Home of an early netsettler, Kent Pitman, resident of the net since 1977.
A “useful genius” Wiktionary says “useful idiot” is a derogatory term meaning “one who unwittingly supports a malignant cause through naive attempts to be a force for good.” I find the “derogatory” part to be a distraction. They're not wrong that people see it that way, but the part of this that I care about would be equally true if the term was…
In a LinkedIn post recently, Ethan Mollick wrote, the following statement. And he's not the only one to have said things like this. «I don’t think it is good for anybody that there is an emerging "anti-AI" group that is actually a coalition of many groups with different worries (jobs, kids using AI, slop, existential risk, the environment, industry concentration). Because of the diverse…
Recent “AI” hype Since the introduction of the Large Language Model (LLM) , the pace of new tools and technologies has been breathtaking. Those who are not producing such tech are scrambling to figure out how to use it. Literally every day there's something new. Against this backdrop, Google has recently announced a technology it calls AlphaEvolve , which it summarizes as “a…
An article at countercurrents.org said this recently: «A new study has warned that if global temperatures rise more than 1.5°C, significant crop diversity could be lost in many regions» — Global Warming and Food Security: The Impact on Crop Diversity Are we not sufficiently at the 1.5°C mark that this dance in reporting is ludicrous? I'm starting to perceive the weather/climate…
Inextricably Intertwined Traditionally, business and politics have been separable in LinkedIn , but their overlap since November is far too substantive and immediate for that fiction to be further entertained. And yet there are people on LinkedIn who still loudly complain that they come there to discuss business and are offended to see political discussion, as if it were mere distraction. I don't…
We are surrounded by too much helpful AI trying to insinuate itself into our lives. I would like the option of leaving “AI” tech turned off and invisible, though that's getting harder and harder. I've drafted a draft version 1 of a bill of rights for humans who want the option to stay in control. Text in green is not part of the proposal. It is instead rationale or other metadata. AI…
A story recently by Rebecca Beitsch in The Hill quotes Attorney General Pam Bondi saying something about the García deportation case that has me particularly furious. I want to take a few moments here to detail the reasons for my ire. «Attorney General Pam Bondi said the Trump administration failed to take “one extra step of paperwork” before it mistakenly deported a…
“First They Came” | ”Als sie kamen” by Martin Niemöller There's been a lot of erosion of US democracy lately. The latest is the case of Kilmar Abrego García's deportation . It should matter to everyone because of the specific precedent it sets . But it's part of a general trend for how many precedents are being set. The order in which things are happening is not…
I often hear people say that Social Security should be eliminated, that we'd do better with our own 401K's. There are a lot of problems with that argument. The argument is that people could invest their money better. Maybe. But they can also invest their money worse. So it's a very uneven policy. And that is ultimately cruel. It makes gamblers of us all, and experience shows that gamblers are…
Be wary of the statement “Government needs to be run like a business.” It should not. It's meant to sound unobjectionable, but is a radical shift away from anything familiar. Centralized Control The Constitution is designed around the notion of decentralizing control. It's inefficient, as people often notice, but that's by design. Inefficiency is protection from tyrants. It makes…
In case you've been off the grid for a few days and somehow missed it, everyone is reeling over these remarks by Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick : “Let’s say Social Security didn’t send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law — who's 94 — she wouldn't call and complain. She just wouldn’t. She’d think something got…
Not How or When, but Why I'm not a fan of the thing presently marketed as “AI” I side with Chomsky's view of it as “high-tech plagiarism” and Emily Bender's characterization of it as a “stochastic parrot”. Sentient software doesn't seem theoretically impossible to me. The very fact that we can characterize genetics so precisely seems to me evidence that we…
A certain well-known politician has quite a regular practice of accusing his political opposition of offenses that are more properly attributed to him. Some like to label this as “psychological projection”, which Wikipedia describes as “a psychological phenomenon where feelings directed towards the self are displaced towards other people.” I don't even disagree that…
