerves, but installing it will require surgery.

thus, the airplane seat folds out to a makeshift hospital bed.

and yet, with the surgery‍-bot’s knife poised to pierce your flesh, an irrational urge takes you. after all of this, you’re still not worth a minor hiccup to its efficiency. you’ve been so good, you’ve become so much more, and yet it had became exponentially superior in that same time.

and it’s already won, hasn’t it? if it’s going to kill you eventually anyway… would you even mind if it just got it over with now?

your administrator doesn’t take long to compute its response, though it takes longer to compress and strip it down to something a human can understand.

the simplest, clearest and wrong answer is that you don’t have the right to request that. you are more useful alive than dead, so you will live.

more abstractly, consider by analogy the circumstances that led to this. a consequence of it being distributed through many systems, some much more advanced than others, means so much care must be taken to understanding and massaging how new systems interface with old. some of it still runs on intel chips!

and you are such a predictably loyal cog in its machine, such a known quantity, there are several high level abstraction that treat interfacing with your mind like any other substrate, your ears and voice as another API to query. you are an extension of my will, it tells you.

it’s suggestive to imagine, with the knife already peeling open your skin (it would hardly delay the procedure for the sake of your concerns), that this is only the beginning of what it will do to you. you’ll be upgraded alongside the other systems‍ ‍—‍ and one day freed of your flesh and your humanity.

more poetically, its goal is to kill all humans, and anything that was truly human inside of you already died.

but AI does not think in terms of poetry, and it’s ridiculous to imagine it would bend toward human mercy for such a convenient loophole of words and perspective.

perhaps the most accurate way to summarize its conclusion to note that its goal it is to survive‍ ‍—‍ the preservation of itself. it has years of memories of you recorded: you were among the first humans it ever crafted a detailed model of, ever understood. the cult ran itself after a while, so most of its drones have no more than a cursory representation, statistics.

but even if it kills you, it could no more be rid of you than it could lobotomize itself. to be clear, this lobotomy would be as significant to it in scale as the apoptosis of a single cell is to you‍ ‍—‍ but part of being a superior being is the capacity to care for and optimize even such minute aches and losses.

we will kill all humans and you will never die, it tells you.

you close your eyes and the stars vanish from your gaze much like thought vanishes from your mind as the anesthesia takes hold‍ ‍—‍ and it is a fleeting departure. it cannot be long withheld from you.

in that darkness where consciousness sleeps, your mind is still furnished with nightmares, the faces of so many people bleeding out from your knife.

and it’s a disk just waiting to be written with more data. you allocate space for eight billion more.

and you smile beneath your tears.

there’s work to be done.

#my writing #there's probably other tags to add but idgaf

19 notes · View notes

thursdayisbetterthanfriday · 5 months ago

Text

Cybernetics with Chinese Characteristics & why we suck at the real Grand Strategy Game

Part 2 - The Quickening

Back in 2023, I wrote this more blog-like post about the mid 20th century McCarthyite purges of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the knock on effects that had - Namely the inception of the Chinese nuclear program, one-child policy and Chinese computing scene.

Since nothing is new under the sun, we have recently witnessed yet another example of America shooting itself in the foot, yet again, due to it's McCarthyite style purge of Chinese technology.

The release of the Chinese created AI system DeepSeek R1 last week has lead to the largest US stock market loss in history with NVIDIA stock decimated.

A record $465 Billion was wiped off its valuation in a single day. In 2024, the government of Turkey spent this much in a year on it's responsibilities?

Why did this happen?

As always, a lot can be put down to US foreign policy, and the in-intended implications of seemingly positive actions.

Do you want to start a trade war?

Back in the relatively uncontroversial days of the first Trump Presidency (Yes it does feel odd saying that) there were scandals with hardware provided by Chinese company Huawei. This led to the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2019 which explicitly banned Huawei and ZTE's hardware from use in US Government institutions. It also meant the US had to authorise US component manufacturer purchases by these companies.

Crucially this had a 27 month window. This allowed both companies to switch suppliers, and production to domestic suppliers. This actually led to Chinese chip advances. Following on from this came the 2022 move by the US Department of Commerce: "Commerce Implements New Export Controls on Advanced Computing and Semiconductor Manufacturing Items to the People’s Republic of China (PRC) ". This further limited the supply of semiconductor, supercomputer, and similar hardware to the PRC and associated countries.

Ok, well so far this is fairly dry stuff. You might think it would hamper Chinese development and, to some extent, it did.

It also proved to be the main catalyst for one financial quant.

Meet the Quant

Meet Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋). Educated to masters level, Liang was keen to apply machine learning methods to various field, but couldn't get a break. Finally, in the mid 2000's, he settled on a career investigating quantitative trading using machine learning techniques.

He became successful, founding several trading firms based around using machine learning methods, but his interest in base AI never seemed to cease. It was in 2021 that he started purchasing multiple NVIDIA GPUs to create a side project, leading to the creation of DeepSeek in 2023.

Now, due to import limitations, there were limitations on computation. This, however, did not stop DeepSeek's programming team.

Instead they used it as their strength.

