memfree @ memfree @beehaw.org

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2 yr. ago

Holy moly, that is a good essay. Below are a few bits that resonated with me.

Martin Luther King Jr. understood this: “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.” Peace without justice isn’t peace—it’s imposed order. It’s the peace of the graveyard, the peace of submission, the peace that comes when one side stops fighting because they’ve been crushed.

That made me cringe thinking of the current state of the Supreme Court and how they are making true Justice harder to reach.

The problem isn’t efficiency itself—it’s optimization imposed by algorithmic systems or corporate interests without democratic input about what human values should guide that optimization. When we optimize transportation, do we prioritize speed, safety, environmental impact, or community connection? When we optimize education, do we focus on test scores, critical thinking, creativity, or civic engagement? When we optimize healthcare, do we emphasize cost reduction, patient outcomes, doctor-patient relationships, or population health?

These aren’t technical questions with objectively correct answers—they’re moral and political questions that require democratic deliberation. The current system optimizes for metrics that can be easily measured and monetized, often at the expense of human values that are harder to quantify but more important to preserve.

This called to mind the same author's essay from 2 days earlier (Brock, Ideas Without Love) about Peter Thiel:

What makes this particularly dangerous is that Thiel possesses genuine intelligence and insight. He’s not ignorant or deluded. He correctly identifies patterns of decline, understands technological risks, predicts political dynamics. But he approaches all of it with the emotional engagement of someone debugging code rather than someone whose species’ survival depends on getting the answers right.

Back to this post, two more insights I appreciate:

Poverty, for instance, is not meaningful struggle—it’s systematic deprivation that prevents people from engaging in the kinds of challenges that actually generate growth and purpose.

The choice to remain human is not a single decision but a daily practice requiring constant vigilance and continuous effort. It begins with the recognition that magical thinking serves not our interests but the interests of systems designed to eliminate human agency.

All this reminds me of the critique on U.S. society that we are no longer "joiners" and now put artificial barriers between ourselves and our neighbors. We don't join the Elks Club or attend Township meetings or have block-party get-togethers where it doesn't matter if it is a mix of Trumpers and Biden-backers, or vegans and beefeaters because everyone is there to get the road fixed or raise money for the library or whatever the cause of the day might be. I am guilty of this failure, too. I am fully aware that online chat is siloed and doesn't count, so I really need to join something. I just wish my body wasn't giving me mobility issues that make the task so hard.

That sounds as likely as any other crazy uninformed reason the Trump team might have.

I do recommend watching those and other government pages because I'm sure this is not the end of the weird edits.

These attacks do not have to be reliable to be successful. They only need to work often enough to be cost-effective, and the cost of LLM text generation is cheap and falling. Their sophistication will rise. Link-spam will be augmented by personal posts, images, video, and more subtle, influencer-style recommendations—“Oh my god, you guys, this new electro plug is incredible.” Networks of bots will positively interact with one another, throwing up chaff for moderators. I would not at all be surprised for LLM spambots to contest moderation decisions via email.

I don’t know how to run a community forum in this future. I do not have the time or emotional energy to screen out regular attacks by Large Language Models, with the knowledge that making the wrong decision costs a real human being their connection to a niche community.

Ouch. I'd never want to tell someone 'Denied. I think you're a bot.' -- but I really hate the number of bots already out there. I was fine with the occasional bots that would provide a wiki-link and even the ones who would reply to movie quotes with their own quotes. Those were obvious and you could easily opt to ignore/hide their accounts. As the article states, the particular bot here was also easy to spot once they got in the door, but the initial contact could easily have been human and we can expect bots to continuously seem human as AI improves.

Bots are already driving policy decisions in government by promoting/demoting particular posts and writing their own comments that can redirect conversations. They make it look like there is broad consensus for the views they're paid to promote, and at least some people will take that as a sign that the view is a valid option (ad populum).

Sometimes it feels like the internet is a crowd of bots all shouting at one another and stifling the humans trying to get a word in. The tricky part is that I WANT actual unpaid humans to tell me what they actually: like/hate/do/avoid. I WANT to hear actual stories from real humans. I don't want to find out the 'Am I the A-hole?' story getting everyone so worked up was an 'AI-hole' experiment in manipulating emotions.

I wish I could offer some means to successfully determine human vs. generated content, but the only solutions I've come up with require revealing real-world identities to sites, and that feels as awful as having bots. Otherwise, I imagine that identifying bots will be an ever escalating war akin to Search Engine Optimization wars.

From the article:

The Supreme Court ruled last week that Trump can continue to break the law — both US and international law — by having his secret police agents snatch people off American streets, “disappear” them into immigration prisons, then deport them to foreign concentration camps.

Lacking national injunctions, this cruel and inhumane process can now only be stopped one person at a time, one court at a time, at least until the six Republicans on the Court get around to deciding a person’s fate. And they’re now on vacation until October.

As Himmler himself wrote:

“The Führer is of the opinion that in such cases penal servitude or even a hard labor sentence for life will be regarded as a sign of weakness. An effective and lasting deterrent can be achieved only by the death penalty or by taking measures which will leave the family and the population uncertain as to the fate of the offender. Deportation … serves this purpose.”

Field Marshall Keitel was equally enthusiastic, writing:

“Efficient and enduring intimidation can only be achieved either by capital punishment or by measures by which the relatives of the criminals do not know the fate of the criminal. The prisoners are, in future, to be transported … secretly, and further treatment of the offenders will take place here; these measures will have a deterrent effect because: A. The prisoners will vanish without a trace. B. No information may be given as to their whereabouts or their fate.”