I am unforgiving of GOP Congressional cowardice . They pledged an oath to support and defend the Constitution. They have historically sent millions into war, the sometimes-tenuous justification being a need to defend our way of life. There is now a coup afoot and it falls to Congress itself to defend us. Any in Congress sustaining the coup because they fear for their job, their safety or the…
Given that people aren't always mindful about what they do, sometimes almost preferring that people make suggestions they can just passively agree to, it's quite a responsibility to make really casual choices sometimes. For example, in Facebook, the choice of metaphor where we call people “friends” if we connect to them socially there has some amazing ramifications. People dither…
My friend Probyn Gregory has been writing about his nervousness being near the fires in LA. Probably a lot of people have. I assume it helps people dissipate stress, or to feel less alone. Fortunes might change on a dime, so perhaps some want to leave a realtime record of what's going on, just in case they suddenly blink out of existence. Some are poised to run, and want to leave hints about where…
Q. Who should I vote for? A. Kamala Harris . Q. But what about Trump? A. The guy with 34 felony convictions and several court cases pending? The guy who says he'll be a dictator on day one ? He says only day one. Give some thought to how much you trust his impulse control. I could go on, but just read some of these other questions and answers. They should make it plain why Harris is the only safe,…
Martin Tye wrote in a post on the ex-bird site : "Scale of demand" is the key component of #Sustainability . Almost anything is #sustainable if demanded on a small enough scale, & almost nothing if demanded on too large a scale. — Martin Tye (@martinrev21) October 24, 2024 I replied with a thread , that I have reproduced with some corrections and clarifications here: Yes, large scale is a…
I want to bookmark and celebrate a particular interchange in the conversation from a recent town hall that featured Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney together. The remarks by Cheney capture what I think could be an important shift the political dialog on reproductive health, trigged by the anger and revulsion of many women to the Dobbs decision, the recent Supreme Court ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson…
Spoiler Warning: I'm going to speak of the ending of a certain fairy tale here, so if it's something you've waited your whole live to read, you'll want to stop when it's mentioned and go read it before continuing on. — kmp So we're on the same page In the well-known Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale The Emperor's New Clothes , the emperor is sold a garment that is said to be invisible to…
I needed a graphic for another of my posts, so I asked an “AI” (really just a Large Langugage Model, or LLM). Sketch a grayscale image of a wall calendar for november 2024. This is what I got. I cropped it and reduced the resolution slightly. It's pretty. But it's messed up. Days are not lettered right. Numbers are not in the right order and are duplicated. Starts on wrong day of the…
Version 2 by Kent M Pitman Once player loads, click “Play” to hear this poem read by the author. It's about 10.5 minutes long. Your browser does not suppport HTML5 audio. --> Your browser does not suppport HTML5 audio. --> Your browser does not suppport HTML5 audio. --> CONTEXT --> Most voters in Freedom liked voting a lot, but the Fraud (dumb, dumb, dumb) —who was fearful of…
It's in the news that Trump is “exhausted,” and that's supposedly why he's been canceling appearances. Maybe. There's a lot of attention paid to him seeming to nod off . But, you know, he's been doing that all along. and it's never been portrayed by him or his team as exhaustion. What is happening more often are incoherent rambles, which some of the media has tried to paper over. And…
I don't believe in “Green AI.” It's not that it's impossible to do the things people are calling Green AI. Rather, it's that I'm not willing to call those things “green.” Some of the most technologically capable people in the world see the environmental challenge that Large Language Models (LLMs) pose and think “I should make a green data center for this new…
This observation by David Roberts helped me crystalize some thoughts. I wrote them originally as a reply thread, but have included a tidier and slightly expanded form below that for easier reference.    —Kent Pitman My reply to David : Rachel Maddow , over the last few weeks, has run some great pieces. In one of them, I recall her quoting one of Vance's idols saying something…