Shit like this is why I made https://nopilot.xyz and added it to my e-mail signature.

If you value other people's writing and creative labor, please please don't open it in MS Word.

https://mstdn.ca/@ned/113477469187444731

Hot take: AI as a category of technology should be understood as an advancement in the spam side of the eternal arms race that is the Internet. AI makes it easy and relatively affordable to custom-generate your own junk email or social media posts that are plausible enough to fool most filters and make it in front of human eyeballs.

From that perspective, AI should be valued to the precise degree we value any other tools that seedy marketers use to flood our inboxes.

As a side note, politics gets a lot more critical and harder to ignore when you realize it ultimately comes down to disagreements over who gets to survive, over what timelines, and under what conditions.

Like, it's hard to avoid concluding that this is the median voter's view of the world. Endless AI spam about how awesome Musk is, not even out of any kind of conservative or fascist agenda that can be meaningfully opposed, but sheer get-rich-quick con artistry scalping off the margins.

And yet this has immense political implications, and by extension, implications for who gets to survive the next ten years and how.

God *damn* this is bleak.

https://www.404media.co/absurd-ai-slop-about-how-elon-musk-will-fix-america-is-megaviral-on-facebook/

@aud girl who owns a normal amount of:

- soldering irons
- c-clamps
- ikea skadises
- lockpick sets
- exhaust fans and/or air scrubbing systems
- towels
- 99% ipa
- unmodified NESes
- garlic peelers
- extension cords
- paperclips
- domain names
- senators
- modded NESes
- movies from the Criterion Collection
- camping spoons

@noracodes Also important: knowing that driving cars causes pedestrian deaths and exacerbates climate change. A level of literary with cars has massive socioeconomic implications.

Ditto with tech.

@aud Well, that's worrisome timing.

@aud I know, right? I'm so shocked, I'm desperately trying to find my fainting couch so that I can dramatically collapse!

Of course Sam Altman is tripping over himself to kiss the ring and congratulate a fascist.

@aud @lpwaterhouse Perhaps a practical takeaway, but have fallback networks. Matrix has a lot of problems (cop shit being one of them), but can make a decent failsafe should Signal go the worst way.

@aud Also spicy: planning on or helping with getting an abortion.

Also spicy: DIY HRT.

Also spicy: who the fuck knows what's about to become spicy, so it's awesome to have defenses set up well in advance.

I just want to go to each one of those sixty-three million people and ask them why they hate me so fucking much. I want every one of them to look me in the eyes and tell me how much they hate me.

I hate that they can do this from a place of comfort, not even seeing who they're doing it to.

@cthos They announced the Switch 2. In a tweet. About an hour ago.

Nintendo dropped the news *now*? Really? That's worse than a fucking Friday night news dump!

@aud @blogdiva Did something new happen? Oh fuck...

@aud @glyph Yeah, gods this. My rational brain has been so catastrophically wrong on this before back in 2016 — there's no way that someone who brags about sexually assaulting women *on tape* could get so much of the vote, right?

My lizard brain is once burnt forever shy at this point.

@glyph Yeah, exactly. It should never have been uncertain at *all*. We shouldn't have to wonder if we'll have a democracy left to live in two months from now.

I hate this so fucking much.

@glyph Right, and even within each state, Republicans have successfully gotten a lot of changes made that force blue-leaning blocks to be counted after red-leaning blocks, so that red mirage is definitely engineered.

Plus side, the states that haven't been called yet and that are leaning towards or likely to go to him aren't enough to cross the 93 more votes he needs.

It only takes one or two awful surprises for this to go the wrong way, so I'm biting my nails and having a second drink, but this *might* work out OK?