Constructive pessimism beats false hope

Do you feel like the state of the world is bad, is nearly certain to get worse, and that there’s virtually nothing you can do to change any of it? If you answered yes to all three questions, I think you have a more realistic understanding of our circumstances than many people.

But that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook! Research described in this article shows that those of us with a pessimistic outlook are more likely to act to improve our circumstances than naive optimists—as long as that pessimism inspires action.

This article focuses on attitudes toward climate change, and back in December I shared it with many of my friends who share my concerns about our warming planet. However, the argument is also relevant in other contexts—such as the political environment—so it’s worth reading again.

The Upside of Climate Pessimism

“Technology is the active human interface with the material world”

This quote comes from a essay from my favorite sci-fi author, Ursula K. Le Guin. It challenges nerds (like me) to remember that “technology” doesn’t mean “high tech stuff.” It’s a quick read and worth your time.

A Rant About “Technology”

What is an “open source” machine learning model?

I loved this Mastodon post from Timnit Gebru so I’ll just reproduce it right here:

Friends, for something to be open source, we need to see

1. The data it was trained and evaluated on

2. The code

3. The model architecture

4. The model weights.

DeepSeek only gives 3, 4. And I’ll see the day that anyone gives us #1 without being forced to do so, because all of them are stealing data.

I made a similar point in the “terms” I wrote for anyone who wants to scrape my site to train a model¹. If you can’t reproduce a digital artifact using the “sources” provided, then it’s not “open source”, and machine learning models (including large language models like DeepSeek) can’t be reproduced without the data that trained them.

Link to Gebru’s original post