Tootfinder

Just saw this:
#AI can mean a lot of things these days, but lots of the popular meanings imply a bevy of harms that I definitely wouldn't feel are worth a cute fish game. In fact, these harms are so acute that even "just" playing into the AI hype becomes its own kind of harm (it's similar to blockchain in that way).
@… noticed that the authors claim the code base is 80% AI generated, which is a red flag because people with sound moral compasses wouldn't be using AI to "help" write code in the first place. The authors aren't by some miracle people who couldn't build this app without help, in case that influences your thinking about it: they have the skills to write the code themselves, although it likely would have taken longer (but also been better).
I was more interested in the fish-classification AI, and how much it might be dependent on datacenters. Thankfully, a quick glance at the code confirms they're using ONNX and running a self-trained neural network on your device. While the exponentially-increasing energy & water demands of datacenters to support billion-parameter models are a real concern, this is not that. Even a non-AI game can burn a lot of cycles on someone's phone, and I don't think there's anything to complain about energy-wise if we're just using cycles on the end user's device as long as we're not having them keep it on for hours crunching numbers like blockchain stuff does. Running whatever stuff locally while the user is playing a game is a negligible environmental concern, unlike, say, calling out to ChatGPT where you're directly feeding datacenter demand. Since they claimed to have trained the network themselves, and since it's actually totally reasonable to make your own dataset for this and get good-enough-for-a-silly-game results with just a few hundred examples, I don't have any ethical objections to the data sourcing or training processes either. Hooray! This is finally an example of "ethical use of neutral networks" that I can hold up as an example of what people should be doing instead of the BS they are doing.
But wait... Remember what I said about feeding the AI hype being its own form of harm? Yeah, between using AI tools for coding and calling their classifier "AI" in a way that makes it seem like the same kind of thing as ChatGPT et al., they're leaning into the hype rather than helping restrain it. And that means they're causing harm. Big AI companies can point to them and say "look AI enables cute things you like" when AI didn't actually enable it. So I'm feeling meh about this cute game and won't be sharing it aside from this post. If you love the cute fish, you don't really have to feel bad for playing with it, but I'd feel bad for advertising it without a disclaimer.

Really silly dream
I had a really silly #dream recently. I dreamt that my CFL broke. Or more specifically, it kept trying to turn out, successive parts of it were lighting up, then it all went off and tried again. And it looked like it had a bunch of cuts across it, and around these cuts little thunder sparks started appearing, like some kind of STALKER-like anomaly.
I finally flipped the switch, but the anomaly remained, and I wanted to get rid of it in case the sparks could jump onto my hardware and damage something. So I threw a metal bowl towards it, supposing the thunder would jump onto it. While it was flying near the anomaly, it slowed down and started turning back like a boomerang. On top of that, pieces of cat food (don't ask me why I threw a full bowl) were getting out of it and staying in the air levitating. When the bowl reached the floor and started turning again, Mr Ek came close to it and started levitating himself; he was sitting a few centimeters above the floor.
In the middle of all this, I've figured out I should record it. I took a bunch of photos with my phone, before I managed to switch to recording video.
Once I've recorded the fascinating flying bowls and levitating cat food, I needed to go back to discharging the thing. I threw a second metal bowl, and that one started levitating as well. I've figured out that's stupid, and I've found some big ass hammer with a metal end and a wooden handle. I held the end near the lamp to charge it, then tried to find something to discharge it to. I've tried some small stuff like the door handle, but obviously that wasn't sufficient. Finally, I've figured out to use the electricity box, since it is grounded. I held the hammer to it, watching sparks light the semi-darkness; I've recorded that as well.
And that's how much of it I remember.

TL;DR: what if nationalism, not anarchy, is futile?
Since I had the pleasure of seeing the "what would anarchists do against a warlord?" argument again in my timeline, I'll present again my extremely simple proposed solution:
Convince the followers of the warlord that they're better off joining you in freedom, then kill or exile the warlord once they're alone or vastly outnumbered.
Remember that even in our own historical moment where nothing close to large-scale free society has existed in living memory, the warlord's promise of "help me oppress others and you'll be richly rewarded" is a lie that many understand is historically a bad bet. Many, many people currently take that bet, for a variety of reasons, and they're enough to coerce through fear an even larger number of others. But although we imagine, just as the medieval peasants might have imagined of monarchy, that such a structure is both the natural order of things and much too strong to possibly fail, in reality it takes an enormous amount of energy, coordination, and luck for these structures to persist! Nations crumble every day, and none has survived more than a couple *hundred* years, compared to pre-nation societies which persisted for *tends of thousands of years* if not more. I'm this bubbling froth of hierarchies, the notion that hierarchy is inevitable is certainly popular, but since there's clearly a bit of an ulterior motive to make (and teach) that claim, I'm not sure we should trust it.
So what I believe could form the preconditions for future anarchist societies to avoid the "warlord problem" is merely: a widespread common sense belief that letting anyone else have authority over you is morally suspect. Given such a belief, a warlord will have a hard time building any following at all, and their opponents will have an easy time getting their supporters to defect. In fact, we're already partway there, relative to the situation a couple hundred years ago. At that time, someone could claim "you need to obey my orders and fight and die for me because the Queen was my mother" and that was actually a quite successful strategy. Nowadays, this strategy is only still working in a few isolated places, and the idea that one could *start a new monarchy* or even resurrect a defunct one seems absurd. So why can't that same transformation from "this is just how the world works" to "haha, how did anyone ever believe *that*? also happen to nationalism in general? I don't see an obvious reason why not.
Now I think one popular counterargument to this is: if you think non-state societies can win out with these tactics, why didn't they work for American tribes in the face of the European colonizers? (Or insert your favorite example of colonialism here.) I think I can imagine a variety of reasons, from the fact that many of those societies didn't try this tactic (and/or were hierarchical themselves), to the impacts of disease weakening those societies pre-contact, to the fact that with much-greater communication and education possibilities it might work better now, to the fact that most of those tribes are *still* around, and a future in which they persist longer than the colonist ideologies actually seems likely to me, despite the fact that so much cultural destruction has taken place. In fact, if the modern day descendants of the colonized tribes sow the seeds of a future society free of colonialism, that's the ultimate demonstration of the futility of hierarchical domination (I just read "Theory of Water" by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson).
I guess the TL;DR on this is: what if nationalism is actually as futile as monarchy, and we're just unfortunately living in the brief period during which it is ascendant?

I don’t remember this episode of The Archers???
https://kolektiva.social/@igd_news/114997281185597838