Reports from civil rights groups and journalists have documented instances where individuals were taken off the streets or from their homes without warning, transferred out of state, and left incommunicado from legal counsel or family for extended periods. These actions were not isolated errors: they are deliberate strategies aimed at instilling fear across immigrant communities, particularly those made up of Black and brown people.

What makes this moment even more alarming is the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that strips lower courts of the authority to halt deportations or removals, no matter how unlawful or abusive. With judicial oversight diminished, there is a clear and present danger that enforcement powers could be used arbitrarily and punitively.

The use of fear — rather than law — as a governing principle corrodes the foundation of due process and equal protection under the Constitution. Nonetheless, Border Czar Tom Holman bragged:

“Illegal immigrants should be afraid.”

It ends with a call to contact your Senators and Representatives -- and obviously to vote for people who are against all this. The more courageous might also choose film and report any activity that looks ICE-like, but there are heavy risks to that and the article did not suggest it. Instead, they more obliquely suggest:

Support organizations on the ground providing legal aid and sanctuary. Show up at protests, city council meetings, and community gatherings to bear witness and push back.

I heard several sound bites with officials saying, 'No one could have predicted this' and I keep thinking, "I betcha some groundwater geological engineer already predicted this exact disaster complete with amount of rain needed per each foot-level of river rise and with a precise measure of their margins of error." I do NOT know that for a fact, but -- having known geological engineers -- it feels like the sort of thing they'd calculate out of idle curiosity (especially if they notice new development diverting groundwater in unmitigated ways).

I see a muscovy mama's wing. Are they all hers or do other girls lay eggs in her nest? Lots of different colors in that set.

ptarmigan

Link is part of a live feed. Here's more:

DHS claims Padilla 'lunged' toward Noem 'without identifying himself' – despite footage showing he identified himself

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, has claimed the senator Alex Padilla “lunged” toward Kristi Noem during the press conference “without identifying himself” despite being told to back away.

She also claims that the Secret Service “thought he was an attacker”.

In the video footage of the moment, Padilla can be heard clearly identifying himself, saying: “I’m Senator Alex Padilla” and trying to ask Noem a question.

Not only did he identify himself, I didn't see anything I'd call a 'lunge'. Here's more:

Asked why the response was to forcibly remove Padilla, Noem deferred questions to law enforcement and doubled down on the claim that Padilla didn’t identify himself first (again, he did):

• "But I will say that it’s – people need to identify themselves before they start lunging at people during press conferences."

MSNBC reminds us of Biden's State of the Union when Bobert and Marjorie Taylor Greene started acting up and yelling and no one threw them out. Commentor wants to know why Noem didn't call off the guards as soon as he identified himself.

Deep in the entrails of the framework, the databases have been glitching: incorrectly issuing penalties and wrongly moving recipients into the Kafkaesque “penalty zone”. The bug was falsely cancelling welfare benefits to thousands of recipients across many years.

That's a really critical bug. QA is supposed to catch this sort of thing. Development is supposed to fix it, and fast. When the client is a government, it should have the foresight to put in the contract that it will withhold payments until such critical bugs are fixed. If you don't do that, why would the vendor bother with QA and bug fixes?

And all of that is aside the fact that the whole thing results in busy work, hoop-jumping, and wasting time for both the people administrating it and those trying to get benefits. Sheesh.

i don't know if they'll be any good, but I'm planning to see the start of Revival on Syfy and Patience on PBS. I'll also watch my mom's show, Resident Alien for its new season.

Yours is a perfect and concise expression of my main complaints.

Well, my favorite has been DiBruno's Sicilian Pepperoni, -- but they were recently bought up by some corporation so we'll see how it goes.

Gallo Salami brand pepperoni

I haven't seen Gallo , so I looked it up and it seems they're branded "Galileo" on my side of the country. I'll give them a try!

Hrm. I was one of those viewers. I didn't think it was awful, but it wasn't so strong that I'd recommend it, either.

Lobster Newburg

Hey! Today is "NATIONAL LOBSTER NEWBURG DAY - March 25"

I've made 'seafood' newburg dishes at home at least twice in the last few years (crab and shrimp). I think I like using Harveys Bristol Cream Sherry more than Cognac and serving it on rice is easier than any pastry/bread-y thing. The above has a link to a standard recipe on All Recipes, but I'll put it in the below list, to show how the other two vary.

• https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/57042/lobster-newburg/
• https://www.readersdigest.ca/food/recipes/lobster-newburg/
• https://www.saveur.com/article/recipes/seafood-newburg/

From Steam founder Gabe Newell, 2011:

We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy," Newell said. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable.

The same can be said of movies/tv -- except Steam saw the issue before EA and everyone made their own streaming stores, whereas all the video distributors have splintered into their own services.

I'm not sure where/why Hulu failed to gain the sort of share Steam attained. It existed early on and had ... at least 3 big networks (iirc, not cbs? but abc, nbc and fox -- then nbc dropped out to just do peacock, I think). Perhaps hulu didn't pay enough for rights or perhaps Apple, Netflix and Amazon represented too many other players to make the equivalent arguments as Steam made.

I got around to finishing Interior Chinatown (hulu) and was disappointed. I don't want to spoil it for others, but I think I can safely complain that it wrapped things up in an unsatisfying manner.

I always watch 'Elsbeth' because my mother watches it.

I stumbled onto The CW's 'Good Cop/Bad Cop' last week and watched all the current episodes this week because it seems exactly like the thing my mom will enjoy: a mix somewhere between the setting and townie bonding of 'Resident Alien' (with no Alien or other-worldly aspects) and the silly sleuthing of 'Elsbeth' (without the expensive sets and celebrities).

Ah, you mean Matthew Graham stuff rather than David Bowie.

I was looking for something new to watch, but could not stomach Suits LA.