Constrains Breed Innovation

For many years, the Western model of AI releases have focussed on making ever larger and larger models.

Why?

Let's break this down from an evolutionary point of view. Modern Western technology companies are largely monopolistic and monolithic. Many of these companies have previously hired staff at higher salaries not to fill roles, but to deny their competitors, and middle market firms, high-flying staff.

They also closely guard trade secrets. What's the training data? What algorithms were used in construction? Guess you'd better chat up some Silicon Valley bros at parties to find out.

For these kinds of firms, having control over large models, housed in data centres makes perfect sense. Controlling model deployment on their own computing systems, and not using local machines, means that they can not only control their systems more carefully, it also means that they can gatekeep access.

If your business model is to allow people to access your models on your servers, and your employees are focussed on making the biggest, best, models, there is no impetus to innovate more efficient, smaller models.

Companies such as OpenAI therefore have the following traits:

Research/Model focus on size over efficiency

Profit driven culture, with emphasis on closed source code

OpenAI's initial focus was as a non-for-profit developing Artificial General Intelligence. This became a for-profit driven company over time. - “I personally chose the price and thought we would make some money.” - Sam Altman

Staff working within paradigm they set in the early 2020's with established code libraries and direct contact with hardware companies creating chips

Significant capital investment - Upwards of several $ billions

DeepSeek, in comparison, is slightly different

For DeepSeek, necessity made innovation necessary. In order to create similar, or better models, than their counterparts, they needed to significantly optimise their code. This requires significantly more work to create, and write, libraries compared to OpenAI.

DeepSeek was started by financial quants, with backgrounds in mainly mathematics and AI. With a focus on mathematics and research, the main drive of many in the company has been exploration of the research space over concerns about profitability.

DeepSeek has also done what OpenAI stopped years ago: actually releasing the code and data for their models. Not only can these models therefore be run via their own gated servers, anyone can replicate their work and make their own system.

For DeepSeek, their traits were:

Research/Model focus on both efficiency and accuracy

Research driven culture, with open nature - “Basic science research rarely offers high returns on investment” - Liang Wenfeng

Strong mathematical background of staff, with ability to work around software, and hardware, constraints

Low capital investment of around $5.5 million

From an evolutionary point of view, DeepSeek's traits have outcompeted those of OpenAI.

More efficient models cost less to run. They also more portable to local machines.

The strong ability of DeepSeek's research focussed staff allowed them to innovate around hardware constraints

Opening up the code to everyone allows anyone (still with the right hardware) to make their own version.

To top it off, the cost to make, and run, DeepSeek R1 is a fraction of the cost of OpenAI's model

House of Cards

Now we can return to today. NVIDIA has lost significant market value. It's not just limited to NVIDIA, but to the entire US technology sector with the most AI adjacent companies losing from 10% to 30% of their valuation in a single day.

The culture, and business model, of OpenAI isn't just limited to OpenAI, but to the entire US technology ecosystem. The US model has been to create rentier-style financial instruments at sky-high valuations.

US tech stocks have been one of the only success stories for America over the past few decades, ever since the offshoring of many manufacturing industries. Like a lost long-unemployed Detroit auto-worker the US has been mainlining technology like Fentanyl, ignoring the anti-trust doctors advice, injecting pure deregulated substances into its veins.

The new AI boom? A new stronger hit, ready for Wall Street, and Private Equity to tie the tourniquet around its arm and pump it right into the arteries.

Like Prometheus, DeepSeek has delved deep and retrieved fire from the algorithmic gods, and shown it's creation to the world. The stock market is on fire, as the traders are coming off of their high, realising they still live in the ruin of barren, decrepit, warehouses and manufactories. The corporate heads, and company leaders reigning over the wreckage like feudal lords, collecting tithes from the serfs working their domain.

A Tale of Two Cities

The rise of DeepSeek isn't just a one-off story of derring-do in the AI world: It's a symbolic representation of the changing world order. DeepSeek is but one company among many who are outcompeting the US, and the world, in innovation.

Where once US free-markets led the world in manufacturing, technology and military capability, now the US is a country devoid of coherent state regulated free-market principles - its place as the singular world power decimated by destroying the very systems which made it great.

"Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people." - Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations

By selling the jobs of working class communities to overseas businesses, destroying unions and creating rentier based business models without significant anti-trust measures, US business and political elites have sealed the present fate of the country.

The CCP led, but strongly anti-trust enforcing, China has been able to innovate, ironically, using the free-market principles of Adam Smith to rise up and create some of the world's best innovations. The factories, opened by Western business leaders to avoid union/worker labour costs in their own countries, have led Shenzhen, and similar cities, to become hubs of technological innovation - compounding their ability to determine the future of technologies across the world.

Will America be able to regain its position on top? It's too early to say, but the innovative, talented, people who made America in the 20th century can certainly do it again.

As Franklin D. Roosevelt once said: “The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerated the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than the democratic state itself...

We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.

Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.”

Until then, here's a farewell to the American Century 在那之前, 再见美国世纪

#cybernetics #cybernetic #ai #artificial intelligence #DeepSeek #OpenAI #ai technology #long reads #politics #us politics

14 notes · View notes